Enotes

I feel sorry for those who never got a chance to see "Truth or Consequences." I don't mean the town in New Mexico , either. I'm thinking of "T or C" this morning amid the news that host Bob Barker is in the hospital after a fall near his Southern California home. "Truth" didn't give Barker, 91, his start in broadcasting, but it put him on television for the first time. And there Bob stayed for some 51 years. It was game show---and reality TV, if you want to know the truth---pioneer Ralph Edwards who passed the torch of "Truth" to Barker, in 1956. Edwards created "Truth" on the radio in 1940. The premise was wacky yet simple. The show was among the first "audience participation" offerings of the day. Regular folks would have to answer an obscure trivia question---always designed for the contestant to fail---and when the answer was wrong, there would be consequences. These usually came in the form of w...

"No news is good news." I always wondered about this oft-used phrase. Is it saying that there is no such thing as good news, or that when you find yourself without any news at all, that's a good thing? However you choose to decipher "No news is good news," I have one for you that is without ambiguity. "The news isn't convenient." There shouldn't be any confusion over that, but yet there is. In the whirlwind of social media sharing and updates in the wake of the horrific murders of two young television journalists---one a reporter, the other a photographer---in Roanoke, VA on Wednesday during a live interview, we had ourselves a genuine "made for TV" violent crime, and there was much pontificating about what to do with it. The alleged shooter of reporter Alison Parker and photographer Adam Ward, Vester Flanagan, aka Bryce Williams (on-air name), a reportedly disgruntled and frustrated TV reporter himself, crafted a highly...

Which Dick Van Patten would you like to remember and mourn today? Is it the actor Van Patten, who most famously seeped into our consciousness as Tom Bradford, the patriarch of the TV family on ABC's "Eight is Enough" from 1977-81? Is it the tennis player Van Patten, whose sons got some of the old man's genes and did pretty good on the court as well? Is it the animal activist Van Patten, who worked tirelessly for our furried and feathered friends, including founding National Guide Dog Month in 2008? Is it the entrepreneur Van Patten, who co-founded Natural Balance Pet Foods in 1989? Take your pick---or take them all, if you'd like. Van Patten passed away on Tuesday at age 86. Some reports blame the cause of death on complications related to diabetes. There was some juice to the Van Patten name in the entertainment industry. There was Dick, of course, and there was his younger sister Joyce, a fellow actor. There were the Van Patten boys---Vincent, Nels...

Comedians/actors Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara were married for 61 years, but had they not heeded warning signs, the marriage might have ended some 44 years ago. The comedy team of Stiller & Meara was seemingly cruising along in 1970, having just enjoyed a nice run of 36 appearances on "The Ed Sullivan Show"   in the 1960s, when both members of the team/marriage sensed that something was amiss. With an act based largely on their real-life domestic trials and tribulations, Stiller and Meara found that despite their success---or maybe because of it---the line between life at home and life on stage was getting further blurred as the years went on. "I didn't know where the act ended and our marriage began," Meara told People  magazine in 1977 . "We were like two guys," Stiller said in the same article. With Meara questioning things and Stiller worried that he might lose his wife, the act was disbanded in 1970. But they never stopped working ...

As if suicide isn't rotten enough, it invariably raises more questions than it answers. That's because suicide often doesn't answer any questions at all. Even a note left behind won't necessarily satisfy all the curiosity. In fact, suicide notes are likely to create more questions than they answer, as well. A suicide note is like a press conference where a statement is issued and the issuer scrambles away, without taking any queries. Sawyer Sweeten is dead. Apparently it's suicide. Sawyer, on the verge of turning 20, was one-half of the identical twin actors who played Ray and Debra Barone's twin boys on "Everybody Loves Raymond" (1996-2005). Sawyer played Geoffrey and Sullivan Sweeten played Michael. The twins' older sister Madylin played older sister Ally on the TV show. According to reports, Sawyer was visiting family in Texas when he apparently shot himself on the front porch of the house where he was staying. In the early years of ...

They were television advertising icons who resided on the banks of our cultural consciousness. Mr. Whipple (Charmin bathroom tissue). Madge the manicurist (Palmolive dish detergent). The Maytag Repair Man. Even the Qantas koala bear. Those were just a few commercial characters who invaded our living rooms in the 1970s and '80s. Their ads---usually 60 seconds in length or even longer---were rarely the same. The format might have been nearly identical, and of course the tag lines were ("DON'T squeeze the Charmin!"), but each appearance by Mr. Whipple or Madge usually had them interacting with different customers. The actors behind the characters were often nameless, as it should have been, but I'm sure their paychecks weren't nameless---or paltry. The pitchman on TV these days is usually a local litigator or a voice-over hawking prescription meds. There isn't really any character that is iconic---no one who, when they appear on the screen, instantl...

In the 1980s, HBO presented a comedy series called "Not Necessarily the News." In it, pretend anchors used real news clips but altered them for laughs. Cleverly inserted shots that the HBO show produced, interspersed with the actual clips, would be used for gags. Of course, the notion of fake news on TV was hardly new at that time. "Saturday Night Live" began the trend in earnest with its signature Weekend Update segment not long after "SNL" debuted in 1975. While "NNTN" was playful and Weekend Update was very sarcastic, always delivered with a wink and a smirk, there was still further to go in the fake news genre. Enter Comedy Central's "The Daily Show." Where "NNTN" was produced sporadically and Weekend Update was weekly (during the "SNL" season), "The Daily Show" was exactly that---daily. But that's hardly where the delineation ended. "TDS"'s Jon Stewart was not part o...

Today's Miss Americas serve their term and then they're never heard from again. Or so it seems. There's no prerequisite, of course, that the winner of arguably the most famous beauty contest of all time needs to stay in the limelight when she hands the crown over to her successor. But there was a time when Miss America was often the springboard to bigger and better (or, at least, more profitable) things. Mary Ann Mobley was one of those Miss Americas who stuck around in our consciousness long after she sashayed down the runway. Mobley, 77, passed away the other day after a battle with breast cancer . She was the first Mississippian to win the legendary contest, and she parlayed that distinction into a pretty decent stage and film career as an actress. Like so many other women of her era, Mobley was able to star opposite Elvis Presley on screen, and like her brethren, she out-acted him. Mobley had a smile that went from ear-to-ear and her dark beauty was a star...

Allen Funt created television's  Candid Camera . But he was not the star. If Funt were alive today, he would concur. Funt, who took the idea of a roving microphone capturing unguarded moments from the days of radio and turned it into a TV phenomenon, also never liked the notion that his show made fools out of unsuspecting people. Funt preferred to think that Candid Camera was more of a series of case studies on human behavior, rather than a gag-filled half-hour. Regardless, the star wasn't Funt, though he hosted the in-studio segments and often appeared during the hidden camera "case studies." The stars of Candid Camera were always the people---the folks whose behavior was being chronicled in a very unfiltered and unscripted way. Therefore, the laughs that resulted were always from the audience's glee at the reactions of the unwitting, caught by Funt's hidden camera. But that was then. TV Land has trotted out a new version of Candid Camera, hos...

" I try to keep my sadness hid Smiling in the public eye But in my lonely room cry the tears of a clown." I don't generally like to start blog posts or columns with quotes or song lyrics. I have often looked at that sort of thing as a cheap, hackneyed stunt. But the first thing I thought of upon hearing the news of Robin Williams' death by suicide was the iconic song by Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, "Tears of a Clown." So I thought it would be appropriate to lead this post with a portion of Smokey's lyrics, because how can you read them and not think of Williams and the many comedians before him who made their living making us laugh while at the same time battling inner demons? Williams, 63, apparently hanged himself at his California home, sometime between 10:30 p.m. Sunday night and 10:30 a.m. Monday morning. His manager said Williams was battling "severe depression" lately. It is fascinating to me, how many...

James Garner was once asked if he'd ever do a nude scene on camera. "I don't do horror movies," he said. Rim shot. Garner, who died on Saturday at age 86, was a Hollywood leading man but a humble Oklahoman at heart. "I got into the business to put a roof over my head," he once said. "I wasn't looking for star status. I just wanted to keep working." And work he did, especially in the 1960s, when Garner was often teamed with the biggest female names in movies, such as Doris Day (Rock Hudson is more famously connected with Day, but Garner did his fair share with her as well), Audrey Hepburn, Shirley MacLaine and Kim Novak. The film boom for Garner was set up by his work in TV's Maverick, in which he starred from 1957-60, playing old Western card shark and ladies man Bret Maverick. The show went toe-to-toe on Sunday nights with The Ed Sullivan Show and The Steve Allen Show, more than holding its own. If you were a casting director...

Before the commercial airwaves on television were taken over by ads for prescription drugs, lawyers and car insurance companies, there was the wild and crazy pitchman. Every city had them. The products being pumped were usually electronics, appliances and used cars. The ads were low on productions costs---usually all we saw was the pitchman screaming into the camera with an occasional glimpse at what he was hawking. The emphasis was on the supposed insanity of the pitchman, because the deals were so good, you see. New York had Crazy Eddie, who pitched electronic gizmos while shrieking maniacally at the viewer. And Detroit had Ollie Fretter. Fretter, who passed away Sunday at age 91, blanketed the TV and radio ad space with commercials for his appliance store, starting in the 1960s and continuing for about 30 years. He promised five pounds of free coffee if he couldn't beat your best deal. The appliance wars in Detroit were hot in the 1970s and '80s. Fretter went...

The wise-cracking maid/butler/servant in situation comedies has been a trope for nearly as long as folks first started flicking on televisions in the 1940s. So by the time Ann B. Davis showed up to help stay-at-home mom Carol Brady in 1969, she was hardly the first of the hired help in TV history to get some funny lines. But Davis, who played Alice in "The Brady Bunch" from 1969-74, will go down as one of the most memorable, if not the most memorable, live-in helpers of all time. We lost Davis yesterday at age 88, the victim of a fall in her home. Unlike some of her brethren on screen---before and after the Bradys---Davis' Alice wasn't snarky or mean-spirited and didn't try to steal the scene. Her lines were delivered with a dose of humility and with a good heart. Davis was more like Sebastian Cabot's Mr. French in "Family Affair"---subtle but omnipresent. You knew Alice was always around, even if she wasn't chewing the scenery and alwa...

It's not easy to be a trailblazer when so many of the trails have already been blazed, but David Letterman somehow managed to blaze one anyway. You may think that late night television was an already-mined resource by the time Letterman, 66, came along in 1982, hosting "Late Night with David Letterman" on NBC. It's true that TV at the witching hour was nothing new in 1982, having been first attempted some 30 years prior and being refined for 20 years by Johnny Carson when NBC gave Letterman a late night slot, following Carson's "Tonight Show." But it turned out there was still plenty that Letterman found to do that not even the iconic Carson managed to discover. Letterman announced today, somewhat shockingly during the taping of "The Late Show with David Letterman," that 2015 will be the year of his retirement. "This (retirement) means Paul (bandleader Shaffer) and I can finally get married," Letterman said to a crowd that s...

The distinctly debonair, razor-thin, legendary British actor was in the middle of his scripted bit of monologue when suddenly the crowd was in an uproar. It was 1974, in the middle of an American craze that inexplicably had caught on ever-so-briefly, as so many other American crazes seem to do----inexplicably. This particular craze was called "streaking," or running naked through a very public place. The nation's ballparks and football stadiums, to name just a couple venues, were being overrun by those sans clothing, making their mad dashes. And now the Academy Awards show was being interrupted by a streaker. He was male, even if just barely. David Niven, startled by the sudden burst of hoots and howls from the audience, turned and looked to see what the commotion was all about. A streaker was moving behind him, across the stage, flashing the "peace" sign with his fingers. Straying off script, Niven commented with spot-on---as they say in his country--...

There's a certain delicate symmetry when a person's birth city and death city are the same. Harold Ramis has such a line on his biography. Born: November 21, 1944; Chicago, IL. Died: February 24, 2014; Chicago, IL. Ramis, the comedic actor/director who passed away Monday from a rare and painful vascular disease, was as Chicago as wind, deep dish pizza and crooked elections. If you cracked him open you'd have found a Cubs cap and a megaphone. Ramis was always smirking. He had that twinkle in his eye, as if he knew something you didn't. When it came to movie making and laugh making, he did. Ramis was one of the leaders of a band of merry men and women who yukked it up at the original Second City improvisational theater group in Chicago, starting in the late-1960s. He was hardly alone when it came to finding fame later, but his imprint on American filmmaking puts him near the head of the class. Ramis's first role on the big screen saw him smirking all the...

Television was pretty much an extension of the theater when Sid Caesar first started showing up in the living rooms of America in the late-1940s. The performances were shown to audiences much like you would see something live on stage---few if any close-ups, archaic blocking, everything horizontal. Not that you couldn't deliver the goods shooting that way---just look at any "Honeymooners" episode. But it was the work ethic that also translated from theater to early television. The shows may have been in front of cameras, but the players performed like it was Broadway---live and often. Sid Caesar is gone. The year, just 43 days old, has already been unkind. We've lost legendary animator Arthur Rankin, Philip Seymour Hoffman and, on Monday, Shirley Temple Black. Caesar was 91 when he slipped away today in California after a short illness. Caesar lit it up every week, for 90 minutes no less, in "Your Show of Shows," which was basically television'...

How will TV historians judge Jay Leno? The legacy of Johnny Carson was already filed and ready for perusal long before the amateur magician from Nebraska hung up his microphone in May, 1992 after nearly 30 years of hosting The Tonight Show. Carson's imprint on television history---forget just Tonight ---was plainly indelible about 10 years into his run, when the show moved from New York to Burbank. So the next 20 years were spent building on a legacy that saw the unofficial launch of countless stand-up comedians' careers and the cementing of various other entertainers into the public's consciousness. That, plus Carson's own star grew so bright that we were blinded by it when he walked away from the studio and into retirement. But what about Leno, whose final show as Tonight's  host for 22 years was recorded on Thursday? When Carson took the mantle in 1962, the show was eight years old and had been hosted by Steve Allen (1954-57) and Jack Paar (1957-62). Te...

After 27 years of delivering the weather to TV viewers, Chuck Gaidica is going to be working a little closer to the source. Gaidica, who's been telling us how to dress since 1987 on WDIV-TV (channel 4), is leaving that position in August for the ministry. He'll be joining the Oak Pointe Church in Novi as its pastor of world outreach. Leaving broadcast news for the private sector is hardly unprecedented. Nor is leaving it for the public sector; note how many television and radio journalists have joined political administrations. But it's not too often when one moves from the TV studio to the pulpit. A cynic would argue that speaking into a camera to millions every night is the perfect prep job for what Gaidica is about to embark upon. “I think maybe we all would like God to send us a message in skywriting but that didn’t happen,” Gaidica told the Detroit Free Press . “God leads people with whispers and nudges.” Gaidica's decision was hardly made in haste or o...

Between them, Russell Johnson and Dave Madden are known, pretty much, for two television characters. That doesn't mean they were flashes in the pan---it just means that the folks they played made an impression that was almost indelible. Johnson was The Professor on "Gilligan's Island." Madden played the "Partridge Family"'s manager, Reuben Kinkaid. Both passed away today. Johnson was 89; Madden was 82. As is typical when lightning strikes and you find yourself in a role that is enormously popular, Johnson was a little known character actor when he signed on to play the Professor on "Gilligan" in 1964. His life, of course, was then changed forever. In Madden's case, he first showed up on the small screen as one of the ensemble members of "Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In," which debuted in 1967. But the real money and notoriety came a few years later, when he joined the cast of "The Partridge Family," playing the...