As I mentioned last week, I happily was able to track down four episodes (for now...) of the wonderful 1964 NBC series, The Rogues, which I've long felt had the greatest cast of any series in TV history.  It starred two of Hollywood's great romantic leading men, Charles Boyer and David Niven, as well as Oscar-winner Gig Young, and featured one of the grande dames of the theater, Oscar-winner Gladys Cooper and Robert Coote (who played Col. Pickering in the original Broadway and London productions of My Fair Lady).

Following up on the episode I posted last week, I have another one today, "The Day They Gave Away Diamonds.".  There's a bit of a treat with this one.  As I noted previously, only on a very rare occasion would the full cast appear each week.  Usually, only one of the three main leads would star, though every once in a while another of the Big Stars would make a short appearance.  Gladys Cooper and Robert Coote however were the uniting figures and in every episode.  Well, this is one of those occasions when all three of the stars show up.  The main lead is Charles Boyer, though Gig Young has a substantial role to play, as well, and David Niven makes a brief appearance.  The series is very much of its era, and is hardly a great, meticulous "con" show, but it makes up for that in acting and monumental charm.

For those who missed last week's episode, you can find it here.  The Rogues was about a family of elegant con men whose standards were very high, and they would only trick the most wealthy and reprehensibly unscrupulous marks. 

And again, ignore what the video shows as the length of the episode.  It's 20 minutes shorter than that and runs around 51 minutes.

This is a real treat.  A huge treat, in fact, for some.

A few weeks back when writing about the movie musical The Happiest Millionaire, I embedded a song was that performed by several people, including Gladys Cooper, one of the grande dames of the London and Broadway stage.  I mentioned that three years before that movie was made she had played the matriarch in perhaps my favorite unsuccessful TV series (though it did last a full season of 30 episodes) that has arguably the greatest, high-quality cast in television history -- The Rogues.  The series starred two of Hollywood's great romantic leading men, Charles Boyer and David Niven, as well as Oscar-winner Gig Young, as well as Gladys Cooper and Robert Coote (who played Col. Pickering in the original Broadway and London productions of My Fair Lady).

Well...I was able to track down four episodes of The Rogues!  And I'm going to post the first of them below, and then the others over the next few weeks.  To be clear, these aren't necessarily the best of the lot, they're what's available.  (My favorite, I recall, was a Christmas Carol homage that had the wonderful character actor John McGiver as the Scrooge-like character they were trying to con.  Hopefully it will pop up eventually.) The series is dated and really of its time -- the mid-1960s.  It isn't one of the most riveting dramas, nor had the most intricate cons.  What it had, though, was overwhelming charm and an elegant breeziness that was infectious.  The acting is a joy, it treats the audience with intelligence and respect, and has a winking sense of fun.

Just a few words about the show and cast.

The Rogues premiered on NBC in 1964.  It told the story of a family of elegant con men whose standards were very high, and they would only trick the most wealthy and reprehensibly unscrupulous marks. Only on a very rare occasion would the full cast appear each week.  Usually, only one of the three main leads would star, though every once in a while another of the Big Stars would make a short appearance.  Keeping things tied together, Gladys Cooper and Robert Coote were in every episode.

David Niven and Charles Boyer, as  said, were among the two most popular suave, romantic leads in Hollywood history.  Niven was probably most-famous for starring as Phileas Fogg in the Oscar-winning Best Picture, Around the World in 80 Days.  Boyer (who was also in the film in a cameo as a travel agent in Paris, who sells Fogg the most iconic prop in the film -- his hot-air balloon) delivered one of the famous lines in Hollywood history, when he starred as a notorious thief in the 1938 classic Algiers where he wooed Hedy Lamarr, saying, "Come with me, Gaby, come with me to the Casbah."

The third of the series's stars, Gig Young, wasn't as legendary as the others, but was a major romantic leading man, as well.  Later in his career, he had  two Oscar nominations for Best Supporting Actor (including for Teacher's Pet) and then won the Oscar as Best Supporting Actor for They Shoot Horses, Don't They?  He also made a lot of light comedies, like That Touch of Mink.  And was actually set to play the Waco Kid in Blazing Saddles, but health issues -- mainly a drinking problem -- forced him to drop out, where he was replaced by Gene Wilder.

As for the two regulars on the show, Gladys Cooper is best known today for playing Henry Higgins' mother in the film of My Fair Lady.  However she began her acting career back in 1905, and in 1911 appeared on the West End stage in Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest and George Bernard Shaw's Man and Superman.  She made her first film in 1913 -- 14 years before there were even sound movies!  She also received three Oscar nominations for Best Supporting Actress -- Now, Voyager, and The Song of Bernadette, as well as My Fair Lady.  And was named a Dame in 1967. 

Robert Coote was the least-known of the five, but he came to fame a few years earlier with his own connection to My Fair Lady, playing, as I noted above, 'Col. Pickering' in the original Broadway production of My Fair Lady, a role he repeated when the show went to London.

That is quite a cast for a TV series.

And here is the first of episodes I was about to track down.  It's not the best of them, but I like it because it stars David Niven, and the guest star -- before he became a star in feature films -- is Walter Matthau!  Gig Young also makes a small appearance. Don't be put off by the time shown on the video.  For some reason they all begin running again after finishing.  The show is about 51 minutes long.  (Can you imagine?  Just nine minutes of commercials.)

And now -- The Rogues.  Huzzah!!!

Writing about old folk singing groups the other day made me think of this, which I'm surprised I haven't posted before.

Another of the popular trios of the time was The Limeliters.  And like The Chad Mitchell Trio, their lead singer Glenn Yarbrough left the group for a solo career -- and then later reunited with them, though not as extensively as Mitchell did.

Yarborough's solo career wasn't overly successful, though he did have one big hit, "Baby, the Rain Must Fall," which was the title song from a Steve McQueen.movie.  He also sang another title song, which I've always liked,  but which is largely lost to history, and is the point here.

The team of Arthur Rankin and Jules Bass had a very successful career producing animated TV specials, most notably Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and Frosty the Snowman.  In fact, they did a whole series of popular animated Christmas specials, mostly stop-motion, including The Little Drummer Boy and Santa Claus is Comin' to Town.  

In 1977, the did a full-length animated movie for television, long before Peter Jackson got into the picture, with their version of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit.  It has a very good voice cast, including John Huston, Cyril Ritchard,  Hans Conreid, Orson Bean, Otto Preminger, Richard Boone and Brother Theodore.  And a charming opening-credit song, "The Greatest Adventure, sung by Glenn Yarborough.  The music is by Maury Laws with lyrics by Jules Bass. (Interestingly, the credits say that the lyrics are "written & adapted by...", so I would imagine that the foundation of the words are from Tolkien himself. 

(Fun Fact; You'll see in the credits that the script for this version of The Hobbit was written by Romeo Muller.  He wrote many, if not most of the Rankin/Bass specials, including their classic, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.)

Here 'tis --

WGN television carried Chicago Cubs baseball games for 72 years!  To put in perspective how remarkable that is, television hasn't been broadcasting much longer than that.  However, the other day was their last game, since the Cubs will have their own cable network starting next years.

Thanks to Eric Boardman who sent me a heads-up to this video tribute that WGN made as a tribute to its long history broadcasting baseball and the Cubs.

That said, much as I enjoyed the piece, I think it's only fair.  Too much is just generic about how one broadcasts a game, any game.  And they show very few highlights that have occurred over seven decades   But mostly, there is more focus on Harry Carey than Hall-of-Famer Jack Brickhouse.  Though Harry is far better known to most Americans through the WGA superstation, he only covered the team for 17 years.  A long time, to be sure, but Jack Brickhouse announced their games for 33 years.  Further, for 20 of those years on WGN, Jack didn't just broadcast the Cubs, but also the White Sox.  So, for 20 years, he did the play-by-play of both the Chicago Cubs and Chicago White Sox!!

Since this is a piece on WGN broadcasting the Cubs, I don't fault them for not referencing the White Sox.  But they sure could have focused more on Jack Brickhouse broadcasting almost half of the station's 72 years with the team.

Happily, he at least is part of the story, and it's handled fairly nicely.  With the baseball season ending on Sunday, here's the tribute.
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On this week's 3rd & Fairfax, the official podcast of the Writers Guild of America, we have a recording of the WGA event, "Sublime Primetime".  The was a roundtable panel  discussion that spotlighted this year’s Emmy-nominated writers for comedy, drama, and limited series.  It was recorded at the Writers Guild Theater on August 21.

I came across this video over the weekend, and hadn't even known of the reason behind it until then, though I'm certain many fans of the TV series Happy Days did.  Though I suspect not all of them knew what made it stand out.

This all came about when I was writing a friend about a revival of the musical A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum that played in Chicago around 1971.  It starred Phil Silvers as 'Pseudolus', and he was tremendous.  (If I recall correctly, Larry Gelbart -- who co-wrote the book with his then-partner Burt Shevelove -- told me that Silvers had been one of the first choices for the original production, but he turned it down.  When they made the movie, Zero Mostel recreated his starring Broadway role, but Silvers joined the cast as the procurer Marcus Lycus.  And then things came full circle, when he took on the lead role in the revival.)

The revival was originally intended to play only in Los Angeles, but thanks to Larry Blyden -- who played the sidekick, Hysterium and was also, I think, one of the producers -- he pushed the show to tour the country, where I saw it in Chicago, and then it went to Broadway.  Where Phil Silvers won the Tony Award as Best Leading Actor in a Musical.

(Don't worry, I'll get around to Happy Days -- but not yet.)

What's infuriating is that the production is the only one of the show's three on Broadway that didn't get a cast album.  Not only does that mean Phil Silvers' performance wasn't captured on record, they also didn't have a recording of the wonderful "The Echo Song" which was added to that production, and then dropped from later productions.  (I absolutely loved the song, but could never find a recording of it.  About 15-20 years later, I had become friends with Larry Gelbart and off-handedly asked him if he know whether there was a recording of the song.  He didn't know but said he'd ask Steve the next time they spoke.  I figured that that was his assistant -- but I then realized he meant the show's composer, Stephen Sondheim.  I thought that that was wonderfully nice of him, but didn't expect anything to come of it.  Even though Larry and I were friendly, it was only over email at that point.  We hadn't ever even met -- that was to come later.  But a week after, he wrote me back, "Steve says it was done in a little revue and has a copy. He's sending it to me, and I'll get it to you.  What's your address?"  As the expression goes, that it is high cotton.  And shows what a wonderful guy Larry Gelbart was.

Anyway, during the run of Forum Phil Silvers had a stroke.  Happily, he recovered enough to continue performing in some small things for the movies and TV.

At which point we'll now change gears and bring up...yes, Happy Days. At the time, one of the characters in the show was named 'Jennie Piccalo," a friend of 'Joanie Cunningham.  She was played by an actress named Cathy Silvers, who is the daughter of Phil Silvers.  I was aware of that, though at that point in the series' life I didn't watch it much.  And so I had no idea that they wrote an episode where Phil Silvers appeared and played the father of his real-life daughter.

And this is that scene.

He's clearly not in the best of health, but is nonetheless wonderful in the scene.  And there's even what is clearly a very-intentional touch of 'Sgt. Bilko' at the very end.

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.