When sitcom writers resort to relying on catchphrases to get a big studio audience response, that sitcom is generally on the decline. Whether it's "Dyn-o-mite!", "Kiss my grits", or "Up your nose with a rubber hose," they are funny the first half dozen times, but wear a...

We're almost at the exact hour of TCM's first sign-on. They signed on the air at 6 p.m. EDT on 14 April 1994.

Anyone notice that the Criterion Channel now has a programmed streaming channel? They call it Criterion 24/7. When I started the Criterion app on my TV last night, I noticed that the layout was slightly different. There's a new option at the top called Criterion 24/7. It's programmed, meaning they d...

To add to the sitcom discussion, add another vote to the column for The Nanny. That show was hilarious, and the ensemble was perfectly matched together. I saw a couple of episodes of Cybill online and wanted to see more because it seemed fantastic (and I loved Cybill on Moonlighting), but never got...

There are also regional differences, like Southerners (me, for one) who thought All in the Family was WAY TOO LOUD!!! PEOPLE SHRIEKING AT EACH OTHER IN UGLY ACCENTS!!!!!! Whereas Designing Women, so brilliant and funny in its early years, might not have made as much sense to people in other parts o...

I had the "Elaine at The English Patient " experience with Pirates of the Caribbean . People had low expectations of the film, based as it was on a Disney theme park ride, but because it was better than that, suddenly it became a phenomenon. When I saw it, I was expecting a really enterta...

I'd never heard of Stopette until I started watching WML reruns on the Game Show Network years ago. They would show the entire original show with period commercials (and then add their own modern ones too), so a 30 minute episode ran 40 minutes. It is currently shown on: Buzzr. It retains the origi...

What's My Line (1950-1967) was sponsored by: 'Stopette' (Poof! There goes perspiration!) These commercials were usually a talking head but there was one which had a lady in a unitard doing an interpretive dance. It is ... interesting. Stopette is referenced in Sabrina , of all things. As I understa...

Old Friends, Cameron Mackintosh's love letter to Stephen Sondheim, will be coming to America. It began life as a one-off event in London with an all-star cast, to benefit the Stephen Sondheim Foundation. It was later mounted with a mostly different cast for a run in the West End, which is where I s...

THE THING ABOUT MODERN COMMERCIALS that gets me is THAT THEY ARE soooooooooooooo PUNISHINGLY DREADFUL- and there is NO NEED FOR THEM TO BE. I was recently looking at commercials from the 70s 80s and 90s ON YOUTUBE and was taken aback by how INNOCUOUS AND INNOFFENSIVE AND TO-THE-POINT THEY ARE. No s...

It's been on Sundance, AMC and BBC America lately (with ads), along with on-demand copies on MGM+ and YouTube Movies. I DVR'ed it off Showtime when they had a free week offer some time ago, and my DVR still picks up copies from various networks. The ad networks have about 45 mines of ads, based on t...

I'm one of the few Americans who never saw any of the trial, so my filter is just based on what the media & others have said afterwards. I was living in London almost the entire time. I returned to the US just a day before the trial ended. You never heard anything about it on TV or radio in the ...

I don't watch any network shows, but the news shows (network and cable) are also awful. Many long commercial breaks. It seems there are more commercials than actual news stories. Often they'll come back from a commercial break, tell one news story and go on break again! I'm constantly switching sta...

Most network shows now have about 9 minutes of breaks per half hour - ads, promotions for other shows, PSAs. That's nearly a third of the time slot wiped out. Older shows had about 5 minutes of breaks per half hour - even less in the 1950s. The FCC doesn't regulate this, except for children's progra...

Okay, sorry, but I now have one more comment to make about David Janssen. Well okay, not particularly about him, but an observation about the TV series he will forever be most associated with. I noticed that these bikers were mostly riding Triumphs and Hondas (c'mon, everybody knows that outlaw bik...