My Trio

reprinted: January 10th:

I suppose Time Magazine's Joel Stein is an okay kind of guy. I've never met him. He seems to have a bit of a wit, however dry, for someone who works at Time Magazine, the world's capitol of gravitas and all that. In the end, though, there is nothing wrong with Joel Stein that a robust multivitamin couldn't remedy. But what was he thinking when Trio TV gave him the gig of a lifetime? I mean, who wants to watch endless hours of Battle of the Network Stars?

I mean, seriously, who even watched Battle of the Network stars back then, when Telly Savalas and Gabe Kaplan had juice and ruled the roost? Not me: and I was ever the hip 6 year old with emergent media antennae outstretched towards the avant garde world of Schoolhouse Rock's Figure Eight song on the melancholy of infinity and The Land of the Lost.

Now, If Laura Zalaznick of Trio Tv called The Corsair tommorrow (call me, Laura, call ... me ...) and asked: What low budget high quality shows would you program for Trio TV? Remember, we only have a fraction of the network budgets, but we want high quality. I would say: Laura, have you ever read my blog? I am all about low budget high quality.

Anyhoo: These are some of my picks:

Dummy. Gritty 70s drama of urban social decline -- thanks, Ed Koch! Asshole! Back in the Koch day, NYC was all pimps with straightrazors and greaser glue sniffing graffiti punks roaming the streets in search of ultraviolence. Koch turned NYC into a Guns n Roses video, with Mr. Brownstone creeping around Central Park in a raincoat with nothing on underneath! Get this plot, though, peeps: LeVar Burton plays a deaf and dumb mute who is framed for the death of a prostitute (Kuta Kinte, you are a framed man!). But will we get justice for the amiable host of Reading Rainbow?

Anyhoo: Will a young Paul Sorvino get him redemption when he cannot even communicate with his morose client? Or will "Dummy" just become another urban statistic on the Koch street? Despite the overall bleakness, this a very, very cool slice of social commentary.


Masterpiece Theater: Last of the Mohicans. No, not the cheesy Michael Mann MTV video with Daniel Day Lewis and Madeline Stowe overproduced romance to the lowest common denominator. No, this one was the real deal. The French and Indian War, my little pomegranates. Colonial wars involving trappers and Native Americans dressed in coonskin and caribou, muskets at the ready. The Massachusetts Bay Colonizers and what not. Dodgy alliances based on mutual interests, snow and the fate of North America -- we're talking the French and Indian War, people, work with me here. The drama, fo' shizit. For some bizarre reason the Masterpiece Theater programs made in the 70s -- arguably the best programming of all time -- languish in someone's vault, uncherished and unsung. American history geek? (raises hand sheepishly) Present.

Alice: I've always wondered if this was a comedy or a tragedy, or perhaps that significant 70s artistic construct, the (flexes fingers) "dramedy." Single mom who sings Bradway showtunes working to support her kid in Arizona on diner tips. Fuck! It's a hard knock life.

I'd imagine that singing "There's a New Girl In Town" ought to really get those coffee refil tips into the bathysphere out there in Phoenix. I'm sure the serial killer truck drivers en route to the Pacific Northwest on one hours sleep, a thermos full of coffee, tweaking from the crank with a meat cleaver under the diner stool are really up and around to hearing broadway medley's a la Our Alice, no? "How about a little Irving Berlin whilst I carve up the dingy broad" -- "might I suggest a breathless version of Marie from Sunny Italy?"

Better yet, Alice Hyatt, thou repository of the standards of The Great White Way, stick with Florence "Flo" Castleberry's crafty weltanshauung: a leathery-Southwestern oversexed outlook on truckstop flings and a pipin hot "kiss my grits!" for the cheapskates.

Imagine if that show were pitched nowadays. Only David Lynch would know what to do with it. Without the laugh track, Alice could easily be an American drama drenched in pathos, like Dreiser's Sister Carrie --only more chilling. Take away the laugh track, throw in some creepy Lynchian music, or maybe some John Cage, and you've turned a dramedy into Americana horror. In all likelihood, Alice would end up on the evening news having sung ill-advisedly some Mel Torme to a guy who insisted that he "was not the one."

Lil' Tommy would be shackin up with the crank smoking Vera faster than Mel could re-lard his pork chops or Flo could pitch woo in her mobile home. No ... Alice doesn't live here anymore.

Don't even get us started on the great Vic Tayback banging the pick up bell with his spatula like the true character actor he was. Dating those seedy Phoenix chicks well past their expiration date. A diner owner is royalty in the A-Z, you better recognize! Americana horror is the genre. May Mel Sharples rest in a greasy kind of peace. Pink uniforms, ah, Mel, read much de Beauvoir?

Just looking back I cannot believe I just wrote this much about Alice the tv show (holds his head in shame)

Rich Man Poor Man: Observe Nick Nolte before the fermented grape robbed him of his marginal looks, then again, there is charm in Nolte's whiskey ravaged grim visage. If Nolte can be a star then so, dammit, can anyone. Earns props for Teachers, slo. He counts. In both North Dallas 40 and Teachers Nolte plays a disenchanted member of the middle america with his job. He was a Gephardt man before his time, methinks.

Poldark: This cult British tv series is quite habit forming. Incredible. Just incredible. A period piece that is a cross between Wuthering Heights, the Mayor of Casterbridge and Le Liaisons Dangereuse but with a compelling soap opera character at its heart. A guilty high quality pleasure. You get sucked in to this costume drama that is one part Danielle Steele and one part high art.

Assorted Good Times episodes: Come on, you know you had a crush on Wilona ("and you too, Wilomena" said the archetypical corrupt pol, Alderman Davis) when you were kid, didn't you; or, if you were a girl, Bookman the janitor was your long, cold drink of water. What, you never saw a black man doing a John Wayne impression, pilgrim? And you know in your heart Wilona saved Janet Jackson from falling down that elevator shaft while trying to escape her mom who beat her with a hot iron just before she became Willis' girl, then Cleo on Fame, then the ill-starred Ms. deBarge.

Remember the episode where Michael gets crunk off some dodgy ghetto "health tonic" (aka muscatel) classic ("Get Vita Brite and sleep tonight" ...*promptly passes out*).

Then there was the time Michael joined a gang and hid his jacket in the oven. Oh, what about the one where Thelma almost married this polygamist Nigerian cat. Crazy! What about that pimpy guy "Lennay," who always sold hot appliances from out of his coat. Classic. So was the episode when James has hypertension. So was ... hey ... was this a comedy or what?

Cinema Paradiso. The best work of art on the subject of friendship I've ever encountered. A glorious film.

Fellini's Satyricon. A pagan work. Un-be-fucking-lievable: creativity on a galactic scale. The Rablasian Fellini walks us through Roman antiquity as he imagines it, crossed with highbrow science fiction sequences of an imagined future. There can never be anyone as Felliniesque as Fellini. The soundtrack alone is mindblowing.

The Big Blue Marble: My favorite show as a kid, if you must know.

Carl Sagan's Cosmos: Okay, so in the madcap world of astrophysics Sagan's hypotheses are probably all outmoded already. Right? So what? So is Ptolemy's Almagest, and yet I still read it in college and gained benefit. The provocative thinking is worth another looksie; and, of course, worthy of more questions in light of our current data. This series was the bomb! (looks around sheepishly, then raises hand, "question: who is the PBS geek"?) Classics are never outmoded.

Chespirito. This show was a mystery to me: Why would a grown Latin man want to go on tv dressed like a bumble bee with a big "CH" affixed to his paunch. Subtitle it and put it on Trio; I'd watch it just to clarify a childhood mystery. Why is everyone else laughing but me on this one? We'd all like to know what the people on that endless laugh track find so funny.

Stoned, the Afterschool Special with Scott Baio. "Super Stoned Jack," was the scariest introduction that most of us had to the world of the sweet leaf. Sensimila? Not if you have any sensibilities! If I were stoned I would never go out in a row boat on some grey and greasy river. Well, certainly not after seeing this little chestnut. Put it on Trio so we can all laugh at the "reefer madness." Just say yes to the Farah Fawcett haired Felicity. But I'm sure skeevy New York Times writer Neill Strauss will.

Fame the TV Series: Why are there not repeats on VH1 of this show already? When you say low budget and high quality I think .. right here's where you start paying for it ... with pain ... and sweat. The show of young, artistic people struggling for their moment to shine is about as American as it gets. Whatever happened to that sexy cello player who wouldn't give anyone the time of day, Lori Singer. I was all about the emotional cellist Lori Singer back in the day.

Cries and Whispers by Ingmar Bergman. If Black Stallion is the most beautifully shot film, then this is number two. All natural lighting. Bergman uses a fade to red to seperate scenes, mimicking the inner membrane of our eyelids. About as fucking intense as art can get. And halfway through this film about communication and treachery and time past, Bergman dissolves a reconcilliation scene with a Bach Sarabande in the most mysterious manner imaginable.

Schoolhouse Rock: That Figure Eight. Mysterious, melancholy and mathematically instructional. Time will never again be so mundane. A strong influence on The Corsair's childhood.

The Black Stallion: Those fabulous Copollas! This is perhaps the most beautiful filmed movie ever.

The Gore Vidal-Bill Buckley Debate-Fight It was in the heart of the 60s: the polarized political center of the 60s. The left and the right clash violently on national television. In the news division of a respectable network. Fuck! A classic. I just finished reading Vidal's Burr, BTW. Excellent. And of course Buckley's role as Grandfather of the American movemenet is secure. For a moment, our two leading intellectuals of our two political polarities went at it in a bareknuckled intellectual fistfight. Not since Burr shot Hamilton dead has there been so much political drama in The Republic.

Woody Allen's Teleplay: Don't Drink the Water. One of the most interesting experiments on television ever. Woody Allen directs and writes a teleplay starring Michael J Fox and the kid who played Blossom. Shaky handheld camera follows a grown Michael J. Fox as he slowly becomes involved with a bright but much younger woman. How the fuck did this get on American and not Parisian tv? Aren't we supposed to be puritainical? Did Woody Allen have so much juice back in the day that he could put on pedophilic Americana on network tv? Does the story sound familiar? Actually the story is tame, and inventive and very, very arty.

Kramer vs. Kramer. The first dramatic and fully articulated statement of the Baby Boomers achieving adulthood. A film of the first water. Young married couple breaks apart. They become two seperate people post sexual revolution. Wife leaves shallow workaholic husband and baby. Goes out West. Comes back revitalized. In the meantime, shallow husband defined by his work, like an Eisenhower-era man, like--probably--his father changes, grows. Welcome to 1978, motherfucker.

Husband fights custody. Bach and Vivaldi weave in and out of drama that takes place, it seems, amidst the most poignant colors of Autumn in Central Park.

And the courtroom scene where Meryl Streep slowly dissolves into tears offset by forced composure as Hoffman's lawyer vivisects her irresponibility -- her feminism, her 1978ness -- are among the best goddamned acting you ever will see. Kramer versus Kramer is as good as film gets.

Okay, so those are some of my Trio picks. And you have to admit it is a hell of a lot better than Battle of the Network Stars.