Rate The Last TV Show Episode You Watched

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jkholm
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Re: Rate The Last TV Show Episode You Watched

#121 Post by jkholm »

Get Smart S1 Ep 1 “Mr. Big”
The Loner S1 Ep 1 “An Echo of Bugles”

I had never heard of “The Loner” until I saw a mention in another message board. Normally I wouldn’t blind-buy a TV series I wasn’t familiar with, especially when there are so many well-known shows I don’t yet own. Nevertheless, I was at Wal-Mart the other day and decided “What the heck” and bought it for $15. Surely a show created by Rod Serling was worth it?

Being the geek that I am, I looked up when the show originally aired and saw that it debuted on the same night as Get Smart. Since I have the first season of that show, I realized I could watch two pilot episodes to two shows that aired an hour apart back in September of 1965.

Get Smart was one of my favorite shows as a kid and “Mr. Big” holds up quite well. The tone of the show as a whole is there right from the start. We even get the first use of such long running gags as the cone of silence and “would you believe…?”

The first episode of The Loner introduces the audience to William Colton, a former Union soldier (Lloyd Bridges) wandering the American West shortly after the end of the Civil War. The opening scene sets up a fairly standard Western trope: a stranger enters a saloon and soon must intervene in an increasingly dangerous situation as a drunk teen taunts an ex-Confederate soldier. Colton is soon drawn into a duel with the boy and we learn through flashbacks why Colton resigned from the army after the war.

There’s a very subtle anti-war message here but thankfully Serling restrains himself and keeps the story focused more on Colton who could very well be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. I presume the other episodes deal with him moving from town to town, helping out strangers as he tries to figure out what he wants to do next. Picture quality was not great but good enough for me.

Eric Paddon
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Re: Rate The Last TV Show Episode You Watched

#122 Post by Eric Paddon »

I've known about "The Loner" for years because Goldsmith's theme and pilot score were part of the very first FSM CD release as a bonus to the release of his "Stagecoach" score (and "The Loner" theme turns up oddly in some mystery "trailer" track in the "Hombre" score, a movie that Goldsmith had no involvement with!) I have never seen the series and I'm not sure if I'll give it a chance (a few years ago I would have been more willing).

mkaroly
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Re: Rate The Last TV Show Episode You Watched

#123 Post by mkaroly »

jkholm wrote:Get Smart was one of my favorite shows as a kid and “Mr. Big” holds up quite well. The tone of the show as a whole is there right from the start. We even get the first use of such long running gags as the cone of silence and “would you believe…?”
I love Get Smart...I am currently working through season 3.

Eric Paddon
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Re: Rate The Last TV Show Episode You Watched

#124 Post by Eric Paddon »

Star Trek: The Mark Of Gideon

This is another one of those TOS episodes that I hadn't watched since the 1980s. It's one of those episodes I ignored as a mature adult because it had such a silly premise in its plot (a planet that suffers from overpopulation finds the space to build an exact duplicate of the Enterprise???) that I never bothered to revisit it until now. And this marked the first time as an adult I got to digest all the talky speeches that bog down the final third of the episode about Gideon's overpopulation problem etc. It really exposes just how bad the episode is on all levels (and Sharon Acker I have to say gives one of the worst female guest performances in the series). In their zeal to give us an unsubtle tract about over-population and a plea for all things necessary to control it, this episode creates an epic-sized plothole even bigger than the one about the duplicate Enterprise on such a crowded planet. Namely this:

WHY NOT SOLVE THE PLANET's OVERPOPULATION PROBLEM BY SIMPLY TRANSPORTING THE SURPLUS PEOPLE TO OTHER HABITABLE PLANETS INSIDE THE FEDERATION???????!!!!!!!

I mean like gee, wouldn't it be simpler for the planet Gideon to see the virtue in joining the Federation for a chance to move its population to other places and let their own planet's population become manageable and in the future if populations continue to rise just have more transferred off instead of resorting to a duplicitous charade that to put it bluntly involves at its core introducing a long-term form of planetary genocide? (What else would you call trying to introduce a virus into the population to thin out the ranks and lower the lifespan???)

Oh but if you resorted to that simple form of story logic then goodbye to your political tract about overpopulation on Earth as it seemed to some people in the late 1960s! If ever there was a classic case of bad television writing that sacrifices story credibility for the sake of a "message" this is it (it certainly proves that Cyrano Jones should have stuck to being in front of the camera).

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Paul MacLean
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Re: Rate The Last TV Show Episode You Watched

#125 Post by Paul MacLean »

Eric Paddon wrote:Star Trek: The Mark Of Gideon
Agreed on all counts about "Mark of Gideon's" gaping holes!

After taking over Executive Producer duties from Gene Roddenberry, Fred Frieberger refused to commission any more scripts from established science fiction writers, and instead hired only television writers, on the grounds that people like Richard Matheson, Norman Spinrad and Robert Bloch "don't know how to write for TV". (Yet Stanley Adams did?) :roll:

The result was turds like "Spock's Brain", "And The Children Shall Lead", Ellan of Troyus", Whom Gods Destroy", and "Mark of Gideon". Star Trek's third season is unquestionably its worst, and while I do consider "The Tholian Web" one of the series' best episodes, I agree with David Gerrold's assessment of year three, that it was "like watching a sick friend die".

Don't the denizens of Gideon get tired of shuffling around in those cramped rooms? Don't they ever sit down?

If life is so "sacred" to the Gideon's -- so-much-so that even contraception is an unacceptable option -- why is it preferable to infect their population so that they will die horribly while wasting away from an incurable disease?

If the high council of Gideon wants Captain Kirk to keep believing he is on the actual Enterprise, why do they allow images of the Gideon people to appear on the screen?

Just how was the Gideon world capable of creating a perfect duplicate of the Enterprise -- and one detailed enough to fool the Enterprise captain? Did the computers on the duplicate Enterprise contain all of the classified Star Fleet information which the real Enterprise's computers did? Did they duplicate the personal effects Kirk keeps in his quarters? If so, how?

Why didn't Captain Kirk try using his communicator to contact the real Enterprise after beaming down to Gideon (as Spock later did)? Wouldn't it dawn on him that he might have been transported to a duplicate of the Enterprise? However unlikely that may have seemed, he would have to take this into account when he found himself on an Enterprise with no crew.

And why recreate the Enterprise at all? Why didn't they just have Kirk beam into a location where he was trapped (and his communicator rendered inoperable) and then have him meet (and infect) the girl? (Probably because it was cheaper than building a new set!)

Eric Paddon
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Re: Rate The Last TV Show Episode You Watched

#126 Post by Eric Paddon »

I will say though in fairness that you can point to a lot of clunker episodes in Season 2 as well and that the problem doesn't begin with Freiberger (though he exacerbated the situation in a few instances where he wasn't helped by having a story editor who was also new to the show). "Patterns Of Force" is still my choice for an episode that is as close to "Lost In Space" goofiness at its core as you'll get in terms of premise (that a brilliant historian would create a "good" Nazi planet; and don't get me started on having a German WW2 uniform ready for McCoy on a moment's notice!) And if there is one thing I'll forever be grateful to Freiberger for it was his final rewrite of "All Our Yesterdays" that turned that into one of the best episodes of the whole series.

But yes, in S3 the tone to a degree seems more off because there's someone else at the helm overall and that makes the bad episodes on some levels seem worse than similarly bad episodes from S2 do.

Excellent points on the further absurdities of Gideon as an episode. It reeks of a producer thinking of how to use empty standing sets without spending extra!

Eric Paddon
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Re: Rate The Last TV Show Episode You Watched

#127 Post by Eric Paddon »

Playhouse 90: "Forbidden Area"

I'd wanted to see this for years but had no idea it was on YT until today. This aired 60 years ago today as the debut episode of the series and its a testament to how much prestige live TV anthologies commanded that you had Charlton Heston starring in this in the weeks before "Ten Commandments" was released (another "Ten Commandments" cast member, Vincent Price, also appears). It was directed by John Frankenheimer and based on a novel by Pat Frank about a Soviet plot to launch a sneak attack on the US by using a mole inside the Air Force to sabotage the bombers responsible for the delivery of America's nuclear retaliatory capability.

It's fascinating to see this kind of Cold War tale done by Frankenheimer before he would do "Manchurian Candidate" and "Seven Days In May" because if you take this production and the later two movies as a whole they reveal an interesting paradigm shift from the 50s to the 60s. In "Forbidden Area" we have the element of elaborate Soviet subversion to bring down the US and the heroic military figures like Heston (whose character wears an eyepatch though it's not the same eye that he wore a patch on decades later in "True Lies") who expose it and save the US. "Manchurian Candidate" gives us another tale of Soviet subversion and a Soviet plot to bring down the country, but not by war but through their mole in the supposedly vehement anti-communist Senator. And then we have "Seven Days In May" in which Rod Serling, who also wrote the "Forbidden Area" script, writes a script focusing on the threat coming from the gung-ho US military. It makes ultimately for an interesting trilogy as a whole when you take into account the unifying theme of Frankenheimer as director.


Eric Paddon
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Re: Rate The Last TV Show Episode You Watched

#128 Post by Eric Paddon »

I picked up for just $2 after discounts the 1965 western series "The Loner" created by Rod Serling and which of course had a pilot score by Jerry Goldsmith that was in the very first FSM CD along with "Stagecoach". Going through the first six episodes, it comes off as no more than okay. I like the fact first off that it's only a half-hour show. I am not a big fan of westerns to begin with and have only kind of over time learned to respect the superior TV westerns while remaining totally indifferent to movie westerns. The half-hour "Gunsmoke" to me is the best western ever done and I think its because the compact storytelling keeps things from being tedious. And that's exactly what "The Loner" needs because if it were a full-hour show I think it would have gone from okay to excruciating. The real flaw, even at a half hour is Serling's writing. His greatest flaw as a writer was having characters overtalk and it really sticks out here. If we had to have an hour of characters talking the way Serling has them talk, the results would have made the worst hour-long TZ seem literary by comparison.

What's fascinating though about the pilot episode "An Echo Of Bugles" (the one whose score is on CD) is that it has a plot that if made today would generate an epic level of outrage from the PC crowds that are destroying our society. The conflict Lloyd Bridges' William Colton is thrust into stems from the fact that he objects to a punk teenager stealing a weary Confederate veteran's old flag and stomped on it and dumped liquor over it. Colton steps in and forces the punk to clean it whereupon the irate punk challenges him to a gunfight. It's astonishing to think that once upon a time we could see Rod Serling, whose credentials on civil rights were as impeccable as anyone, write an episode where the issue of honor is respecting an old Confederate veteran's flag, simply because it symbolizes the men he fought with and the experience he went through and not misguided loyalty for a "ghost that bled itself to death" and NO ONE AT THE TIME PROTESTED!

EDIT-I apologize for not revisiting jkholm's earlier review of the pilot episode at the top of this page! You had things nailed right in that Colton just aimlessly wanders about helping people making this a show more in the mold of earlier westerns with the "loner" figure moving on like "Cheyenne" etc.

jkholm
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Re: Rate The Last TV Show Episode You Watched

#129 Post by jkholm »

I've now watched twenty episodes of THE LONER. Serling's writing style is certainly the most notable element of the series (along with Bridges' performance). His dialogue is very theatrical and most of his episodes come across as compact morality plays. His style can seem outdated and preachy but has its own peculiar rhythm. The non-Serling penned episodes are the worst of the series, in part because they are so conventional.

I agree that the half-hour format works well for the series. Some episodes are perfect at that length while others feel as though the middle act of the story was squeezed out. And there are a few duds where there isn't even enough story for 30 minutes and the episode doesn't end so much as it just stops.

Eric, let us know if you continue to watch. The best episode so far is "The Homecoming of Lemuel Stove," a brutal story about racism with a terrific performance by Brock Peters.

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AndyDursin
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Re: Rate The Last TV Show Episode You Watched

#130 Post by AndyDursin »

Been catching up on the GSN's recent $25,000 Pyramid reruns which I DVR in standard def, so as to not take up too much space.

Not sure I've ever seen a worse performance than this one particular episode with Robert Foxworth, who managed to net $50 (1 correct answer) on his 1st trip to the top of the Pyramid in the 1st half of the show....then returned with the other contestant, and managed to get him back as the show champion by netting $150 (2 correct answers!) in the other portion. One of the worst attempts I've ever seen in one single episode!

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Re: Rate The Last TV Show Episode You Watched

#131 Post by Eric Paddon »

If you think that was bad, get a load of this (and why 90% of the time the contestant chose to receive!) :)


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AndyDursin
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Re: Rate The Last TV Show Episode You Watched

#132 Post by AndyDursin »

Lol!

I remember watching one show where Dick Clark was actively trying to talk the contestant out of "giving" in that round. She ended up doing it anyway, winning $10k in the first half but then stumbling the second time around. He basically castigated her when she lost that time, like "you're not as good as you think" lol. There are times though when the celebrities are so bad that it might be worth the try...like Robert Foxworth!!

What's also weird about these shows (which I'm not as familiar with as the $10000 syndicated version) is the Mystery 7 wasnt buried but it's own category...weird they didn't hide it but thought contestants would be so scared off by not knowing the category theme they'd shy away from it. Guess that didn't last long!!

Eric Paddon
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Re: Rate The Last TV Show Episode You Watched

#133 Post by Eric Paddon »

Yeah that format of "Mystery 7" happened only early in the show's CBS run in 1982-83 and then they changed it to the more standardized version we saw in later years.

The two worst celeb Pyramid players I ever saw were Jimmy Baio of "Soap" on a 1979 week in New York on the old "$20,000 Pyramid" where he and Susan Richardson were playing with kid contestants. Baio was beyond inept that you could tell the kids who got stuck playing with him were P.O'd that they drew him. He managed to win only two of ten games all week and at the Winners Circle for "Famous Walters" literally for a 12 year old contestant could only come up with "Pidgeon" and "Matthau" instead of the obvious one for kids "Disney."

Matching Jimmy for ineptitude was Barbara Bosson of "Hill Street Blues" who had a total inability to give clues properly the one week she was on early in the CBS run in 82.

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AndyDursin
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Re: Rate The Last TV Show Episode You Watched

#134 Post by AndyDursin »

Matching Jimmy for ineptitude was Barbara Bosson of "Hill Street Blues" who had a total inability to give clues properly the one week she was on early in the CBS run in 82.
yep, she preceded Foxworth by a week and they just ran through those. She was bad -- but Foxworth was really just as terrible. Endless dumb errors, total blanking on obvious clues...by the end of the week the contestant turned him around going for $10k...and still didn't work. lol

Eric Paddon
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Re: Rate The Last TV Show Episode You Watched

#135 Post by Eric Paddon »

This thread is overdue for a bump!

I have been going through in sequence for the first time in some years one of my favorite short-lived shows of all time "Ellery Queen" from 1975-76. Starring Jim Hutton and David Wayne, this period mystery show evolved out of the success of "Columbo" by giving us the reverse formula of that show, here a traditional "Whodunnit?" with a roster of all-star guest stars for suspects and Hutton's Queen breaking the fourth wall to challenge the viewer to see if they had figured out the solution to the mystery. It was also a forerunner to "Murder She Wrote" which was created by the same production people at Universal responsible for "Ellery Queen". "Ellery Queen" though always had one big advantage over "Murder She Wrote" because since Ellery's father was a police inspector, it was perfectly natural for this brilliant mystery writer to be drawn into a murder case every week whereas the coincidences that always saw Jessica Fletcher drawn into one week after week after a while made it harder to accept the premise ("Murder She Wrote's" success is more a tribute to the star, it's old-fashioned sense of style and the fact that it became the only show on TV in the 80s and 90s where older audiences could see old and familiar faces who were disappearing from the scene).

The mysteries on "Ellery Queen" could sometimes range from maddeningly complex to too obvious, but to its credit, the show would always play fair by knowing that they had to keep things diverse. Each episode would begin with a teaser that would show us the prominent guest star suspects and then offer the suggestion "or was it someone else?" suggesting it was possible the killer could be one of the obscure characters not played by a top-billed guest in the episode. And they would deliver on that every few episodes which meant the viewer wouldn't get sucked into a predictable trap of how one could always guess the killer based on his social background or ethnicity or for that matter who was the biggest guest star name.

But in addition to having genuinely solid mysteries, it also was blessed in two outstanding stars in Hutton and Wayne. Jim Hutton is so much Ellery Queen that its always impossible for me to see him in any other thing he did without thinking of this role first (and he had enjoyed a sizable film career for much of the 60s). His brilliant, absent-minded persona certainly owes much to the dynamic of Columbo but he makes the part his own and the chemistry with David Wayne as his police inspector father is a joy to watch. The show also had the periodic presence of John Hillerman as radio sleuth Simon Brimmer who was always trying to prove his worth as a real sleuth by topping Queen and always falling on his face. This part was where Hillerman basically introduced the persona of what would become his Higgins character on Magnum P.I.

The pity is that the show only lasted one season (it would only have lasted four at most since Jim Hutton sadly died of cancer just three years after the show ended). A lot of unproduced scripts were recycled by Universal on other, far less memorable shows in the late 70s (one unfilmed script even got dusted off on "Murder She Wrote" in the 80s which had Jessica Fletcher introducing a tale of a Queen like genius with an inspector father but of course the names had to be changed). Thank goodness the show got a DVD release.

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