"Over the last two decades, 'The Comeback' has become something of a cult classic, and Kudrow’s depiction of Cherish — her big red hair, her earnest demeanor, her totally unique turns-of-phrase..."

"... remains a meme in present day. Earlier this year, Variety published a list titled  'The 100 Greatest TV Performances of the 21st Century,' and ranked Kudrow in 'The Comeback' at No. 4. The show, however, has never been broadly popular. HBO canceled 'The Comeback' after it premiered in 2005 because of low ratings, before bringing it back — to the surprise of the industry — for a second season nearly a decade later. The season got a rapturous response from some critics but the result was the same: The ratings were very low...."

From "'The Comeback' to Come Back/Lisa Kudrow’s critically beloved cult comedy will return to HBO next year, the network announced on Friday" (NYT).

You may remember, long ago, in September 2005, I told you "The Comeback" was my favorite TV show:

Just yesterday, re-watching the last episode of my favorite TV show, "The Comeback," I said, "Valerie Cherish is my favorite TV character, ever."

"Really? What about Seinfeld?"

"No." I thought back over all the TV characters I could remember to see if anyone meant so much to me and said, "There's only one other person I can think of: Maynard G. Krebs."

"He writes graphically of his own deflowering; how he passes on the favor to his friend Carrie Fisher; of the almost-hand job he gets..."

"... in the back seat from someone’s wife when hitchhiking, as everyone used to do before the Manson murders; how Tennessee Williams grabs his testicles when he’s waiting tables at a dinner party — for better and worse, people always seem to be making a run at Griffin’s crotch — and Martin Scorsese’s wrath when he violates an order of celibacy during the filming of 'After Hours' (1985).... Much of [this memoir] is a privileged young man’s search for a place in the showbiz court to which he was born.... dropping Timothy Leary’s finest acid. Sean Connery, then playing James Bond, saved him from drowning! Bob Denver from 'Gilligan’s Island' had a temper!"

Writes Alexandra Jacobs, in "Growing Up With Joan Didion and Dominick Dunne, in the Land of Make-Believe/In his memoir 'The Friday Afternoon Club,' the Hollywood hyphenate Griffin Dunne, best known for his role in Martin Scorsese’s 'After Hours,' recounts his privileged upbringing" (NYT).

Here's the book, "The Friday Afternoon Club: A Family Memoir" (commission earned).

In 1964, when I was 13, I went to the movies to see "A Hard Day's Night," and it was a double feature.

The other movie — the movie I've chosen for 1964 in my "imaginary movie project" — was "For Those Who Think Young."



That poster says it's "The swingin'est young people's picture of the year," and I saw it immediately after that other "young people's picture," "A Hard Day's Night." Two entirely different visions of "young."

Compare Pamela Tiffin (who was was 22 in 1964) with Pattie Boyd (who was 20):



I made both of those screen grabs, and I can tell you Tiffin was done up like that for a day at the beach. Tiffin oozed maturity. Movies like this were called "beach party" movies, but her character was a college student who was continually attending to her studies and she was insistent that her boyfriend, the rich kid (James Darren), treat her with complete respect. Boyd played a schoolgirl whose role was to gawp at the Beatles and say her one line, "Prisoners?!"

Why didn't I pick "A Hard Day's Night" for my project? It fits the requirement that I need to have seen it in the theater when it came out. But I'd already rewatched "A Hard Day's Night" a time or 2, and I want to compare my original response with what I feel now, so... too much static. And there's something specific I remember about seeing "For Those Who Think Young" when I was 13: I enjoyed it more than "A Hard Day's Night."

But why? That's a mystery to solve. First, I loved Bob Denver. The show "Gilligan's Island" debuted in the fall of that year, but I knew him from my favorite TV show, "The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis," which was on from 1959 to 1963. I had a 8"x10" glossy photo — I'd sent in for it — of Denver as Maynard G. Krebs. I loved the beatnik character who questioned all of society's conventions — especially work.

Let me show you about 10 minutes of "For Those Who Think Young," beginning with the Bob Denver character. He's meditating, and this is 4 years before The Beatles took up Transcendental Meditation. This segment continues with some Tiffin/Darren interplay and reaches a peak with Bob Denver buried in the sand using his mouth in a way that I found gut-bustingly hilarious in 1964. And don't miss Nancy Sinatra:



Did you see that early #MeToo wokeness? Nancy hits Bob for kissing her in an entirely nonphysical way. The meditation is so strong.

The Bob Denver character, Kelp, is employed as Darren's assistant, and we see him running over to serve him and Tiffin some drinks in tall glasses. Before running off, Kelp then slips one of those glasses into his swimsuit pocket, where it bulges like an erection I didn't notice in '64.

Joaquin Phoenix's Forehead.



I found this oddly reminiscent of Bob Denver's Chin in "For Those Who Think Young":

Soshoku danshi — "grass-eating men" — "a heterosexual man for whom relationships and sex are unimportant."

"The phenomenon emerged a few years ago with the airing of a Japanese manga-turned-TV show. The lead character in Otomen ('Girly Men') was a tall martial arts champion, the king of tough-guy cool. Secretly, he loved baking cakes, collecting 'pink sparkly things' and knitting clothes for his stuffed animals. To the tooth-sucking horror of Japan's corporate elders, the show struck a powerful chord with the generation they spawned."

This comes from the article "Why have young people in Japan stopped having sex?," which I linked to earlier today for some different purposes. I wanted to break this out separately. I may not be understanding the Japanese phenomenon accurately, but I'm interested in the way a television show can begin with a character who is supposed to be laughed at but who ends up inspiring some viewers, who legitimates and activates feelings that they have about themselves, and shows them new ways to behave, openly and without shame.

The example that occurs to me in American culture is Maynard G. Krebs, the best friend of the main character on the old Dobie Gillis show (which was on from 1959 to 1963). It was assumed that viewers would identify with Dobie. That's why he was the main character. He dressed and acted like a conventional teenaged boy of that time. He wanted girlfriends, and he had struggles with his parents and teachers, but he mostly tried to satisfy them even as he pursued his overarching goal: relationships with females.

The Maynard character wasn't supposed to call American teenagers into another way of living. Maynard (played by Bob Denver) was less good-looking, dressed grubbily, wore a goatee, was dumb about or uninterested in a lot of typical teenager things. He wasn't interested in girls. He rejected work and other conventions of middle class American life. His only interest was jazz, and he was — we were expected to understand — a beatnik. But we didn't fulfill the expectation that we would read this character as a clown. We got the idea: We could live in a new way.

Blah blah blah... we became hippies.

Debate moderators announced... and include Candy Crowley, who reacted to the Paul Ryan VP announcement with the phrase "some sort of ticket death wish."

Drudge aptly assembles the links:

DEBATE MODERATORS ANNOUNCED:
PBS Jim Lehrer, first Pres debate, Oct 3 Denver...
CNN Candy Crowley, town hall, Oct 16, Hempstead NY...
CBS Bob Schieffer, third Pres debate, Oct. 22, Boca Raton...
ABC Martha Raddatz, VP debate, Oct 11, Danville KY...
FLASHBACK: CROWLEY: Some Think Ryan Pick 'Some Sort of Ticket Death Wish'...
60 MINS edits out Ryan talking about Medicare mom in Florida...

That last link might seem less apt, a bit off topic. But think about it. It's not. Drudge knows what he's doing. This is about media bias.

So all the moderators will be liberals. Can't help that — you say? — all the big media people are liberal. Couldn't we get one Fox News person — Chris Wallace, for example? But Fox News is somehow known to be biased in a way that those other networks are not. Ironically, the reason that factoid is known is that we learned it through all those other media outlets. Their voices corroborate the view that Fox News is biased. Perception of bias is a numbers games.

ADDED: Why Crowley? They needed a woman... and it was the best they could do?

"I assume there are dragons and griffins and werewolves and homosexual Frankensteins throughout these novels..."

"...but I honestly don't give a shit if my assumption is true or false."

Chuck Klosterman is not reading the Harry Potter novels.

I find it astounding that the unifying cultural currency for modern teenagers are five-hundred-page literary works about a wizard. We are all collectively underestimating how unusual this is. Right now, there is no rock guitarist or film starlet as popular as J. K. Rowling. Over time, these novels (and whatever ideas lie within them) will come to represent the mainstream ethos of our future popular culture. Harry Potter will be the only triviality that most of that coming culture will unilaterally share.

And I have no interest in any of it.

And I wonder how much of a problem this is going to become.

If it's the only shared thing, that means, in the future you won't get any of the references.

... I will not grasp the fundamental lingua franca of the 2025 hipster. I will not only be old but old for my age. I will be the pterodactyl, and I will be slain. It is only a matter of time.

ADDED: The word "hipster" is vastly overused these days. Anyone with a tinge of youth and a shred of knowledge of fashion and pop culture trends seems to be a hipster — at least to people who notice they're aging and don't want to bother with the trends. Hipster — the category should be more elite. Or it seems completely absurd.

We could try to think deeply about the word "hip." For example, why aren't hipsters and hippies the same thing? What is the -ster relationship to "hip" that is different from the -ie relationship? To me, -ster seems to make you more of a knowledgeable proponent or an obsessive devotee, and -ie suggests you're having fun with it. Other -ster words that come to mind: mobster, roadster. Is a mobster's relationship to the mob and a roadster's relationship to the road the same as a hipster's relationship to hip?

Other -ie words I think of easily: foodie, groupie. See? More fun.

AND: A little musical accompaniment to this postscript: here. In the comments, Trooper York brought up The Orlons, but then he didn't quote "South Street." The first time I ever heard the word "hippie," it was in that great early 60s song. Let's check out the etymology:

During the jive era of the late 1930s and early 1940s, African-Americans began to use the term hip to mean "sophisticated, fashionable and fully up-to-date". The term hipster was coined by Harry Gibson in 1940, and was used during the 1940s and 1950s to describe jazz performers. The word evolved to describe Bohemian counterculture. Like the word hipster, the word hippie is jazz slang from the 1940s, and one of the first recorded usages of the word hippie was in a radio show on November 13, 1945, in which Stan Kenton called Harry Gibson "Hippie". This use was likely playing off Gibson's nickname, "Harry the Hipster."

In Greenwich Village, New York City, young counterculture advocates were named hips because they were considered "in the know" or "cool", as opposed to being square. Reminiscing about late 1940s Harlem in his 1964 autobiography, Malcolm X referred to the word hippy as a term African Americans used to describe a specific type of white man who "acted more Negro than Negroes."

In a 1961 essay, Kenneth Rexroth used the term to refer to young people participating in African American or Beatnik nightlife.

In 1963, the Orlons, an African-American singing group from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania released the soul dance song "South Street", which included the lyrics "Where do all the hippies meet? South Street, South Street...The hippest street in town".[9][10]....

The more contemporary sense of the word "hippie" first appeared in print on September 5, 1965. In an article entitled "A New Haven for Beatniks," San Francisco journalist Michael Fallon wrote about the Blue Unicorn coffeehouse, using the term hippie to refer to the new generation of beatniks who had moved from North Beach into the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. Fallon reportedly came up with the name by condensing Norman Mailer's use of the word hipster into hippie. Use of the term hippie did not catch on in the mass media until early 1967, after San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen began referring to hippies in his daily columns.

Nothing there about the more recent transition to "hipster," though there is a section about the pejorative use of the word "hippie." Basically, "hippie" ended up meaning not hip at all. That's certainly the way I use it (almost always in self-deprecation).

"Beatnik" is a cool word, but I think it's solidly anchored in the 1950s... or to refer to Maynard G. Krebs, the Bob Denver character in my all-time favorite TV show "Dobie Gillis." He also did his beatnik role in a cool movie called "Surf's Up," which came out the same year as "Hard Day's Night." What a contrast between those two movies. I must confess that I saw them in a double feature at the time... and much preferred "Surf's Up." I found this hilarious:



CORRECTION: The movie title is actually "For Those Who Think Young." I went through a long period of thinking it was pathetic of me to have liked this movie more than "Hard Day's Night," but now, much as I know "Hard Day's Night" is better, I think it's perfectly acceptable to enjoy an old surf movie. Look at the cast:

James Darren ... Gardner 'Ding' Pruitt III
Pamela Tiffin ... Sandy Palmer
Paul Lynde ... Uncle Sid
Tina Louise ... Topaz McQueen
Bob Denver ... Kelp
Robert Middleton ... Burford Sanford 'Nifty' Cronin
Nancy Sinatra ... Karen Cross

POSTSCRIPT: If we called monsters "monnies," would we be less afraid?

Maynard to God: "You rang?"

So soon after failing to make a public demonstration of mourning upon the death of Chief Justice William Rehnquist, I'm going to have to cry publicly here over the death of one of my favorite television personalities, Bob Denver.

Just yesterday, re-watching the last episode of my favorite TV show, "The Comeback," I said, "Valerie Cherish is my favorite TV character, ever."

"Really? What about Seinfeld?"

"No." I thought back over all the TV characters I could remember to see if anyone meant so much to me and said, "There's only one other person I can think of: Maynard G. Krebs."

All the obits will forefront Gilligan. But I don't care about Gilligan. It's Maynard I love!

Like, I'm getting all misty.

IN THE COMMENTS: "When you think about it, how many actors play two iconic characters in their careers on TV?" He mentions Mary Tyler Moore and Bea Arthur. For me, Lisa Kudrow sprang instantly to mind. Then there's Patty Duke, who did it on one show. Robert Young. William Shatner? Don Knotts?

TV on DVD.

Tomorrow the new "Seinfeld" DVD collection comes out and Entertainment Weekly is recommending it because you'll get to see the full-length original show (the syndicated version shaves off a minute or so), there are commentary tracks (with Julia Louis-Dreyfus partaking of episode one for the first time), there are deleted scenes, additional stand-up material, and there's a 60-minute documentary.

EW also has some recommendations about what other TV shows ought to come out in disc form. But they don't seem remember any shows before 1965, so they fail to mention the show I really want: "Dobie Gillis"! Oh, how I love that show! Warren Beatty was even in it--a minor character, but it's fun to see him as a high school student. There are all these people who love "Gilligan's Island," so there must be a fan base for Bob Denver: he was unforgettably great as the beatnik high schooler Maynard G. Krebs ("You rang?"). And no one has ever been more beautiful and funny at the same time than the brilliant Tuesday Weld (who played Thalia Menninger).

UPDATE: I picked up the first "Seinfeld" collection on Tuesday. Couldn't resist.