Episodes Tv Show Quotes

Hermes rolled his eyes. "Surely you've seen network TV lately. It's clear they don't know whether they're coming or going. That's because Janus is in charge of programming. He loves ordering new shows and cancelling them after two episodes. God of beginnings and endings, after all. Anyway, I was bringing him some magic doormats, and I was double-parked-" "You have to worry about double-parking?" "Will you let me tell the story?" "Sorry.

Here’s the thing about cults: I see them everywhere. If you’re deep into the Kardashians, you’re in a cult. If you watch your favorite TV show and go online and you’re in chat rooms with everybody else who’s obsessed with that show and you’re breaking it down episode by episode, you’re in a cult. If you’re bingeing, scrolling, absorbing from one news source more than any other, especially if it happens to be fair and balanced, you are in a cult. You’re living your life through other people.

Seinfeld was the most popular, most transformative live-action show on television. It altered the language and shifted comedic sensibilities, and almost every random episode was witnessed by more people than the 2019 finale of Game of Thrones.

When your mom noticed me watching a Buffy rerun on the little TV on the doorman desk one slow night on the job, she admitted that watching Buffy was her shared solace with you after your dad left. She told me how you cry and cry for Buffy. You cry when Angel shows up to be Buffy's prom date even though they'd already recognized the futility of their true love and broken up. You cry when Buffy's mom is taken away by natural instead of supernatural causes. You cry when seasons six and seven really don't reflect the quality of seasons one through five except for the musical episode.

Here is your law enforcement and media question of the day: Was the TV show COPS real or BS? It might have been real incidents, but it wasn't really all that real. They edited the episodes to make it appear as if black people were committing fewer crimes. That is what the show creator John Langley said in a 2009 interview in response to people who were unhappy his long-running reality show, COPS, was showing too many black people getting arrested. What irritates me sometimes is critics still watch and say, 'Oh look, they misrepresent people of color.' That's absolutely not true. To the contrary, I show more white people than statistically what the truth is in terms of street crime..It's just the reverse. And I do that intentionally, because I do not want to contribute to negative stereotypes, said Langley, the show's producer, in 2009.

Once we subliminally accept that we are watching a reality show rather than thinking about real life, no image can actually hurt the president politically. Reality television must become most dramatic with each episode. If we found a video of the president performing Cossack dances while Vladimir Putin claps, we would probably just demand the same thing with the president wearing a bear suit and holding rubles in his mouth.

How to describe the things we see onscreen, experiences we have that are not ours? After so many hours (days, weeks, years) of watching TV—the morning talk shows, the daily soaps, the nightly news and then into prime time (The Bachelor, Game of Thrones, The Voice)—after a decade of studying the viral videos of late-night hosts and Funny or Die clips emailed by friends, how are we to tell the difference between them, if the experience of watching them is the same? To watch the Twin Towers fall and on the same device in the same room then watch a marathon of Everybody Loves Raymond. To Netflix an episode of The Care Bears with your children, and then later that night (after the kids are in bed) search for amateur couples who’ve filmed themselves breaking the laws of several states. To videoconference from your work computer with Jan and Michael from the Akron office (about the new time-sheet protocols), then click (against your better instincts) on an embedded link to a jihadi beheading video. How do we separate these things in our brains when the experience of watching them—sitting or standing before the screen, perhaps eating a bowl of cereal, either alone or with others, but, in any case, always with part of us still rooted in our own daily slog (distracted by deadlines, trying to decide what to wear on a date later)—is the same? Watching, by definition, is different from doing.

Don’t say you don’t have enough time. We’re all busy, but we all get 24 hours a day. People often ask me, “How do you find the time for all this?” And I answer, “I look for it.” You find time the same place you find spare change: in the nooks and crannies. You find it in the cracks between the big stuff—your commute, your lunch break, the few hours after your kids go to bed. You might have to miss an episode of your favorite TV show, you might have to miss an hour of sleep, but you can find the time if you look for it. I like to work while the world is sleeping, and share while the world is at work.

Espenson reflects on parallels between the fic-writing and television-writing processes:        To get a job as a writer in Hollywood—you write episodes of television shows [someone else has created]. And actually, the eventual job you get in television is writing for characters you didn’t create. I write fanfiction every day when I sit down to write something for the characters of Once Upon a Time in a way because I’m writing for characters that I didn’t create. I’m putting myself in Adam and Eddy’s shows and writing in as close to their voice as I can do. And that’s the same thing that fanfiction writers do.

Once upon a time, mystery fans had to solve puzzles on their own; now, you not only didn’t need to be the one to solve it, you didn’t even need to be hanging around on the website where someone else had solved it. An Ana Lucia flashback episode in the second season showed Jack’s father, Christian, visiting a blonde Australian woman. Not long after it aired, I saw someone on the Television Without Pity message boards passing along a theory they had read on a different site suggesting that this woman was Claire’s mother, that Christian was her father, and that Jack and Claire were unwitting half-siblings. I hadn’t connected those dots myself, but the theory immediately made sense to me. When I interviewed Cuse that summer, he mentioned Christian Shephard, and I said, “And he’s Claire’s father, too, right?” Cuse looked like he was about to have a heart attack.

Come to think of it, I could not even think of a movie or TV shows where they had a baby die, with the sole exception of a couple of episodes of “Little House on the Prairie” and perhaps soaps. I was beginning to understand this was truly “the” unspeakable loss, “the” invisible loss, a loss so great nobody wanted to talk about it; a loss so inconceivable and so horrible that many people declared it as being the most overwhelmingly painful experience of their life; the death of which they were least prepared for. I was beginning to understand. My grief was colossal and all-encompassing. No loss is more difficult to accept and feels more unnatural and less understood

Back at home, I caught up on TV shows Bill had been saving. We raced through old episodes of The Good Wife, Madam Secretary, Blue Bloods, and NCIS: Los Angeles, which Bill insists is the best of the franchise. I also finally saw the last season of Downton Abbey.

Just as some people enjoy knitting in front of the television, Mrs. Bennet was fond of perusing housewares catalogs; indeed, the sound of pages turning, that quick flap when no item caught her eye and the pauses when something did, the occasional businesslike lick of the index finger, was one of the essential sounds of Liz’s childhood. This habit was also, apparently, what allowed Mrs. Bennet to maintain a belief that she had not actually “watched” a wide variety of shows even though she had been in the room for the duration of entire episodes and, in some cases, entire seasons. They

LOST is often lauded as one of the best fantasy dramas in television history, as well as one of the most cryptic and - occasionally – maddening. But confirmation of just how important it is came with an almost unbelievable communiqué from the White House last week. President Obama’s office reassured Lost fans that the commander in chief wouldn’t move his yearly state of the union address from late January to a date that would coincide with the premiere episode of the show’s sixth and final season. That’s right. Obama might have had vital information to impart upon the American people about health care, the war in Afghanistan, the financial crisis – things that, you know, might affect real lives. But the most important thing was that his address didn’t clash with a series in which a polar bear appears on a tropical island. After extensive lobbying by the ABC network, the White House surrendered. Obama’s press secretary promised: “I don’t foresee a scenario in which millions of people who hope to finally get some conclusion with Lost are pre-empted by the president.

Once we subliminally accept that we are watching a reality show rather than thinking about real life, no image can actually hurt the president politically. Reality television must become more dramatic with each episode. If we found a video of the president performing Cossack dances while Vladimir Putin claps, we would probably just demand the same thing with the president wearing a bear suit and holding rubles in his mouth.

After you shoot the pilot of a TV show, the network executives watch all the pilots and pick about a third of them to actually get made into a series. We were part of the lucky third, and, even cooler than that, we got the highest episode order of all the picked-up shows. Most of them got ten- or thirteen-episode pickups. We got twenty. Mom says this is probably because of my outstanding performance as Sam Puckett, a zinger-slinging, rough-around-the-edges tomboy with a heart of gold who, ironically compared to my experience with it, loves food.

Despite forty years in the music business, he still never knew for certain which of his acts would succeed, and the Hollywood dictum that “Nobody knows anything” held equally true for every other type of show business. Every year hundreds of movies played to empty theaters; dozens of TV shows were commissioned and then killed after a few episodes; thousands of freshly printed books were remaindered and pulped. Perhaps the saying even held true for the corporate world at large, and those who embraced this uncomfortable state of Socratic ignorance were those who tended to survive.

Which meant it was time for the centerpiece of the celebration, the reason they were all gathered on Saturday, the weekly episode of what, as far as many of the Davidsons including Jody were concerned was the greatest television show ever made. Hee Haw. While Roy and Buck sang the opening song, everyone would bicker and talk back and forth, what was better about the show, the music or the humor, what have you, the natural result of 40 people crowded around one rabbit eared television set. But once Hee Haw started, the talking was over. After that, it was all about the love. And so was everything before, really.

I would dance all day in my basement listening to Off the Wall. You young people really don’t understand how magical Michael Jackson was. No one thought he was strange. No one was laughing. We were all sitting in front of our TVs watching the “Thriller” video every hour on the hour. We were all staring, openmouthed, as he moonwalked for the first time on the Motown twenty-fifth anniversary show. When he floated backward like a funky astronaut, I screamed out loud. There was no rewinding or rewatching. No next-day memes or trends on Twitter or Facebook posts. We would call each other on our dial phones and stretch the cord down the hall, lying on our stomachs and discussing Michael Jackson’s moves, George Michael’s facial hair, and that scene in Purple Rain when Prince fingers Apollonia from behind. Moments came and went, and if you missed them, you were shit out of luck. That’s why my parents went to a M*A*S*H party and watched the last episode in real time. There was no next-day M*A*S*H cast Google hangout. That’s why my family all squeezed onto one couch and watched the USA hockey team win the gold against evil Russia! We all wept as my mother pointed out every team member from Boston. (Everyone from Boston likes to point out everyone from Boston. Same with Canadians.) We all chanted “USA!” and screamed “YES!” when Al Michaels asked us if we believed in miracles. Things happened in real time and you watched them together. There was no rewind. HBO arrived in our house that same year. We had

One TV show I’m not a fan of is this show called Football. This show has been going on for fifty-four seasons, and honestly, I don’t see the appeal. Episodes are repetitive, the writing is confusing, the cinematography is flat, there are too many characters to keep track of, and I can’t relate to any of their struggles. Also, for some reason, they all want to hold this oddly shaped ball. I must have missed the episode where they explained why it’s so important. Football episodes always have a huge live studio audience at the tapings. The audience is so big that a lot of times they can be seen in the shots—which I wouldn’t mind if the audience wasn’t screaming every time the show started to get interesting. Whenever Football airs the season finale, I get invited to viewing parties and people cosplay as their favorite character. I always go because of the free food, but I’m never caught up in the show, so it’s hard for me to get invested. Oh well, at least the commercials are entertaining.

Go away.” I stick my elbow in his ribs and force him to step back. “Sit on the couch and keep your hands to yourself,” I instruct, then follow him to the sofa and grab my Dating and Sex for Dummies books off the coffee table and shove them into my sock drawer while he laughs. “You’re making me miss my show,” I gripe as I toss things into the suitcase. “Your show? You sound like you’re eighty.” He glances at the TV behind me then back to me. “Murder on Mason Lane,” he says. “It was the neighbor. She was committing Medicare fraud using the victim’s deceased wife’s information. He caught on so she killed him.” I gasp. “You spoiler! You spoiling spoiler who spoils!” Then I shrug. “This is a new episode. You don’t even know that. It’s the daughter. She killed him. I’ve had her pegged since the first commercial break.” “You’re cute.” “Just you wait,” I tell him, very satisfied with myself. I’m really good at guessing whodunnit. “Sorry, you murder nerd, I worked on this case two years ago. It’s the neighbor.” “Really?” I drop my makeup bag into the suitcase and check to see if he’s teasing me. “I swear. I’ll tell you all the good shit the show left out once we’re on the plane.” I survey Boyd with interest. I do have a lot of questions. “I thought you were in cyber crimes, not murder.” “Murder isn’t a department,” he replies, shaking his head at me. “You know what I mean.” “Most crimes have a cyber component to them these days. There’s always a cyber trail.” Shit, that’s hot.

Which is actually good because we’re doing an AP Euro study group this week at the library—I mean good that it got canceled, not good that someone died—so I was wondering too if maybe I can use the car, so you won’t have to come pick me up super late every night?” Alma had been a wildly clingy kid, but now she is a mostly autonomous and wholly inscrutable seventeen-year-old; she is mean and gorgeous and breathtakingly good at math; she has inside jokes with her friends about inexplicable things like Gary Shandling and avocado toast, paints microscopic cherries on her fingernails and endeavors highly involved baking ventures, filling their fridge with oblong bagels and six-layer cakes. “I’m asking now because last time you told me I didn’t give you enough notice,” she says. She has recently begun speaking conversationally to Julia and Mark again after nearly two years of brooding silence, and now it’s near impossible to get her to stop. She regales them with breathless incomprehensible stories at the dinner table; she delivers lengthy recaps of midseason episodes of television shows they have never seen; she mounts elaborate and convincing defenses of things she wants them to give her, or give her permission to do. Conversing with her is a mechanical act requiring the constant ability to shift gears, to backpedal or follow inane segues or catapult from the real world to a fictional one without stopping to refuel. There’s not a snowball’s chance in hell that she won’t be accepted next month to several of the seventeen exalted and appallingly expensive colleges to which she has applied, and because Julia would like the remainder of her tenure at home to elapse free of trauma, she responds to her daughter as she did when she was a napping baby, tiptoeing around her to avoid awakening unrest. The power dynamic in their household is not unlike that of a years-long hostage crisis.

This is a short public service announcement: you don't have to fail with abandon. Say you're playing Civilization, and your target is to get to sleep before midnight, and you check the clock, and it's already 12:15. If that happens, you don't have to say "too late now, I already missed my target" and then keep playing until 4 in the morning. Say you're trying to eat no more than 2000 calories per day, and then you eat 2300 by the end of dinner, you don't have to say "well I already missed my target, so I might as well indulge." If your goal was to watch only one episode of that one TV show, and you've already watched three, you don't have to binge-watch the whole thing. Over and over, I see people set themselves a target, miss it by a little, and then throw all restraint to the wind. "Well," they seem to think, "willpower has failed me; I might as well over-indulge." I call this pattern "failing with abandon." But you don't have to fail with abandon. When you miss your targets, you're allowed to say "dang!" and then continue trying to get as close to your target as you can. You don't have to say dang, either. You're allowed to over-indulge, if that's what you want to do. But for lots and lots of people, the idea of missing by as little as possible never seems to cross their mind. They miss their targets, and then suddenly they treat their targets as if they were external mandates set by some unjust authority; the jump on the opportunity to defy whatever autarch set an impossible target in the first place; and then (having already missed their target) they reliably fail with abandon. So this is a public service announcement: you don't have to do that. When you miss your target, you can take a moment to remember who put the target there, and you can ask yourself whether you want to get as close to the target as possible. If you decide you only want to miss your target by a little bit, you still can. You don't have to fail with abandon.

The Mike Douglas Show wasn’t the only place to find colored people on television. Each week, Jet magazine pointed out all the shows with colored people. My sisters and I became expert colored counters. We had it down to a science. Not only did we count how many colored people were on TV, we also counted the number of words the actors were given to say. For instance, it was easy to count the number of words the Negro engineer on Mission Impossible spoke as well as the black POW on Hogan’s Heroes. Sometimes the black POW didn’t have any words to say, so we scored him a “1” for being there. We counted how many times Lieutenant Uhuru hailed the frequency on Star Trek. We’d even take turns being her, although Big Ma would have never let us wear a minidress or space boots. But then there was I Spy. All three of us together couldn’t count every word Bill Cosby said. And then there was a new show, Julia, coming in September, starring Diahann Carroll. We agreed to shout out “Black Infinity!” when Julia came on because each episode would be all about her character. We didn’t just count the shows. We counted the commercials as well. We’d run into the TV room in time to catch the commercials with colored people using deodorant, shaving cream, and wash powder. There was a little colored girl on our favorite commercial who looked just like Fern. In fact, I said that little girl could have been Fern, which made Vonetta jealous. In the commercial, the little girl took a bite of buttered bread and said, “Gee, Ma. This is the best butter I ever ate.” Then we’d say it the way she did, in her dead, expressionless voice; and we’d outdo ourselves trying to say it with the right amount of deadness. We figured that that was how the commercial people told her to say it. Not too colored. Then we’d get silly and say it every kind of colored way we knew how.

People just don't get it… they don't fucking get it… It's not "everybody lies…"… doesn't say only this one... he also says "From lies we get slowly up to truth.

She had played the part in an episode of a television show called Bosch, which Ballard knew was based on the exploits of a now-retired LAPD detective who had formerly worked at RHD and the Hollywood detective bureau. The production occasionally filmed at the station and had underwritten the division’s last Christmas party at the W Hotel.

You might put off watching the latest episode of your favorite TV show until after finishing your homework, for example.

awkward televised hug from the new president of the United States. My curtain call worked. Until it didn’t. Still speaking in his usual stream-of-consciousness and free-association cadence, the president moved his eyes again, sweeping from left to right, toward me and my protective curtain. This time, I was not so lucky. The small eyes with the white shadows stopped on me. “Jim!” Trump exclaimed. The president called me forward. “He’s more famous than me.” Awesome. My wife Patrice has known me since I was nineteen. In the endless TV coverage of what felt to me like a thousand-yard walk across the Blue Room, back at our home she was watching TV and pointing at the screen: “That’s Jim’s ‘oh shit’ face.” Yes, it was. My inner voice was screaming: “How could he think this is a good idea? Isn’t he supposed to be the master of television? This is a complete disaster. And there is no fricking way I’m going to hug him.” The FBI and its director are not on anyone’s political team. The entire nightmare of the Clinton email investigation had been about protecting the integrity and independence of the FBI and the Department of Justice, about safeguarding the reservoir of trust and credibility. That Trump would appear to publicly thank me on his second day in office was a threat to the reservoir. Near the end of my thousand-yard walk, I extended my right hand to President Trump. This was going to be a handshake, nothing more. The president gripped my hand. Then he pulled it forward and down. There it was. He was going for the hug on national TV. I tightened the right side of my body, calling on years of side planks and dumbbell rows. He was not going to get a hug without being a whole lot stronger than he looked. He wasn’t. I thwarted the hug, but I got something worse in exchange. The president leaned in and put his mouth near my right ear. “I’m really looking forward to working with you,” he said. Unfortunately, because of the vantage point of the TV cameras, what many in the world, including my children, thought they saw was a kiss. The whole world “saw” Donald Trump kiss the man who some believed got him elected. Surely this couldn’t get any worse. President Trump made a motion as if to invite me to stand with him and the vice president and Joe Clancy. Backing away, I waved it off with a smile. “I’m not worthy,” my expression tried to say. “I’m not suicidal,” my inner voice said. Defeated and depressed, I retreated back to the far side of the room. The press was excused, and the police chiefs and directors started lining up for pictures with the president. They were very quiet. I made like I was getting in the back of the line and slipped out the side door, through the Green Room, into the hall, and down the stairs. On the way, I heard someone say the score from the Packers-Falcons game. Perfect. It is possible that I was reading too much into the usual Trump theatrics, but the episode left me worried. It was no surprise that President Trump behaved in a manner that was completely different from his predecessors—I couldn’t imagine Barack Obama or George W. Bush asking someone to come onstage like a contestant on The Price Is Right. What was distressing was what Trump symbolically seemed to be asking leaders of the law enforcement and national security agencies to do—to come forward and kiss the great man’s ring. To show their deference and loyalty. It was tremendously important that these leaders not do that—or be seen to even look like they were doing that. Trump either didn’t know that or didn’t care, though I’d spend the next several weeks quite memorably, and disastrously, trying to make this point to him and his staff.

Hi, I’m Kirk Cameron. I know I’m late . . .” “You are,” he said. He looked at his watch. “The audition was at 4:30. It’s 5.” He started to close the door. Instinctively, I put my foot out so he couldn’t close it. “I know, I know. But my mom will kill me if I don’t do this audition. Please can I read just to tell her I did it?” He looked over his shoulder, probably to ask what the others thought, then opened the door. I had no idea what I was auditioning for except that it was a “pilot”—the first episode of a TV series that determines whether the network will put the show on its schedule. I’d gotten the script ahead of time but had really only glanced at it. I knew nothing about the show. To me, the title Growing Pains sounded dramatic and gritty. I left the audition without a sense of how things had gone. They laughed, but I wasn’t sure they were supposed to.

Wilson, “whose strange past is darkly troubled” (Radio Life), and Ray Brandon, a bitter ex-con on parole. By the early 1950s, the Bauer family had become the serial’s center: Bill and Bertha (Bert), their 11-year-old son, Michael, and Meta Bauer, Bill’s sister. Three decades later, the TV serial was still focused on the Bauer brothers and their careers in law and medicine. The Ruthledges and the Kranskys were fading memories, and the “guiding light” of the title was little more than symbolic. In its heyday, it was one of Phillips’s prime showpieces. She produced it independently, sold it to sponsors, and offered it to the network as a complete package. Phillips paid her own casts, announcers, production crews, and advisers (two doctors and a lawyer on retainer) and still earned $5,000 a week. She dared to depart from formula, even to the extent of occasionally turning over whole shows to Ruthledge sermons. Her organist, Bernice Yanocek, worked her other shows as well, and the music was sometimes incorporated into the storylines, as being played by Mary Ruthledge in her father’s church. A few episodes exist from the prime years. Of equal interest is an R-rated cast record, produced for Phillips when the show was moving to New York and the story was changing direction. It’s typical racy backstage stuff, full of lines like “When your bowels are in a bind, try new Duz with the hair-trigger formula.” It shows what uninhibited fun these radio people had together.

Three months earlier I shot an episode of Judge Hatchett, a court TV show that sometimes did a special episode where entertainers intervene in the lives of at-risk kids who’ve been through her court. Judge Hatchett contacted me to go on the show to meet

Culture is power. The music we listen to, the social media we consume, the food we eat, the moves and television shows we watch-these all inform our values, behaviors, and worldviews. Culture is in a constant battle for our imagination. It is our most valuable tool to inspire the social change these times demand… As the old narrative of capitalism reveals its devastating failures, we urgently need more compelling and relatable stories that show us what a just, sustainable, and healthy world can look like. The old myths will die when we replace them with new ones. … A recent look at episodic TV shows found that in 2019 only three dealt with climate change (excluding docuseries that explicitly focus on climate); “a crisis that’s reshaping every aspect of human experience is being effectively ignored.” … Stories are like individual stars. For thousands of years, humans used the stars to tell stories, to help make sense of their lives, to orient them on the planet. Stories work in the same way. When many stars coalesce around similar themes, they form a narrative constellation that can disrupt business as usual. They reveal patterns and help illuminate what was once obscured. The powerful shine in one story can inspire other stories. HARNESSING CULTURAL POWER by Favianna Rodriguez

A couple of weeks before, while going over a Variety list of the most popular songs of 1935 and earlier, to use for the picture’s sound track – which was going to consist only of vintage recording played not as score but as source music – my eye stopped on a .933 standard, words by E.Y. (“Yip”) Harburg (with producer Billy Rose), music by Harold Arlen, the team responsible for “Over the Rainbow”, among many notable others, together and separately. Legend had it that the fabulous Ms. Dorothy Parker contributed a couple of lines. There were just two words that popped out at me from the title of the Arlen-Harburg song, “It’s Only a Paper Moon”. Not only did the sentiment of the song encapsulate metaphorically the main relationship in our story – Say, it’s only a paper moon Sailing over a cardboard sea But it wouldn’t be make-believe If you believed in me – the last two words of the title also seemed to me a damn good movie title. Alvin and Polly agreed, but when I tried to take it to Frank Yablans, he wasn’t at all impressed and asked me what it meant. I tried to explain. He said that he didn’t “want us to have our first argument,” so why didn’t we table this conversation until the movie was finished? Peter Bart called after a while to remind me that, after all, the title Addie Pray was associated with a bestselling novel. I asked how many copies it had sold in hardcover. Peter said over a hundred thousand. That was a lot of books but not a lot of moviegoers. I made that point a bit sarcastically and Peter laughed dryly. The next day I called Orson Welles in Rome, where he was editing a film. It was a bad connection so we had to speak slowly and yell: “Orson! What do you think of this title?!” I paused a beat or two, then said very clearly, slowly and with no particular emphasis or inflection: “Paper …Moon!” There was a silence for several moments, and then Orson said, loudly, “That title is so good, you don’t even need to make the picture! Just release the title! Armed with that reaction, I called Alvin and said, “You remember those cardboard crescent moons they have at amusement parks – you sit in the moon and have a picture taken?” (Polly had an antique photo of her parents in one of them.) We already had an amusement park sequence in the script so, I continued to Alvin, “Let’s add a scene with one of those moons, then we can call the damn picture Paper Moon!” And this led eventually to a part of the ending, in which we used the photo Addie had taken of herself as a parting gift to Moze – alone in the moon because he was too busy with Trixie to sit with his daughter – that she leaves on the truck seat when he drops her off at her aunt’s house. … After the huge popular success of the picture – four Oscar nominations (for Tatum, Madeline Kahn, the script, the sound) and Tatum won Best Supporting Actress (though she was the lead) – the studio proposed that we do a sequel, using the second half of the novel, keeping Tatum and casting Mae West as the old lady; they suggested we call the new film Harvest Moon. I declined. Later, a television series was proposed, and although I didn’t want to be involved (Alvin Sargent became story editor), I agreed to approve the final casting, which ended up being Jodie Foster and Chris Connolly, both also blondes. When Frank Yablans double-checked about my involvement, I passed again, saying I didn’t think the show would work in color – too cute – and suggested they title the series The Adventures of Addie Pray. But Frank said, “Are you kidding!? We’re calling it Paper Moon - that’s a million-dollar title!” The series ran thirteen episodes.

Surely you’ve seen network TV lately. It’s clear they don’t know whether they’re coming or going. That’s because Janus is in charge of programming. He loves ordering new shows and canceling them after two episodes.

It’s hard to explain how important Star Trek is to me. I think I went to my first Star Trek convention when I was fifteen. So to hear that Leonard Nimoy—Mr. Spock—was on the phone, I was not processing what he was saying. I could only focus on his amazing voice. I thought this was a phone call to see if he’d agree to do the part, but in his mind, he had already agreed to do it! He had one specific note on the script, which is that Mr. Spock doesn’t use contractions when he speaks. He says “cannot;” he doesn’t say “can’t.” And I remember just being chagrined that I hadn’t intervened and had allowed this to go on. I loved Spock so much, I used to sneak lines of Mr. Spock dialogue from the movies and TV shows into Big Bang Theory and give them to Sheldon. There’s an episode early on where Sheldon and Leonard are having a fight, and Penny asks, “Well, how do you feel?” And Sheldon replies, “I don’t understand the question.” That’s from the beginning of Star Trek IV where Spock has reunited with his mind and his body, and is being quizzed by a computer about his status. So Leonard Nimoy was just one of many fanboy moments. I once said to LeVar Burton, “If I could go back in time and tell my teenage self there would be a day where I would eventually talk to three crew members of the USS Enterprise, I’d fall over and die.

Her love of dogs goes back to her childhood growing up watching black and white television. As Oprah remembers, “I grew up in the days of Lassie – the TV show about a boy [Timmy] and his dog. On the episodes when Lassie would go missing, I would actually get on my knees and pray for Lassie’s return. Not until several years ago – while visiting the set of Desperate Housewives and seeing the house where Timmy and Lassie lived, which is the same neighborhood – did it hit me. Lassie was never lost. It was the scriptwriters and producers’ ode to May sweeps. - Oprah Winfrey in the essay A Dog Like Lassie

People often ask me, “How do you find the time for all this?” And I answer, “I look for it.” You find time the same place you find spare change: in the nooks and crannies. You find it in the cracks between the big stuff—your commute, your lunch break, the few hours after your kids go to bed. You might have to miss an episode of your favorite TV show, you might have to miss an hour of sleep, but you can find the time if you look for it. I like to work while the world is sleeping, and share while the world is at work.

Have you noticed how busy people are in today’s world? Especially women. Sometimes there is simply no room for anything else to happen. When you fill your day with work and you’re making calls even during your commute, you leave no space for God. When you’ve got so many hobbies and projects that you can’t even keep track of what’s going on, you leave no space for God. When you give everything you have to your family because you’re desperate for their approval, you leave no space for God. And when you line up a whole season of TV shows on your DVR and just binge watch episode after episode, you leave no space for God. God is not a divine vacuum salesman who will try to force His way into your house or your life. He will wait until you offer Him some space to work, and then He will work. Make space for God in your life. Otherwise, you will have no room for prayer.

think you’ve seen too many episodes of The Last of Us,” Munawar tells him. “The video game?” I ask. “They made a TV show of it?” “You haven’t seen it?” Munawar asks in disbelief. “Every single mycology student is hooked on the show. Pedro Pascal? Hello?

No, read it now, Tom.” The article was titled “Magnum, the Champagne of TV?” In a typical television series, the professor wrote, “Each episode stands by itself. Characters and situations develop only slightly, if at all.” But Magnum was different. “Its creators have established and refined a new television form that stands between the traditional self-contained episodic forms and the open-ended serials. Call it the ‘cumulative narrative.’ One episode’s events can greatly affect later events, but they’re seldom directly tied together. Each week’s program is distinct, yet each is grafted onto the body of the series, its characters’ pasts.” Magnum was all about memory and storytelling, according to Newcomb. He singled out the show’s voice-over narration, which he said provided “a central perspective and permit[ted] Magnum’s ongoing moral dialogue with himself.” And all of it, the professor said, was true to the post-Vietnam world that Americans found themselves living in.

Even away from the set and in Joseph, Walter Brennan continued to police his performances—as Louise Kunz observed when he visited his wife in the hospital, where she was recuperating from an operation. At the only television set in the hospital, everyone gathered around to view The Real McCoys. Louise and a group of teenage kids watched as Walter said, “Oh, I did that okay. Oh, I’ve got to work on that, that’s terrible.” When the episode ended, a boy asked him how he remembered to limp. Walter said he put a tiny pebble in his shoe; otherwise he limped on the wrong foot. Diane Turner remembers the times Walter would enter the local drugstore, sit down at the soda fountain, and entertain everyone with his Grandpa Amos routines. When his granddaughter Tammy Crawford watched The Real McCoys, she would get upset because every episode the characters would get mad at her Grampy—although by the end of the show he would have learned his lesson.

Greg’s deal meant that the new show had been ordered straight to series with a thirteen-episode guarantee. Most shows start by making a pilot episode. When the pilot is done, a group of mysterious people gather in a room and weigh its merits, consult various oracles, and then send white papal smoke out of the holy chimney when it is decided it will become a series. Being ordered straight to series was great news because it meant we were able to skip that mysterious and painful pilot process, but on top of that, the first episode was slated to air after the Super Bowl, TV’s most coveted slot. It was a remarkable and rare opportunity, a home-run decision for any actor.

A scouting craft soon entered our solar system. It detected several broadcast signals, and routed the strongest one (WABC-TV in New York) to a distant team of anthropologists—who then found themselves watching a first-run episode of the hit sitcom Welcome Back, Kotter (the one in which Arnold Horshack joins a zany youth cult). Before I get into what happened next, I should mention that music is the most cherished of the forty so-called Noble Arts that Refined beings revere and dedicate their lives to. It is indeed viewed as being many times Nobler than the other thirty-nine Arts combined. And remember—their music sucks. The first alien Kotter watchers initially doubted that we had music at all, because everything about the show screamed that we were cultural and aesthetic dunderheads. Primitive sight gags made them groan. Sloppy editing made them chuckle. Wardrobe choices practically made them wretch. And then, it happened. The show ended. The credits rolled, and the theme music began. And suddenly, the brainless brutes that they’d been pitying were beaming out the greatest creative achievement that the wider universe had ever witnessed. Welcome back, Welcome back, Welcome back.

two entertainers got together to create a 90-minute television special. They had no experience writing for the medium and quickly ran out of material, so they shifted their concept to a half-hour weekly show. When they submitted their script, most of the network executives didn’t like it or didn’t get it. One of the actors involved in the program described it as a “glorious mess.” After filming the pilot, it was time for an audience test. The one hundred viewers who were assembled in Los Angeles to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the show dismissed it as a dismal failure. One put it bluntly: “He’s just a loser, who’d want to watch this guy?” After about six hundred additional people were shown the pilot in four different cities, the summary report concluded: “No segment of the audience was eager to watch the show again.” The performance was rated weak. The pilot episode squeaked onto the airwaves, and as expected, it wasn’t a hit. Between that and the negative audience tests, the show should have been toast. But one executive campaigned to have four more episodes made. They didn’t go live until nearly a year after the pilot, and again, they failed to gain a devoted following. With the clock winding down, the network ordered half a season as replacement for a canceled show, but by then one of the writers was ready to walk away: he didn’t have any more ideas. It’s a good thing he changed his mind. Over the next decade, the show dominated the Nielsen ratings and brought in over $1 billion in revenues. It became the most popular TV series in America, and TV Guide named it the greatest program of all time. If you’ve ever complained about a close talker, accused a partygoer of double-dipping a chip, uttered the disclaimer “Not that there’s anything wrong with that,” or rejected someone by saying “No soup for you,” you’re using phrases coined on the show. Why did network executives have so little faith in Seinfeld? When we bemoan the lack of originality in the world, we blame it on the absence of creativity. If only people could generate more novel ideas, we’d all be better off. But in reality, the biggest barrier to originality is not idea generation—it’s idea selection. In one analysis, when over two hundred people dreamed up more than a thousand ideas for new ventures and products, 87 percent were completely unique. Our companies, communities, and countries don’t necessarily suffer from a shortage of novel ideas. They’re constrained by a shortage of people who excel at choosing the right novel ideas. The Segway was a false positive: it was forecast as a hit but turned out to be a miss. Seinfeld was a false negative: it was expected to fail but ultimately flourished.

into the dimly lit apartment. Josh in front. Abbie, cradling Clem in her arms, one step behind. A lamp shined in the living room. The TV was showing an old episode of the Twilight Zone. Wrapping paper and uneaten cake still lay scattered on the coffee table. Clem meowed as Abbie turned toward the kitchen. Dharma came around the corner,

Take just one well-known event: The Beatles' 1964 appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. This has been depicted with astonishing regularity as a pivotal cultural moment; in fact an entire movie -- I Wanna Hold Your Hand -- was built around it. And that Sullivan episode was indeed a major event in popular culture. But did you know that in 1961, 26 million people watched a CBS live broadcast of the first performance of a new symphony by classical composer Aaron Copland? Moreover, with all the attention that sixties rock groups receive, it may come as a surprise to learn that My Fair Lady was Columbia Records' biggest-selling album before the 1970s, beating out those of sixties icons Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin and The Byrds.

When a TV show starts out, it is incredibly competitive: maybe one in a hundred TV ideas goes on to get made into pilot (tester) episodes. Maybe one in twenty of those pilots will go on to have a first series commissioned. And maybe one in ten of those will be asked back for a second season. It takes a sprinkling of fairy dust and a lot of goodwill. But do two seasons and you will quite probably go on to do five--or more. So we got lucky. No doubt. And I never even asked for it. Let alone expected it. I was simply, and blissfully, unaware. But on this journey, Man vs. Wild has had to endure a lot of flak from critics and the press. Anything successful inevitably does. (Funny how the praise tends just to bounce off, but small amounts of criticism sting so much. Self-doubt can be a brute, I guess.) The program has been accused of being set up, staged, faked, and manipulated. One critic even suggested it was all shot in a studio with CGI. If only.

The Rorschach test episode for this question tends to be “Homer’s Enemy” from season 8, where new plant employee Frank Grimes is driven mad by the realization that Homer is an incompetent drowning in unearned privilege while Frank, a smarter, more hardworking, more ethical person, struggles and suffers.

every single week. In fact, I remember this very issue. I read everything about Willoughby I could get my hands on.” Mrs. Lamerton sighed as Lara and James came over to her. “We were still living in England when they showed the first episode. I’ll never forget it. It was the night we decided to emigrate. We were so thrilled when we arrived here to see it on Australian TV, too. It’s still my favorite program, you know.” Lara had looked at the magazine article while Mrs.

Do you know how, sometimes, during a commercial break in your favorite television shows, your best friend calls and wants to talk about one of her boyfriends, and when you try to hang up, she starts crying and you try to cheer her up and end up missing about half o the episode? And so when you go to work the next day you have to get the guy who sits next to you to explain what happened? That's the good thing about a book. You can mark your place in a book. But this isn't really a book. It's a television show.

Franks goal of pleasing his homeowners is almost an obsession, so he took it to heart when Pam, the female homeowner on his team for the Seattle:137th St episode, saw her own living room and ran out sobbing. Frank had worked with Pam and her husband for two days, and he sympthetisized entirely: "Every time I see that show, I just physically tighten up, " he says. "I know how much that reaction ruined her life." That's why Frank's makeovers are often less drastic and retain elements of the old room. "Many times people don't have the money to put it back, so you don't want to screw up their house just for a TV show," he says. "That's why I don't take down ceiling fans, because it costs to put them back up.

If TiVo had interviewed customers about how they program their VCRs, they might have gotten feedback that drove them to simplify the programming controls and missed the boat on creating the digital video recording industry. In fact, that’s exactly what the first attempts at improving the VCR looked like.[30] Compare that to asking customers about the time they missed the last 10 minutes of the final episode of Twin Peaks or the game-winning play in the Super Bowl — it’s easy to imagine how quickly (and emphatically) customers would’ve told you about the problems that inspired pausing live TV, recording by show name instead of time slot, and fast-forwarding through commercials.

attacked in the darkness by unknown assailants, directly leading to Punk pinning Rock; the announcers blamed the Shield for the attack. The match was later restarted with Rock winning. The next day on Raw, the Shield attacked and laid out John Cena; Sheamus and Ryback suffered the same fate when they attempted to save Cena. Later in the show, it was revealed through footage played by Vince McMahon that Punk and/or his manager Paul Heyman had been paying the Shield and Brad Maddox to work for them all along. This set up a six-man tag team match at Elimination Chamber, which the Shield won. At WrestleMania 29, The Shield made victims of Randy Orton, Sheamus & Big Show in what was The Show of Shows debut of "The Hounds of Justice." The following night on Raw, The Shield attempted to attack The Undertaker but were stopped by Team Hell No. This set up a six-man tag team match on the April 22 episode of Raw, where The Shield emerged victorious. Four days later on SmackDown, Ambrose made his singles debut against Undertaker but lost via submission, after which the Shield attacked Undertaker and triple-powerbombed him through the announcer's table. On the May 3 episode of SmackDown, Ambrose defeated Kane in a singles match. On May 19 at Extreme Rules, Ambrose defeated Kofi Kingston to win the WWE United States Championship, his first singles title in WWE, while Rollins and Reigns won the WWE Tag Team Championships later that night. Ambrose made his first televised title defense on the following episode of SmackDown, retaining his title when he was disqualified due to the rest of the Shield's interference. Three days later on Raw, Ambrose defeated Kingston again to retain his title. At WWE Payback, Ambrose defeated Kane via

a Cell match for the main event at the pay-per-view. Later in the week on Smackdown, on the Miz TV segment between Ambrose and Cena, the match was revealed to be a No Holds Barred Contract On A Pole Match. On the October 13 episode of Raw, Ambrose and Cena had their match that night instead in which Ambrose won and will face Seth Rollins in a Hell in a Cell match at the Hell in a Cell pay-per-view. At Hell in a Cell, Ambrose lost to Rollins after Bray Wyatt attacked Ambrose at the end of the main event match. The next few weeks saw Ambrose and Wyatt taunting and attacking each other in both backstage and in-ring segments, with Wyatt claiming that he could "fix" Ambrose, leading to a match at Survivor Series. Ambrose lost the match by disqualification after hitting Wyatt with a steel chair and then hit Wyatt through a table in which Wyatt would be buried under tables and chairs as Ambrose stood on a ladder. This would then soon after announce another match between the two in a tables, ladders and chairs match on the TLC pay-perview next month. During the match, a television monitor blew up in Ambrose's face, allowing Wyatt to win the match. Ambrose managed to beat Wyatt in a Boot Camp match yet again was defeated by Wyatt in a "Miracle on 34th Street Fight". The feud concluded when Wyatt beat Ambrose in the first Ambulance match held on Raw. At the Royal Rumble, Ambrose participated in the Royal Rumble match, but was eliminated by Kane and Big Show. On the January 19 episode of Raw, Ambrose defeated Intercontinental Champion Bad News Barrett. The following weeks, Ambrose demanded a match for Barrett's title, but Barrett declined, leading to Ambrose attacking him, tying his hands around the ring post, and forcing him to sign a contract

apartment door. Clem strutted out, meowing and winding between Abbie’s legs. Abbie picked up the cat as she peeked into the living room. Everything looked quiet. They stepped into the dimly lit apartment. Josh in front. Abbie, cradling Clem in her arms, one step behind. A lamp shined in the living room. The TV was showing an old episode of the Twilight Zone. Wrapping paper and uneaten cake still lay scattered on the coffee table. Clem meowed as Abbie turned toward the kitchen. Dharma came around the corner,

To distract herself, she turned on the TV and watched the Property Brothers renovate an entire house for what it cost her just to install a kitchen countertop. The show was about as realistic as an episode of Star Trek. She turned off the TV in disgust

Drew talks about her school friends as if they're cartoonishly unreal characters in a beloved television show, one where I should know every single member of the cast despite never having seen an episode.

Somehow, Midsomer Murders is our best-rated TV import,’ admits Adrian, reluctantly. ‘It’s been getting a 30–40 per cent audience share for the past thirteen years – as long as it’s been around.’ The show is so popular in Denmark that to celebrate the anniversary of the ITV crime drama, bosses teamed up with Danish producers and stars from The Killing and Borgen for a special episode. ‘I think it’s because people find it soothing or something,’ says Adrian. I tell him that The Viking compared the experience of watching Midsomer Murders with eating soup: ‘It’s not the most exciting thing out there but it does make you feel all warm and hygge.

Near the end of Donald Trump’s first year in power, for instance, The New York Times reported that, before taking office, he had “told top aides to think of each presidential day as an episode in a television show in which he vanquishes rivals.

I snuggle up against him to watch episode five of season two of BoJack Horseman. It’s this television show about a drug-addicted horse who was on a nineties sitcom. Don’t judge.

Among artsy people, it can lead to the feeling—false almost by definition, and ubiquitous among white, relatively-not-poor Midwestern artsy kids—that nothing has ever happened to you. There was, a few years ago, a television show—one so over-discussed I cannot type its name without nausea—that came close to dealing with this dilemma in a thoughtful way. Its hero, a college graduate from East Lansing, Michigan, wanted to write books and conquer New York, but she so disbelieved that anything story-worthy had ever happened in her life that she exploited the experiences of others just so that she could do her work. In one particularly disturbing episode, she lured a recovering addict—who she knew was attracted to her—into buying crack for her, so that she could “have an experience” that would enable her to write. At the end of that season, she spiraled into a total collapse—which ought to have struck her as some sort of purchase, at least, on being interesting.

Stories can be incredibly powerful and beautiful devices that form and assist our perception and understanding of the world. However, according to twentieth-century American author Kurt Vonnegut, stories rarely tell the truth. After studying stories from an anthropological standpoint, examining the relationships with various cultures, Vonnegut found that stories and myths across many cultures share consistent similar shapes that can typically be broken down into just a few main categories. These shapes can be found graphing the course of a protagonist’s journey through a story along an axis of good and ill fortune. In all stories, someone or something starts somewhere, either in a good place, bad place, or neutral place. Then things happen related to that person which is conveyed as good or bad, bringing the character up and down the axis of fortune as they traverse forward through the story. Then, the story ends and its shape reveals itself. Vonnegut discovered that many popular stories follow common, consistent curves and spikes up and down the good/ill axis and that most end with the protagonist higher on the axis than where they started. However, what’s perhaps most interesting about Vonnegut’s analysis is this argument that these shapes, and consequently most stories, lie. Vonnegut proposed that a more honest, realistic story shape is simply a straight line. In a story of this shape, things still happen and characters still change, but the story maintains ambiguity around whether or not the events that occur are conclusively good or bad. According to Vonnegut, Hamlet is the closest literary representation of real life. “We are so seldom told the truth. In Hamlet-Shakespeare tells us that we don’t know enough about life to know what the good news is and the bad news is and we respond to that.” One story medium that seems to inadvertently coincide with this idea, is the medium of the television series. The goal of TV series is to keep viewers watching as long as possible. Each episode must be an engaging enough story to keep the viewer watching until the end, but each episode must also be left unresolved enough so the larger season-long and series-long stories continue and the viewer is interested in watching all the following episodes. In order to keep the whole thing going, none of the stories can reach a conclusion, and thus, the main characters can’t find ultimate peace or freedom from the uncertainty between good and ill-fortune. Of course, most shows don’t qualify as the straight-line shape in Vonnegut’s analysis, because most shows attempt to convey conclusively good and bad fortunes within them. However merely by the requirements of the medium TV series are forced to self-impose the same sort of universal truth that Vonnegut suggests. That neither the viewer nor the characters in a series can ever know what anything that’s so-called “good” or “bad” in one episode might cause in the next. And that on a fundamental level, the changes in each episode are futile because they are a part of a never-ending cycle of change through conflict and resolution, for the mere sake of its continuation, with no aim of a final resolution or reveal of what’s ultimately good or bad. Of course, eventually, a show reaches its series end when it stops working or runs its natural course. But the show fights its whole life to stay away from this moment. A good TV series, a series that we don’t want to end, is only a series that we don’t want to end because it can’t seem to resolve itself. In this, the format of Tv series also shows us that there is meaning, engagement, and entertainment within the endless cycle of change, regardless of its potential universal futility. And that perhaps change in life can exist not for the sake of some conclusion or ultimate state of peace, but a continuation of itself for the sake of itself. And perhaps the ability to be in this cycle of continued change for the sake of change is the actual good fortune.

He’d watch Saturday Night Live, record the episodes on a video cassette recorder, transcribe the tapes by hand, and study the jokes. He scoured TV Guide every week to see which comedians were going to be on the talk shows. He wrote a thirty-page paper on the Marx brothers when he was in the fifth grade.

Meryl Streep can read your poem, and it can be in an episode of a primetime TV show, but your life is still your life—mothering and dog-walking and working. The things we call “life-changing” are and aren’t.

The award-winning American TV series Breaking Bad has a scene in its second season set in the murder capital of Ciudad Juárez. In this episode, American and Mexican agents are lured to a patch of desert just south of the border looking for an informant. They discover the informant’s head has been cut off and stuck on the body of a giant turtle. But as they approach, the severed cranium, turned into an IED, explodes, killing agents. The episode was released in 2009. I thought it was unrealistic, a bit fantastic. Until July 15, 2010. In the real Ciudad Juárez on that day, gangsters kidnapped a man, dressed him in a police uniform, shot him, and dumped him bleeding on a downtown street. A cameraman filmed what happened after federal police and paramedics got close. The video shows medics bent over the dumped man, checking for vital signs. Suddenly a bang rings out, and the image shakes vigorously as the cameraman runs for his life. Gangsters had used a cell phone to detonate twenty-two pounds of explosives packed into a nearby car. A minute later, the camera turns back around to reveal the burning car pouring smoke over screaming victims. A medic lies on the ground, covered in blood but still moving, a stunned look on his face. Panicked officers are scared to go near him. The medic dies minutes later along with a federal agent and a civilian. I’m not suggesting that Breaking Bad inspired the murders. TV shows don’t kill people. Car bombs kill people. The point of the story is that the Mexican Drug War is saturated with stranger-than-fiction violence. Mexican writer Alejandro Almazán suffered from a similar dilemma. As he was writing his novel Among Dogs, he envisioned a scene in which thugs decapitate a man and stick a hound’s head on his corpse. It seemed pretty out there. But then in real life some gangsters did exactly that, only with a pig’s head. It is just hard to compete with the sanguine criminal imagination. Cartel thugs have put a severed head in a cooler and delivered it to a newspaper; they have dressed up a murdered policeman in a comedy sombrero and carved a smile on his cheeks; and they have even sewn a human face onto a soccer ball.

True crime reality TV, if you like. Judging by the cliffhanger at the end of last night’s opening episode, it certainly shows promise.

Do you know how, sometimes, during a commercial break in your favorite television shows, your best friend calls and wants to talk about one of her boyfriends, and when you try to hang up, she starts crying and you try to cheer her up and end up missing about half of the episode? And so when you go to work the next day, you have to get the guy who sits next to you to explain what happened? That’s the good thing about a book. You can mark your place in a book. But this isn’t really a book. It’s a television show.

IT GOT CANCELED. The League of Ladybugs was taken off the air two years ago. And it’s not like they’ve been showing reruns, either. Apparently, one of the show’s two creators sued the other one, and they’ve been in some long, messy court battle ever since. It’s illegal—as in against the law—for any TV station to show a single episode. Learning this, my anger disappears. It gets zapped away, fast as lightning. Now I’m just upset.

The head of research for Sesame Street in the early years was a psychologist from Oregon, Ed Palmer, whose specialty was the use of television as a teaching tool. When the Children's Television Workshop was founded in the late 1960s, Palmer was a natural recruit. “I was the only academic they could find doing research on children's TV,” he says, with a laugh. Palmer was given the task of finding out whether the elaborate educational curriculum that had been devised for Sesame Street by its academic-advisers was actually reaching the show's viewers. It was a critical task. There are those involved with Sesame Street who say, in fact, that without Ed Palmer the show would never have lasted through the first season. Palmer's innovation was something he called the Distracter. He would play an episode of Sesame Street on a television monitor, and then run a slide show on a screen next to it, showing a new slide every seven and a half seconds. “We had the most varied set of slides we could imagine,” said Palmer. “We would have a body riding down the street with his arms out, a picture of a tall building, a leaf floating through ripples of water, a rainbow, a picture taken through a microscope, an Escher drawing. Anything to be novel, that was the idea.” Preschoolers would then be brought into the room, two at a time, and told to watch the television show. Palmer and his assistants would sit slightly to the side, with a pencil and paper, quietly noting when the children were watching Sesame Street and when they lost interest and looked, instead, at the slide show. Every time the slide changed, Palmer and his assistants would make a new notation, so that by the end of the show they had an almost second-by-second account of what parts of the episode being tested managed to hold the viewers' attention and what parts did not. The Distracter was a stickiness machine. “We'd take that big-sized chart paper, two by three feet, and tape several of those sheets together,” Palmer says. "We had data points, remember, for every seven and a half seconds, which comes to close to four hundred data points for a single program, and we'd connect all those points with a red line so it would look like a stock market report from Wall Street. It might plummet or gradually decline, and we'd say whoa, what's going on here. At other times it might hug the very top of the chart and we'd say, wow, that segment's really grabbing the attention of the kids. We tabulated those Distracter scores in percentages. We'd have up to 100 percent sometimes. The average attention for most shows was around 85 to 90 percent. If the producers got that, they were happy. If they got around fifty, they'd go back to the drawing board.

The major TV networks at the time all aired some version of melodramatic afternoon programming for teens. ABC called its afternoon movie series After School Specials, and CBS called their version Schoolbreak. NBC went with Special Treat, which, given the content of these shows, strikes me now as darkly comic. I rarely managed to watch one of these programs in its entirety because I wasn’t allowed to turn on the television during homework time, but occasionally I’d sneak a half hour. They ranged from mild domestic drama, like “Divorced Kids’ Blues,” to more sensational stories, such as “Are You My Mother?,” in which a girl finds out the mom she thought was dead is actually alive and in some kind of institution. Then there were episodes like these: “One Too Many”—one of several specials about drunk-driving accidents. “Don’t Touch”—a variation on the theme that abuse can come at you from any direction: a sitter, a parent, an uncle, a family friend… (See also, and I swear I’m not making this up: “Please Don’t Hit Me, Mom.”) “Andrea’s Story: A Hitchhiking Tragedy”—What happened to Andrea when she accepted a ride from a stranger? Well, it wasn’t good at all, I can tell you that. “A Very Delicate Matter”—Guess what? The matter is gonorrhea. “Tattle: When to Tell on a Friend”—Answer: as soon as you notice their interest in cocaine.

Yeah. I saw them in a TV show once. I think the show was called Paranormal. It was like one of the first episodes of the show. I thought they were really cool, but also giant dicks. Go figure.

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If Metaxas offered a comparatively highbrow discourse on heroic masculinity, the Robertsons offered a decidedly lowbrow version. Duck Dynasty, the reality television show featuring the Robertson family, debuted in 2008, and by 2013 it had become one of the most popular shows on television, with its fourth season premier drawing almost twelve million viewers, more than the highest viewed episodes of critical favorites Breaking Bad and Mad Men combined.

But not all TV shows. One TV show I’m not a fan of is this show called Football. This show has been going on for fifty-four seasons, and honestly, I don’t see the appeal. Episodes are repetitive, the writing is confusing, the cinematography is flat, there are too many characters to keep track of, and I can’t relate to any of their struggles. Also, for some reason, they all want to hold this oddly shaped ball. I must have missed the episode where they explained why it’s so important. Football

When you multitask, you are not focused on the most important thing that you need to do. Rather, you are focusing on many other things that don’t matter at that time. For example, you are constantly checking your email or your messages when you should be completely focused on getting the job done. Unless there is an email or message which represents a life and death situation, it can wait. If you receive messages that do not refer to anything truly important at the moment, then you can let them sit there and wait. By living in the present, in the here and the now, you are able to focus on what you really need to get done and not what you want to do. Sure, you might be tempted to kick back and watch a couple of episodes of your favorite TV show.

I KNOW HOW THIS is going to sound, but Anthony Bourdain was the one who hooked me on Laos. Over the previous year, I had slipped further into insomnia—the accumulated effect of Benghazi stress and a hungry newborn keeping me awake for long stretches of each night. I’d fill that time lying on my couch in a darkened living room plowing through every episode of Bourdain’s various travel shows, over and over. I felt a sense of recognition in this guy wandering around the world, trying to find some temporary connection with other human beings living within their own histories. I’d been vaguely familiar with the story of Laos. Hillary had visited in 2012, and I remembered that we cobbled together some money for UXO clearance—a few numbers on a budget sheet. But the Bourdain episode that showed human beings on a television screen in the middle of the night, struggling in a place that was still a war zone, forty years after a war that I’d never learned about in school, woke my interest. I added two items to the bucket list for my final year in the job: Get more money for Laos, and get Obama to tape an episode of Parts Unknown with Anthony Bourdain.

Prior to the last episode, InsideHook explained it best: “No matter who wins the Iron Throne, it’s clear that Game of Thrones has conquered not just the kingdom of television, but the continent of American culture in a way few other cultural touchstones can in these divided times. It’s a show that’s watched by Republicans and Democrats; discussed in nerdy fan forums and The New Yorker; watched in dive bars and corporate boardrooms. Maybe the only thing that unites us in 2019 is a TV show about fictional warring kingdoms, evil ice elves and winged lizards.

Paul McCartney agreed to make a cameo on the TV show The Simpsons only if Lisa Simpson became a vegetarian for the rest of the series. The show agreed and he appeared in season 7 episode titled "Lisa the Vegetarian.

Ed’s reason for breaking up with Debbie Lynn (played by Gloria McMillan) is that she got married. Actually, Gloria was busy doing episodes of Our Miss Brooks for television and radio as was Gale Gordon which is why Gordon appears in only thirteen Fibber McGee and Molly episodes during the 1952-1953 season and three of those are repeats of shows from previous years.

I didn’t understand about alcoholism yet, how booze and drugs fed the wounded animal in Walter, I just thought that’s how life was. Unpredictable and insane. I’d show up to school the day after one of his episodes feeling shell-shocked and spaced out. I don’t know how I manifested this stuff outwardly, but I never talked to anyone about it. I just wandered around in a daze, stuck in a severe hangover. I had no idea how to deal with it. I was very conscious of the things I loved about my family—the freedom of all of us walking around the house naked, Walter being a musician, the amazing jazz I heard, the well-stocked book and record shelves, the bohemian aspects of our life. But I’d lie in bed at night and wish that I had a boring, normal, dumb family. One with no creativity. I wished my dad worked in a factory, and my mom was a conservative housewife who wore ugly pantsuits. I wished they’d have petty arguments and watch TV; the way Archie Bunker and Edith behaved on the TV show All in the Family, or like the Battaglias back in Larchmont. I equated creativity with insanity.

sat outside in my car as if I was on an episode of a new reality TV show, Whorehunters.