TVXOHOF, DECEMBER 2018 - BRINGING HOME MALONE FOR CHRISTMAS

Traditionally in the Television Crossover Hall of Fame, December is the month in which Toobworld Central celebrates the Multiversal.  It stems from the fact that many of the Christmas entrants had representation in a variety of TV programs, especially Santa Claus.  (Thanks to the Hallmark channel alone, there will probably be plenty of Santas to fill dozens of dimensions!)

In the beginning of the TVXOHOF's history, the entire month of December served as the showcase for a holiday entry.  But now our Christmas Crossover is inducted on Christmas Day, and we can spotlight the major multiversals in the monthly showcase.  And now that we’ve introduced the Friday Hall of Famers this year, we can have a few of the minor multiversals as well.  (This December will be two such minor multiversals, but two of the Friday Hall Of Famers will be identical cousins who deserve this honorific as their portrayer left us this year.)

At the beginning of this year, actress Dorothy Malone passed away, just ten days shy of her 94th birthday.  She had been one of the most glamorous actresses of the late 40s and throughout the 50s.  With “The Big Sleep”, she played one of the sexiest roles in the movies, simply playing a bookstore clerk, deceptively staid in appearance, who offered Humphrey Bogart’s Philip Marlowe the chance to “keep her company” back in the storeroom.  After that it’s left to the imagination and I have a very good imagination.

From Wikipedia:
Mary Dorothy Maloney (January 29, 1924 – January 19, 2018) was an American actress. 

Her film career began in 1943, and in her early years she played small roles, mainly in B-movies. After a decade, she began to acquire a more glamorous image, particularly after her performance in "Written on the Wind" (1956), for which she won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.

Her film career reached its peak by the beginning of the 1960s, and she achieved later success with her television role as Constance MacKenzie on 'Peyton Place' from (1964–68). 

From 1964-68, she played the lead role of Constance MacKenzie on the ABC prime time serial 'Peyton Place' except for a brief stretch where she was absent due to surgery. Lola Albright filled in until her return. Malone agreed for $3,000 a week less than ABC's offer of $10,000 weekly, if she could be home nightly for 6 p.m. dinner with her two daughters and no shooting on weekends. "I never turned down a mother role," said Malone. "I like playing mothers. I started out as a very young girl in Hollywood doing westerns, portraying a mother with a couple of kids." 

In 1968, she was written out of the show after complaining that she was given little to do. Malone sued 20th Century Fox for $1.6 million for breach of contract; it was settled out of court. She would later return to the role in the TV movies "Murder in Peyton Place" (1977) and "Peyton Place: The Next Generation" (1985).

Constance MacKenzie is a multiversal, immortalized in BookWorld, the Cineverse, and Toobworld.  Within the greater TV Universe, she is a multidimensional.  As played by Ms. Malone, she is a member of the main Toobworld, Earth Prime-Time, and as such is being inducted today into the Television Crossover Hall of Fame as our December showcase.  But Constance also appeared in a daytime soap opera later on and that show is to be found in Toobworld2, the Land O’ Remakes.

From Wikipedia:

Constance MacKenzie (née Standish) is a fictional character in the 1956 novel “Peyton Place” by Grace Metalious. In the subsequent film adaptation, she was played by Lana Turner; in the sequel “Return to Peyton Place”, by Eleanor Parker; in the prime-time television series, by Dorothy Malone (and briefly by Lola Albright); and in the daytime soap opera “Return to Peyton Place”, by Bettye Ackerman and later by Susan Brown.

Constance Standish was born and bred in the small New Hampshire community of Peyton Place; living with her widowed mother, Elizabeth Standish. Like most people in that community, she was repressed. She met, acquired a job with, and eventually fell in love with a man named Allison MacKenzie, who ran an exotic fabric shop in New York City.

They had an extramarital affair (he was married and had two children and a wife in Scarsdale, New York), and from that affair, her daughter, Allison MacKenzie, his namesake, was born. (Allison, according to the book, was a year older than she really was, because Constance and her mother doctored the birth certificate.) After the birth of Allison, Mr. MacKenzie died, and left her some money in a discreet bank account. With this money and what she had saved while her former lover was alive, she opened a clothing store in her hometown. 

In the novel, it was named, the Thrifty Corner Apparel Shoppe; in the movie, it was simply called, The Tweed Shop; and in the television series, she didn't own a clothing store, but operated the town's book store.

Here are the tally listings for Contance MacKenzie’s membership into the TVXOHOF:

CONSTANCE MACKENZIE

1964-1968
Peyton Place
Constance Mackenzie Carson / Constance Mackenzie
430 episodes

The original primetime soap took place in the title town, which was founded by the Peyton family, whose members included the Harringtons. Some of the plots involved Rodney Harrington, the oldest son, choosing between bad girl Betty Anderson or fragile Allison MacKenzie. His brother Norman took up with working class Rita Jacks. Allison's mother Connie was keeping a secret about her daughter's birth. People married and divorced, loved and lost. Murder, illicit passion, insanity, and secrets were the staples of Peyton Place. 

1977
Murder in Peyton Place
Constance MacKenzie

A former resident of the town of Peyton Place, now wealthy and powerful, secretly returns to the town and sets in motion a spate of killings designed as revenge for past wrongs.

1985
Peyton Place: The Next Generation
Constance Carson

This movie, based on the 60's television series, brings back some of the major characters. It begins when a young girl Megan comes to town and she bears a resemblance to Allison Mackenzie, who disappeared 20 years ago. It is revealed that she is Allison's daughter. She is not warmly greeted by Kelly, the sister that Allison never knew of, it seems that she resents Allison, because she appears to be the center of her parents’ universe. She has set her sights on Dana Harrington, who is in line to inherit the Peyton fortune. And it seems that Dana has shifted his attention from Kelly to Megan. It is also revealed that Allison, not long after she disappeared was attacked by someone, and she has been in a catatonic state, when she is moved to Peyton Place someone goes into her room and kills her and makes it appear that she committed suicide. However, Steven Cord suspects that Allison did not take her life, so he investigates.  

O'Bservation:
Those summaries are courtesy of the IMDb.

There are a couple of pozz’ble, just pozz’ble, theories of relateeveety to be found in just those summaries, let alone the entire list of characters.  “Carson” could have some connection to Joe Carson of ‘Petticoat Junction’ and there are several Cords in TV Westerns who could be the ancestors for Steven.  But that would be something to investigate at a later prime-time because the focus should remain on Constance.

There is one aspect of Constance MacKenzie’s life in the main Toobworld that must be addressed – for fourteen episodes of ‘Peyton Place’, Constance MacKenzie was played by Lola Albright while Ms. Malone was recovering from surgery. 

There have been times when I have switched the home dimension of a TV show out of the main Toobworld for just one episode.  A case in point would be the crossover between ‘NCIS: LA’ and the remake of ‘Hawaii Five-0’.  Every other episode of ‘NCIS: LA’ is situated in Earth Prime-Time where it belongs with ‘JAG’ and the other ‘NCIS’ shows.  But this ‘Hawaii Five-0’ is from Toobworld2 because the show that starred Jack Lord, James MacArthur, and occasionally the incredible Khigh Dhiegh is the only ‘Hawaii Five-0’ for the main Toobworld.  So in just this one instance, we were watching the ‘NCIS: LA’ team from Toobworld2. They just didn’t get recast as was the case with the other McGarrett and Danno.

I suppose such a situation could be applied to these fourteen episodes of ‘Peyton Place’, that in another dimension (but not Toobworld2 since the daytime soap opera ‘Return To Peyton Place’ occupies that world) Constance MacKenzie had a different combination of her DNA.  And the Powers That Be forced the attention of the Trueniverse audience to watch that other dimension for two weeks.

But…. That’s a boring splainin.

It’s the standard Toobworld splainin for all of the dozens of recastaways in soap operas that all of those fictional soap opera towns are serving as test sites for future research into quantum leaping.  And as ‘Peyton Place’ was a prime-time soap opera – perhaps the first? – then that is the situation we had in this case.  In order to study ordinary life in a small town during the 1960s, a leaper from the far future took the place of Constance MacKenzie.  For the leaper, it might even have been a pleasure trip, a two-week vacation.  Eventually Ms. MacKenzie was returned to the world that she knew with her memory erased of her experience in that testing facility in the Future.

If you think it too crazy an idea, remember – Toobworld is NOT the Real World.

So in memory of the late and lovely Dorothy Malone, we here at Toobworld Central would like to welcome her character of Constance MacKenzie to the Television Crossover Hall of Fame!

Until next prime-time…..

HER RIDE'S HERE.....

FRIDAY'S HALL OF FAMER - LES MOONVES

Finishing off the month of November with a current newsmaker....

LESLIE MOONVES

From Wikipedia:
Leslie Roy Moonves (born October 6, 1949) is an American media executive who served as Chairman and CEO of CBS Corporation until he resigned on September 9, 2018 in light of allegations that he sexually abused many women. He is married to Julie Chen.

He had held a series of executive positions at CBS from July 1995 to September 2018. He has been on the Board of Directors at ZeniMax Media since 1999. Later, he was co-President and co-Chief Operating Officer (COO) of the original Viacom, Inc., the legal predecessor to CBS Corporation, from 2004 until the company split in December 2005. He became Chairman of CBS in February 2016. On September 9, 2018, Les Moonves stepped down as Chairman of CBS after multiple sexual harassment claims.

According to various media reports, Moonves has amassed a net worth of over $800 million as a result of extremely generous compensation packages from CBS, with Moonves earning $68.4 million in 2017, combined with stock options of the media company, worth over $100 million. It was reported that Moonves was entitled to a severance package of over $240 million from CBS, however, this has been suspended pending the outcome of several sexual abuse allegations against him.

So there's a cheerful newsmaker to close out November's Friday Hall of Famers, huh?  We're going to seat him next to Matt Lauer in the Hall...

Moonves had started out as an actor and was able to parlay his talents to help when he played his own televersion in several TV shows, especially when he was held hostage and threatened with execution - live on TV! - in an episode of 'The Practice'.  

But for the most part he played himself TV shows which visit Hollywood 'The Nanny' or as a talking head doing commentary in documentaries ('Chicago Hope')

None of those shows mention his sexual predation.  In fact, had it not been for him being a very naughty boy, Moonves was earmarked to be a monthly showcase when we did a full year tribute to Hollywood, mostly thanks to that episode of 'The Practice'.  Heck, he even got his name featured in the episode title!  But no, he had to go cheat on the Chenwag like that....

Here are the TV shows which qualify him for membership in the Hall.

Sisters 
- Moving Pictures (1993) 
When Georgie's husband's plane goes missing and she gets into a car crash near her due date, a Hollywood producer decided to make a TV movie about her.  This leads to Georgie, John, Frankie and Alex on an tour of the Warner Bros. studios in Burbank, where Moonves is one of the famous people they meet. 

Arli$$
- Timing Is Everything (1996) 
Arliss launches a league for indoor beach volleyball with a massive made-for-TV promotion.

The Nanny 
- The Heather Biblow Story (1997) 

From the IMDb:
The woman who stole Fran's job and fiance now has a job on "The Young and the Restless." Fran steals that job from her and she takes Fran's nanny job instead.

Chicago Hope
- The Other Cheek (1998) 

From the IMDb:
A TV star is rushed into the emergency room after a fall and dies suddenly, causing a news crew to hound Drs. McNeil and Yeats for the real cause of death.

The Young and the Restless 
- Episode #1.7054 (2001) 

The Practice 
- Les Is More (2003) 

 From the IMDb:
Jimmy goes to meet a mentally unstable old client of his, and is shocked to find himself being held by her at gunpoint. The event takes an even more bizarre turn when he discovers she has kidnapped CBS CEO Les Moonves, and is planning to play Russian Roulette with him on live television - while asking Jimmy to find a TV network willing to carry the broadcast. 

The Price Is Right Million Dollar Spectacular
- Hall of Fame (2004)

O'Bservation: 'The Price Is Right' is an established show within a show thanks to appearances in 'How I Met Your Mother' and 'Martial Law'.

Episodes 
- Episode Nine (2014) 
From the IMDb:
Sean and Beverly are dead-set to leave LA, no matter how much the studios want their new script. Matt gets the lead role in a new series at NBC. Unfortunately, 'Pucks' has not yet been 'officially' canceled.

Operator:
Hi. I'm calling from CBS.36  
I have Les Moonves for Sean and Beverly. 
Beverly:
Uh, Sean and Beverly are right here. 
Operator:
You're on with Les. 
Les Moonves:
Hi. Is this Sean and Beverly?
Uh, it's Les Moon...
[Sean hangs up.]
Sean:
We have a plane to catch.
Beverly:
Are you crazy? 
Sean:
I'll call him back and say we were disconnected.
Beverly:
You hung up on Les Moonves?

Even with my (hopefully apparent) derision, this is probably the last "good" thing that'll happen for Les Moonves this year.

Enjoy your stay....  No wandering!

THE GAME OF THE NAME - LINKING 'HAWKINS' & 'COLUMBO'

JOSEPH HARRELSON

'HAWKINS'
'DEATH AND THE MAIDEN'
[MARCH 1973]

From the IMDb:
Hawkins defends an heiress charged with a triple murder.  

Although he was based in Beauville, WVa, Billy Jim Hawkins traveled all over the country to defend high-paying clients.  (He must have taken a hell of a lot of bar exams!)

In the pilot, he was hired to defend Edith Dayton-Thomas who was accused of butchering her father, her stepmother, and her stepsister.  Although the location wasn’t cited in the dialogue, we know from the newspapers that open each episode where the case takes place.  With the pilot, we saw the breaking news headlines from the San Francisco Dispatch (part of the newspaper empire owned by Arthur Kennicutt as seen in the ‘Columbo’ episode “Death Lends A Hand”.)  So the trial took place in the San Francisco Bay area.

The case was prosecuted by Joseph Harrelson.  He was a decent enough litigator, but he was keen on beating Billy Jim with a guilty verdict for Miss Dayton-Thomas.  However, Billy Jim and his cousin Sheriff RJ Hawkins were able to discover who the true killer was.

Over the next twenty years, Harrelson decided he wanted more in his career and in order to accomplish that, he moved south to Los Angeles when he was offered the chance to run for the District Attorney of the City of Angels.  There he proved time and again his prowess in the court room as he got a lot of headline-grabbing convictions. 

Finally he turned his attention on the mayor’s office in Los Angeles.  In the mid-1980s, he ran for the mayorship and won, becoming entrenched in the position by the time he was caught up in another high-profile murder investigation.
  
'COLUMBO'
"COLUMBO CRIES WOLF"
JANUARY 1990

From the IMDb:
When Dian Hunter, the publisher of the men's magazine "Bachelor's World", wants to sell her stock to a media tycoon, her adulterous partner Sean Brantley objects. Soon afterwards, Miss Hunter apparently disappears on a London-bound flight.

The uproar over this celebrity-driven mystery had the press demanding answers from the upper echelons at the LAPD and at City Hall.  Mayor Harrelson conferred with his police commissioner and even got the chance to grill the chief investigating detective on the case, Lt. Frank Columbo.  And even though the pressure was on him to wrap the case up quickly, Mayor Harrelson finally agreed to let the Lieutenant continue in his own way. 

That proved to be the right call, even with the revelation that Ms. Hunter was still alive which left Columbo holding the bag for the waste of man-hours and the cost of the investigation.  But in the end, Columbo was able to turn the tables on Sean Brantley.

Further investigation into other TV series set in TV-LA would have to conducted in order to determine how much longer Mayor Harrelson remained in office.  (TV shows like ‘Diagnosis: Murder’, ‘The Closer’, ‘Shark’, and the second ‘City of Angels’ have more than likely shown different mayors of the televersion of Los Angeles.) 

Even out of office, Harrelson remained a power behind the scenes in his party and served as a super-delegate for the California delegations at political conventions.

Joseph Harrelson, the former Mayor of Los Angeles, passed away two years ago.

O’Bservation – David Huddleston portrayed Joseph Harrelson in the ‘Hawkins’ pilot and the Mayor in the ‘Columbo’ reboot.  I conflated the two. (And used a couple of other pictures from other projects.)

BCnU!

 

SPLAININ TO DO - TOOBWORLD NEEDS A NEW PAIR OF SHOES

‘COLUMBO’
“THE MOST DEADLY MATCH”

‘Columbo’ is one of the greatest TV shows ever made; it ranks at #5 on my list of personal favorites.  But it is not perfect.  Every episode has errors in it, but it does feel as though “The Most Deadly Match” has more than its fair share; a cameraman or some other techie seen in a mirror; people sitting in an empty hotel room (which I covered in the past); and Emmett Clayton's footwear. 

With this post, we’re taking a look at one of them and hopefully providing a Toobworthy splainin for it.  But we’ll have to go to another TV series for that answer. 

This is Helen Cutter.  She was the wife of Professor Nick Cutter and they were studying the phenomena of the anomalies which opened gateways into the ‘Primeval’ past.  (Hence, the series name.)  But she was lost in the past and presumed dead.  When she was found, Helen Cutter was radicalized by the experience and wanted to use terrorist actions to change the course of the Present before Mankind faced extinction like the creatures from the distant Past.  Eventually she decided Mankind didn’t deserve to be saved once she saw what was going to happen in the Future no matter what she did.

To achieve that end, Helen Cutter went back into one of the primeval periods of Time and whatever she did back then, it changed the timeline radically.  Two of the differences were that the funding for the Anomaly Research Center was accelerated by at least a decade’s worth.  And Claudia Brown was now Jenny Lewis with no memory of working with ARC. 

But not all of the changes were that radical, however, and here we have an example.  Lt. Frank Columbo had already zeroed in on Chess Master Emmett Clayton as his prime suspect in the murder of Clayton’s chess rival from behind the Iron Curtain.  (Based on the language spoken, we know it wasn’t Russian; probably the invented language that was native to some fictional Soviet country.)  As was the case with other suspects in the past, Clayton finally had enough of Columbo’s incessant questions and stormed off.

As we can see in that first picture, Clayton is waiting to take the elevator upstairs and he is wearing tan shoes.  But when he gets off the elevator, he is now wearing black shoes.

So we’re using ‘Primeval’ as the splainin; this is why I consider the sci-fi series to be one of the Toobworld essentials.

Up until Clayton was about to enter the elevator, the action was taking place in the original timeline of Toobworld.  But the perspective of the Trueniverse audience was yanked away before the elevator finished its trip to now view Toobworld in its altered timeline.

But why did the new timeline cause Clayton to choose a different pair of shoes that day than what he wore in the original timeline?

It could be that on his trip to California, Clayton only brought along one pair of shoes, the pair he was wearing.  So then the temporal alteration had to have happened when he was packing for the trip.  Or maybe the deviation occurred when he bought the shoes, after which he looked upon them as his favorite pair, perhaps the lucky ones he needed to wear when playing chess.  (They certainly weren’t lucky for him in committing murder, however.)

Let’s take the pivotal point in Time back to that purchase. 

As for which shoe store, I don’t think there is any purveyor of footwear more famous in Toobworld than “Gary's Shoes & Accessories for Today's Woman” in Chicago as seen in ‘Married… With Children’.  So O’Bviously that won’t be possible as a candidate.

‘THE DICK VAN DYKE SHOW’
“YOUNG MAN WITH A SHOEHORN”

My second favorite TV character of all time, Maurice “Buddy” Sorrell, had an uncle named Lou Sorrell who had a bargain shoe store near the subway.  Perhaps Emmett Clayton, back when he was first trying to make a name for himself in the world of chess, bought a pair of shoes in Lou’s store the same day he had his first chess match which could garner him a national standing.  And whatever pair he bought that day he would then consider his “lucky” pair of shoes once he won that night.

In the original timeline, Clayton bought his shoes from Lou’s best salesman, Sid Feldman.  Sid convinced Emmett Clayton to buy the tan shoes.  (Sid was rude and brusque to the customers and he probably just wanted to get the purchase over with as soon as possible.  And since they were probably overstocked in the tan shoes, that’s why Sid pushed them.) 

But in the new timeline, by the time he reached the shoe store, Sid had “quit” and Rob Petrie and Buddy Sorrell were stuck trying to run the store since Uncle Lou was out to lunch.  Although we didn’t see him in the store, he may have been one of the customers during the jump cut after the man who came in for brown Oxfords, but before those three women were served to varying degrees of success.  (One of them was the mother of Agent 99 from ‘Get Smart’, played by Jane Dulo.)

With Rob and Buddy helping him, Clayton had a bit more time in choosing his shoes and so he went with the black shoes.  (Getting the chance to play chess on a level that would give him a lot of publicity, he probably figured he couldn’t go wrong with black dress shoes.)

I think the alteration of the timeline comes in with the reason why he was late.  That shoe store was near the subway; perhaps Clayton had taken the subway to reach the place.  In the original timeline, there were no problems in the subway ride.  But in the altered timeline, some unknown TV character maybe fell, jumped, or was pushed in front of a train, delaying the train that Emmett was riding.

And if that’s what happened, in the original timeline the shoes he bought from Sid were what he was wearing during the chess match that night, and so he considered them as his lucky shoes and wore them everywhere.  But in the new timeline, the shoes he bought from Rob and Buddy became the lucky shoes.

BCnU!