Last night, I watched the TBS premiere of a seven-part limited series, Miracle Workers.  I thought it was absolutely wonderful, and often laugh-out-loud funny.  To be clear, it was full of charm and whimsy, which is something I love, but not necessarily to everyone's taste.  And I also have no idea how the rest of the series will play out -- but based on the premiere it has a great foundation.

The show stars Steve Buscemi as a burned-out God (and he's great), who's come to the annoyed conclusion that He screwed up with creating Earth and has decided to blow it up in two weeks and come up with some other idea.  (One that He's excited by is a restaurant surrounded by a river, though since He'll have blown up Earth it will have to float in outer space or, well, somewhere.)  And the other star is Daniel Radcliffe as a nerdy angel (and he's great) whose hapless job -- but it's one he's grown to love, since it's pretty much all he knows -- is the only one assigned to answer prayers.  Though impossible prayers are way too much, and sent to God (which wearies the Almighty), so angel Craig contents himself with answering the most-manageable prayers, like helping someone find their keys.  Though he can only deal with a few a day.

Entering his lonely, cavernous office is a spunky, enthusiastic angel Eliza, played by Geraldine Viswanathan (and she's great -- are you catching a theme here...), who wants to help, but only makes things more convoluted.

The premise of the series is that Eliza has made a bet with God that she and Craig have to find impossible prayer and if they can answer it in two weeks, then Earth will be saved.

The was created and written by Simon Rich, who wrote for Saturday Night Live, created the series Man Seeking Woman, and co-wrote additional material for the animated Pixar film Inside Out -- and has been signed to write the prequel, Willy Wonka.

Here's the trailer, which gives a good sense of the limited series, though only touches the surface.  Followed by a big bonus.

And here's the big bonus.  If you missed the premiere, and are interested in seeing it, you don't have to search around for its next air date or track it down On Demand.  I've embedded it below --

A friend sent me an article on thrillist.com that rated all the Super Bowl ads, and he asked for my comments about them.
 
Though I’ve written TV ads, I’m hardly an expert.  But (and this doesn’t make me an expert either), I’m named after a relative who was an expert.  Really.  Isadore James Wagner, and I’m Robert James Elisberg.  That’s why I always write professionally as “Robert J. Elisberg,” as an homage to him.  He was one of the “pioneers” in using singing commercials on radio.  I have an excellent book on old-time radio, The Big Broadcast, sort of an encyclopedia, which has a section on commercials.  They give about a dozen examples of famous radio jingles, and two of them are his.  (One was used for many decades and even I got to hear it on TV, the “What’ll you have?  Pabst Blue Ribbon” jingle.)  He also gave Studs Terkel his first break on radio – and in Terkel’s two memoirs he always give Iz credit.  When I read an interview with him giving credit to “That adman I.J. Wagner,” I ran to tell my mom, and she said, “Oh, yes, I know.  When Iz died, Studs spoke at his funeral.”
 
A story about him and advertising which in a way relates to commenting on Super Bowl ads.  Years back I was talking with an elderly screenwriter, David P. Lewis, who used to write ads in Chicago.  I mentioned having a cousin who did that, I.J. Wagner.  He said he didn’t know him, but worked at the agency where he had worked.  The story is that when he got hired there, he was a know-it-all kid, and when he was told that one of their clients was Thomas J. Webb Coffee (very big in the Midwest at the time), and one of Iz’s big ads, David said he went on a know-it-all rant about how he hated the ad because it was so annoying.  The supervisor went and got a rate book and let him read it – it showed that the ad was WILDLY successful and incredibly well-remembered.  The point being, he realized, that you’re not writing art but trying to get the public to remember your product and then buy it.
 
(The ad – not one of his singing jingles -- was an annoying woman’s raspy voice calling out, “Morrrrrtimer!!  Don’t forget to get the Thomas J. Webb Cofffffffff-eeeeeeeee!!!!”)
 
Before I looked at what Thrillist wrote, I passed along my two favorites.  (I should add that I didn’t think most of the ads were all that wonderful, and there were the only two which, for me, leaped out.  I liked others, but in fairness I didn't see all the ads, and the ones I did see didn’t strike me as great ads, just sort of fun.)  My favorites were --
 
The NFL ad, promoting the upcoming documentary on the history of the NFL.  It wasn’t really a “product” and didn’t make the point of what it was promoting all that great, but I just loved the ad.
 
The Microsoft ad for its usability features for disabled kids.
 
As a special mention, I liked the ad for Bubly soft drink with Michael Buble.
 
As for the Thrillist article, you can check it out here -- which has the added advantage of embedding all the commercials so you can watch the ones you missed list or check out those you did like again.  My own comments aren't comprehensive, so I just skimmed the article, but these are my random thoughts, following the Thrillist order from worst to best.
 
And first of those is that their comments seem to be that if a commercial isn’t all that funny it should be downgraded.  While I understand that to a degree if a commercial is trying to be funny, they seem to miss that the point of a commercial isn’t to be funny but…to sell a product.  And sometimes being “too” funny is felt to detract from the product.

While they rated the Jason Bateman/Hyundai commercial as the worst, I thought it was wonderfully produced and great fun.  However, I think it was a lousy ad for selling their cars.  (In fact, I didn’t remember if it was for Hyundai or Honda.)  So, I don’t know if that should make it it high on the list or low -- but definitely higher than "worst."
 
Their comment about how one of the reasons they didn't like the WeatherTech ad was because they felt the cellphone holider should be higher so that you could actually see the phone was idiotic.  The whole point of the product is that so you keep your hands on the wheel and eyes on the road.  NO, they don’t want you looking at the phone.
 
I like the Stella Artois ad, though because I've never seen Sex in the City, and don't think I've seen The Big Lebowski in 15-20 years, I didn't quite get all the references, but I thought it was well-done and fun.  And think that Thrillist missed the point of why it worked. And I liked, too, the quick but great use of "The Most Interesting Man in the World" -- not just because it was a nice addition and a tweak to another beer company, Dos Equis, but I suspect there was a bit of joyful comeuppance by the actor, Jonathan Goldsmith, who had been let go by the ad agency for being too old.

I didn't think the Pepsi ad with Steve Carell ad was all that effective in selling the product especially well, but I thought he was great fun in it.

Though I don’t watch Game of Thrones, I thought the Bud Light crossover ad with the TV show.  was AWFUL.  Not just because the two styles didn’t mesh, but Budweiser thought it was a great idea to have one of its iconic characters, the Bud Knight, get killed in a battle and then decapitated.  Seriously????
 
I thought the Alexa ad was well-produced and fun, but thought it lost its focus on what it was selling.  What I think they were trying to sell was how great and versatile Alexa is, and that it can do SO much, though some efforts were misguided because Alexa shouldn’t be used for that.  A good point in theory, but it doesn’t come through properly, instead it looks like they’re saying Alexa doesn’t work well.
 
How weird that they describe the Mr. Peanut ad as “it’s all pretty stupid,” but rate it as #15.
 
I dislike the Verizon ads that have been running for the last few weeks – with the First Responders, and the tag line about how “They save everyone, and we make sure they got the call.”  The ads themselves are good – but I hate the tag line.  If the ad was the same and they ended with “Verizon salutes those who put themselves out to save others,” then that would be just fine.  But to suggest that Verizon deserves to be part of the First Responder “team” and deserves part of the praise and thanks, simply because they connect the phone call is bothersome.  Furthers, as far as I know, there isn’t an issue with any other service not being able to connect to 911 and First Responders.  Besides which, how do we know that in these cases the call to the First Responders was made using Verizon service??  Maybe it was, but maybe not.  Either way, though, they are NOT part of the team.
 
I can’t say that that Bo Jackson commercial for Sprint was very good, and they even say so, too, yet make it #11 best simply because they like seeing Bo Jackson!
 
Thrillist saying that “Obviously, it’s hard to get too outraged over a clip of Andy Warhol eating a burger” misuses the word “outraged.”  I thought the ad was fairly effective in getting your attention, which is a critical aspect of any ad, though I can assure you there were people at our group who were indeed close to outraged by it, thinking it boring, a bit creepy and inexplicable.  But at least them making it #4 made my point to those “outraged” folks that the ad was effective in getting attention and being remembered.
 
Okay, two of my favorite three made their top three, so I can’t complain about that – the Microsoft ad and the one for Bubly.  Though I wouldn’t have put the Bubly ad #1.  But – but – they completely ignored and left out the NFL promotional spot.  Perhaps because it was just a “promotion” and not a tradition ad per se, but so what?  It was great.  And even if one didn’t like it, you at least include it!!!
 
And that they thought the avocado ad was the second best is bizarre.  Among other things, it didn’t do much to sell avocados (focusing mostly on the unrelated, goofy antics of the humans) …which is the point of an ad.
 
Well, it’s all personal taste.  And I admire that Thrillist took the leap to rate them all in order.
 
 
 
 
I think your recommended tag line for the Bob Dylan “Blowin’ in the Wind” ad is a perfectly good one for commenting on Dylan’s song, but not an especially good one for selling the product.

No doubt thanks to people who read this site, saw the Media Alert posted here, and tuned in, the documentary Three Identifical Strangers turned out to be most-watched CNN Films premiere ever.

But it's more than that.  The film got 1.982 million viewers.  This not only topped "Fox News" Channel during the same time -- it had more viewers than "Fox News" and MSNBC (which had its prison Lock Up reruns).

Even in the most-important "25-54 demographic," CNN's airing of the documentary beat both "Fox News" and MSNBC, as well.

For those who like numbers -- from 9-11 PM, "Fox News" Channel got 1.393 million viewers, and MSNBC had 474,000.  For that 25-54 demographic, "Fox News" had 237,000 people watching, and MSNBC had 96,000.

Yesterday, I posted a bunch of Christmas songs ​from Kukla, Fran and Ollie, so I figured that it's only fitting that we give that show's brilliant creator Burr Tillstrom his due.  This will sit in for today's Holiday Music Fest.

I wrote about this piece of remarkable TV history two years ago, and it remains one of my favorites.  Back in my initial posting on this site about Kukla, Fran and Ollie, I wrote about how puppeteer Burr Tillstrom won an additional Emmy Award that was not involved with KF&O, but for his work on his own.  It was for one of the "hand ballets" that he performed on occasion for the satirical news series, That Was the Week That Was.  

That Was the Week That Was was a smart, pointed, very sharp British sketch-comedy show which was brought over to the U.S. in the early 1960s.  Among other things, it introduced to American audiences one of the original British cast members, David Frost.  It's also the show that introduced Tom Lehrer to most Americans.  He wrote periodic songs for the series, and then recorded them for his now-classic hit album, That Was the Year That Was.

And it also brought Burr Tillstrom into the national spotlight in a way people hadn't seen or expected.

Once again, we have another version of "The Little Drummer Boy," but honestly that's not the point here.  That's just background music -- and hugely effective background music, that impacts the scene magnificently -- for one of the more moving, wonderful scenes from a Christmas episode The West Wing.  And the episode, "In Excelsis Deo" was one of their best.  Which is saying a lot, though something you could say a lot, as well...

The scene is pretty self-explanatory, but quickly the episode concerns a homeless veteran who had died, and the business card of one of the West Wing staffers was found in the coat he was wearing because it had been donated to a shelter.

We'll start off the holiday with something from The West Wing.  The series would periodically do a a Thanksgiving-themed episode, and this is one of the memorable sequences from one of those, an episode entitled "Indian in the Lobby."   (If it seems to jump in time a bit, that's because it's not a single scene per se, since this is a collection of snippets that the YouTube poster edited together.)

Happy Thanksgiving from Joe Bethersenton to you and yours...

I like The Rachel Maddow Show a lot.  I watch it most days.  I think she not only does very good work, but but often great, important work.  I do tend to record it so that I can fast-forward through the parts she's reported before, or through the long history lessons she's given that I know, or the repeating of a point four times to make sure you get it.  I understand her doing that, and I'm okay with it -- but that doesn't mean I have to listen to it regularly, which is why God invented the fast-forward button.

But every once she goes off the rails.  And last night was one of those.

With ALL the news stories to cover today -- the 11 murders at the Pittsburgh synagogue, the 14 pipe bombs that got mailed, the two murders at a grocery store when the killer couldn't get in a black church, Trump trying to claim he could sign a racist executive order to rewrite the Constitution, the murder of Jamal Khashoggi which Turkish authorities expanded that day, the 400 immigrant children still separated from their parents, and much, much, much more -- and it being only week before the mid-term elections, I thought it was irresponsible of the show last night to spend 23 MINUTES on their LEAD STORY being about Dodge City, Kansas voter suppression, which largely repeated an story she's been covering repeatedly for the past week.

Some added perspective.  A one-hour primetime TV show has about 44 minutes of content.  For a news show on MSNBC, it might be different.  But that's the ballpark.  So, that means that when you open with a 23-minute segment, that's not a-third of your hour show...it's HALF.  Half of The Rachel Maddow Show was devoted to a lead story they've covered repeatedly for the past week and even longer.

It's not that it wasn't a good story or an important one.  It's significant  But this wasn't a breaking story, which is what you generally have as the lead -- they'd covered the story regularly all week. It wasn't even particularly an extension of the story with significant new details, which also generally justifies sometime being a lead story.  In fact, If they wanted to give the story another 23 minutes and put it on later in the broadcast -- that would have been too much, but really okay.  Indeed, if they wanted it to be the lead story -- that would be fine, too, but for 10 minutes for anything that was new to report. But...not 23 MINUTES as the lead story they've covered repeatedly -- and with SO MUCH else going on, especially as the election date nears...including other major stories of voter suppression, not just in a town with 27,000 people but like in the entire state of Georgia, North Dakota and Indiana, for starters.

And I suspect because they devoted SO much landscape as their lead story last night, they'll feel compelled to give it even more precious air time tonight, with a long follow-up.  And beyond.

It's a good story.  It's an important story.  But this was out of perspective.

I first wrote here about the little-known show Snoopy!!!  The Musical back in 2013.  The stage show was a sort of sequel to the big off-Broadway hit, You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown, though with a different team of writers, having a wonderful score by Hal Hackady and Larry Grossman, which is near the equal of the gem that was the original -- and includes the now-classic "Just One Person," which has become seen as a "Muppet song."  I wrote about the show's background here, and last month posted a few more songs from it, among them some videos of an animated Peanuts TV special they did of a cut-down version of the musical.

I tracked down the full special, and figured why just post a random song or two.  Here's the whole, joyful thing.

It will not come as a shock to anyone who knows me that I was busy last night with the Chicago Bears and Chicago Cubs both on television.  So, it completely slipped through the cracks that the Emmys were on, and I missed them.  In fairness, I probably wouldn't have watched, since I tend not to.  I may have recorded them, had I remembered, and the fast-forwarded through to specific moments, like I do with most awards shows, but who knows? 

The larger point here is I only recently found out the winners.  And readers of these pages will recall me raving here about the Amazon Prime series, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, and singling out the show's star Rachel Brosnahan and supporting actress Alex Boorstein.  So, I’ll note that it had seven wins, including Best Comedy Series – as well as wins for Ms. Brosnahan and Ms. Boorstein, as well as writing.  And three others.

I tries nots to steers ya wrong.

I was also told by a friend who watched the show about the broadcast's high with the award for Best Director of Outstanding Variety, Music or Comedy Special, won by Glenn Weiss -- who proceeded to  propose on stage to his girlfriend.  Actually, for all the attention that got, my favorite moment was when he looks up to the control booth and (being a director of live events, who understands such things like the tight schedule they're under) apologizes to "Hamish" -- the Emmy broadcast's director, and clearly a friend -- for taking more time that he's allotted.

(After the show, I saw an interview with Glen Weiss where ​he was asked about what if he hadn't won, was there a Plan B.  He answered that, no, that there was no Plan B.  It was all Plan A, everything with his now-fiance was always Plan A.)

​Here's that segment.