babbling blue

Those of you who know me well know that I watch a lot of TV. I mean, a lot of TV. It’s my number 1 hobby. Hey, don’t look at me like that. Everyone needs a hobby and I’m very good at mine. Okay?

I watch so much TV that it’s very tough to pick a few shows and say that they’re my favorites. But I’m going to try. So here is another installment in the “My Favorite Things” series. I am limiting myself this time to shows currently in production. Here they are, in no particular order.

“The Wire” on HBO
This is a cop show, plus. It’s not a crime procedural of the likes of “Law & Order” or “CSI”. Rather it’s a drama in which we see both sides of the coin, cops & robbers (or in most cases drug dealers). In both cases we get a glimpse of how the characters’ work affects their lives. Extremely well written and acted and produced.

“24” on FOX
Unless you live under a rock, you probably at least know about this show. It’s a show that takes place in “real time”, each episode lasting an hour and each season taking one day. It revolves around Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland) a Los Angeles counter-terrorist agent. In every season lots of people die and things blow up. While they often take considerable liberties with the real-time format, it’s a great action/suspense show unlike anything else.

“Boston Legal” on ABC
It’s really the actors that make this show great, though it’s also pretty well-written. The show features Candace Bergen (you know, Murphy Brown), Renee Auberjonois (Constable Odo from “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine” and James Spader (the only actor left from “The Practice” from which this show was spun off). But the man who really makes the show is William Shatner. I’m serious. “Denny Crane!” The show is theoretically a legal drama, but it’s more of a dramedy as it’s constantly making me laugh.

“Arrested Development” on FOX
The only sitcom to make the list. This show is brilliant. Perhaps it’s too brilliant, since while it’s a critical darling it’s done mediocre in terms of ratings and always seems to be on the verge of cancellation. The theory I’ve seen espoused online is that the show is too clever for the average viewer. Maybe it is. I’m behind on this show by quite a bit. Thanks to Netflix, I’m catching up though. The show revolves around the quirky Bluth family, whose patriarch (Jeffrey Tambor) was arrested for various white-collar crimes. The most sane adult in the family, Michael (Jason Bateman) is trying to keep everything together. I can’t do it justice in a paragraph. Watch it for yourself!

“The Shield” on FX
A very gritty and realistic (from what I hear) cop show. There are a lot of excellent characters portrayed by an extremely talented cast, but the center about which the show revolves is Detective Vic Mackey (Michael Chiklis, who apparently got demoted since “The Commish”). Mackey is a dirty, violent cop. But strangely enough he seems to mean well. He’s constantly haunted by the fact that he once killed a fellow cop and covered it up. This show loves to push the limits and I always look forward to the next episode.

I don’t want to make this too long, so I’ll stop there. But I want to include a few honorable mentions that I’d feel remiss in leaving out. They are: “Jeopardy!”, “Battlestar Galactica”, “Family Guy”, “Nip/Tuck”, “Commander in Chief”, “MI-5″ (“Spooks” on BBC), “Without a Trace”.

If you follow any of the same shows and want to chat about ‘em, let me know.

Edit: I realized when I saw a commercial for it last night that I forgot to include “Prison Break” as an honorable mention.

In the “strange coincidences” category, the day after my post on “Match Game” I played Trivial Pursuit Pop Culture Edition. There was a question to which the answer was “Match Game” referring, of course, to the very game show I was just writing about. I got it right and got a piece of the pie for it!

In other strange coincidences. . . I have two half brothers. One from my mom and one from my dad. They are very close in age and build, despite not being related to each other. In fact, I don’t recall them ever having met each other. If they did, it was many years ago. I saw them both over Christmas and was struck by not only their similar size, but that they both have long hair and goatees.

Anyway, I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas or is enjoying a festive Chanukah or just enjoyed their time off or holiday pay. I took the whole week off to be extra lazy.

I’ve decided to try to make this blog a little more personal and to lighten the tone a bit, which has been very serious lately.

So I’m going to do a series of posts about some of my favorite things. They won’t be in any particular order. I’m just going to post them as they come to me (spread out over time). I’ll be adding a new category to hold these. Anyway, with no further ado, the first of my favorite things:

I like game shows. In particular, I like the “Match Game,” the best game show of all time, bar none. While the show went through numerous incarnations, the best and most popular (and the only ones you can see today) were hosted by Gene Rayburn. While nowhere near as prolific as such game show host greats as Bert Convey, Bill Cullen or Chuck Woolery, Gene was loveable, quick-witted and had an excellent rapport with both contestants and celebrity panelists.

The show originally aired from 1962 to 1969 on NBC. Apparently few of these episodes remain (one source says only 11 out of 1,760–which is very sad), and they are not seen at all today. When the show reappeared in 1973 on CBS, the rules changed a great deal. These episodes starting in 1973 are the ones that are showed today on GSN. There was also a “Match Game PM” version, similar to the daytime version, also hosted by Rayburn. In fact, after the original version in the 60’s, there were three Rayburn-hosted versions, all similar. One from 73-79, called “Match Game ‘73″ (or whatever the year was) on CBS (over 1,400 episodes!), the syndicated “PM” version which ran at night from 75-81 and the syndicated daytime show simply called “Match Game” from 79-82.

The basic premise of the show is that contestants (regular people) try to match answers with a panel of six celebrities on fil in the blank questions. To really appreciate the show, one has to watch it. The show’s regular celebrities were Brett Somers, Charles Nelson Reilly and Richard Dawson. But there were many others that made frequent appearances, including Betty White, Bill Daily and Vicki Lawrence. The interaction among Gene and the celebs and the humor that often ensued, especially from questions designed to be potentially racy, was priceless.

Another version of the show also aired, though I’ve never seen it. It was “The Match Game-Hollywood Squares Hours” from 83-84 hosted half by Gene Rayburn and half by Jon Bauman. It obviously combined “Match Game” with “Hollywood Squares”. Two unsuccessful revivals were attempted in the 90’s, one hosted by Ross Shafer and the other by Michael Burger. None of these still air, though I would like to see them (as well as the original 60’s version) for myself to see how they compare to the others.

Sadly, a revival of the show which might have succeeded was scrapped before it happened. Everything was set to go in 1987 to start the show up again, with Gene Rayburn as the host. But an episode of “Entertainment Tonight” aired before the show started taping which reported Rayburn’s true age as 70, instead of the early-to-mid-sixties that the producers had believed. The version was scrapped, as it was believed that Rayburn was “too old.” A lost golden opportunity. Ah well.

This concludes my first “Favorite Things” post. I hope you enjoyed. If you get GSN watch the “Match Game”. Tell ‘em Josh sent you!

Match Game links:
Match Game.org (watch out for pop-up ads)
Match Game ‘75/Match Game PM

Well, I know something that a lot of bloggers do is link to other bloggers. And the circle of internet life goes on. Anyway, there are a couple I just discovered.

Doug Savage, at savagechickens.com, likes to draw chicken cartoons on post-it notes. He did a week of Star Wars cartoons. This is the best:

And another one I really like is PostSecret. According to the site:

PostSecret is an ongoing community art project where people mail-in their secrets anonymously on one side of a homemade postcard.

It’s something you should definitely check out. Some are funny, some are sad. Some are uplifting and some are incomprehensible. See for yourself.

http://postsecret.blogspot.com/