Chicago -
By Tim Willette and Steve Rhodes
An e-mail exchange.
Tim: The MASH Marine colonel who blocked a soldier from being sent home early to say goodbye to his mother, facing deportation? Columbo suspect tonight.
Steve: OMG so great.
Posted on July 11, 2017
By Steve Rhodes
An e-mail correspondence.
Steve: Idea: An Aaron Spelling and Aaron Sorkin production.
Tim: Long walk and talks on the Love Boat.
Posted on July 3, 2017
By Scott Buckner
Eventually, 24-hour news-channel coverage of Donald Trump’s campaign of crash-and-burn turns into droning redundancy, so it was nice to find the History Channel in the middle of a Forged in Fire marathon all day Tuesday. I’ve lived a cable TV-deprived existence for a number of years, so it was refreshing to spend a few hours with a cable program not devoted to The Orange Man proclaiming every single thing under the sun “a total disaster.”
Given my total lack of aptitude for anything involving tools, I’m always interested in seeing how true craftsmen end up manufacturing awesome shit out of basically nothing. If I learned anything from the three-round, $10,000 winner-take-all elimination competition between four bladesmiths that is Forged, it was this: It might take a village to raise a child, but it takes a guy with an anvil to arm the village.
Posted on October 26, 2016
By Scott Buckner
On Sunday evening (or all damn day, depending on your rabid dedication to the sport), America paid homage to Super Bowl 50, a football game which has rocketed to such a ridiculous level of pomp and circumstance simply because we need an excuse for something, anything. That’s because when it comes to large public events that promote mass consumption of food and alcohol, the calendar’s a desolate place between January and March 17 if you’re not in New Orleans for Fat Tuesday.
It’s an event that, even if you do have $20,000 to shell out for a seat mid-field, you’d still stay home and watch the thing on TV instead because the beer is cheaper, the bathroom’s only 50 paces away and usually unoccupied, and your car’s already parked a lot closer. In that sense, it’s become The Super Commercial Bowl for the million-dollar ads alone, mostly because your team (or a team you despise and would love to see their teeth get bashed in) isn’t in it, and the halftime show always features someone overexposed or irrelevant, or bands whose music you never could stand anyway. So now we’re basically reduced to an audience of eleventy billion people waiting to see if Snickers’ ad agency can top last year’s commercial.
Posted on February 8, 2016
By Scott Buckner
A short while after I’d settled into her apartment, Gracie said to me, “The TV’s there if you want to watch TV.” It’s not like I’m so daft that I actually need to be reminded what the big, hulking Magnavox is for, but it comes in handy at 3 a.m., when – with nothing else to do in such a small town at such an ungodly hour – I try to find out if 3 a.m. TV is any worse in rural Virginia than it is in Chicago.
No matter what I do, I get snow. Enough incessant white-noise snow to render an army of insomniacs narcoleptic. More snow than the Donner Party ever imagined. Hissing, fuck-you TV snow.
Then it occurs to me what the problem might be.
Posted on September 20, 2010
By Steve Rhodes
I suppose William Shatner wants to keep working, but he keeps showing up in the weirdest ways. His latest is a Biography channel show called Aftermath, described thusly:
“William Shatner takes an in-depth look at what happens when people are tragically or infamously transformed from unknown citizens into household names overnight, taking viewers back to the dramatic events that dominated the American news cycle as he gains exclusive access to the newsmakers at the heart of each story – heroes, villains, perpetrators, victims, family members and law enforcement officials – to dig deep and separate the fact from the fiction.”
Well, yes, but he’s not exactly a newsman and with episodes on Mary Kay Letourneau and the Unabomber, the whole enterprise just sounds like an another excuse to play the television version of search engine optimization – hammer those buzzwords! Or in this case, those buzzpeople.
I was, however, quite interested in the episode I saw over the weekend about Randy Weaver of Ruby Ridge fame because I had ever so slight touch upon the story back when I was a reporter in Iowa. And I have to give the show’s creators credit – it was fascinating to hear from the central characters now reflecting upon the tragedy (particularly Weaver’s daughter, Sara).
It’s just too bad Shatner played the role of inquisitor instead of someone with a more serious mien. Perhaps he would have been a bit more skeptical; I guess I always viewed Weaver as less victim and more provacateur than the general view because of my reporting experience.
Posted on September 7, 2010
By Scott Buckner
Since forever, science and industry have been on a mission to develop some sort of life form capable of doing nothing but growing or shitting money. By the looks of Food, Inc., the Robert Kenner documentary released in 2009 and shown last Sunday night on PBS’s POV, the American food industry has made astounding headway toward accomplishing that goal.
I’ve never been particularly concerned over who makes my food, how it’s slaughtered and processed, or how it ends up at my grocery store. I’ve never exactly been picky about what goes into it, either; I love a good hot dog, a nice bologna sandwich, and I’ve rarely met a hamburger I didn’t like. I like it that way. But Food, Inc. made me reconsider what constitutes good food made good and fast and cheap.
Yet therein lies the dilemma I’ve been dealing with for years since I’m not affluent and do my own food shopping. I know anything off a Wendy’s dollar menu is cheaper and tastier than a whole head of lettuce, and takes no prep time; I also know that’s why so many of us have become lard-assed Type II diabetics. Yet the same foods that are better for us (no pesticides, no growth hormones, no genetic engineering, no feedlot raising, etc.) cost three to four times more than the regular stuff. To me, $10 for a gallon of milk and $6 for a pound of ground beef isn’t exactly a consumer-friendly way to cultivate mass appeal.
Posted on April 30, 2010
By Pat Bataillon
America’s Worst Driver: Chicago aired the other night. It’s shows like these that made me cancel cable.
The above statement should be the entirety of this column but that isn’t any fun. What is fun is the ending of this particular show. The beginning and middle are just like every other reality television show but in the end a car is destroyed by a monster truck. For what it’s worth, every reality show that brings nothing to to the table for 40-some minutes should all do us a favor and end with a monster truck running over a contestant’s car. The reaction is worth the wait.
So here’s how it goes:
Posted on March 31, 2010
By Thomas Chambers
Like Sugar Bombs being “part of a nutritious breakfast” or government EPA-rated mileage at 23 city/31 highway, things are usually not as they appear.
I simply don’t believe Churchill Downs Inc. (CDI) is the benevolent caretaker of horse racing and America’s biggest racing event. And I don’t believe reality television has much to do with reality. Instead, it’s a crass capitalization on the fact that Americans have an innate desire to believe what they see on television and in newspapers.
I didn’t make much inner progress on these things after watching the latest installment of CBS’s Undercover Boss, where the geek head of CDI went “undercover” to experience the “lowest” jobs in the company. You know, the other side of the tracks. The only bit of reality they shoot for and hit is that the employees they meet have eminently more grease in their elbows, work ethic in their brains and pride in their souls than any cookie-cutter, interchangeable MBA above them.
Posted on March 18, 2010
By Scott Buckner
NBC deserves to die. Today.
Just when you thought NBC couldn’t screw up its Winter Olympics coverage any more than it already had, the network decided to go for broke Sunday night and sprint across the crash-and-burn finish line by interrupting the contemporary music portion of the closing Olympic ceremonies for a Jerry Seinfeld abomination called The Marriage Ref and then air the portion it bumped an hour later, following the local news.
If we weren’t convinced before, we’re convinced now that NBC is the only network on the planet that wouldn’t just tape-delay the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, it would find a way to cut away from the really crucial part where The Savior is telling Christians how to save themselves and avoid the rising dead so it could squeeze in four more minutes of commercials.
Posted on March 1, 2010
