PEEGE-TV? SUPERGIRL'S COMING

CBS has big plans to break out of their crime procedural programming - somewhat - with a TV series based on the DC Comics heroine Supergirl.

 

CBS entertainment chairman Nina Tassler made the announcement, adding that the show would involve female empowerment, but that it would still focus on the basics of the character, Kara Zor-El, as the last daughter of Krypton.  That would probably be the mythos explored in the longer story arcs.  But she'll also be solving "the crime of the week" as do the police procedurals on the CBS schedule.

 

No actress has been cast yet, but Tassler said it has to be somebody who can carry the weight of the show and still be a role model/everywoman with whom other women in the audience can identify.

 

I wish they had gone with Power Girl.  Aside from the allure of her boob windows, she'd be a fresh new character to most of the TV audience, and that bright white costume would be a welcome change from the current trend of dark costumes.  But there's no denying the power of that S logo......

Still, there's always hope that the series will run for awhile, so eventually they could bring in Power Girl as her otherworld doppelganger. 

It might look something like this:

 

 

I'm concerned with how they're going to tie into the Superman mythos. For Toobworld, Superman has been dead since the early sixties. Will they try to suggest a connection to the Superman of the movies? Revive the perception of Tom Welling in the role? Supergirl's placement in the greater Toobworld Dynamic will hinge on this....

 

BCnU, by Rao!

 

WISH-CRAFT - STANDING/MUNCH/LUTHER

'NEW TRICKS'
"BERMONDSEY BOY"

ROBIN:
Cait tells me you grew up round here, Gerry?
GERRY:
That's right.
ROBIN:
Rough corners.
GERRY:
Rough what?
ROBIN:
Street corners.
GERRY:
This is Bermondsey, not Baltimore.

It may seem strange that retired Detective Sergeant Gerry Standing might be making a reference to an American city for its street violence when there surely must have been a location closer to home that would have served the same purpose.

It could be that Gerry's future son-in-law Robin was referring to a TV show. In our world there were a few that were set in Baltimore and dealing with crime - 'Homicide: Life On Streets', 'The Wire', and perhaps more germane to the dialogue reprinted above, 'The Corner'.

But all three of those shows should be sharing the same TV dimension with 'New Tricks' - your favorite* and mine, Earth Prime-Time. So I have to find another reason why Gerry might have been so familiar with the rampant crime problems in "Balmer".

Sure, it could be on the news, and with the internet making the world so much smaller, it's easy enough to get the news that normally wouldn't be covered by local media.

But I'm thinking it's pozz'ble, just pozz'ble, that Gerry Standing once met somebody from Baltimore, somebody very familiar with the crime situation in "Charm City".

Somebody like the King of TV Crossovers, Detective John Munch.

At some point in his career as a cop, the Munchkin must have come over to London, perhaps on some sort of fact-finding exchange program just as Lt. Columbo did back in the early 1970s.

While in Great Britain, Munch could have met Gerry, perhaps at some international police detective conclave. Hound-dogs that they are, they could have been swapping stories that eventually led to tales about their jobs.

At such a conclave Munch must have also met Detective Chief Inspector John Luther. (Both 'Luther' and 'New Tricks' take place in London.) How else would Luther have known to contact him with regards to a particular case he was working on? ('Luther 1.5')

And because he told the other detective to contact Munch in New York City, it's likely he met the SVU detective after he had already transferred from Baltimore.

It's the flimsiest of possibilities that this could have happened, but who knows?

BCnU!

*Of course, if you've constructed your own alternate reality TV universe, I'm sure that's your favorite. Hello, Robert!

This post is dedicated to Jill Cohen-Wilson, one of my fellow Iddiots and formerly of Baltimore.....

ZONKS - FROM PAWNEE TO GOTHAM

With its return for a final season, the shabbily-treated* 'Parks & Recreation' has jumped ahead in the Toobworld timeline to now be taking place in 2017.  From the two episodes broadcast so far, it doesn't look like they'll be making any outrageous claims of future-vision... except maybe for the spacey 3-D tablets that look similar to the vid-paper used in an episode of 'Journeyman'.  But the idea of a new Jason Bourne movie in two years seems viable and even the idea of Kevin James starring in it isn't so outlandish that a little splainin can't fix it.  He could be the heavy back at the Agency, or a sidekick to whoever is playing Bourne.

It looks like most of the recurring players among the citizens of Pawnee are also going to be showing up, including the City Council Methuselah, Milton.  (Although I worry about Mrs. Beavers.)  And one of those who have come back already is Joan Callamezzo and she's a train wreck.



At a speech she gave at a city rally, Joan proclaimed: "Thank you, Commissioner Gordon, people of Gotham....."

"Great," muttered City Manager Ben Wyatt.  "She thinks she's in 'Batman'."

Ben was referring to the various movies that have been made about the Caped Crusader over the years, but Joan might have thought she was in the actual Gotham City during this delusion. 

The Gotham City from the 1960s TV show shares the same TV dimension as Pawnee and it's Zonk-proof because Batman was so newsworthy that it's very believable that he should be immortalized not only in the movies, but in a TV show during his crime-fighting career... with lookalike actor Adam West playing the role.

As for the mention of Commissioner Gordon, I'm afraid he's long been dead in Earth Prime-Time, despite his appearance as a hale and hearty younger man in the TV show 'Gotham'.  (That takes place in an alternate TV dimension, probably the Evil Toobworld.)

It was just another sign that Joan Callamezzo is a hot mess in 2017.

BCnU!

Despite scoring high ratings upon its return, the episodes are being burned off two at a time to get rid of it as quickly as possible.  At least "William Henry Harrison" and "Ron & Leslie" were meant to be paired together.....

MR. ED - A TELE-FOLKS DIRECTORY UPDATE

It used to be my contention that Mr. Ed, the talking horse in that eponymous sitcom, was originally from the Isle of the Houyhnhnms, the race of talking horses from "Gulliver's Travels".  Since this was adapted into a mini-series, the book's story was absorbed from BookWorld into Earth Prime-Time.  (But unlike BookWorld, in which the characters all look different depending upon who happens to reading the books in question, Lemuel Gulliver and the other characters from Jonathan Swift's classic were locked into looking like the actors who portrayed them.)

'MR. ED'
"ED'S MOTHER"

 

But with this episode we met Ed's mother who was working as a plow-horse and Ed implored Wilbur Post that he should buy dear old Mom and save her from any further life of drudgery... or even worse!

So instead of Ed having surfed his way to America from the Island of the Houyhnhnms, either his parents or some of their forebears came to the New World.  I know Mr. Ed wasn't the only talking horse in television.  When that abysmal movie version of 'The Wild Wild West' was about to premiere, Burger King ran a tie-in blipvert in which a horse talked to a couple of cowboys.

There's a pozz'ble hitch to the overall claim of Ed's connection to the Isle of the Houyhnhnms:  Ed's Mother didn't talk.

It may be due to the fact that she was a palomino.  Although not as fair as a white horse, there may have been genetic reasons why she didn't talk. 

Back in their native country:

"Among the Houyhnhnms, the white, the sorrel, and the iron-gray, were not so exactly shaped as the bay, the dapple-gray, and the black; nor born with equal talents of mind, or a capacity to improve them; and therefore continued always in the condition of servants, without ever aspiring to match out of their own race, which in that country would be reckoned monstrous and unnatural."

So Ed's Mother may have been dim of mind and unable to talk, only to serve... which she did as a plowhorse.

Then again, Ed's a palomino as well and he certainly could talk... so long as he had something to say.  Not a problem, like Comic Book World, Toobworld has mutations in the genetic mix as seen in many TV shows.  This usually is seen only in relation to humans, but it could apply to horses and other intelligent animals as well.  And Ed could be duplicitous and most unlike his logic-adhering brethren back on the island of their ancestors.

So I'm still holding fast to this connection between 'Mr. Ed' and "Gulliver's Travels", but I will amend it so that it wasn't Ed himself who came from the Island of the Houyhnhnms, but either his parents or relatives from an earlier generation.

And what happened to Mr. Ed after his show ended?  Ed Murphy's pilot for "What's Alan Watching?" posited that he became a radio talk show host down in North Carolina.  (One of his topics was about Nazis.)  But this pilot falls into the dimension of Skitlandia despite the linking story about Alan (played by Corin Nemec.)

Personally, I think Ed finally got the chance to go back to the Island of the Houyhnhnms, where he lived out his life and was a hit with the ladies of Hay Society, despite the fact that he was white in color.  I'm sure a lot of his attitudes and opinions caused quite a few scandals among the population and may even have changed the long-entrenched way of life among those intelligent horses.

And how did he get back to that land located off the coast of Australia?  Well, we know he could surf, but that's quite a distance. 

There's one character who could have helped him, one who can be fit into just about any story from Toobworld......

I think the Doctor may have given him a hitch via the TARDIS.....

BCnU!

TUESDAY NEWS DAY - A NEW LOVEJOY IN THE WORKS



Thanks to "The Medium Is Not Enough" (the fourth best TV blog in all of the UK), I've learned about "TV, Eh?" a website about Canadian TV.  And they had this news item from the other day:

LOVEJOY, a mystery series in development with BBC, produced in partnership with UK-based Red Planet Pictures, based on the series of novels by Jonathan Gash, which inspired the BBC series Lovejoy starring Ian McShane which ran from 1986-1994. Tony Jordan (Life on Mars, Hustle, Crash) is writing the pilot script.
This will go into the Land o' Remakes automatically since - as the article stated - there already is a TV series about Lovejoy on Earth Prime-Time.......

And we know that Ian McShane's televersion of 'Lovejoy' is the official portrayal for the main Toobworld because we saw a book based on his life in an episode of 'Doctor Who' and it had his face on the front cover.

Check it out here:
ROSE & PROSE

This was not a Zonk!  Just as the Toobworld maxim states that eventually everyone will have a TV show made about them, so too will many TV characters will have books written about them.  And who better than to put on the cover of that book than the actual bloke... who just happens to look like an actor by the name of Ian McShane?

There is one way in which both televersions of "Lovejoy" can remain part of Earth Prime-Time, but it would take a pretty good argument.

Although everything in that news snippet above screams "UK location", it is going to be a co-production with a Canadian company.  What if this new adaptation is set in Canada?  Maybe we could make the argument that this new Lovejoy is a nephew of the "original" and one who is named after him.  But it's an argument that would have to be very convincing.

BCnU!

REMEMBERING DR. KING......

 

 

 



VIDEO SUNDAY - CAR CHASES BENNY HILL STYLE!

It's Video Sunday, my way of still providing content on a day of "rest" but with as little effort on my part as possible. So I thought today to provide one of the mainstays of California reality news reports with its own Skitlandian twist. (California is better known for these, but I have a couple from Colorado and Ireland as well......

 

BCnU!