Category / Television

by Edward Champion

Aw Damn…

Don Adams has passed on. Damn.

I grew up with that curious generation just at the beginning of the Internet (i.e., the Usenet days) and near the end of UHF saturation (before I gave up television). And Adams was one of my unspoken comic heroes. If I learned anything from watching Get Smart, it was this: deadpan ardor with dollops of sincerity can get you through a lot of life’s unexpected scrapes. It didn’t help that Smart worked with a damn sexy and damn smart gal named Agent 99.

The Maxwell Smart persona was dug up somewhat with the Inspector Gadget cartoons, but Gadget was only Adams’ voice. And while Adams’ voice, in itself, was intoxicatin, you needed the expressive eyes and the benign look of confusion to get the full schtick. It was not dissimilar to John Astin’s Gomez Adams, an equally exuberant comic figure. But where Gomez invited destruction, Maxwell Smart unwittingly did so. So it’s Maxwell Smart that I remember and I mourn, wondering if there is a single comic actor (let alone an ambitious producer actually concerned with developing a comic character) who can ever fill Adams’ shoes.

by Edward Champion

Raquel & Janis

DICK CAVETT: Do you remember your dreams, Raquel?
RAQUEL WELCH: Ohhh! My dreams.
CAVETT: Your dreams.
WELCH: Which…which ones?
CAVETT: What’s the last one you remember?
WELCH: Oh. I’ve been dreaming nights about that premiere. I mean I just keep seeing pushing and shoving and flashing and getting mad. That’s all. That’s the last dream. But before, um, that when I was a little girl, I always used to dream that there was this ballet dancer and she was doing that — this thing called a forte, which is that terribly difficult and complicated spin that they do. And just doing it, like — intensely. You know? Until there were like sparkles coming out all over the place. And then I can remember this other dream I used to have, where they — there were men and beautiful women on flying trapezes. And they used to do these somersaults and clamp their hands over the bars. It was fantastic and exciting!
CAVETT: Gee.
WELCH: That was all — that’s the only thing that I can really…
JANIS JOPLIN: Do you know about F. Scott Fitzgerald? I mean, were you ever an F. Scott Fitzgerald freak?
WELCH: Sure.
JOPLIN: Yeah, well I was — I’ve been an F. Scott Fitzgerald freak for years and, uh, Zelda just came out. And, uh, you oughta read it. She was something else.
CAVETT: Yeah. Ms. Milford wrote that.
JOPLIN: Yes. She did indeed.
CAVETT: I’d like to read that. Good? You recommend it?
JOPLIN: Yeah. Oh…well, I’m a Fitzgerald freak. But it gives a lot of insight like you…the impression I got from all the Fitzgerald…uh..autobiographies I read was that he sort of destroyed her, right? But he wrote her a letter and he said, they keep saying that we’ve destroyed each other. He said I don’t believe it’s true. He said, we destroyed ourselves.
CAVETT: His letters are wonderful.
JOPLIN: Oh, so are hers!
CAVETT: Did you think of him when she mentioned ballet dancing?
JOPLIN: Yes. That’s what I thought.

From The Dick Cavett Show, June 25, 1970

by Edward Champion

Six Feet Under Finale

Just saw the finale. For a while, everything was rocking. The eyes were getting a-misty. The heart was still involved. There was the promise of some sense of finality, some ultimate message about existence that Alan Ball (who did, after all write and direct this send-off), hoped to provide for us. But what did we get in the final ten minutes?

Saccharaine moments that were, amazingly enough, more unconvincing than the Xmas future seen in the Richard Donner-Bill Murray version of Scrooged. (And that takes some doing.) Actors under really bad makeup living out their final moments in the future. A cheap finale. The overall message of living, so eloquently portrayed in the first hour, disrupted by some of the silliest moments ever seen in Six Feet Under‘s history. What Ms Chicha deservedly referred to as the most emotional car commercial ever. I don’t think so. Let’s try “most expensive car commercial ever.”

And it’s all thanks to Alan Ball that these characters were cheapened for an unconvincing future and, most likely, an unconvincing present.

Ah well. Go figure. The series went out with a bang and once again proved that, all along, this was an audacious yet flawed series. I have to agree with my good friend Beck that this series certainly did well, all things considered. And it certainly did me in because I’m an emotional fellow.

But I would argue that it was Jill Soloway and Kate Robin who knew how to write for this show and that contributed to the show’s convincing narrative, not Ball. Without these fantastic talents, the show would have quickly turned absurd and hackneyed. So here’s thanks to them or possibly Ball for hiring them.

Even so, the other thing that strikes me as false about the Six Feet Under solution is that salvation comes from a trust fund. This is about as realistic as D.W. Griffith’s shameless melodramas of blind women finding miraculous cures through generous scientists. In short, it just doesn’t happen. Which begs the question: how can anyone here be sad when the financial realities are out of scope with a sizable percentage of the population?

In the meantime, what does the man forever jaded against television have to look forward to? Why, Battlestar, of course!

by Edward Champion

Memo to USPS: Where’s the Dick Cavett DVD Set That We Ordered Last Week? We’re SO Jonesing For This

Chicago Sun-Times: “In July 1970, for instance, ‘The Dick Cavett Show’ featured a chat session with Sly and the Family Stone, Debbie Reynolds and tennis great Pancho Gonzales. Equally weird, a month earlier, was the joint appearance of Janis Joplin, Raquel Welch, news anchor Chet Huntley and the terminally suave Douglas Fairbanks Jr. The elderly Huntley was visibly sweet on Welch, and — while taking hits from a long cigarette holder — Joplin lectured Welch about underground cartoonist R. Crumb.”

[RELATED: Newsday talks with Cavett and Cavett reveals he unintentionally interviewed Howard Hesseman. Further Cavett trivia: You know that he underwent shock treatments for bipolar disorder, but did you know that he appeared on not one, but two soap operas?]