Tag Archives: tv

“The View” Taping

Posted on by

Matt and I had a cool experience this morning — we were in the live audience for The View.

We used to watch the show back when Rosie O’Donnell was on, and then we watched it occasionally when Whoopi Goldberg and Sherri Shepherd joined, so it seemed like a cool thing to try to get tickets for. We’d signed up online for tickets a long time ago — maybe a year ago or more? And then a couple of weeks ago, we suddenly got two tickets in the mail for this morning’s live show.

We got to the studio around 8:45 in the morning, and they started letting us into the building about 20 minutes later. After showing our tickets and going through security, we had to wait in a holding area for an hour, until about 10:30 (that was the slowest, most boring part of the morning). Then they took us up to the studio in a small elevator.

I’ve been to a couple of TV show tapings before (The Daily Show and The Colbert Report), and I’ve seen TV studios a couple of other times in the past, and it’s always such a weird experience when you first walk into one, especially one you’ve seen before on TV. It’s so bright and shiny and chilly and simultaneously real and artificial.

The audience seemed to be about 95 percent female. We counted only a handful of men, and the few we counted seemed to be there with their wives. We seemed to be the only male couple, although there were one or two guys in the audience who might have been on our team.

We got to sit in the middle of the center section, third row, although there was a smaller section in the very front of the audience, so we were some distance from the stage area. A warmup comedian came out and trained us in applauding loudly and enthusiastically. And then at 11 a.m., the show began, and out came Barbara Walters, Joy Behar, Whoopi, and Sherri. Elisabeth Hasselbeck is out this week, which didn’t bother me; I was just psyched that Barbara Walters was there, since she only does two or three shows a week. She’s a television legend and it was cool to see her in person.

The sound in a TV studio is different than in a theater — it’s so crisp and clear, but sterile, with no reverberation. When the hosts were talking, we could hear them perfectly through their mikes. It was almost like watching them on TV. And since a camera was blocking my view of Sherri Shepherd, there were a few times when I did actually glance at the TV monitors above our heads.

Unfortunately, there were no celebrity guests. It was mainly a Day of Hot Topics, although the final segment did have non-celebrity guests: a family who had a daughter with a red blood cell deficiency and who then had another kid who was then able to donate some of his blood and cure her. Everyone in the audience got a copy of a new book about the family, The Match, on the way out. This is not a topic that really interests me, but, hey, free book, I guess.

At the end, we got our free book as well as a free tote bag filled with several bags of pita chips from a food company.

TV tapings are always fun. It was neat to think that what we were seeing live in person was simultaneously being seen on TV all over the Eastern and Central time zones. Women watching at home all over America, in Kansas, in Florida, in North Carolina, in Ohio… and later in New Mexico, and Idaho, and California, and Hawaii… in small towns and suburbs and cities far, far away from us.

TV is so cool!

Screen Clutter

Posted on by

Lost is my favorite show on TV, even though the final season so far has been a little slow and disappointing. But the other night it was practically unwatchable, because for nearly the entire hour there was this bright red “V” at the bottom of the screen along with a countdown clock, promoting an upcoming episode of, well, V. The first scene of the episode was tinted green, because the characters were being seen through night-vision lenses, which made the ugly red V stand out even more. This episode also had lots of subtitles and a couple of scenes where a character was writing on a pad, and some of the words were obscured:

[image via Alan Sepinwall]

The TV executive who came up with this idea should be fired, though it’ll never happen. I’m used to bugs by now, but, really? Bright red? It couldn’t at least have been translucent? And you needed to include a countdown? We don’t have clocks?

And apparently it worked, because now for an aside about V.

I watched the first episode of the V remake last fall and was underwhelmed. Perhaps I’d have liked it better if I hadn’t seen the original as a kid. First of all, on the new series, the characters refer to the aliens as “the V’s,” which is totally ridiculous because in the original story, “V” stood both for “Visitors” (the aliens) and for the hoped-for “victory” against them; it wasn’t their frickin’ nickname. But I guess in the 21st century we have to dumb everything down.

I also actively hated a couple of the characters. I haven’t watched the show since.

So some big stupid red V is not going to make me tune in to your stupid remake. Lost is practically a religious experience for some people — me included — and we don’t want any distractions. You want to put garbage on the screen during something like Dancing With the Stars that doesn’t require any brain cells, fine, but don’t interrupt me when I’m trying to watch Lost.

The Hulu.com version didn’t have the V at the bottom, but that would have required waiting a day and trying to avoid spoilers.

Here’s more on the stupid red thing. And Alan Sepinwall went on a long rant about it, which made me feel better because it meant I wasn’t alone in hating it.

I’m just waiting until the night my dreams start to have TV logos in the bottom corner. Dude, what if someday they invent a sleeping pill that has in-dream ads for cola and TV shows?

Early TV Manual

Posted on by

Lately I’ve been re-exploring one of my interests: the history of broadcasting and telecommunications. Since I was a kid I’ve loved the early history of radio and TV broadcasting, the rise of the broadcast networks, the transition from radio to TV, and so forth.

I was tooling around online last night and found an RCA television manual from 1946.

1946 was the year that mass-market TV took off. Television experiments were underway in the late 1920s and throughout the 1930s, and by 1939, mass-market television was ready to go, but World War II got in the way. It wasn’t until after the war, when the economy returned to a peacetime footing and consumers were eager to spend again, that TV really took off on a mass scale. In 1946, a year after the end of the war, RCA introduced its first mass-market TV sets.

It’s funny to scroll through the pages of this manual and see how new and mysterious this all was. I love this from page 4:

Reception of a picture with the accompanying sound from a Television Transmitting Station which is broadcasting in your area is a simple tuning process. The Model 621TS gives station coverage as given on page 12.

Check to see that the Television Station is on the air at the time you wish to tune in, and note the channel number of the station. This information is usually published in newspapers. Program schedules may also be obtained from the station on request.

Ah, yes — “Check to see that the Television Station is on the air at the time you wish to tune in,” because the stations are broadcasting for just a few hours each day. Page 7 has a picture of a test pattern and says, “A test pattern of this type is usually broadcast for about fifteen minutes before the program commences.” Today, that would be a waste of valuable advertising time.

Page 12: “This Television Receiver is designed for operation on all thirteen Television Channels as allocated by the Federal Communications Commission in November, 1945. However, in no area are there stations operating on all channels.”

Page 13 explains that the TV tube and receiver will come in separate cartons:

Do not attempt to unpack the Kinescope or the receiver. Leave the equipment complete with all labels and tags in the two cartons for the technician who will install the receiver and explain its operation.

Great fun. I wonder if someday people will laugh at the instructions for setting up a home wireless network with a router.

Paramount Closet Killer

Posted on by

This is my favorite find of the day. You know those production company logos that appear at the end of most TV shows? It seems that some people find them scary, because they consist of short bursts of attention-grabbing music and some sort of logo flying at you.

Well, one of them, from Paramount in 1969, has a nickname: the Closet Killer. Because it sounds like what you hear when a serial killer is waiting in your closet.

I associate this with the first season of The Brady Bunch.

(More Paramount logos here.)

Even better than that, a short film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival last month called The S From Hell, which spoofily explores children’s fears of the 1960s Screen Gems logo. The entire nine-minute film is currently online, and after watching it, I’m a little unnerved by the S From Hell, too.

Finally, here’s a good explanation of why these things can be frightening to a kid.

Glee, Swingle Singers, Golliwog’s Cakewalk

Posted on by

We watched the premiere of “Glee” last night. It was cute. It’s about a high school Spanish teacher (played by Broadway actor Matthew Morrison) who takes over the school’s glee club. Apparently there are going to be all sorts of theater guest stars when it officially premieres in September. It’s catnip for us gays.

I don’t know why they’re calling it a glee club; it’s really a show choir. This is a glee club. If this show gets popular, for the rest of my life I’m going to have to explain to people that when I was in the Virginia Glee Club we did not dance around in costumes and sing pop songs.

Much of the background music to this episode was provided by the Swingle Singers; one music clip recurred three or four times during the episode, and Matt and I both thought it sounded familiar and were racking our brains to figure out what it was. After the show ended, we spent the next 45 minutes furiously googling and finally figured out that it was “Golliwogg’s Cakewalk” from Debussy’s “Children’s Corner.” “Golliwogg’s Cakewalk” is a pretty racist name for a piece of music, but it was written 100 years ago by a Eurpoean, so what can you do. Here’s a clip of someone playing it.

TV History

Posted on by

TV Book

My previous post got me thinking about how much I love TV history.

When I was a kid growing up in the ’80s, I was really interested in old TV shows. My vision of the 1950s was filled with black-and-white nuclear families; my vision of the 1960s had Technicolor housewives with secret magic powers living in leafy suburbs. And everyone from the Cleavers to Major Nelson and his genie lived in classical American homes. There was no segregation or Cold War or Joe McCarthy, no Vietnam or civil rights marches: just tidy families resolving problems in 30 minutes or less.

One day when I was 11 or 12, I was at a shopping center with my dad. We were in one of those all-purpose stores like Wal-Mart, except we didn’t have Wal-Mart in New Jersey, so maybe it was Caldor? Channel? I was browsing through the book section when I saw an enormous paperback that caught my eye: The Complete Directory to Prime Time Network and Cable TV Shows, 1946-Present by Tim Brooks and Earle Marsh.

I was enthralled. I had no idea such a book existed! It had every show, in alphabetical order, with first and last broadcast dates, regular airtimes, cast lists, and several paragraphs describing the show. For each year it also had the prime-time fall TV schedule, top-rated shows for each year, and Emmy winners in the major categories.

I bought it right then and there. In the internet era, books like this are practically obsolete, but I still have my copy. They’re up to the ninth edition now, but I could never bear to part with my edition, for nostalgic reasons.

And if you want a great summary of TV history, here’s the introduction to the latest edition, including “The Eight Eras
of Prime Time,” and this list of the number of Westerns on TV by year:

Number of Westerns in Prime Time, by Season

1955–1956: 9
1956–1957: 11
1957–1958: 20
1958–1959: 31
1959–1960: 30
1960–1961: 26
1961–1962: 16
1962–1963: 13
1963–1964: 8
1964–1965: 7

My concept of postwar American history has become more complicated since I was a kid, but I still have a soft spot for the ’50s and ’60s and all that Atomic-Age TV stuff, and I still love TV history.

No wonder “Back to the Future” has always been my favorite movie and always will be.

TV Anniversary Specials

Posted on by

Last night I watched ABC’s 50th Anniversary Celebration on TV. (Actually, I was out for the first half of it, so I taped it and watched most of it last night.) I’m a sucker for those big TV nostalgia-fests. This one wasn’t spectacular — it was awkwardly edited and had pointless, incomplete cast reunions — but it was filled with lots of great TV clips. I think ABC’s heyday was in the late ’70s and early ’80s, when it ran escapist sitcoms like “Happy Days” and “Mork & Mindy” and fun shows like “Eight is Enough” and “The Greatest American Hero.” I’m too young to remember that era very well, but these are the memories I have manufactured for myself, and isn’t that what nostalgia’s all about?

The best network anniversary special I’ve ever seen was NBC’s 60th Anniversary Celebration, a three-hour show broadcast on a Sunday night in May 1986. I still have it on tape somewhere, and I used to watch it all the time. The whole thing was liberally sprinkled with clips from the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s and ’80s. There were a few radio excerpts, but I guess radio doesn’t translate very well to TV. Different NBC celebrities introduced each segment, but the main hosts were Malcolm Jamal-Warner and Keshia Knight-Pulliam, a.k.a. Theo and Rudy of “The Cosby Show,” NBC’s big hit at the time. They travelled through the NBC studios at 30 Rockefeller Center, and there was a musical number in the lobby of the building, with all the singers and dances dressed as NBC tour guides, wearing navy blue jackets with the NBC logo and khaki pants or skirts. And the musical number included a woman dressed as the NBC Peacock. You really had to see it.

There was an entire segment consisting of clips from “Saturday Night Live.” Bryant Gumbel and Jane Pauley hosted a segment on the history of “The Today Show.” Deidre Hall of “Days of Our Lives” and Pat Sajak of “Wheel of Fortune” hosted a segment on NBC daytime. Barbara Eden of “I Dream of Jeannie” appeared on a stage decorated as a big suburban home to host a loving segment on NBC sitcoms. Michael Landon of “Little House on the Prairie” did Westerns. Michael J. Fox did something. There were segments on variety shows, cop shows, news, TV movies, sports programming, children’s television, and so on. There was an even a segment that had various NBC logos morphing into each other.

The whole thing was really quite cheesy and wonderful. I have to find that tape.

I love the 1950s, or at least the 1950s as I used to see them, filtered through movies and television. I used to fantasize about going back in time to the ’50s and wandering through an empty suburban house on a random weekday, when the kids were at school and the father was at work and the wife was out shopping with her wifely friends. Nobody would be home, so I could sit on 1950s furniture and watch cheesy 1950s game shows and soap operas, and then I could go outside and wander along the suburban streets filled with big Chevys, kids on tricycles, and leafy black-and-white trees.

It should be no surprise that “Back to the Future” is one of my all-time favorite movies.

We all need a little escapism, right?