NOTE: There may be insignificant spoilers. RIP, Robert Culp You may have missed this. Or, like thousands of others, didn’t recognize the name from the obit. He’s been chiefly remembered recently for his friendship with Bill Cosby and their joint pioneering efforts to break racial barriers in network TV in the mid 1960s. They did [...]

Review of Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography by David Michaelis (Harper, 2007) I did not read Peanuts avidly when I was young—I’m not a Sunday or daily comics sort of guy. Partly because I never understood why it was called “Peanuts” in the first place. (This book answers that question, by the way.) But I [...]

Once upon a time in 1960, an era for TV which FCC Chairman Newton Minnow famously declared to be “a vast wasteland,” America weekly, avidly, watched a whole hour in glorious black-and-white depicting two guys riding around the U. S. in a two-seater Corvette. Viewers’ passion for the adventures of this anthology show’s winsome duo [...]

 

 Route 66 Theme [1.9mb] [2:10m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

And now for something completely different. In the Spring of 1963, when ABC was the upstart ugly stepsister (read: FOX network) of broadcast TV, its programming heads would try anything to garner ratings away from venerable NBC and CBS, all to try to get their meager affiliate base off of UHF channels. Someone very groovy [...]