The Way It Is

Isn’t it odd that Walter Cronkite passed during the 40th anniversary of his career’s highlight—covering the Apollo 11 mission?
Because my father was a dairy farmer, suppertime at our house was 5:00, so Dad could go out and milk the cows afterward. At 5:30, I usually turned on somebody’s network newscast. I watched the other networks [...]

Kicker Nation

(There’s nothing about music in this post. Sorry.)
Every once in a while, you’ll find a vintage network news broadcast at YouTube or somewhere else online, and the experience of watching it is enlightening. The pace is what jumps out first—how slow it seems. Often, for several uninterrupted minutes, it’s a guy reading with a slide [...]

Anything But Tranquilizin’

For the purpose of making this post fit the general subject matter of this blog, let me state first that Bea Arthur, who died over the weekend at age 86, once made a record. Bea Arthur on Broadway: Just Between Friends was recorded in December 2001 at her one-woman Broadway show. Arthur was an old [...]

Joke and Don’t Look Back

I am collecting the early seasons of Saturday Night Live on DVD, and I’m currently working my way through season 4 (1978-1979). Apart from showcasing classic comedy bits and musical performances by some of the most important stars of the age, these old episodes of SNL are cultural artifacts that illuminate their times, and they [...]

There’s a Strangeness About This Day

You can have M*A*S*H, I Love Lucy, Cheers, Seinfeld, or any of the other contenders in the race for greatest sitcom ever if I can take Sports Night, the ABC series created by Aaron Sorkin, which ran from 1998 to 2000. It was Sorkin’s first series, in which he honed the dense and speedy style [...]

Special Midnights

If you read this blog regularly, you are probably old enough to remember when TV stations signed off the air at night, although you don’t have to be all that old. It was the early 90s before 24/7 operation became the norm in most places across the country. Before that, it wasn’t unusual for stations [...]