TV posts

Klinger and Frank pass each other in the entrance to the Swamp. Frank gives a disgusted look.

Klinger [grandly]: I wore this with just you in mind.
Frank: You make me want to throw up!
Klinger [happily, to everyone else]: See, it pays to dress.

Season 5, Episode 4, “Out of Sight, Out of Mind,” the one where Hawkeye is temporarily blinded. Halfway through season 4 it began to feel a lot less funny to me, but Jamie Farr still makes me laugh.

What, you think people are going to notice what comic book this is? On their little black-and-white TVs? And even if they have a big color job, it just goes by in a flash. Plus it's *a comic book*. Who cares? Nobody. I'm not wasting any sleep over it.

The screenshot is from “Der Tag,” M*A*S*H, S4, Ep17, aired January 1976. It's the one where Hot Lips is away, Frank bothers everybody, so Col. Potter asks Hawkeye and B.J. to be nice to him. Frank winds up: cleaning up in poker, getting drunk, professing a romantic interest in Nurse Kellye. He also stumbles into an ambulance (with a jokey toe tag on his foot) and winds up at the front. Joe Morton guest stars.

The comic book Radar is holding is Avengers #60 from December 1968. Avengers #1 was published in Sept. 1963, or about 10 years after the end of the Korean War. But yeah, I'm sure they thought, “Close enough. Who's going to notice? And who's going to know?” Turns out, nerds. Lots and lots of nerds.

There was this thing that “Seinfeld” did pretty much throughout its run where characters would talk over each other. It wasn't in that Woody Allenish simulacrum of everyday conversation, where dialogue was a series of fender benders. No, in this, each character was involved with their own concerns, their own minidramas, and would voice them, and the other side would voice their own, and it seemed like they were having a conversation but they were actually having two separate conversations. Each was talking and neither was listening. It felt a bit like the way the solipsistic world ran. I'd never seen a TV show, or a movie for that matter, do something similar. 

Turns out, “M*A*SH” did it two decades earlier. 

Last night I watched the episode “Life With Father” (Season 3, Episode 8), and that's pretty much what happens throughout. There's a mail call and Father Mulcahy learns his sister, the sister, wants to leave the nunnery to have children. This upsets him. Henry's wife sends him a letter giving him permission to have an affair, and, initially buoyant, he slowly realizes, and then conclusively finds out, it's because of a guilty conscience. “An orthodontist, Lorraine?” There's a subplot about a half-Korean, half-Jewish baby needing a bris, and how Frank and Hot Lips object and try to document it. Meanwhile, our heroes Hawkeye and Trapper walk through the episode trying to find 10 presidential faces in a barnyard scene in order to win a pony. They become like the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of their own show.

I'd already noticed this solipsistic tendecy developing in the mess tent but it really plays out when Henry visits Father Mulcahey, each airs their own concerns, neither listens to the other, and in fact Henry thinks the Father gave him great advice he never gave him. It's totally “Seinfeld” two decades before “Seinfeld.” 

The writers of the episode were Everett Greenbaum and James Fritzell, who worked together in television for 30 years, writing episodes of “Mister Peepers,” “The Real McCoys,” “The Andy Griffith Show” and 24 episodes of “M*A*S*H,” including “The General Flipped at Dawn,” “Abyssinia, Henry,” a lot of the transitional ones (Col. Potter's arrival, Margaret's marriage), as well as several other mail call episodes. In case this is ever helpful to anyone doing a history of sitcoms.

Don't know if I've mentioned this here, on my own blog, but in my run through the first few seasons of “M*A*S*H,” the actors who have consistently made me laugh out loud are: 1) McLean Stevenson and 2) Jamie Farr. Oh, and Loretta Swit does the best drunk on the show. Hands down. Overall, the show is shockingly undated for something 50 years old.

Delivering the POB line before they duck back inside—a la “Laugh-In.” 

The other night I watched the Season 3, Episode 2 episode of “M*A*S*H” called “Rainbow Bridge,” original air date Sept. 17, 1974—or nine days after Pres. Ford pardoned former Pres. Nixon. It's the one where the Chinese let the MASH 4077th unit know they have nine wounded Americans they can't care for and could someone please pick them up at the titular Rainbow Bridge, which, our heroes find out, is 30 miles within enemy territory and only 20 miles from the Chinese border. Inevitably, Frank and Hot Lips are against going, Hawkeye and Trapper think (as doctors) they should go, and Henry has trouble making a command decision but finally comes down on the Hawkeye/Trapper side. It's still a tense mid-bridge meeting, made more so because Hot Lips convinces Frank to go along, then convinces him to bring her little pistol for protection, even though “no guns” was one of the stipulations, and even though the Chinese have plenty of them. Plus the pistol is little. It's hardly protection at all. But that turns out to be its saving grace, since, once it's discovered, once Frank in a sense unholsters it, it's good for a laugh and breaks the ice and allows the wounded to be transfered.

Throughout the episode, a lot is made of the racism of the “bad doctors” so it's a little disappointing that the Chinese man in charge on the bridge, Dr. Lin Tam, is played by Mako, who is, of course, Japanese. Nothing against Mako, he does a fine-enough job. I don't even believe you should make actors stay behind geographic lines, as some do today, particularly when racial matters are involved. But Hollywood almost never seems to land on the proper country when Asian actors are involved.

Anyway, that's not why I'm writing about the episode. I'm writing about the episode because of three jokes. 

This is the first one. Frank is doing triage but, being Frank, keeps messing it up. Or he's doing it according to U.S. Army regulations rather than Hippocratic ones: U.S. first, Allies second, enemy last. On the bus, Hawkeye countermands him—putting a Chinese POW with a chest wound at the front of the pack. And we get this exchange:

• Frank: What you're doing is mutiny! I'm in command of this bus!
• Hawkeye (to Father Mulcahey as they exit): “Mutiny on the Bus.” It was a B movie. They couldn't afford a bounty. Allen Jenkins played the bus driver. 

Five years ago, I wouldn't have gotten that final joke, but Allen Jenkins was a perennial Warner Bros. supporting player of the 1930s. You could see him in comedies and gangster movies, and in gangster comedies, but he was always supporting. A movie with Allen Jenkins in the lead would indeed be “B.” Mostly I was tickled to hear his name.

Later, Hawkeye says this, referencing another 1930s Warner Bros. regular:

• I think Ralph Bellamy said it best when he said, “If I can't get the girl, at least give me more money.” 

Finally, before they leave for Rainbow Bridge, Father Mulcahey offers a fine benediction. Which leads to this exchange:

• Hawkeye: He's really very good, isn't he?
• Trapper: Tops.
• Hawkeye: I feel guilty. We tried to get Pat O'Brien.

The writer of the episode is Laurence Marks, who is mostly known for writing “M*A*S*H” episodes. He wrote 21 of them between 1972 and 1978. He was aided and abetted by Larry Gelbart. Not sure who decided to make the episode a Warner Bros. homage but I'm glad they did. After the last several years of movie-watching, it feels like something gift-wrapped especially for me.

“Now just a minute, this is a press conference! The last thing I want to do is answer a lot of questions!”

— Season 2, Episode 12, “The Incubator,” written by Laurence Marks, original air date Dec. 1, 1973

I was laying on my stomach on a lounge chair in an area outside of a building where there was a long row of chairs and lounge chairs. A group of us were there, and Conan O'Brien came over, and I sensed this was his territory and I was in his spot. But I didn't budge. Eventually, and not rudely, he told me to get out of his chair. “Really?” I said. “You think this is yours?” I was kind of joking and kind of not—it seemed a dick move on his part but I didn't really care about the chair. The group of us were watching TV, most of us sitting, Conan standing, and as he did so he blocked the sun. “That's why we need a tall person standing there,” I said. “So the sun isn't shining on the TV and we can see it better.” It was supposed to be a joke but Conan got huffy and began to go inside. “Conan...” I began. “Conan...” And just as I was telling him I was joking and he could have his seat, he turned on me angrily and said I was no longer invited to this place. Then he left. That was it, I was banned. The others sort of awkwardly moved away from me, and some part of me shrugged, oh well, but another part thought, well, that's a shame.

This was amid several dreams about the logistics of moving from different rooms/apartments in the last few days of a long trip, with the suitcase nearly empty of clean clothes. One of the rooms was in an old girlfriend's basement, and one of our group, an adult who seemed to know more about the world, was leaving her a tip ($50 or $100, I couldn't tell) paperclipped to a postcard on a small table. “Are we supposed to do that?” I asked. “Of course,” he said. I felt guilty over my breach of etiquette. How did I not know this?

I watched most of the Emmys last night and tweeted some of my disappointment with the show. Not with the winners—although my vote goes to “Barry” for comedy, and my vote (and my heart) goes to Rhea Seehorn for “Better Call Saul”—but more with the show's presentation. Didn't get much engagement from those tweets, but today I read Michael Schulman's piece in The New Yorker, “Cringe-Watching the 2022 Emmys” and felt seen. Example:

Despite celebrating the craft of television, the ceremony was ineptly written and paced. Thompson's comedy interludes had a wocka-wocka desperation about them, and the formerly low-key job of announcer went to the comedian Sam Jay, who stole focus with contrived introductions of the presenters. (“You've seen them on 'Black Bird,' but they've never been mentioned on Black Twitter. . . .”) For whatever reason, not all the presenters could be trusted to read off the nominees, which were sometimes announced before the presenters walked onstage, and the “In Memoriam” sequence was shot from angles that made it difficult to see the names of some of the departed. In the d.j. booth—because somehow having a celebrity d.j. has become mandatory at awards shows—was a fellow called Zedd, whose idea of wit was bringing up “Succession” 's Jesse Armstrong to “Shake Your Booty.” The play-off music, just as subtly, included “Time to Say Goodbye,” and kept things moving at a brutal clip. Instead of letting the winners build up to real emotion, the broadcast shooed them off to make time for the stars of “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” (tastelessly introduced as “two cops no one wants to see defunded”) to go on a chase for a stolen Emmy.

Agree on all of it. I don't need the house-party vibe. I don't need extra bits. I like comedy, I like songs, but mostly just celebrate the craft. Celebrate the people. That's why we're there. We like you, we really like you. So get on with it.

And next year, give a fucking statuetee to Rhea Seehorn. For God's sake.

Here’s a story about the influence of Nichelle Nichols’ Lt. Uhura character.

After the first season of “Star Trek,” she was thinking of quitting because there often wasn’t much to the role beyond “Hailing frequencies open, Captain.” Apparently she’d already submitted her resignation to creator Gene Roddenberry, who told her to think it over. During that thinking-it-over period, she attended a NAACP fundraiser, where she was told someone wanted to meet her:

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Turns out he was a fan. “Star Trek” was one of the few shows he and Coretta let the kids watch. Per Nichols’ New York Times obit: 

“He said, ‘We admire you greatly, you know,’” Ms. Nichols said, and she thanked him and told him that she was about to leave the show. “He said, ‘You cannot. You cannot.’”

Dr. King told her that her role as a dignified, authoritative figure in a popular show was too important to the cause of civil rights for her to forgo. As Ms. Nichols recalled it, he said, “For the first time, we will be seen on television the way we should be seen every day.”

 On Monday morning, she returned to Roddenberry’s office and told him what had happened.

 “And I said, ‘If you still want me to stay, I’ll stay. I have to.’”

Such was her influence that when Roddenberry rebooted the series two decades later with Picard, Riker, et al., a major movie star said she wanted in. That’s why Whoopi Goldberg’s Guinan began showing up in the second season. “Nichelle was the first Black person I’d ever seen who made it to the future … the one beacon that said, ‘Yes, we’ll be there,’” Goldberg said this week, in tribute.

Lt. Uhura was the main woman on the show, wasn’t she? I’d never really thought about that before. Roddenberry’s original conception was even more progressive, with a female second-in-command (Majel Barrett) in the pilot episode “The Cage,” but of course the network had notes. Basically: lose the woman and the guy with the ears. Roddenberry had to pick his battles and went with Spock. Of the other recurring female characters, Yeoman Rand was just first season, Nurse Chapel (Barrett again) only began with the second season, and both were kind of lovelorn—the former making eyes at Kirk, the latter making plomeek soup for Spock. Lt. Uhura had a job.

What else did we know about Uhura? She liked to sing. She could speak Swahili. She liked small furry things. Sometimes she was frightened. I remember reading, decades ago, fan supposition that she had a thing for Kirk, or Kirk for her, since in the episode “Plato’s Stepchildren,” the Platonians chose Chapel for Spock, knowing their history, but why Uhura for Kirk unless something was there? Sure. Or maybe because there was nothing there? “Trek” fans have long claimed this was the first interracial kiss on television, though there’s plenty of evidence of predecessors, but I’m pretty sure it was the first interracial kiss between TV series regulars. Anyway there’s a better argument that it was Sulu, rather than Kirk, who had a thing for Uhura. Cf., “Fair maiden” in “Naked Time” and rapacious ways in “Mirror Mirror.”

An even better argument: We all had a thing for her. I sure did. I had a poster of Lt. Uhura on my wall as a kid. This was in the mid-1970s when I watched “Star Trek” on reruns at 6 PM on Channel 11 (MetroMedia Television), at first haphazardly, then regularly, and then I fell hard: memorizing titles, their production order, their air dates. And up Uhura went, next to Cheryl Ladd. Even with that, it wasn’t until I was an adult and saw some TOS episodes again that I realized how absolutely freaking gorgeous she was. Just stunning. I look at photos today and I’m still stunned.

Shame I didn’t see her in more stuff, but onscreen roles were skimpy back then even for stunning Black women. She was hired by Duke Ellington as a dancer for his orchestra in the 1950s, and per IMDb, she was an uncredited dancer in the 1958 Otto Preminger “Porgy and Bess” movie. Pre-“Trek,” she played a mother preparing to send her kids to a newly integrated school in a 1964 TV movie, and was a guest star on an episode of Gene Roddenberry’s “The Lieutenant” TV series that went unaired because it was too controversial (read: mildly progressive). Mostly she was in the background: uncredited as a nurse on “Peyton Place,” uncredited in a 1966 Ann-Margret movie, a dice player in a 1966 James Garner movie. She also played “Ruana” in two episodes of the 1966 “Tarzan” TV series. Dare we? Probably not. Then she was in space. Then she was in the future.

After “Trek” there’s not much, either. She kept returning to Uhura: in the animated series, in the movies. She has 69 credits on IMDb and 16 of them are for Uhura, who finally got a first name, Nyota, in, I guess, “Star Trek VI”? Tim would know. Uhura also led to Nichols’ work with NASA, beginning in 1977, to help recruit women and people of color. The role she was ready to shed was the one she never did, and it made all the difference. 

I was never a huge Boba Fett fan. I was there at the beginning, original “Star Wars” with lines around the block and are you a Luke or Han guy; and then “Empire” dropped and suddenly dudes were talking Boba Fett. Boba who? You mean the guy that turned in Han? You're not supposed to like him! But many of my contemporaries did. They thought he was cool. And even though he went into the mouth of the desert-monster thingy in “Return of the Jedi,” the legend grew. And eventually we learned—I guess in the prequels or one of the cartoon shows I never watched—that Boba was the model for the stormtroopers. They're all clones of him. Or his father? Or something? And he's a clone of his father, too? Another example of how, in trying to connect his universe, George Lucas destroys it.

Long way of saying I didn't jump right on Disney's latest “Star Wars” series, “The Book of Boba Fett,” even though I liked “The Mandalorian” enough. But this spring I finally got around to it. I'd heard it had Luke in it. The return of Luke! Looking like 1983 Mark Hamill! With scenes and everything! I was always a Luke guy. How could I miss that?

And? 

And I liked the Boba Fett stuff.

I liked that they didn't explain it. They just take us to Tatooine, and the now darkened, empty halls of Jaba the Hutt's lair, and then outside into the desert, and eventually down into the mouth of that desert-monster thingy, the sarlacc, with Boba Fett in its maw, or stomach, or wherever he is. And how he blasts his way out. And how the Jawas arrive and strip the Mandalorian armor from the unconscious Boba Fett. Then a Tusken tribe takes his body. I liked seeing all these creatures again. I assumed Boba would eventually turn the tables on the Tuskens, the Sand People, who make him a kind of slave. Instead, he proves his worth, adapts, and is welcomed into the tribe. He likes the Tuskens. He basically becomes the T.E. Lawrence of Tatooine.

All of this is intercut with later scenes where Boba is the crime lord of Mos Espa, with Fennec Shand (Wen Ming-Na) by his side. (Aside: Wen is nearly 60 years old and hot as all get-out.)

So I liked how it opened. But when it shifts to pick up on the Mandalorian's story in episode 5, and when in ep. 6 we get my man Luke and baby Yoda, now named Grogu, I was hugely disappointed. I'd somehow forgotten that, yes, during the prequels they'd made the Jedi boring. They made them assholes. They created a kind of Buddhist ascetism, which the Jedi-in-training has to follow whether he's a twentysomething Luke or a baby Yoda. We see Luke training baby Yoda and it's kind of painful to watch. The Mandalorian shows up, essentially Grogu's dad, with a present for him, chain mail, and isn't even allowed to see him. And Luke presents Grogu with a choice: the chain mail and life with Mando, or Yoda's lightsabre and life as a Jedi. “But you may choose only one,” he says. For life. He says this to a baby.

So stupid. Luke's path to the Jedi-hood was way more haphazard: Yeah, there's this thing called the Force, here's how you try to access it, not bad, hey, the Force is strong with this one, OK, why don't you go to Dagobah and learn from this dude Yoda? And by the time he chose the path he had nothing to lose: no parents, no aunt/uncle, no Ben. He had nothing to give up. And now he's asking Grogu—a baby—to give up his dad.

Anyway, Grogu chooses Mando, and good for him. Maybe that'll begin to set this galaxy on the right path. Lord knows the Jedi haven't helped much. One wonders, in fact, if the problem with this galaxy isn't just the bad guys, the Empire, but the good guys, too, and their ascetic rites. Both sides are just different kinds of assholes: one takes, one denies. Two sides of the same fucking coin.

My other takeaway from “The Book of Boba Fett” was what a potpourri of film history it was. “Lawrence of Arabia” was just the start. We also got the kids from “Quadrophenia,” an alien cowboy looking like Lee Van Cleef from the Leone-Eastwood movies, and King Kong. I liked the alien cowboy. I thought the “Quadrophenia” stuff a bit silly. 

But I think it went from homage to derivative in the final episode when it lifted lines directly from the early “Godfather” movies. As the other crime families align with the Pyke Syndicate, betraying Boba Fett, Mando says, “It was the smart move,” echoing Michael's line about Tessio's betrayal. Then, trapped, Boba sends Mok Shaiz's Majordomo (an excellent David Pasquesi) to negotiate the terms of his surrender, which turn out to be “Nothing,” echoing Michael's line from “II” about what he's willing to offer the scumbag U.S. Senator. I doubt the makers of “Boba Fett” thought they were scamming anyone—that we wouldn't notice. I'm sure they thought it was homage. But it still felt wrong. The way to create cool lines is not to lift the cool lines of better films. You gotta write them.

Sometimes all it takes is a moment that just lands.

In the mid-80s I was watching “David Letterman” and Gilbert Gottfried came on to do standup. Had I seen him before? Had someone disparaged him before? He had a loud rasping voice and was perpetually squinting. His eyes were all but shut and I kind of wanted to do the same with mine, because I was a little embarrassed for him. What laughs he was getting were awkward. Because he was awkward. I wasn't laughing, either. I think I kept thinking, “When does he stop this bit and go into his regular act? Oh, this is his regular act?” But I kept watching. And at one point (27:20 here) he segued from an Elephant Man joke into this:

“And I said there you go putting everything into your looks! You think everything is your looks! It's not—women do not care about a man's looks! If you read any sex quiz, they care about a personality and a sense of humor! Women love a sense of humor. Women would trample over Tom Selleck to get to Buddy Hacket!”

And I lost it. I laughed so hard. And from that moment on, whenever anyone disparaged him, I defended him. That was all it took. I bonded with him on that. And amazingly, the thing I thought was the awkward bit—that loud, rasping, annoying voice—lasted his entire career. He played it for all it was worth. He parlayed it. Iago in “Aladdin.” Gilbert Gottfried reads “50 Shades of Grey.” When John Oliver realized early in the Trump administration that though Jared Kushner was everywhere, we never heard him speak, who did he tap to be Kushner's voice?

We've lost so many standups in such a short time: Norm Macdonald, Bob Saget, Louie Anderson. All in their 60s. Is there something about standup that shortens your life? It seems to be a brotherhood, too. Which you totally get. It's a tough life, I would imagine, and most people aren't funny, and you need to hang around the people who are. I envy that brotherhood. It would be a great group to hang around. 

After the news broke, my friend Josh told a story on Twitter about interviewing Gottfried for an article in Playboy magazine, and how he was never “Gilbert Gottfried” in those conversatons. He was kind and quiet; he always apologized for bothering him. A few months later, he called while Josh was driving to ask when the article was coming out; Josh had to admit that the piece had been killed for various reasons. “Long silence then he went full Gilbert on me. 'Oh my god' he said in that voice, 'what is it like to have your work rejected by a porno magazine?' He then said 'Have you thought about selling it to Leg Show? How about Barely 18....' He said he might know someone at Nugget and various other skin mags. I nearly drove off the road I was laughing so hard.” 

Berryman in the backyard. 

Sunday night, during the season 3 finale of HBO's “Succession,” I asked Patricia if she knew where the title of the episode, “All the Bells Say,” came from. She did not, and I forgot to look it up, but this morning, reading a synopsis in The New York Times, she told me it was from one of John Berryman's Dream Songs. She told me this not only because I'd asked but because she knew I knew the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet. He and my father were friends from the time Dad interviewed him for a feature profile in the Minneapolis Tribune in 1965 until Berryman's death by suicide in January 1972 at age 57. He came over to our house in South Minneapolis. He had a nice daughter named Martha. He had a long beard. We called him Santa Claus.

He actually wrote one of the Dream Songs for my father, number 325, the one that begins “Control it now, it can't do any good,” about the sudden death of Dad's friend Pat McCarty, which includes the line, “Our dead frisk us, & later they get better at it.” It ends this way:

Henry made lists of his surviving friends
& of the vanished on their uncanny errands
and took a deep breath.

The older I get, the more these lines mean to me.

So not only did I know the poet of the lines referenced in the episode title, I knew the poem, Dream Song 29, intimately. In college, or afterwords, I'd even titled a short story “There Came a Thing So Heavy,” truncating a few of the first lines. The relevant line for the episode is “All the bells say: too late.” I have to admit, I don't remember that one at all, but it's another great line, a Never send to ask for whom the bell tolls kind of line.

It fits the episode perfectly. The Roy children, Kendall, Roman and Shiv, finally stop fighting for once and band together to stop their divide-and-conquer father, this universe's Rupert Murdoch, from selling a controlling interest in the company to a tech dick played by Alexander Skarsgard. But on the way to the battle—and please, accept this SPOILER ALERT for anyone who wants to see the episode fresh—as they're rallying the troops, the daughter, Shiv, calls her husband, Tom, to let him know what's about to go down. Even as it was happening, I was like, “Oh, bad move.” And it was. Tom betrays them, the patriarch pivots, and the kids arrive, as both he and the bells say, too late. And there goes their legacy. 

I always liked Dream Song 29 because of the way it begins:

There sat down, once, a thing on Henry's heart
So heavy, if he had a hundred years
& more, & weeping, sleeping, in all them time
Henry could not make good. 

We're whole and then we're not. I think everyone feels this at some point in their lives. How did I get here? Wasn't it so much better over there? Before I knew? It's why the Eden myth resonates so much.

The final stanza of the poem speaks to the episode, too. In season 1, Kendall, played by Jeremy Strong—about whom The New Yorker recently published a fantastic profile—causes the death of a waiter at his sister's wedding in England. It's Chappaquiddick-like: a car goes into the drink, only one gets out. But it's levened a bit because Kendall was in pursuit of drugs rather than sex, and we see him trying to save the dude. But then he flees the scene. And it's been eating at him ever since. Last night, he finally tells his siblings of his crime. He sits on a dusty alley in Italy and cries and tells them how he killed a guy; and they're suddenly put in the awkward position of bucking him up. And that's what binds them together enough to try to take on their father. 

This is the final stanza of Dream Song 29:

But never did Henry, as he thought he did,
end anyone and hacks her body up
and hide the pieces, where they may be found.
He knows: he went over everyone, & nobody's missing.
Often he reckons, in the dawn, them up.
Nobody is ever missing.

The episode was written by Jamie Carragher and series creator Jesse Armstrong. There's a lot of smart people working on “Succession.”

“It was definitely Nesmith's band,” Micky Dolenz told Rolling Stone. “He was the bandleader the whole time.” 

He had the driest sense of humor among the Monkees, a faux-Beatles band created by Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider for a 1966 NBC sitcom to recreate the mood of “A Hard Day's Night” and “Help!,” so of course he was my favorite. Davy got the girls, Micky had a vague wildman quality, Peter was goofy, sweet and dumb, and Mike kind of watched it all from under his stocking cap with a nonchalant face and tossed in dry comments. He seemed to know the world was stacked against us so he would just comment on it as he went along. He was a critic, basically. A kindred spirit. He was in on the joke.

They were disparaged as “The Prefab Four,” four dudes who didn't even play their own instruments on their first record, but a few things to remember. They had good backing musicians, including Glen Campbell, and good songwriters, including Neil Diamond. And Mike Nesmith. He wrote a number of their songs, including “Mary Mary,” “Papa Gene's Blues,” and “Different Drum” which became a huge hit for Linda Ronstadt in 1967, and he was the leader in fighting for some semblance of control over music director Don Kirshner. It's good to remember, too, how hugely popular they were. Their first single, “Last Train to Clarksville,” was the fourth biggest song of 1966, according to Billboard magazine. The next year, the summer of love, they had four songs in the yearly hot 100: “I'm a Believer” (No. 5), “A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You” (No. 60), “Pleasant Valley Sunday” (74) and “Daydream Believer” (94). The Beatles had two: “All You Need Is Love” and “Penny Lane” (30 and 55).

Finally, the show was good. I mean, I haven't seen it in 30 years, but I remember when it went into reruns in the late 1970s, just being kind of astonished at how funny it was. It even won the Emmy in 1967 for outstanding comedy series, beating out “Bewitched,” “Hogan's Heroes,” “The Andy Griffith Show,” and “Get Smart!” 

Post-Monkees, Nesmith went back to college while starting his own country rock band, First National Band. (You can hear the country influences in “Papa Gene's Blues” and “Different Drum.”) They had nominal success, and when they broke up, with his usual dry sense of humor, he named his new one Second National Band. He became a successful music producer as well as an early innovator in directing music videos. He had a show in the mid-80s called “Telelvison Parts” and recognized talent. Guests included up-and-comers Whoopi Goldberg, Jay Leno, Jerry Seinfeld and Garry Shandling. A regular bit was “Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey,” which later appeared on SNL. Nesmith was also the executive producer of movies, including “Repo Man” and “Tapeheads.” He wrote a novel in the '90s. He seemed to do a bit everything.

He remained friends with the other Monkees, particularly Mickey Dolenz, the last surviving member, who has a nice eulogy for Nesmith in Rolling Stone. He says that even during the crazy height of their success, Nesmith tended to be a bit of a loner. “He wasn't a big social bumblebee. He was quiet, sardonic, extremely bright, very witty.” All that came through.

I loved “Bosom Buddies” when it first aired in 1980-81. I kept telling people, “You gotta watch this show. Something about the two leads—they have such great chemistry.” I added: “I think the shorter one is going places.”

And he did, just not to the level of the other guy, Tom Hanks. But then, who has?

Peter Scolari kept acting but I kept missing him. I didn't watch “Newhart,” for which he was nominated best supporting actor three times. I did see him in the Tom Hanks-directed “That Thing You Do!” in 1996. And I saw him regularly on “Girls,” playing Hannah's dad with impeccable, fumbling, comedic timing. Almost Bob Newhart-esque timing. He won an Emmy for that. It was fun seeing him regularly again.

On “Bosom Buddies,” I identified. He was short, cute, and wanted to be a writer. I remember they did an episode where it became clear that it's almost impossible to make a living and pursue your passion. The ending cut to Kip's empty canvas and Henry's cold typewriter. The show was trying to warn me of the future. 

Scolari died this week of cancer, age 66. Here's his New York Times obit. Godspeed, Henry. 

“It was more a comment of how cheap life was and that [Omar] could be got. He had turned his back on someone in the market. He was buying a pack of smokes. He was depleted at that point, too. We didn't want to give him a big gun fight or anything like that—or even what Stringer got, which is the satisfaction of Omar and Brother Mouzone hunting him down. We just didn't want to do that with him. If you recall in that episode, after his death, you cut to the newsroom, and the paper comes across somebody's desk, and they look at it and they throw it in the basket. Outside of his world, he's nothing to anybody. In what we think of as the proper society, and even in the newsroom, he's nothing. 'Throw him in the basket. Put him with all the other guys.' It's like in DC, in The Washington Post, they change the name of it quite frequently—it's been called 'Around the Region' and 'Crime,' but buried in the Metro section are the murders of blacks in the city, and they get a paragraph or maybe two paragraphs, if they're lucky. But if a white person is killed on the other side of town, it makes the front page. What that does is, subconsciously, it puts in the mind of people reading the newspaper, especially young people, that black lives don't in fact matter.”

-- George Pelecanos, Writer/producer on “The Wire,” in the book “All the Pieces Matter: The Inside Story of The Wire,” an oral history by Jonathan Abrams

They gave him Malcolm X's original surname, Little, and set him out on an eight-episode arc in the first season of a show about the tragedy of an American city, Baltimore, called “The Wire.” But as with Malcolm, there was nothing little about Omar. He got big, and they kept him on, and they ended that first season with him robbing drug dealers again with his shotgun and a smile. He was everyone's favorite character—even the president of the United States. He was Robin Hood, beloved, feared, arriving out of nowhere in trenchcoat and shotgun, whistling “The Farmer in the Dell.” People scattered but they watched. The kids imitated him. We loved him. He was personable. And the man had a code. He never put no gun on no citizen. The best gangsters have codes. Most of Cagney's gangsters seemed better men than his private citizens, who stayed within the law, within the boundaries, and thus didn't need a personal code to orient themselves. They didn't have the honor the gangsters did.

To the suits, initially, he seemed irrelevant. Add Omar to the list of great movies, TV shows, characters that excecutives wanted to quash. From Jonathan Abrams' oral history, “All the Pieces Matter: The Inside Story of The Wire”:

Early on, HBO executives asked David Simon to cut a seemingly pointless scene featuring a shadowy figure named Omar, who robbed drug dealers. His presence did not seem relevant to them in moving the story along. Simon asked them to wait.

Then they wanted nothing but Omar. If it had been a network show in the '70s, rather than an '00s HBO show, he would've gotten a spinoff (“The Omar Show”; “The Chronicles of Omar”; “Indeed”), but there was no way creator David Simon was going to go there. In the same book, Simon likens the audience to a child. “If you ask the audience what they want, they'll want dessert. They'll say they want ice cream. They'll want cake. ... 'You like Omar?' 'Yeah, I love Omar. Give me more of Omar.' No, I want to tell you a story, and the characters are going to do what they're supposed to do in the story, and that's the job of the writer.” Which is why Omar died the way he did, ingloriously, in the fifth and final season, just some kid at a market when his back was turned, and in the larger world, the whiter world, no one knew or cared. In our world, the opposite: people howled their protests but to deaf ears. Hell, maybe to pleased ears. But it was the right way to send him out.

After Michael K. Williams' death last week at age 54, people kept posting favorite scenes or mentioning favorite lines: Come at the king, best not miss, etc. I immediately thought of him sparring with Avon Barksdale's attorney, Levy, from the witness stand, leaning back, playing all the while with the odd tie the prosecution made him wear, and getting the best of him: “I got the gun, you got the briefcase. It's all in the game, though, right?” I thought of his interactions with Bunk. I saw Williams in a lot, “Boardwalk Empire,” “The Night Of,” “Lovecraft Country,” and it's a testament to his acting that nothing hit as hard as Omar. These others were different roles, different characters, and he played them as what they were. Omar's playfulness wasn't there because they weren't Omar. It would've been so easy to go back to that, to what made him a star, but Williams had a code, too. He created one of the most indelible characters in television history and moved on. Rest in peace.