I like the blue jumpsuit.

That's image that sprang to mind for me as we were discussing this blue jumpsuit worn by Democratic gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong at the Madison protest yesterday.

If you don't know who that is in the photo above, it's Jack Lalanne. Why did I know his jumpsuit was blue? I only ever watched him on black and white TV. His daytime show began in 1951 (the year I was born).

"Many of the writers, directors, producers or actors I’ve worked with wouldn’t even recognize or know how to make this stuff."

"Apparently, people will watch anything BUT the expensively produced content I write — unless it is in the form of unlicensed 15- to 30-second clips."

Writes Karl Taro Greenfeld, "a scriptwriter for television and a novelist," in "Short Videos Are Killing Hollywood. A Merger Won’t Save It" (NYT).

Why would a composer of symphonies know how to write a 2-minute pop song? People love the visual equivalent of a pop song and, as with pop songs, they'll listen to a lot of them in a row. It's not as though they don't want to spend the time with the material they like. They just like snazzy little works of art that begin and end quickly.

But Greenfeld takes the position that the "attention span is shattered," even if people are spending hours looking at short video.

"Do you think Bari Weiss needs to be removed?"/"Oh, gosh, yes. Look, she’s a lovely person. And her Free Press organization that she founded has been very successful. But television’s not her thing."

"This is like somebody walking up to me and saying, 'There’s a 747, there are 400 people on it, we need you to fly it to Paris.' I’m going to decline because I don’t have a clue. And it would have been so much better if Bari Weiss had been offered this job and said, 'Oh, that’s not for me, I don’t know how to do that.'"

That's Scott Pelley, answering a question in "The Interview/Scott Pelley on the Bari Weiss Era and His Last Days at '60 Minutes'" (NYT).

Here's the entire interview (with a transcript at YouTube):

"The air is loud."

"What is that sound that that we hear irritating us so dreadfully?" Dick Cavett asks Jimi Hendrix, as some kind of background noise, emanating from the musical equipment, is interfering with our effort to hear the very soft-spoken guest.

Jimi Hendrix: "Well, it sounds it sounds something like the New York street. I don't know. It's like today the air is all static, so the amplifiers are static. Music is loud, the air is loud, and you know, we're trying to settle things down a little bit, but it's going to take it like a rest."

The idea of trying "to settle things down a little bit" gets the mind of Cavett going toward the idea of human beings settling down, and later he asks Jimi if he sees himself getting married. When Jimi says he hopes not, Cavett delivers a punchline: "But you'll never get a situation comedy on television." That's funny, because sitting on the other side of Hendrix is Robert Young, the father of "Father Knows Best."

Young looks like an funny throwback to an earlier time, but Hendrix died a year later, and Young lived for 3 more decades.

"[T]he foundation of Mr. Colbert’s success was something new to late night: hard-core, point-of-view political comedy."

"He had developed it while contributing to 'The Daily Show' on Comedy Central. A broadcast network, steeped in the traditional 'both sides' style of Johnny Carson, was going to expect him to drop that as well as the character. CBS did; Mr. Colbert tried. It didn’t work.... The network says it decided to end 'The Late Show' because it was losing at least $40 million a year. Sounds credible, doesn’t it? Maybe not.... In forcing Mr. Colbert out and shutting down a 33-year late-night franchise — while selling that post-local-news hour of airtime to a syndicated show instead of replacing him with an original program of its own creation — CBS is assenting to its own diminishment. The biggest loss is to core America values, such as the right to speak freely, even in brutally mocking terms, about those in power. Then there is the opportunity, shared by everyone, to find and be entertained by voices like that on a free national platform, or to turn them off and watch something else."

Writes Bill Carter, author of “The Late Shift” and “The War for Late Night,” in "CBS Cancels Itself, Not Just Colbert" (NYT).

The biggest criticism I'm seeing there is the failure to put something new — "an original program of its own creation" — in that slot. But maybe they know that slot is doomed. People don't watch TV the way we used to. Staying up/getting into bed early to spend that last waking hour with Johnny lest you miss the whole thing forever — there's no going back to that. 

"Last week, the Department of Transportation released the first trailer for the Duffys’ odyssey, and boy does it look lavish."

"The family of 11 is shown riding in style in new model SUVs provided by Toyota — official vehicle partner of the show — lounging in bathrobes in hotels, snowmobiling, and even screaming down water slides on a Royal Caribbean cruise (another partner of the project). The trailer was met with widespread public backlash, with critics calling the seven-month production not only out of touch given the high costs currently hitting American travelers, but a potentially unethical misuse of federal resources. Duffy, who thinks people shouldn’t fly in comfy clothing because it’s uncivilized, is encouraging Americans to drive this summer, and get to know their country. 'We’re encouraging everyone to go take a road trip to celebrate America’s 250th anniversary,' he says in the trailer, adding later to Fox News that a road trip 'fits any budget.'"

That's from the Rolling Stone article "How Much Would It Cost to Fuel Sean Duffy’s Reality Show Road Trip?" which is updated "to reflect that the Duffys did not actually set sail on a cruise, and that they only enjoyed its amenities while it was docked."

With that correction, the price doesn't seem so astounding. I couldn't find the number, but then I only skimmed and then searched the page for a dollar sign. We're told the family — of 11 — drove 4,706 miles and maybe 2,458 miles more. Who would do that?! These people are taking care of 9 children. Why would you want to kick them around? Calling it "lavish" is nuts.

Here's that trailer that made Rolling Stone get all peevish:

Did that make you want to do a big road trip or did it make you want to wait until the 250th anniversary celebrants get back home? Or to never go anywhere again. I hear the bears are biting up in Glacier National Park.

"[Tyra Banks] spends half the docuseries explaining how she was intimately, minutely involved in every brilliant aspect of the show, but her memory suddenly goes foggy..."

"... when she’s asked about trash parts. Shandi’s horrific experience in Milan? She didn’t know anything about that, she insists. The blackface? Her unique way of showing that all skin tones were beautiful. The show was just a product of its times, she insists: 'You guys were demanding it.'Were we? I don’t personally recall ringing up Les Moonves to say that I wanted to see 12 young women get knocked over by swinging pendulums and wear dresses made of raw beef, but who can remember — it was a long time ago in the fog of war."

From "We knew ‘America’s Next Top Model’ was cruel. We watched it anyway. Yet another documentary exposes how popular culture failed women 20 years ago. What made this acceptable entertainment?" (WaPo).

Here's the trailer for that new Netflix documentary:

Who are the greatest figures in world history who never got to watch TV? List them along with their (anachronistic) favorite show.

Grok:

1. Socrates - "The Twilight Zone"
2. Cleopatra - "I Love Lucy"
3. Leonardo da Vinci - "Cosmos"
4. Joan of Arc - "M*A*S*H"
5. Genghis Khan - "Vikings"
6. William Shakespeare - "The West Wing"
7. Queen Elizabeth I - "The Crown"
8. Isaac Newton - "Breaking Bad"
9. Mozart - "Glee"
10. Abraham Lincoln - "The Andy Griffith Show"

ChatGPT:

1. Socrates — The Good Place
2. Cleopatra — Succession
3. Leonardo da Vinci — Black Mirror
4. Joan of Arc — Buffy the Vampire Slayer
5. Genghis Khan — Game of Thrones
6. William Shakespeare — The Simpsons
7. Marie Antoinette — RuPaul’s Drag Race
8. Ludwig van Beethoven — Mozart in the Jungle
9. Abraham Lincoln — The West Wing

"With subtitles on, I find myself being able to quickly gather what one character has said, look down at my phone, react to a message..."

"... then look up before that character has even finished their line. The viewing experience thus becomes multifaceted and efficient. The subtitles allow us to go on our phone but still absorb the content and gist of the TV show....  And social media itself has encouraged the use of subtitles across the board. It is now a given that most creators add text captions to their videos – without the option to turn them off.... This isn’t simply a trend but a feature anchored in the algorithm itself. Text captions, rather than dialogue, encourage the video to crop up in the TikTok search engine.... It began as an accessibility improvement, but the rapidity with which it has caught on suggests it’s business-oriented and crucial to getting that sweet algorithm boost. The fact that 85% of social media visual content is now watched on mute... coupled with the ease with which AI can generate subtitles without the need for human transcription, means we’re living in a subtitled world – one that is often poorly translated, low-quality and error-ridden...."

Writes Isabel Brooks, in "Most of gen Z watch TV with the subtitles on – and I understand why" (The Guardian).

"This show has become a sort of lighthouse show for people who want to believe that there are people in these hospitals who are dedicated, intelligent, compassionate, doing this kind of angelic work."

Said Noah Wyle, quoted in "'The Pitt' Defied Odds by Going Back to the Future/On Sunday, Emmy voters made a loud statement that there is an appetite for the kind of shows that used to dominate TV" (NYT).

I had never heard of this show, but apparently it's what people want these days. I'd watched "The White Lotus," which had a lot of nominations but won nothing. 

It seems that people are worn out and done with snark and irony. They want to be reassured that there are sincere, competent, hard-working people ready to help. (Note: Everything seems to relate to Charlie Kirk.)

Reminds me of "Hill Street Blues." Or... more on the subject matter: "St. Elsewhere."

Watched last night, not chosen by me: 2 TV shows from 1956.

Things I asked Grok:

"I was in my twenties then, and I’d grown up with a certain expectation, watching films, of what my sexual life was going to be like, and then it wasn’t that."

"The world had begun to be so saturated by sexual imagery in porn and the expectations were shifting. Not that there’s anything wrong with porn, but it does change the way people are expecting you to behave in a natural sexual situation. And so I was just confounded, and I think Girls expressed a lot of that confusion, anxiety, and frankly, pain."

Said Lena Dunham, quoted in "Lena Dunham on Too Much and her long-awaited return to TV: 'I stepped back from acting after my body was dissected'/Eight years on from ‘Girls’, the HBO comedy that made her name – and made her a lightning rod for criticism – Dunham is back with a 10-part romcom, ‘Too Much’. Ellie Harrison hears from the writer, along with her new lead stars Meg Stalter and Will Sharpe, about their London-set love story, which is well worth the wait" (Independent).

Did Lena Dunham have her body "dissected"? When I read that in the headline I thought it was a reference to her health problems (notably, endometriosis). But no: "When Girls was on television, discourse about Dunham’s appearance was rabid. Howard Stern called her 'a little fat girl' on national radio. One newspaper described her as a 'pathological exhibitionist.' 'Having my body dissected was a reason that I chose in general to step back from acting a little bit more and focus on my writing and my directing, and also just make different kinds of choices as an actor,' she says now."

"'Duck Dynasty' was a simple entertainment, but it was also a complicated mash-up of several of the most popular TV genres of its time."

"It had some connection to 'hicksploitation' reality shows like 'Here Comes Honey Boo Boo' and to series like 'Deadliest Catch' that celebrated people who worked with their hands. It also had the structure and beats of a mockumentary sitcom. Like 'Modern Family,' it often ended with voice-overs summing up the episode’s themes and lessons.... Like 'The Office,' it structured stories around staffers goofing around the warehouse and cooking up schemes like flooding the loading dock to create a duck pond. But there was a key difference.... It was about work, family and faith — a typical episode would close with a prayer over a meal.... 'Duck Dynasty' was affectionate for backwoods ways and tradition.... It gave the patriarch Phil plenty of airtime to sermonize about manhood and encourage his grandsons to marry 'a meek, gentle, kind-spirited country girl.'.... Phil’s opinions came out more blatantly and less telegenically, however, in a 2013 GQ interview, in which he called gay sex a sin and insisted that southern Black farm laborers were happy in Jim Crow-era Louisiana. ... A&E suspended him from the series.The punishment seemed, at the time, like the affirmation of a new cultural order.... The Trump 2016 campaign was in many ways a successful appeal to voters like Phil Robertson, who believed that their views were being silenced, their icons canceled, their traditions trampled, their beliefs insulted.... [Trump] promised... to restore the rich and meaningful lifestyle of their ancestors...."

From "'Duck Dynasty' Is Coming Back to a Changed America/The family reality comedy, being revived on A&E, was a lighthearted entertainment — that anticipated a decade’s worth of cultural politics." (NYT).

The article is about the revival of the show. Phil Robertson does not appear in it, and, as we talked about here, he died a few days ago. 

"Screen time together is better than individual device time, experts say. Start playing multiplayer video games like Mario Kart on the same screen...."

"Pick a movie or TV show to watch together as a family, without checking a your phone. 'TV is underrated in the age of short form video, if you’re worried about their attention span,' says Devorah Heitner, author of 'Growing Up in Public: Coming of Age in a Digital World.' 'It’s an opportunity to connect, and it’s also an opportunity to have a shared vocabulary.'"

From "The White House is worried about kids’ screen time. Here are five things parents can do. A new MAHA-led report on childhood health has harsh words about screen time, but the reality is more nuanced" (WaPo)(free-access link).

Did you ever think it would come to this, that the situation with children would get so bad that watching more TV would come to be regarded as therapeutic?!

That's a free access link, so you can see multiple other issues, such as the painful dissonance for parents who want to get their kids off the devices but hate to be on the same page with Trump and Bobby.

"Meghan Markle Wears Ginormous, Cozy Button-Down While Flower Arranging With Dog Guy."

That's the headline of the morning for me — over at InStyle.

Don't get me started on the present-day inanity of calling a shirt a "button-down" — in my day, a "button-down" was a shirt with a button-down collar, not a shirt that you button up (up, not down) — because I've already spent an hour down a rathole with Grok, exploring the origins of that usage — is it a retronym necessitated by the prevalence of T-shirts? — and wondering the how kids these days could understand the meaning of the album title "The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart." And that veered off into a discussion of the comic genius of Lucille Ball in this 1965 episode of "Password," and how, in Episode 4 of Season 1 of "Joe Pera Talks With You," Joe, dancing, says "Do you think AI will dance like this?," and Sarah says "No, because they don’t have genitals." How does that make Grok feel? 

But back to Meghan Markle. I'm not going to ask why it's a story that she wore a shirt while doing something and why the headline doesn't prioritize what she did, which was to arrange flowers, which would only make us wonder why it's a story that she arranged flowers. What I want is to clarify is what was meant by "Flower Arranging With Dog Guy." I assumed, the entire time I was down the rathole with Grok, that Markle had a guy who helped her with her dogs, that a "Dog Guy" was like a "Pool Guy," and for some reason, the Dog Guy got involved in the effort to arrange flowers. But no. Here's the Instagram InStyle wrote the headline about:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Meghan, Duchess of Sussex (@meghan)

So Guy was the name of her dog. And the dog was not participating in the flower arranging. He was just running around the general area. I don't know much about flower arranging, but I do have some confidence in my word arranging, and that headline needs work. But I'm not doing the work. I'm writing this post to say that I find my misreading delightful and enjoy thinking about this phantom character, the dog guy. I kind of am married to a dog guy. If we ever get a dog, I want to name him Whisperer so I can go around referring to my "Dog Whisperer." Or do you prefer Whiskerer? I can tell you Grok thought both names were brilliant. 

"Will Hutchins, who had a comically genteel starring role during the craze for television westerns in the 1950s, playing a sheriff who favored cherry soda..."

"... over whiskey on 'Sugarfoot,' died on April 21 in Manhasset, N.Y., on the North Shore of Long Island. He was 94.... Mr. Hutchins’s character, Tom Brewster, was the sugarfoot in question: an Eastern law student seeking his fortune as a sheriff who sidles up to the saloon bar to order a sarsaparilla (Wild West root beer) 'with a dash of cherry.' He abhors violence, tries to stop women from throwing themselves at him and lovingly gives up his share of drinking water for his horse. Mr. Hutchins played the role for comedy, following up a villain’s insult with a dramatic pause, only to critique the man for not being 'sociable.'... [H]e was likely to end a fight not with a killing but rather a comment like, 'All right now, how about that apology?'... [Hutchins said] the best advice he had received about comic performance was to act as if you were doing something no less severe than 'Hamlet.' "In order to make people laugh, you have to act seriously,' he said. 'Chaplin was just as sad as he was funny. Buster Keaton never smiled.'"

From "Will Hutchins, Gentle TV Cowboy Lawman in ‘Sugarfoot,’ Dies at 94/He starred in one of the westerns that dominated TV in the late 1950s. After losing traction in Hollywood, he became a traveling clown" (NYT).

Here's a snippet that shows the beginning of the second episode, "Reluctant Hero." I like how our law student character is reading what looks like a casebook as he rides his horse into town:

Watch the whole first episode — the pilot — here. Look for Dennis Hopper as Billy the Kid and Slim Pickens as Shorty.

And here's a clip from an episode of "Bronco" where Will Hutchins — as the Sugarfoot character — has a conversation with Theodore Roosevelt!

"In a 1987 episode of the HBO satire series 'Not Necessarily the News,' he played an enraged, violent version of himself obsessed with revenge..."

"... on Hollywood executives who had ignored him, all while wearing Dennis the Menace’s signature overalls and striped shirt."

From "Jay North, Child Star of ‘Dennis the Menace,’ Dies at 73/He was best known for playing the towheaded Dennis Mitchell on a sitcom that ran on CBS from 1959 to 1963" (NYT).

"Blue-eyed and porcelain-faced, and with an acting style that initially veered from earnest to wooden..."

"... Mr. Chamberlain was rarely a critical favorite as a younger man. People magazine once summed up his reputation as an actor: 'pretty — and passionless.' Over the years, and especially toward the end of his career, he more than amply corrected that impression by tackling Hamlet and other Shakespearean parts on the English stage and embraced characters with a dark, even cruel edge. As a sign of his range, he grew a beard and wielded a samurai sword for 'Shogun' (1980), and playing a hunky but tormented Catholic priest wrestling with illicit love in 'The Thorn Birds' (1983), one of the most-watched miniseries of all time."

From "Richard Chamberlain, TV heartthrob and ‘king of the miniseries,’ dies at 90/He starred on the popular 1960s medical drama 'Dr. Kildare' and later in the miniseries 'Shogun' and 'The Thorn Birds'" (WaPo)(free-access link).

I remember arguing with my sister about who was better, Dr. Kildare or Ben Casey. She was for Dr. Kildare. Ben Casey (Vince Edwards) died 30 years ago, and now Dr. Kildare has joined him in that great hospital in the sky.

Should I be watching Alec Baldwin's new reality show? "The Comeback" is my all-time favorite TV comedy.

I'm reading "The Baldwins Isn’t Alec Baldwin’s Comeback—It’s Basically The Comeback/On his cringey TLC show, the actor bears more than a slight resemblance to Lisa Kudrow’s Valerie Cherish" (Vanity Fair).

Like Valerie, Alec is an actor who appears to be seeking redemption by turning to a foreign medium that he might have at one time considered beneath him. While Valerie often calls out for her producer “Jane,” it similarly takes Alec about a minute into his show’s first episode to look directly into the camera, as if pleading for help, and explicitly spell out why his five-bedroom apartment is too small for his big family. Valerie attempts to produce her show as she’s being filmed, constantly interjecting about what she thinks should be left on the cutting room floor. Likewise, as they shoot a close-up of him cleaning his garbage can, Alec tosses out a question to the crew: “You don’t really wanna film this, do you?” But when one of his sons says something Alec deems entertaining, he changes his tune: “That was worth the whole day [of filming]! Line of the day!” Alec can’t help but regularly point out the brushstrokes and the mechanics of the show his family is filming as they’re filming it.

"Was there an episode of 'Sea Hunt' where someone was growing marijuana underwater?"

I asked Grok to check my memory, which surfaced as I was talking with Meade about the gold in Fort Knox and the movie "Goldfinger," which both of us saw when it first came out. We also saw the next new James Bond film, "Thunderball," and thought it was boring and spelled the end of the James Bond craze. All I could remember of "Thunderball" was that there were scenes underwater, and, I said, "Underwater scenes are always boring. Only Lloyd Bridges could make underwater scenes interesting. But the only episode of 'Sea Hunt' I remember is the one where somebody was growing marijuana underwater."

Hence, my question to Grok, and I was delighted by the answer:

Yes, there was an episode of "Sea Hunt" where someone was growing marijuana underwater. In Season 3, Episode 34, titled "Underwater Narcotics," which aired on August 27, 1960, Mike Nelson (played by Lloyd Bridges) encounters divers who are cultivating a hybrid form of marijuana underwater. The episode involves Mike tangling with these divers as he uncovers their unusual operation.

I don't know what your next question/"question" would be, but mine was: