THE DEADLY TRACKERS. Warner Brothers, 1973. Richard Harris, Rod Taylor, Al Lettieri, Neville Brand, William Smith. Based on a story by Samuel Fuller. Directors: Barry Shear & Samuel Fuller, the latter uncredited.

   The first three minutes of The Deadly Trackers are about as annoying as you can possibly get. In what appears to be an attempt to be artistic and edgy, the movie begins with an unnecessary voice-over dialogue and a frame by frame introduction to the main character, Sean Kilpatrick (Richard Harris), a pacifist sheriff in a small border town.

   It’s enough to make you want to turn the whole thing off.

   I’m guess I am glad I didn’t. While I’d never go so far to say The Deadly Trackers is a particularly good or an effective Western, it does have something worthwhile going for it. That would be Al Lettieri (The Getaway, Mr. Majestyk), a veteran crime film actor who died at the early age of 47 in 1975. Lettieri portrays Gutierrez, a Mexican lawman, who is just about the remotely likable character in this gritty, sweaty, revenge thriller.

   The plot is simple enough. After Kilpatrick (Harris) witnesses his wife and son killed by the cruel Frank Brand (Rod Taylor), he gives up his pacifist ways (a little too easily, it should be noted) and sets out to seek Brand and his three henchmen, Schoolboy (William Smith), Choo Choo (a tired looking Neville Brand), and Jacob (Paul Benjamin). None of these men are particularly interesting villains save Choo Choo, a man with part of a railroad track for a hand.

   After crossing the border, Kilpatrick encounters Mexican lawman Gutierrez and engages in a series of cat and mouse chases with him. By the time the whole thing’s over, Kilpatrick has turned into a carbon copy of the man who killed his family. In the matter of less than two hours running time, he’s become a truly despicable character, so much so that you’re not sad when [SPOILER ALERT] Gutierrez shoots the lout in the back.

   And therein lies the problem with The Deadly Trackers. There’s no one really to root for. It’s mainly just a bunch of dirty, sickly looking men doing horrible things to one another.

   That may be a necessary ingredient for a certain type of Western, but it’s not sufficient to make this anything other than a historical curiosity: an American Spaghetti Western morality play about how blood lust corrupts, a story that attempts to be more profound than it actually is.

   The movie does have some decent cinematography, but it would have been a whole lot better had the film been told from Gutierrez’s point of view. He seems like the only character in this film that you wouldn’t be terrified to be around for more than a minute or two.

THE KEY MAN. Anglo-Amalgamated Films, UK, 1957; United Artists, US, 1958, as Life at Stake. Lee Patterson, Hy Hazell, Philip Leaver, Harold Kasket, George Margo. Written by J. McLaren Ross. Directed by Montgomery Tully.

   Just another British-second-feature of its time, but a bit better than it needed to be and perhaps worthy of note.

   The film opens on joyous celebration scenes of VE-Day in London, then on to a lone figure walking, somber and purposeful, through the confetti and ticker-tape onto a quiet street and up to a mysterious door. He inserts a key and — all of a sudden three guys grab him! And next thing one of them is saying, “Arthur Smithers, you are under arrest for robbery and murder, and anything you say….”

   Flash forward twelve years. Smithers has been released from jail, and Radio Crime Reporter Lionel Hulme (Patterson) is trying to find him — and the whereabouts of the loot from the robbery he did time for. Hulme is also broke, fighting with his wife (Hazell) and trying to get an advance from his boss so he can follow this thing up. In due time, he gets a lead, finds out Smithers has died in mysterious circumstances, gets followed around a lot by a shadowy stranger, finds out Smithers is not dead, talks to a fatale-looking femme who may be Smithers’ wife, gets a call from an informant who has the information he needs and he’ll come right round with it (and we know what happened to that lot!) gets in a fight, a car chase….

   â€¦ all pretty much standard stuff, and it’s not helped by budgetary constraints that keep the background rather sketchy. We’re told, for instance, that Hulme is a Radio Crime Reporter, but all we ever see of the station is a couple of nondescript offices: no microphones, no bustling secretaries or sound engineers. Hell, Monogram did better than that!

   On the plus side though, the writer took some time to populate this with real-seeming people, the producer cast them rather well, and the director added some fine flourishes; there’s some well-judged camera-work here and there, including a nifty fight in a pitch-black barbershop fitfully lighted by an on-and-off neon sign outside.

   But it’s the characters that surprised me most. Our elusive criminal mastermind proves to be a fairly ordinary chap, podgy and middle-aged, with a pretty young wife who loves him anyway. The venal stool pigeon and phony tipster have moments of actual humanity, and when we go to the wrap-up, the final scene between the amateur sleuth and the mysterious lady, where I was expecting to hear “You’re taking the fall, Sweetheart,” I heard something instead very real and quite surprising. Check it out if you can.

Editorial Comment:   One should not confuse this movie (as I did, for a while) with a film noir released in the US in 1955 entitled A Life at Stake, starring Angela Lansbury and Keith Andes.

WHY DIDN’T THEY ASK EVANS? ITV, UK, 30 March 1980. PBS: Mobil Showcase, US, 21 May 1981, Three hours. Francesca Annis, John Gielgud, Bernard Miles, Eric Porter,Leigh Lawson, James Warwick, Madeline Smith, Connie Booth, Robert Longden. Based on the novel by Agatha Christie (also known as The Boomerang Clue). Directors: John Davies & Tony Wharmby.

   I read and reviewed The Boomerang Clue, the US title of the novel this long three-hour British TV movie was based on not too long ago. And since the TV version so closely follows the book version, I’m going to make it easy on myself and simply summarize the plot by repeating four paragraphs from that earlier review:

    “This one begins with a young Bobby Jones (not the famous one) hitting a golf ball and doing dreadfully at it, trying mightily several swings in succession, but hearing a cry, discovers a dying man lying at the bottom of cliff. He had fallen perhaps, as Bobby and his golfing partner believe, not to mention the police and the coroner’s jury, but we the reader know better.

    “Before he dies, though, the man utters a dying question: ‘Why didn’t they ask Evans?’ We are at page 9 and the end of Chapter One, and anyone who can stop here is a better person than I.

    “Assisting Bobby in his quest for the truth, especially after surviving being poisoned by eight grains of morphia, is his childhood friend, Lady Frances Derwent, whom he calls Frankie. Together they make a great pair of amateur detectives, continuing to investigate the case even after the authorities have written the man’s death off as an accident.

    “The tone is light and witty, as if investigating a murder is a lark, but this intrepid pair of detectives do an excellent job of it, even to the extent of faking an automobile accident and inserting an “invalid” Frankie into their primary suspect’s home.”

   There are a couple of changes that where made in translating the book into film, but only one maybe matters. It is as good as a direct scene-for-scene production as you could ever hope for. (A later British telecast in 2011 wrote Miss Marple into the story and changed all kinds of other things around. From what I’ve read about it, it sounds horrible.)

   On the other hand, while scene-for-scene may sound ideal, it does make for a long production, three hours worth, and viewing it on DVD, I found that watching it over the course of two evening was possible but making it very difficult to remember by the end what had happened at the beginning. Luckily I had read the book only a few months earlier.

   Before pointing out the biggest change, I’d like to say that in the movie version I didn’t get the same light-hearted “let’s solve a murder” feeling the two young sleuths seemed to have in the opening half of the book. They tried, but it just didn’t seem to be there. But many scenes were just as I’d imagined them, especially the opening one, with a body being found on the rocks beneath a tall cliff along the shoreline of Wales.

   The major difference between the book and the movie comes at the end, when the killer (in the book) writes a long letter to Frankie explaining how the murder was carried out and tying up the loose ends.

   In the movie, the two — the killer and Frankie — have a direct confrontation in an empty house. The set-up for this didn’t make sense while I was watching it, but later on I realized that doing it as it was done in the book, reading a letter aloud on a TV screen would have bored everyone, including me.

   I believe but am not positive that this movie was shown in its entirety in one evening. (The video above is only Part 1 of 3.) If it did, the attention span necessary would have to have been even greater, but commercials (in the UK) would have helped considerably in terms of snacks, bathroom breaks and whatever else that would have been needed to get through what was, all-in-all, a very nicely done piece of entertainment.

PROFILER. Pilot Episode. NBC, 21 September 1996. (Season 1, Episode 1.) Ally Walker, Robert Davi, Julian McMahon, Roma Maffia, Michael Whaley, Peter Frechette, Erica Gimpel, Caitlin Wachs. Creator/screenplay: Cynthia Saunders. Director: John Patterson.

   I came by the DVD box for this series in part by accident. I saw a large lot of DVDs up for bids on eBay, and not only in the lot were all four seasons of this series, but three seasons of another NBC series that ran at the same time, The Pretender.

   I’d never heard of either series — I wasn’t watching much network TV at the time — but the opening bid was cheap enough ($99 for 65 DVDs) — and lo and behold, no one bid against me. Of the other DVDs in the the lot I kept another 15 or 20. The rest, mostly movies — romantic comedies — from the same time period, I’ll soon be donating to the Local Library.

   What I didn’t realize at the time, but I soon found out, was that basic premise of Profiler is catching another serial criminal every week, not always a killer, but arsonists and other assorted low life. Over and above that, and how it plays out over the entire length of the season I don’t know, is the presence of Ally Walker’s character’s nemesis, a serial killer dubbed “Jack of All Trades,” who notices that Dr. Samantha “Sam” Waters, is back in action again after a three years’ leave of absence.

   Whew. Sorry for that last sentence. I know it’s a long one. Sam is forensic psychologist with the unique ability to personalize crime scenes and “see” the killer, not with extrasensory perception, but by picking up clues that others miss. She’s called into action as this episode begins by her former mentor, Bailey Malone (Robert Davi) when the police in Atlanta run into a brick wall trying to catch a killer who has been killing another beautiful woman every Saturday night.

   I should also mention that “Jack of All Trades,” whom Sam was never able to catch, murdered her husband three years ago, and is one of those serial killers who loves to taunt the police — and Sam in particular — about their ineffectiveness in nabbing him?

   I don’t know how many more in this set I will watch, but I do have four seasons’ worth, so I may. There seems to be a good chemistry between the leading players (see above), which is always a help. On the negative side, a recognized the killer as soon as the character appeared on the screen. Maybe I ought to be a profiler. Either that, or Sam ought to have listened to her own deductions to that point. They were right on target.

THE VILLAIN STILL PURSUED HER. RKO, 1940. Anita Louise, Margaret Hamilton, Alan Mowbray, Richard Cromwell, Joyce Compton, Buster Keaton, Billy Gilbert and Hugh Herbert. Screenplay by Elbert Franklin and Ethel LaBlanche. Directed by Edward Cline.

   Never really funny but always highly amusing, this is a (mostly) straight-faced filming of William H. Smith’s popular temperance play, The Drunkard, first performed in 1844 and frequently revived for comic effect — as I write this it is still playing in Tulsa Oklahoma in a production that started in 1953, which makes it the second-longest-running play currently on the boards.

   The movie version offers a marvelous cast led by one of my favorite character actors, Alan Mowbray (best remembered as the hammy thespian in John Ford’s Wagonmaster and My Darling Clementine) with able support from that eternal juvenile lead Richard Cromwell; Hatchet-faced Margaret Hamilton, sympathetic for once as a dying ol’ widder woman; ditzy Joyce Compton, perfectly cast as Hazel Dalton, wandering lunatic; and Buster Keaton, as her brother William, whose doughty heroics here prompt bittersweet memories of his hey-day in the silents.

   The story, in case you’re interested, deals with kind-hearted but weak-willed Edward Middleton, who marries the poor-but-honest daughter of the dying ol’widder woman and is almost immediately led astray by Lawyer Cribbs, who nurses a hatred for his family (“I hated his father, I hate him, and if he should have any children, I shall hate them as well.”) and has some sort of secret buried in the woods — through which our wandering madwoman is wont to ramble.

   When our young hero succumbs to Demon Rum and flees to the City to hide his shame, it falls to his friend William to bring him home and save his wife and child from the machinations of villainous Cribbs — and incidentally cure his perambulating sister.

   Obviously this is not to be taken seriously, and Director Edward Cline, who worked with some of the great names in Film Comedy, does a fine job of keeping his players earnest and the pace accelerated. But the real show here is Alan Mowbray, who takes this rare (for him) starring role and runs away with it.

   It’s somehow fitting to see Mowbray as Cribbs, since he was a member of the Fields/ Barrymore/ Fowler circle, and W. C. Fields himself played an actor playing Cribbs in The Old-Fashioned Way (1934) to hilarious effect. Mowbray wisely chooses not to ape Fields, but puts his own stuffy hauteur into the part, and achieves the considerable feat of creating a classic screen villain who is also a wonderful comic character. Lovers of old weird movies live for films like this.

“HOLLYWOOD.” An episode of Law & Order: LA, 29 September 2010. (Season 1, Episode 1.) Skeet Ulrich, Corey Stoll, Regina Hall, Wanda De Jesus, Alfred Molina. Guest Cast: Shawnee Smith, John Patrick Amedori, Danielle Panabaker, Wyatt Russell, Jessica Lu.
Created by Dick Wolf; developed by Blake Masters. Director: Allen Coulter.

   Actually there was only one season. The series was a mess, and half the cast disappeared before it was over, to be replaced partway through by an entirely new group of attorneys and police detectives. It was a spinoff of the original Law & Order, which had just finished its 20-year run the previous spring.

   I will let anyone who knows more about the problems the series had go ahead and talk about them in the comments. I’ve not seen any more of the series than this first episode, and I confess that I simply wasn’t paying much attention to what was happening back then. (All I know is what I read online using Google.)

   The setting of the first episode was of course a natural, that being Hollywood, which is probably the first place people think of when they think of L.A. They didn’t have to think too hard to come up with a plot, even though it turns out to be a complicated one. The essence, though, is the convoluted relationship a young female actress slash party girl has with her mother, who has been guiding her and mentoring her and (no surprise) trading in on her daughter’s notoriety and fame for quite some time.

   What I really wanted to bring up again, following Michael Shonk’s recent article about 30-minute TV dramas, is that this first episode of Law & Order: LA is only 40 minutes long, after the commercials have been removed. In this case, forty minutes was simply not long enough, especially for a first episode.

   With both cops and later on lawyers involved, not to mention a story to tell, plus a lot of people who are interviewed by the police or otherwise connected to the case, there is little chance for any of them to get more than two minutes at a time of screen time. When the show was over, I knew who did it and why, but of the primary players, I couldn’t even have told you their characters’ names (or the stars’ names either, for that matter; I didn’t recognize any but one of them). One of the leading suspects was on screen for his two minutes early on, and when his character was brought back into it again toward the end, I barely remembered seeing him before.

   The actors have to talk fast to get all of the story in, too fast for me most of the time, and the locations are switched so quickly they have to identified by the equivalent of silent film insert cards. It’s an approach that works fine when viewers have been watching a series for many years, but not for a very first episode of a spinoff, already cramped for time. Not for me, anyway.

THE JAYHAWKERS. Paramount Pictures, 1959. Jeff Chandler, Fess Parker, Nicole Maurey, Henry Silva, Herbert Rudley, Frank DeKova, Don Megowan, Leo Gordon. Director: Melvin Frank.

   The Jayhawkers, a late 1950s Western set in Bleeding Kansas, doesn’t have the most unique plot. Although the score by Jerome Moross is quite memorable and can be listened to here, the film’s cinematography isn’t all that captivating. And while Melvin Frank’s direction is perfectly adequate, his workmanship isn’t really Anthony Mann or Budd Boetticher territory.

   So what makes The Jayhawkers – at least in my estimation – really worth watching? The characters.

   Well, one character in particular. The villain. His name: Luke Darcy. Modeled, at least in part, on abolitionist firebrand John Brown, Darcy is skillfully portrayed by Jeff Chandler in such a manner that it’s next to impossible to conceive any other actor having the role. Sometimes an actor seems as if he were just destined for the part. That’s certainly the case here.

   To appreciate The Jayhawkers, you really have to consider the film as primarily a character study of Luke Darcy rather than as a standard drama set on the eve of the Civil War. Darcy’s an imposing man, both by height and temperament. A psychologically nuanced figure rather than a caricature, he devours the classic texts of strategy and warfare, drinks red wine, and chases women. And he’s got a grandiose future planned. He’s going to be the authoritarian ruler of an independent Kansas, a tall Napoleon on the wide Prairie.

   Darcy’s not invincible, however. He’s got an Achilles Heel. He is pathologically afraid of being caught and hanged by the authorities. Nothing frightens him so much as the image – one he seems to play out repeatedly in his own mind – of him dangling, lifeless from the end of a rope. He finds the whole notion sickening, a disgusting clownish spectacle for the masses. It is little character details like this that makes Darcy a unique, if at times almost sympathetic, villain.

   But make no mistake about it. He is a villain and has done some horrible things in his time. For instance, he is responsible for seducing and abandoning another man’s wife. That man, Cam Bleeker (Fess Parker) makes it his mission to find and to kill Darcy. But things get complicated along the way.

   Rounding out the cast: Nicole Maurey as Cam’s potential love interest and Henry Silva as one of Darcy’s hired gunmen. All told, it’s a better than average Western, one that benefits greatly from Chandler’s imposing presence and his ability to convey a quiet rage that lurks just beneath a man’s seemingly calm and controlled surface.

FATHER BROWN. BBC, UK, 2013 to date. 35 episodes. Mark Williams, Sorcha Cusack, Nancy Carroll, Alex Price, Hugo Speer, Tom Chambers. Created by Rachel Flowerday and Tahin Guner. Inspired by the stories of G. K. Chesterton.

   So, Father Dowling — no, wait, this one is British and there is no cute nun — Father Brown, that’s right Father Brown, is watching this couple making out; Father Brown is climbing over a fence; Father Brown has been poisoned; Father Brown has a broken leg and is being held hostage by a killer policeman; Father Brown pretends madness to go undercover in an asylum; Father Brown is trapped beneath a castle in a dungeon; Father Brown has to stop a bomb …

   Father Brown (Mark Williams) has a nosy housekeeper (Sorcha Cusack), a randy aristocrat friend (Nancy Carroll), her semi-honest roguish chauffer (Alex Price), a full time parish in Kembleford in the Cotswolds (where there are more murders than Chicago and Miss Marple’s St. Mary’s Mead combined) at St. Mary’s, and two policeman whose lives he is the bane of (Hugo Speer and Tom Chambers who replaced him).

   Father Brown is tall, hardy, and about as meek as a truck driver.

   Father Brown wouldn’t know a paradox if it hit him with a lorry.

   They have actually adapted a few stories by Chesterton. Not that you would know it unless you looked at the title, the only thing vaguely resembling Chesterton.

   That awful television movie with Barnard Hughes was better than this. Walter Connally’s wholly miscast Father Brown was better. Kenneth More, seemingly miscast, was brilliant as was Alec Guiness, also seemingly miscast. Mark Williams is just miscast. It is difficult for a man his size to appear to be a meek, blinking, slightly pudgy, and unassuming priest with the power of an Old Testament prophet. This Father Brown has the power of a Jessica Fletcher.

   The time is the 1950’s, God knows why since the stories end twenty years before that. Father Brown, who traveled extensively in the stories, is a parish priest and served in WWII. He deals with ex-Nazis and refugees and once with radiation poisoning. He seldom leaves Kembleford and his church, St. Mary’s. No one much respects him. Flambeau has a British accent, they couldn’t be bothered to hire an actor who could at least fake a French accent.

   You know it isn’t Chesterton because communist and atheists tend to turn out to be innocent. You know it isn’t Agatha Christie because the young lovers almost never turn out to be the murderers.

   This Father Brown never rises to the occasion. He never blinks behind his spectacles while transformed into a figure of Biblical strength. He never simply observes because he knows human nature and intuits the truth. He is never for one instant of film Chesterton’s priest in anything but name.

   It’s an attractive enough series, and I might like it if it wasn’t the only Father Brown we will get. The actors are personable, and the mysteries no worse than usual, but of course it could be so much more, and instead it is, as I said, “Murder, He Prayed.”

   If you are not an admirer of Chesterton’s stories you may not get why I feel such rancor for this unassuming little series. Try to imagine though they made a situation comedy out of The Great Gatsby. Try imagining they cast Pee Wee Herman as Sherlock Holmes. Try to imagine that the only Shakespeare there was to read was the Lamb’s version.

   You are not going to get good television from people incapable of respecting their source. You are going to get this, a series that disappoints week after week, hints at Chesterton (admittedly not easy to film though the More series did it), but never fulfills the promise. You get what seldom happens on series shown on PBS, the lowest common denominator, just like network television.

   This one wasn’t even designed to be shown at night in England. It was an afternoon series according to Wikipedia.

   This might have worked despite all that if they respected the original in any way, if they understood what made Chesterton’s stories work, what made Father Brown a rival of Sherlock Holmes — the rival of Sherlock Holmes.

   This Father Brown isn’t even a rival of Jessica Fletcher.

   If you like it despite all that, fine. But don’t kid yourself that anyone connected to this ever read a single Father Brown story and understood it or what gave it power. Father Brown the comic book would be better.

RAYMOND KHOURY – The Devil’s Elixir. Dutton, hardcover, December 2011. Signet, premium paperback edition, August 2012.

   This is the third in a series featuring FBI agent Sean Reilly and his close lady friend, Tess Chaykin, who’s been along with him on his two previously recorded adventures, neither of which I’ve read, nor did I need to. This one stands on its own very well.

   In physical size, the book’s a bruiser. It’s over 500 pages of tall premium paperback pages long, almost all of cramjack filled with small print, and after a month or so of short reading bursts just before bedtime, I’ve finally finished it. It begins with Michelle Martinez, one of Reilly’s former girl friends calling on him for help. Her boy friend is dead in a house invasion, but she and her four-year-old son luckily managed to escape their assailants, a gang of guys with guns completely unknown to her.

   Reilly rushes cross-country to be at her side, which is when she tells him that her son is his. After that, all hell breaks loose. A Mexican crime lord is trying to track down the formula for a wildly hallucinogenic drug discovered centuries ago by Indians dwelling deep in Mexico’s densest inland jungles. Hence the title of the book, of course.

   Let me not dwell on the 500 pages this book is long. Khoury’s writing style is one that can be skimmed read very quickly. There is a lot of action, ending in many deaths and much destruction, and before you reach the end, any doubts you have have about the existence of reincarnation will be shaken to the core. Well, maybe.

   I hope I won’t be spoiling anything for you by telling you that all ends well, except for the bad guys and one loose end that will carry over to the next book in the series. My one complaint might be that after so many pages, the end for the main bad guy, a particularly nasty gentleman at that, comes far too quickly and easily.

   All in all, though, I’d have to say that I got my money’s worth from this book. But while it’s solid enough entertainment — nearly a month’s worth, for me — here I am at the end of this review, and I find that I’m struggling with something crucial. I can’t find anything to point out to you about the book that would tell you why I’ll be reading another of Sean Reilly’s adventures any time soon, for I’m sure I won’t. If your results have varied, feel free to let me know.

INTRODUCTION: The following discussion between Michael Shonk and Randy Cox has been taking place mostly in secret, as a series of comments following a review, of all things, a sci-fi movie called The Monolith Monsters. The discourse changed, as it sometimes does, into a conversation about TV viewing in the past and carrying over into the future.

I thought the exchange interesting and even important enough to rescue from a comments section already several days old and in an out of the way place where no one would be likely to come across it. Please read and enjoy, and feel free to respond on your own, if you wish.

michael Says:
March 11th, 2015 at 1:16 pm e

Randy, I am sure Steve doesn’t mind us using this place to have a virtual email exchange:)

I remember back in the 70s when I memorized the TV schedule and made sure to watch every show at least once.

Now I rarely watch TV series on TV. I find my favorites and buy season pass at iTunes. Many of the new series offer the premiere episode for free there so I pay less and less attention to what is on TV tonight. At the moment I am considering either Netflix or Hulu to add to Acorn for streaming TV series so I can watch whatever I want to watch depending on my mood.

There is some great stuff on TV today no matter what your taste. I buy season passes for BLACKLIST, JUSTIFIED, PERSON OF INTEREST (speaking of comic books), and SHERLOCK (whenever its on). I watch regularly ARCHER, DOCTOR WHO, and VENTURE BROTHERS (whenever it is on). Acorn gives me a better and more up to date British fix than PBS and BBC America. YouTube offers me the past. I just finished watch season one of MR ROSE and now am watching ADAM ADAMANT. My TV offers me sports and the El Rey network.

TV has never been better…I just don’t watch much of it on my TV.

Randy Cox Says:
March 11th, 2015 at 4:29 pm e

Michael,

While I still watch some TV shows on TV I have found that I am able to enjoy them more fully on DVD. The lack of commercial breaks helps me to concentrate on the story.

michael Says:
March 11th, 2015 at 6:39 pm e

I have DVDs as well, heck I have three DVD players, one with a VCR. I did have to adjust to the lack of commercial breaks, especially if the show aired on the Big 4. Shows that air on commercials networks are written differently from movies or those on networks such as HBO. Every commercial break demands a mini climax and tease to hook you and get you to stay and wait for the show to return. Even without the breaks on the DVD the story still has them. The TV shows on networks with no commercials can tell a story with a pace and structure that increases the drama rather that make artificial stops to keep the audience from straying. It is one of the seldom mentioned and lesser reason shows such as GAMES OF THRONES work better on HBO and suffers if copied by any major commercial network.

Randy Cox Says:
March 12th, 2015 at 9:48 am e

I have also discovered that I can fall asleep just as easily in front of a DVD story as a TV show.

Randy Cox Says:
March 12th, 2015 at 6:30 pm e

Michael, I’ve been working my way through the 1966-71 Gothic soap opera Dark Shadows via Netflix. I guess you certainly can’t call it a decent story and the acting is only so-so. Steve was once tempted by a deal for getting the entire series in one chunk. If he succumbed we haven’t heard about it.

I watch a few episodes and then take a break.

michael Says:
March 12th, 2015 at 10:10 pm e

I remember DARK SHADOWS. i grew up in a neighborhood of about a dozen and a half kids my age. One summer we would all run inside to watch DARK SHADOWS. Then school demanded our time again and I never saw another DARK SHADOWS.

Binge viewing, watching multiple episodes of the same TV series, is nothing new. We did it with VCRs and once holiday TV marathons (such as Thanksgiving of TWILIGHT ZONE) became popular. But it seems so easier on streaming. It really gives you the feel and rhythm of the series that you miss waiting a week or more between episodes.

Randy Cox Says:
March 12th, 2015 at 10:58 pm e

I was really a fan of Dark Shadows in its day, but I could only see it during vacations and breaks from the college where I worked. One of the first episodes I saw was the one that introduced Barnabas Collins and I also remember the very last episode where they lampooned the show with the final voiceover that said that investigation proved this was no werewolf after all, but just a wild animal.

I saw a few episodes when it was syndicated and I remember seeing a few of the VHS copies of episodes and thinking that to collect those was madness because there were more than 1,200 episodes. Then came DVDs and I came upon a collection of the very first episodes before Barnabas Collins and bought it thinking it might be fun to see how it all began.

At some point I came to my senses and realized that to get all of the dvds would be expensive and (as my brother said) I might not want to watch them more than once. So I started subscribing to Netflix. Each disc has 10 episodes and that’s enough. I need frequent breaks because I lose track of the story, even with the aid of good episode guide.

Randy Cox Says:
March 13th, 2015 at 9:48 am e

Michael,
I should probably add that I turned 30 when Dark Shadows began so there was none of this “running home from school to watch” that I read about so much. I started watching mainly because one of the actresses was from my state of Minnesota and would be mentioned in the entertainment column of one of the Twin Cities newspapers. I tried one episode and was not impressed, but the one I tried sometime later that ended with a hand reaching out of a coffin to grip Willie by the neck was memorable!

You mentioned SHERLOCK in number 32. The Brits don’t beat a good thing to death and there have been only 3 series with 3 episodes each. (I think another series is planned.) It’s fun to see how they will twist elements from the original stories to fit the 21st century.

michael Says:
March 13th, 2015 at 2:42 pm e

Much has been made about the difference between the e-book and print, but in reality it has not changed the basic way we read a book – words, sentences, chapters, etc.

The digital world has changed how we watch TV. And more is coming. From days of limited choices to a possible future that will offer us an unlimited number choices much like books do, from days when you had to adjust your schedule to fit your TV watching to days when you can watch nearly any TV series from any year whenever you fell like it. From small black and white only pictures to 60inch TV screens with Ultra HD 4K (and beyond). TV entertainment itself has changed from Ad agency run TV shows to independently made shows airing on YouTube.

The future of publishing has settled in and while the e-book will become an increasing popular format, print will survive.

It is the future of the visual medium, TV and film that are in chaos. How will viewers enjoy the visual programs of the future remains unknown.

Randy Cox Says:
March 13th, 2015 at 7:45 pm e

And what will be the next new thing?

michael Says:
March 13th, 2015 at 9:33 pm e

Too many possibilities to be sure. Mobile and streaming seems to be where the money is heading.

A la carte cable will fail. One the political clout of the huge multi-corporations that own the networks (such as Comcast) will slow the process until the companies will be able to find a profit with that system or control its replacement system (most likely streaming which is cheaper). Two, why spend money for one network if you only watch one program? Logically the next step for cable providers if it wishes to survive is find a way to offer programs not networks in its packages.

The networks were created as a distributor of programming. It is a function not necessary anymore. This is why the corporations that own the networks (and CBS) are involved in cable networks and their own production studios. And why they, especially CBS, are interested in their own streaming services.

What will probably happen is the content providers will drop the middle man and sell directly to the viewer. Watch what happens to HBO Go and the CBS streaming that will start soon. It could be an early sign of the future demise of cable.

Free TV future is really hard to predict. The broadband its on is worth a fortune. Politically, it would be unwise for free TV to vanish – the poor and those who don’t want to pay for TV would be upset as well as the rich powerful people who own and run your local TV station. I see free TV following the example of free radio with nearly all live programming.

Who would have guessed what the cellphone did to the land phone?

The discussions I have read see the future home with a large 60 inch+ TV screen in the home’s living room. It will be connected to a box such as Apple TV which will connect you to all your mobile devices including video games and the single desktop computer you have in your bedroom. You will attach a sound system such as Bose for theatre like sound.

Programs will stream into the main TV or your mobile devices. Pictures will become more and more lifelike but will still try to keep the feel of film. Film will be like LP, where a small but supportive group keeps the format alive.

Movie theaters will survive, people will always need a place to go, but it needs to find some solutions to the major problems it faces. It needs to find a way to make a profit while lowering costs to the moviegoer, not only for the ticket but the popcorn and drinks as well.

There will be fewer theaters and bigger ones. The movie house needs to return to being an event (see today’s IMAX) and because of that the studios will continue to focus on the huge blockbusters and send its smaller movie stories to the local household via TV and streaming.

The technology can do all of this and more if the big money and politicians let it.

Randy Cox Says:
March 13th, 2015 at 9:48 pm e

It’s still a bit of a case of 99 channels and nothing’s on.

Regarding landline phones, I called on someone at his apartment complex and pushed the buttons beside his name at the door to tell him I was there and heard the voice tell me the number was not in service. I say down and waited and he soon came out to tell me the device didn’t work because he doesn’t have a landline phone.

I was watching the special features on a DVD and all the behind the scenes stuff. PBS makes specials out of this sort of thing to promote the new seasons and raise money. Sometimes the interviewees pat themselves on the back a little too much, but they certainly wouldn’t bad mouth their bread and butter.

michael Says:
March 13th, 2015 at 10:32 pm e

Randy, looking for something to watch in this possible TV future will offer more choices than a library has books. I have heard people tell me there is nothing to read, so you could be right.

NOTE: Michael and Randy continued their conversation briefly in its old location, unaware I had diverted it over here:

Randy Cox Says:
March 14th, 2015 at 12:22 pm e

Lots of choices require much thought and decision, maybe more than we have time to decide. Shows will be available in so many venues just like movies. You used to have to wait for a movie to show up on TV so you could see it again, then wait until it would be available on VHS then DVD. I remember someone telling me the waiting time between versions would someday be non existent and the DVD would be released along with the film premiere (maybe on the way out of the theater). Have we reached the point where a TV show could be launched and canceled in the same breath?

michael Says:
March 14th, 2015 at 4:09 pm e

Randy, movies and TV programming will remain separate as long as there are movie houses. The economic system of the two is different.

But I am sure you remember the direct to video movies of the past. Those are not as successful as in the past. Why, I am not sure, it may be caused by the increase in piracy. Why buy a cheap rip-off of the current hit film in the theaters when you can download the hit film itself.

The time between films and released on DVD and streaming has shorten perhaps due to piracy.

TV shows today are available to download on iTunes a day or two after the episode aired. It is one of the reasons the networks have pushed Nielsen to find a way to count us computer TV viewers.

For example, I buy a season pass at iTunes for TV series I would have bought the DVD. I bought the season pass for PERSON OF INTEREST shortly before the season premiered. Every week a day or so after the newest episode aired I am emailed letting me know it is ready to watch. If I were to wait for the DVD I would have to wait months after the season had ended.

TV programs have been cancelled after one episode. One of the most famous was TURN-ON (February 5, 1969 ABC). Tim Conway was the host and has joked the series was cancelled midway through the first episode.

Today, the Big Four networks are trying the direct to series route for some. MICHAEL J FOX SHOW was the most famous where no pilot was done and a full season of episodes were ordered.

Now a few of those such as Fox’s HIEROGLYPHICS that received a full season order was cancelled during filming without ever reaching the air.