I'm a little late coming to the table with this, but about four months ago it was announced that the TV show Mad About You would be returning this holiday season as a limited series on Spectrum Originals with the original stars Paul Reiser and Helen Hunt repeating their roles.  I'd heard it discussed but didn't realize it was all finalized.

I have deeply mixed feelings. On the one hand, I absolutely loved the original TV series, one of my all-time favorites.  So smart and funny and insightful and wonderfully acted.  On the other hand -- as I think I wrote here a while back -- it had what I thought was the absolutely WORST series finale in the history of television, one that not only destroyed everything the program was about, but that was so horrible that it killed the show's reruns.  Classic TV show reruns have exploded in recent years, some of the best seem like they're on throughout the day every day.  And Mad About You was one of the more popular -- and on for seven years.  And won a dozen Emmy Awards.  Yet in the 20 years since it went off the air, you've never really seen it on TV.  Every once in a while I'll notice an episode airing on a small local station, but that's it.  Further, for a decade, only the first three seasons were released on DVD because sales were so poor.  A couple other distributors picked up the rights, and little by little two more seasons got releases, but I still don't think the last two years have ever been released on DVD.  And the reason, I'm near certain, is that that finale sucked the life out of the show for the audience.  They loved the seven years that lead up to the finale -- but after the finale there was little "point" in watching it again, since it was a borderline lie.   

The short version is that the series was about the marriage between two very distinct personalities who sometimes infuriating the other, but underneath it all we knew -- knew -- they were passionate about each other, mad about each other.  Hey, that's what they called the series.  Mad About You.  And that overwhelming love gave them the joyous sails for the adventure of their lives.  And in the finale, that looked at their life ahead 22 years, they got divorced.  So, apparently they weren't all that mad about each other, after all.  More mad at you.  In the episode, it jumps forward even more years ahead, and the couple cross paths, they remember what attracted them in the first place, and all these years later they get back together.  Supposedly this was a "happy ever after" ending after all.  As the audience reaction to the show's afterlife demonstrates, it wasn't.  It was certainly an adventurously creative tact to try -- but a disastrously mindless "screw you, audience" one.  And one that seemed forced, not justified by the seven years of unadulterated, pure "mad about you" love that went before it, no matter how adventurously creative.

Honestly, I don't know what they're doing to do in the 12-episode limited series.  Will they ignore the earlier finale, like Will and Grace did and just say, "Forget it, folks, It didn't really happen, it was just a misguided TV episode that didn't work right.  Here's the real way it all went on."  Or will that still be part of the show's story?  Because it can be.  The divorce in the finale took place 22 years later.  This new series picks up 20 years after the first series ended.  So, are they going to show us the final two years of a marriage as it breaks down??  That sounds fun!  Or will they show these two years of an "empty nester" marriage (which is how the press releases describe it) as happy, fun and charming -- and ignore that right after this limited series ends the couple that's Mad About You will be getting divorced.  Which would be artistically dishonest.

I hope for the former, but I doubt.  I expect it will be a combination of the latter two possibilities -- fun, charming, smart and showing cracks along the way that ends with them still in love...and hoping most of the audience will forget or block out that they're about to get divorced.

And unfortunately, unlike Will and Grace that showed us right from the first new episode that they were ignoring the previous ending as "Forget about it" -- because the new series took place after what happened in the first finale -- the new Mad About You takes place before the actions of the first finale.  So, unless the show's creators say something about it (and so far I haven't found anything from them), the audience may not know if they're again and still leading us down the path that these two characters who are so deeply in love that they're "mad about you" are just about to get divorced.

The new episodes might be absolutely wonderful.  I suspect they will be, with all the talents involved.  But it also risks being utterly creepy depending on what road they take.  And most of the roads available (though to be clear, not all) lead to that same destination.

It's very interesting.  And even more bizarre.  And totally uncertain.

On this week's Al Franken podcast, the show has a political background but is really pretty much entertainment based.  The guest is David Mandel, the showrunner of the TV series, Veep.  Here's what the Franken folks want to tell you about the episode --

"Veep show runner, David Mandel discusses Veep and what the hell it is that a show runner does. Why Trump’s election made a dark, cynical show even darker and more cynical. Also, how David owes his entire career to Al – a career that includes writing and producing for Seinfeld, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and Veep, all shows that Al had nothing to do with. In his opening monologue Al calls the 2020 presidential election “the second most important election in our lifetime.” The most important being...  
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The guest on this week's 3rd & Fairfax, the official podcast of the Writers Guild of America is Tim Doyle, who created the series  The Kids Are Alright.  His career includes working on the staff for such shows as Last Man Standing, Speechless, The Big Bang Theory, Rules of Engagement, Ellen (the sitcom, not the talk show...) and Roseanne, among many others.

The guest on this week's 3rd & Fairfax podcast is comedy writer Liz Feldman, who created the new Netflix series, Dead to Me, has also written for such series as 2 Broke Girls, The Great Indoors and the talk show Ellen.  She talks here, in part, about blurring the lines between comedy and drama on her new show.

A couple of days ago, for reasons I can't remember why, I was talking about the TV show Green Acres with a friend.  The show ran from 1965-1970, has the general reputation in memory as being one of the corny, hick shows for kids that CBS was running at the time, like The Beverly Hillbillies, Petticoat Junction, Mayberry RFD and Hee Haw, all of which got famously "purged: by the network around 1970, to change focus. 

In reality, if you check out the show in reruns -- and happily, it's actually stuck around in reruns after 50 years, unlike most of the others -- you'll see that this was a sly, almost-subversive program for adults that was often very intelligent and wildly clever, filled with sophisticated humor...just wrapped in cornball hokum for those who weren't paying close attention.  It's not just me who recognizes this, of course -- "Amiable madness" is the way a recent article and appreciation on the very good AV Club website described the program.  Green Acres was created by Jay Sommers who in many knowing-circles has been credited for the show's bizarre creativity.  It starred Eddie Albert and Eva Gabor, and featured a cast that was dry as sand in their lunacy.

To show what I meant to my friend, I went online to track down some clips.  I'll show a bunch more of the gems upcoming, perhaps tomorrow, but for now this is an absolutely great 10-minute montage of totally clever ways that Green Acres broke "the fourth wall" with nothing more than just the opening credits. 

Because the montage deals with the opening credits, I thought it was best first to post the main theme song, so that people unfamiliar with the show have a perspective on it all.  (The lyrics have been added over, so you can sing along...)

And now, here is what the show regularly did with the opening credits that came after -- not every week, since they mixed things up enough to keep audiences on their toes.  But every once in a while they'd throw these in to make sure you were all in on the joke.

By the way, it isn't just that they did something like this so often, or that they were generally very funny, but that they were able to come up with SO MANY clever ways to make these jokes.
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Even with the revelations of the Michael Flynn deposition about the seemingly-blatant obstruction of justice from Trump's lawyers and a member of Congress, and news of various material getting unredacted from the Mueller Report from separate judges, I don't want to talk Trump at the moment.  That news will have to stand poised in its importance.  Instead I want to drop several levels and bring up another disaster.  The HBO mini-series on "Chernobyl."

At first I wasn’t interested, but I was visiting my cousin and his wife who were discussing if they set the recorder to get the next episode.  It was nothing more than that, though I knew they were very interested in most things Russia.  (His wife's name is Olga -- you do the math.)  I kept thinking about it, and when I got home I figured I might as well check it out.  I went to the On Demand setting and watched the first episode -- which was spectacular.  Just a seriously impressive production on every level.  The cast isn't well-known -- the two most recognizable actors are Emily Watson and Stellan Skarsgård -- but everyone is impeccable.  And all five episodes are grippingly written and directed by Craig Mazin (best known for highly-successful goofball comedies and his outspoken, public hatred of his college roommate Ted Cruz), and John Renck (who until the past few years had mostly done commercials and music videos) respectively.  Their work here is substantive and rich.  In fact, surprisingly (if not shockingly) subtle for its scope and epic disaster.  And last night I got up to date just finishing episode #2 which was almost as good.  It goes into levels that most of the public hasn't known, including how close things came to wiping out all of Europe.

If you get HBO, it's exceedingly worth checking out these first two episode before #3 airs next Monday, May 20.  For other folk, put it in your Netflix queue for whenever the DVDs are released.
 
This trailer gives a good sense of the high quality of the mini-series and overall production, but effective as it is doesn't do it justice.  A trailer by its nature quickly cuts together pieces of importance.  The show itself is methodical and absorbing.

Here's a good idea of what I mean.  This is the sequence where the nuclear reactor explodes.  When you think "nuclear reactor explodes" and its aftermath, there are probably a lot of images that immediately come to mind.  I'm guessing few to none would be put together like this, or perhaps as impactful.  And it only builds from here.