Last night, I opened up my internet browser to start a blog post about classic TV. I have stated several times that while I was young, we had cable TV. In fact, we were the only people on our block that I lived in that had cable, and when Michael Jackson's Thriller aired on MTV, my parents would charge the neighborhood kids fifty cents to come in and watch it. My dad recorded it and right after had a "making of" documentary about Thriller, and my dad would charge a dollar to watch both, lol. It was a different time. There is no way we could charge kids in the neighborhood to come into our house, head down to the basement and watch something without a 20/20 or Dateline, or 48 hours interviewing my family about the creepy people that lure kids into the basement.
That story aside, I grew up watching a lot of TV, and on cable, there were a lot of popular shows from the 1960s and 1970s that were in syndication, (for you younger readers, syndication is where a popular TV show is aired after so many years after it premiered on TV, but they usually have scenes and jokes cut from them, and they air more commercials, which can suck!. For example, the cable/satellite channel, FX, which is owned by FOX, airs past year's Simpsons edited episodes with more commercials in between, that is syndication). There was also an old UHF channel based of of Ogden, Utah, Channel 30, which doesn't exist anymore, but when I was little, that little channel would air old shows from the 1960s like The Addams Family, The Munsters, Three's Company, M*A*S*H*, as well as others. at Christmas time, they would air the classic shows like How the Grinch Stole Christmas, Frosty the Snowman, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer as well as others before the major networks got a hold of them, edited a lot of parts out and show them with close to sixty commercials in a thirty minute window. It was a pretty cool little channel when I was little, and I miss it.
When I was a teenager, the cable and satellite channels had tons of syndicated sitcoms and variety TV shows, and Nickelodeon had Nick at Nite's TV Land that was full of them. I loved that channel. There have been so many times where I have taken ideas or make jokes that refer to them. I have a lot of great friends that I have done improv with, as well as older adults, and I have realized that maybe I am weird for loving classic TV. Most of my jokes go over their heads, and I have to explain, but that takes the humor out of it. I love it when older adults get my jokes, and if I strike up a conversation with them and talk about them, it's fun to see them laugh and remember how great those old shows were.
I mentioned a few above, but other shows I love included I Love Lucy, Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In, Batman (the Adam West one, which I still love and own them all on Blu-Ray), Gilligan's Island, The Dick Van Dyke Show, Hogan's Heroes, The Carol Burnette Show, Bewitched, Get Smart, and The Flip Wilson Show, just to name a few off of the top of my head. I am so happy that all of these great shows are still shown on cable or satellite stations, or have wonderful DVD and Blu-Ray sets that contain all of the unedited episodes from all of them.
There were fun things that I would do. I remember in when I was in high school, I introduced my best friend, also named Nate, some of those shows. There was a full week where Nate had found an unopened pack of those "Hello, My Name Is" stickers where you write your name at functions so people can learn your name and face, and we used up the whole pack that week by writing character names from the amazing variety show, The Flip Wilson Show, and we wouldn't answer anyone, even our teachers, unless they called us the character names on the stickers we were wearing. They were always silly, and the teachers actually thought it was really fun because they remembered watching those shows when they originally aired, and were surprised that we knew all of them and could quote lines from them. Flip Wilson was a black man who hosted the show, and he was funny as all get out! He had great guest stars that were either TV or Film actors, athletes, and musical guests. Comedians Tim Conway, Richard Pryor and others, as well as the famous football player Joe Namath, who also appeared in The Simpsons, warning us about vapor lock on our cars in the episode where Bart plays little league football, and Paul McCartney from The Beatles was a musical guest. That was a really fun week of school.
So, last night I was preparing to write a blog post exactly like what I just did, but something happened. I was thinking of old shows I used to love, and anytime I think about shows that I love, I always go back in time to 2006 when ABC aired one of my all-time favorite shows, Pushing Daisies. It was about a man who had a power where he could touch dead people and they would come back to life, but if he touched them again, they would die, and he couldn't bring them back a second time. However, if he doesn't touch the person again, after exactly one minute, someone else in very close range would die, and would be unable to come back to life by his touch. When a private investigator learns his secret, the man is forced to go to funeral homes and see people who have been murdered. The man, whose name is Ned, would touch the person, they would come back to life, tell them who killed them, and then Ned would touch them again within a minute, and they would go solve cases together.
However, Ned learns that the girl he loved from his childhood was murdered on a cruise ship. He brings her back to life, but he doesn't want to touch her again, killing her, so after a minute, the slimy funeral home director who steals jewelry and overcharges people drops dead, and the girl he loves, whose name is Chuck, lol, and they start a romance, but she helps in solving the cases. The hard part is, Ned and Chuck are in love, but if Ned touches Chuck, she will die again, and he won't be able to bring her back to life again. It was so funny and creative how everything played out.
Sadly, there was a Writers Guild strike in 2007, and there were a lot of great shows canceled. Pushing Daisies was canceled after two 13 episode seasons. Despite tons of fans wanting ABC to revive the show, it never was. ABC's explanation was that the show was expensive to produce. Watching one episode of Pushing Daisies will help you to realize that it was a very expensive show to produce since it was a fantasy show, and there were a lot of really great sets, and it looks very expensive. The sad thing is, if it were to have come out in the past few years, it probably would have made it. The creators and writers actually had six, full 22 episode, seasons planned out, and knew all of the cases and storylines. There was talk of Netflix reviving the show, but nothing came of it. There were also rumors of comic books telling the rest of the stories, and there was even talk of a Broadway Musical, which is crazy. The show has so much love, but as the years pass, the cast is getting older, and I don't think a revival would work too well. Lee Pace who played Ned has been in a few movies. He has been getting work on films and was even the main villain, Ronan the Accuser, in the first Guardians of the Galaxy film. He's great, and I'm glad he has had success.
I wanted to talk about Pushing Daisies, but as I looked up some information on it, I discovered that the creators and writers actually produced another TV show in 2004 for FOX called Wonderfalls. I hadn't heard of it before. FOX aired four episodes, but aired them on different nights and times, in horrible TV spots. Just so you are aware, shows that are on Friday nights, besides the old ABC TGIF line-ups in the late 1980s and 1990s, Friday night shows are a death sentences from the network. Think about it, what do you like to do on Friday, or even Saturday, nights? It's date nights, Saturday and Sunday are full of sports, and people go out. It's the weekend. People work and go to school all week, and the weekend evenings aren't for staying in. You go out most of the time. Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday evenings are the bread and butter for network and cable/satellite channels. They show their best material on those nights. FOX took Wonderfalls and threw it on weekend nights, as well as changing the times, and then accused the show for not getting ratings. The show was killed before it even had a fair chance to get started.
When it comes to TV shows, I don't really watch things unless someone suggests something to me, or my family talks about something, and then I give the show five or six episodes. If I don't care for it after five or six episodes, I don't watch that show anymore. There have been exceptions to that rule. I remember when 24 first aired. I gave it four episodes and decided not to watch it anymore, but my family told me to give it another chance, and we were excited for every Monday night for ten seasons. My rule usually stands though. However, almost everything is able to stream, and popular shows on bad nights have more of a chance since people can stream them online, for fees for the streaming services, but Wonderfalls came out before just about all of that. I didn't even know about it to tune in for one episode. However, when I read that the creators and writers of Pushing Daisies had another show, I knew I had to watch it.
I looked it up on Amazon to see if I could purchase DVDs for it, and they have it, but you can also pay to stream it through Prime Video for a little price. I paid the $13 and watched most of the 13 episodes that were produced. They only aired four, and there were thirteen episodes, so I knew I had to see them all before sitting down to write this blog post. I have to confess, I have only watched 10 of the 13, but I know how the show's premise, and I know the characters well enough to be able to recommend it.
The show is about a young woman named Jaye Tyler who works at a giftshop at Niagara Falls who graduated from Brown University, but decided not to go in the direction she originally thought. After fishing out a quarter from a wishing fountain, she is given a gift. Inanimate objects can now talk to Jaye, and if she does what they tell her to do, which makes for a lot of really funny and strange exchanges between her and the people she is supposedly to help. The only thing about the show that I would caution is that the language is a little stronger,(there are a few "B" and "A" words), but if you don't mind the language, Wonderfalls is way worth checking out. It's very funny and has a great premise. It's too bad that it wasn't aired on better nights at the same time. The inanimate objects that Jaye encounters are so much fun and have great personalities, (I think the car air freshener is one of my favorites), and Jaye's spiteful, or negative attitude make it even funnier when she has to talk to or track down annoying people that she wouldn't normally talk to.
Anyway, that's my post for today. For those of you who stuck it out to the end, I commend you! Thanks for reading my stuff. I think it would be well worth your time to check out some of the TV shows that I have mentioned. YouTube has a lot of fun videos from The Flip Wilson Show and The Carol Burnette Show sketches. If you search just the names of those shows, there are a ton of really fun videos that pop up, so go check them out. I will be back in a few days with another post. I hope your December and holidays are finding you well. I am super excited for Christmas. I have Elliot coming to stay with me for a couple of weeks, and I have some really fun presents for my family that I can't wait for them to open. Have a good next little while, and I will catch you one the Flip side, (Get it? I talked about The Flip Wilson Show, and Flip side refers to records which have two sides, and they are from the years of all of the TV shows I talked about), sorry, I'm tired. See you soon!
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