BURNIN' DOWN DA BRONX

ESPN is mounting a mini-series next year timed to the 30th anniversary of the Yankees winning their first World Series under the ownership of George Steinbrenner.

This should be welcome news to Denis Leary......

It's called "The Bronx Is Burning", based on Jonathan Mahler's "Ladies And Gentlemen, The Bronx Is Burning". Personally, I think it should be called "Da Bronx Is Burning".

Based on what I've read in Roger Catlin's blog "TV Eye", I'm hoping the quality of the acting and the skill used in editing and camera angles will overcome my suspicions about the mini-series' believability. Of the three main actors I've seen mentioned, (and I've yet to check the IMDb.com), John Turturro comes closest to fitting my mental image of his real-life inspiration.

Turturro is playing Billy Martin. Had Harry Dean Stanton been a younger man, I might have gone with him in the role of Martin. Funny thing is, five nights a week I have to see Billy Martin's mug across the lobby where I work - there's a picture of him and Mickey Mantle standing outside the hotel. But it's far enough away that I can't make out the details and it's been years since I actually studied it up close. So I can't really say for certain that the casting is a good match.

Not that it matters in Toobworld. Ryan White's Mom looked nothing like Judith Light, and yet that's who played her in a made-for-TV movie. And Richard Crenna as H. Ross Perot? Puleeeze!

Daniel Sunjata is playing Reggie Jackson and that seems like it's going to be a stretch. But then again, it could come down to make-up, with a fake mustache probably carrying the load to pull off the look.

It's the idea of Oliver Platt as George Steinbrenner I find the strangest bit of casting. I can't see where the producers saw a common link in resemblance from which they could splain the notion of casting Platt. 'f I was king of the forest, I'd have gone with Daniel Roebuck, former co-star of 'Matlock', who portrayed Jay Leno in "Late Shift" and who played the unfortunate Arzt on 'Lost'.

Regarding the need for editing and cinematography skills, New London, Connecticut, is standing in for New York City; and a small stadium in Norwich named for the late Thomas Dodd will be representing the House That Ruth Built.

I'm sure it has to do a better job than the set used on the season premiere of 'How I Met Your Mother' - they couldn't even get the look of the stadium security right!

But I hope it's a success and that ESPN will take a chance on more mini-series of a similar vein.

Because the story that should be told is of the 2004 season for the Red Sox!

BCnU!
Tele-Toby

FROM THE CINEVERSE TO TOOBWORLD

Variety reported that ABC is teaming up with Francis Ford Coppola to make a TV Series out of his 1974 movie 'The Conversation'. I saw this movie only the one time when it first came out and certain scenes are still vivid in my memory; very disturbing.

I think it has potential as a TV series in which the protagonist is an electronics surveillance expert. This version, whose pilot is being written by Christopher McQuarrie ("The Usual Suspects") and Erik Jendreson ("Band Of Brothers"), will be set in the present day and will find Harry Caul a master not only of audio surveillance but of digital spying as well.

Like the movie, Harry Caul is under constant surveillance himself by various agencies in the government because of a secret conversation that he taped. (Let's see, there's the Agency, the Firm, the Bureau, the Department, the Syndicate.... And those are just the vague ones.) So that will provide the overyling theme to the storyline. But there will be many self-contained stories as Caul helps people deserving of assistance.

According to Lee Goldberg, the go-to man when it comes to information and history on TV pilots, an attempt to turn 'The Conversation' into a TV show was previously made.

"Back in 1995, Oscar-winning screenwriter Ron Bass wrote a pilot based on THE CONVERSATION for NBC that starred Kyle MacLachlan in the Hackman role."

I think MacLachlan would have been great in the role. I think he still could be. And it would be nice to see him rescued from 'Desperate Housewives'. (Sorry, but I'm still bitter that 'InJustice' was canceled. David Swain was one of the best TV characters of the past year.)

Another actor who would have been perfect for the part is already tied up in another series as well - Gary Sinise of 'CSI: NY'.

The premise and execution of 'The Conversation' put me in mind of several other TV shows over the last decade:
'Fx'
'The Dead Zone'
'The Equalizer'
'The Net'

BCnU!
Tele-Toby

THE HAT SQUAD: MICKEY HARGITAY

Mickey Hargitay recently passed away at the age of 80. (I'm sure you have examples of your own for this, but Mr. Hargitay fell into that category of "I thought he was already dead" for me.)

Although he held three body-building titles in 1955 (including "Mr. Universe") and made several movies, he was better known as the husband of 1950s sex symbol Jayne Mansfield and the father of Mariska Hargitay, Emmy-winning star of 'Law & Order: Special Victims Unit'.

He appeared as himself in several shows like 'This Is Your Life', but his most prominent televersion was embodied by Arnold Schwarzenegger in a TV movie about Hargitay's marriage to Mansfield (who was played by Loni Anderson).

Governor Schwarzenegger cites Hargitay as an inspiration for his own career.

TV GUEST APPEARANCES
"Law & Order: Special Victims Unit"
- Control (2003) TV Episode .... Grandfather
"The Wild Wild West"
- The Night of the Fugitives (1968) TV Episode .... Monk

TV PILOTS
Cool Million (1972) (TV) .... Frederick

BCnU.....
Tele-Toby

THE HAT SQUAD: ROBERT EARL JONES

Robert Earl Jones was the father of James Earl Jones and he was a presence more in the world of theater than in the movies and TV as his son was. (Not to say that James Earl Jones hasn't made his mark on stage.) He died on September 7th at the age of 96.

In my opinion, his best known role would be that of Luther Coleman, the ill-fated partner to Robert Redford's grifter in "The Sting". But he also made his mark in Toobworld as well:

TV MOVIES
The Gospel at Colonus (1985) (TV) .... Creon
The Sophisticated Gents (1981) (TV) .... Big Ralph Joplin
The Displaced Person (1977) (TV)

TV GUEST APPEARANCES
"Lou Grant"
- Renewal (1978) TV Episode .... Earl Humphrey
"Kojak"
- Where Do You Go When You Have Nowhere to Go? (1976) TV Episode .... Judge
"The Defenders"
- The Brother Killers (1963) TV Episode .... Joe Dean

BCnU.....
Tele-Toby

WORKING TO WATCH

Candace Corner is a writer for CareerBuilder.com and she's listed the top ten jobs for TV Junkies:

1. Animator
2. Camera Operator
3. Broadcast Captioner
4. Broadcast News Reporter
5. Film/Video Editor for Broadcast/Television
6. Executive Producer
7. Promotions Producer
8. Director
9. Staff Writer
10. Casting Director

With each category, she fills in a few details as to what the job entails and approximately how much each of them pays annually. (She got these salary stats from Payscale.com, The Bureau of Labor Statistics, The Writer's Guild of America, CNNMoney and Salary.com.)

But those are all jobs for people who want to work in the business. I've always held the opinion that, like laws and sausages, the production of TV shows should not be seen being made.

For me, a job for a true TV junkie is one in which you can get paid to actually watch TV. And I don't mean TV critics, columnists, professional bloggers, or as part of some research group.

I mean, having a regular job on which you can also watch TV during your shift.

I think that as a hotel night auditor, I've got that type of job. (Maybe Ivan over at the Thrilling Days Of Yesteryear can back me up on that.)

During my lunch hour, there's always the TV in the lunch room, of course. But there are several hours during the shift that is like a "dead zone": after I've finished the audit, but before the first wave of checkouts begin around 4 am. (And even then!)

I suppose I could bring in a small portable and see what kind of reception I get there in the lobby. But with all the skyscrapers in midtown, I'm not sure it would be very good.

However, I do have a small DVD player and with that I'm able to catch up on a lot of shows from the past through their boxed sets.

Right now, I'm "working" my way through the boxed set for 'Naked City' starring Horace McMahon and Paul Burke. In the past, I've watched the boxed sets for 'Goode Neighbours', 'Dream On', 'The Job', and a bootleg set of DVDs for the Ninth Doctor of 'Doctor Who' (culled from bit torrents, I'm told).

It doesn't interfere with the job itself, - nobody's coming to the desk and I'm just sitting there anyway! - and helps me to make some headway in my backlog of shows to watch in order to find more trivial information to expand the TV Universe. (For instance, Detective Arcaro in 'Naked City' was shot in one episode and ended up in Manhattan General Hospital. This same hospital was the central location for 'Kay O'Brien, Surgeon'.)

And best of all, I'm getting paid during that time.

Sweet.

BCnU!
Tele-Toby

THE JUNG & THE RESTLESS

There's just something wrong when the announcer proclaims, "Get inside 'How I Met Your Mother'!"

Made me squirm when I heard that on the tape this morning.....

BCnU!
Tele-Toby

BY THE WAY: "MEN IN TREES"

I got that second chance with the 'Men In Trees' pilot on Friday night when I got home from the movies. But this time I never made it to the second episode which followed it.

Sorry, but it just didn't grab me.

I was rather neutral about it, unlike my brother Bill, who sat there loudly grousing that we didn't need another TV show set in Alaska after 'Northern Exposure'.

Speaking as a Televisiologist, this attitude doesn't make sense to me. Would we ever have 'Taxi', 'Rhoda', 'Friends', 'Seinfeld' or 'How I Met Your Mother' if we never allowed another sitcom set in New York City after 'I Love Lucy'?

My brother can be a jerk. All three of them can be. It must be hereditary.

Wait a minute.....

At any rate, I don't see myself heading back north to Elmo, Alaska, any time soon.

BCnU!
Tele-Toby

SOON TO BE RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES

From the AP:

When Susan Kuhnhausen returned home from work one day earlier this month, she was ambushed by an intruder wielding a hammer.After a violent struggle, the 51-year-old nurse managed to fend off her attacker and strangled him with her bare hands.

Neighbors praised the woman for her bravery, and investigators said they believed the dead man, Edward Haffey, was burglarizing Kuhnhausen's home.

But after an investigation, cops say the intruder was a hit man hired by her 58-year-old estranged husband.

The husband was busted last week and held on $500,000 bail. Haffey - a violent repeat offender - had worked as a custodian under Michael Kuhnhausen at an adult video store, according to prosecutors.

Inside a backpack Haffey left at the scene was a day planner with, "Call Mike, Get letter," scribbled on the week of Sept. 4, officials said. Michael Kuhnhausen's cell phone number was jotted on a folder, police say.

First off, it's "Dial M For Murder"/"A Perfect Murder" brought to life.

I'm not sure if it's already been done; the basic plot seems easy enough. But I could see this as being one of those "ripped from the headlines" episodes of 'Law & Order'.

Of course, they would add their own little twist.....

BCnU!
Tele-Toby

LINKS TO THE LEFT, ME LADS AND LASSIES!

I think any blogger will agree with this - the most boring part of the "job" is the maintenance. And for me, that mostly deals with keeping my links to other sites up to date.

Today, I've added eleven new links to the list at left. There's a very general sense of placement with no intention of ranking them by importance or favoritism, just keeping them in the basic community of links in which they are best suited.

Here's the list of newbies:

The TV Guy
Television Commercial Database
uninflected images juxtaposed
The TV Room
Cartoon Brew
Muppet Wiki
Reel Fanatic
Bill Crider's Pop Culture Magazine
U.S.T.V.
Drew's Script-O-Rama
The Internet Movie Script Database

Give them a look-see; they're all worthwhile and a great waste of time.

And isn't that why we're all here in the first place?

BCnU!
Tele-Toby

"ALIAS SMITH AND JONES": A SPLAININ REVISED

I was on vacation this past week - as Rob Buckley would put it, I was "on me hols". And the place where I was staying had access to the Encore Westerns channel. When I was up there during July, I treated myself to watching 'Alias Smith And Jones' each day at 6 pm EST. It's always been one of my favorite series, even outside the Western genre.

(Thinking of it now, I should have listed Hannibal Heyes as one of my Top 25 TV characters. I'd probably have to send Maggie Jacobs of 'Extra' further down the list.....)

I figured: why give up on a good thing? So I watched the show while I was there again.

But the week began with two episodes from when Roger Davis was playing Hannibal Heyes, after the suicide of Pete Duel.

Years ago, when I was running the Tubeworld Dynamic website, I wrote a multi-page splainin on how Hannibal Heyes was able to change his complete appearance, right down to his voice. I thought it was a pretty good essay, especially as it gave me the chance to bring my favorite TV character, Dr. Miguelito Loveless into yet another TV show, deep background. And it provided theoretical links to 'The Wild Wild West' in other ways as well as to other shows like 'The Avengers' and 'The Prisoner'.

But as I begin collecting all my old splainins to see what kind of shape I can knock them into, I decided that particular splainin was wayyyy too complicated. And one thing I want to do is simplify, simplify, simplify the TV Universe.

It had been years since I saw those 'AS&J' episodes which featured Roger Davis, perhaps not even since they first aired. And even then, I think I finally fell away from the series because of his involvement, since there was just something missing without Peter Duel involved.

So I watched those two episodes with great interest, with a fresh perspective, and decided it was time to re-think and re-tool my splainin for the new look sported by Joshua Smith aka Hannibal Heyes.

I decided the simplest splainin would follow the template I'm using for the two different versions of Joey Bishop's sitcom. Bishop played Joey Barnes first as a talent agent bossed around by his family, and then as a late night talk show host with a beautiful wife. Although the change-over occurred between the first and second season, Joey Barnes was supposedly a talk show host for awhile.

The splainin for this involves alternate TV dimensions.

For Earth Prime-Time, the Hannibal Heyes as played by Pete Duel is the official version of the character. Not so much because he was the first, because that rule is flexible. (As is the case with 'The Joey Bishop Show' - the three years in which he was a talk show host belong in the main Toobworld because of a mult-episode crossover with 'The Danny Thomas Show'.) The first incarnation of 'Alias Smith And Jones' belongs in Earth Prime-Time because Pete Duel was inarguably the best in the role.

Roger Davis served well as a replacement after Duel died, and the audience was already somewhat accustomed to him as the narrator for the original version. He may even have been better received had he been the first.

But once you've seen Duel, ain't no one more cool.

What especially helps with the idea that there is a distinct, dimensional divide between both versions of the show is that the opening of the series - in which Curry and Heyes confer with Lom Trevors - was re-shot. Both the Duel image of Hannibal Heyes and the Davis version have the same conversation with the Sheriff about the possibility of amnesty.

This is what especially tosses my original theory about Heyes' mind transplant into the body of the 'Smiler With A Gun' (thanks to the scientific genius of Dr. Loveless) out the window. With that theory, life for Hannibal Heyes continues onward in his new body; he doesn't go back in Time and relive it all over again.

By the way, I used to include the transition of 'Burke's Law' into 'Amos Burke, Secret Agent' as an example of the same show existing in two different dimensions. This is because Burke returned in the 1990s and was still the head of the L.A. Homicide department, with no mention of his tenure as a spy for the U.S. government.

However, I've looked through the episode guide for that last season of Gene Barry's show and found this:

The Prisoners of Mr. Sin 10/27/65
With his knowledge, expertise, and photographic memory, [Dr. Walter Bannister] is highly sought after. Deep in his brain are the files of twenty-one of the country's best agents, including Burke.

Planning on selling his information, Bannister is instead captured by Mr. Sin, who plans to auction off Bannister's facts to the highest bidder, keeping the money for himself.

Mr. Sin was played by the late, great Michael Dunn, best known for playing Dr. Miguelito Loveless on 'The Wild, Wild West'. It's always been the contention here at Toobworld Central that Loveless was immortal, and that he was still active on Earth Prime-Time one hundred years after the events of 'The Wild, Wild West'.

When he was next seen in Toobworld, he was operating under several aliases: Mr. Big ('Get Smart') and The Clown ('Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea'). As an alias, Mr. Sin fits nicely into that same groove, so how could I ever leave 'Amos Burke, Secret Agent' out of the main Toobworld?

But getting back to Hannibal Heyes - Remember Hannibal Heyes? This is a post about Hannibal Heyes. - there is still a splainin needed for the difference in appearance for the version played by Roger Davis.

And that's easy to splain: a simple twist of his DNA strand before birth. This happens all the time in the dimension of Earth Prime-Time Delayed, which is where we house all the remakes and/or lesser known versions of other TV shows.

So even though Kid Curry aka Thaddeus Jones remained the same (being played by Ben Murphy in both incarnations of the show), we might as well toss the re-tooled incarnation of 'Alias Smith And Jones' over into the Remakes dimension with 'The New Addams Family', 'The New Monkees', and 'The New Gidget'.

"I wish the Governor would let a few more people in on our secret."
Hannibal Heyes
'Alias Smith And Jones'

Well, I may not be the Governor of Toobworld - I'm just a Caretaker, - but hopefully this splainin will serve......

BCnU!
Tele-Toby