The other day, Disney announced its news streaming service Disney Plus which will launch November 12.  Pricing will be $7 a month or $70 for an annual subscription, which most news reports commented how it compares favorably to $13 a month for Netflix's most popular tier.  The company said that they may eventually bundle Disney Plus with other of their services like Hulu and ESPN Plus.  During the first year, they expect to release 25 new series and 10 movies, documentaries and specials.  Overall, the Disney Plus library will have over 7,500 TV episodes and 500 movies.

It seems like a fascinating venture, with some plus and minuses.  On the plus side, Disney has a huge vault they can draw from, and recently bought the film division of 20th Century Fox, and now have that library, too -- which include the Star Wars franchise, the Avenger franchise and all 30 years of The Simpsons.  And among the new productions for the service are a Star Wars spinoff series, The Mandalorian and prequel to Rogue One (for which Diego Luna will reprise his role of Cassian Andor).  There will be a series Marvel Studios series Loki, that stars Tom Hiddleston reprising his role,; and a Pixar series Monsters at Work, that takes off after the events of the  original Monsters Inc. movie.

On the negative side -- or at least left out of most news stories is that the $7 a month is an "initial" price, most likely to get interest and subscriptions, and it seems probably that that will rise, and the cost-difference with Netflix will narrow.  In addition, Netflix has $9 stream plan, as well, which is much closer to Disney's "initial" offering.  And a significantly larger catalog -- 1,569 TV shows and 4,010 movies. (Keep in mind that the "7,500" figure for Disney is episodes, not shows.  If each Netflix TV series only has two years of 22 episodes each -- and keep in mind that old shows often had around 35 episodes a years and most not only ran for more than just two years, with some like Gunsmoke and Bonanza running for decades -- that works out to 70,000 episodes.

But further, it only compares with Netflix and leaves out Amazon.  An Amazon Prime subscription averages out to $10 a month.  And that not only includes a very large catalog, including international TV shows -- but most importantly includes free 2-day shipping on Amazon (and free next-day delivery on orders over $35), along with music streaming, cloud photo storage, Prime Now with free grocery and restaurant delivery within range, and more.

And no one should expect immediately competition with Netflix.  Disney predicts between 60-90 million subscribers in five years -- while Netflix currently has 140 million subscribers. Disney also says it expect so spend $2 billion a year over most of the next five years, while Netflix spends around $12 billion on content a year.

This is not to say that the Disney Plus service isn't intriguing and won't be a success.  In fact, it's very fascinating and seems poised to do well.  But as a complimentary service to Netflix and Amazon Prime, rather than one that can knock them out of the box.  Mainly, it's to say that most coverage of Disney Plus was pretty sketchy in its description of the landscape.

Besides which, who know how that landscape may be drastically changed in five years.

For fans of The Office -- and I mean the original, the English production with Ricky Gervais that he created with Stephen Merchant (although fans of the U.S. adaptation will enjoy the history behind it all, as well) -- this is a treat.  It's a wonderful, half-hour documentary on how the show came to be, and the story is pretty interesting and a lot of fun.

The documentary features Gervais and Merchant, and though I can't tell precisely when it was done, it appears to have been made before 2010.  At first, I was a bit wary since about 30-seconds in, with an effort to show the series' Grand Importance (which isn't needed since the British show is classic all on its own), the narrator refers to it winning two Golden Globes as "television's Oscars."  That would of course be the Emmys -- but making matters worse, the Golden Globes is a total joke, basically the equivalent of "your office pool's Oscars."  But with that hyperbole out of the way early, the rest of the documentary is very enjoyable.

This week, f/X begin its 8-part mini-series Fosse/Verdon about the loving, dynamic stormy, professional, volcanic relationship between director-choreographer Bob Fosse and actress-dancer Gwen Verdon.

I thought the first episode was extremely well-done and smart, and I liked how low-key it is, although I don’t find it overly compelling yet.  But it’s just the first episode, so I’ll take “extremely well-done and smart” for starters, and expect that, being smart, it will build from that.  (One challenge that the production has, as a friend noted, is that Bob Fosse himself already made the story, dynamically, in All That Jazz.  In fairness, that was a two-hour film, and this is eight hours, minus commercials.  Which is why I'm looking forward to the other areas it goes into.)
 
What I also loved -- and looked forward to further -- is that within minutes Fosse/Verdon begins with a musical number, the "Hey, Big Spender" song from the musical Sweet Charity..
 
Both lead actors, Sam Rockwell and Michelle Williams, did very good jobs.  But Williams has the more challenging role given that she was one of the most famous dancers in Broadway history.  She also had a unique, quivering voice, and Williams impressively pretty much has the Verdon Quiver down, which I’d think would be very difficult to do.

I also look forward to future episodes because the whole cast is seriously impressive.  And it's fun who they play, most particularly -- for my interest -- Neil Simon (Nate Cordry), Hal Prince (Evan Handler), Paddy Chayevsky (Norbert Leo Butz), Cy Feuer (Paul Reiser)  -- all great casting – along with the Broadway greats George Abbott, Chita Rivera, Liza Minnelli, Joel Grey and Jerry Orbach.
 
My only serious “quibble” has absolutely nothing to do with the show, but is about the promotion.  I've watched a couple of talk show interviews with Michelle Williams and Sam Rockwell, and both largely said the same thing – “Bob Fosse is really famous, but Gwen Verdon is pretty much unknown today, and this hopes to correct that..”  How difficult would it have been to say more accurately and provide much-better promotion at the same time –
 
“Bob Fosse is really famous, and though Gwen Verdon is still considered one of the greatest dancers and performers in Broadway history, outside of Broadway she’s pretty much unknown.”  Is that difficult??  And the thing is, as easy as that would be, even better would be to say it this way –
 
“Bob Fosse is really famous, and Gwen Verdon is still considered one of the greatest dancers and performers in Broadway history.  She was the original star of Chicago, and the original star of Damn Yankees, and in the movie, too, and was the original star of Sweet Charity.  And later in her career she even played Tom Selleck’s mother on Magnum, P.I. and starred in the hit movie Cocoon its sequel...Though outside of Broadway, she’s much more unknown.”
 
I don’t say this just for the sake of accuracy and because I know how famous Verdon still is on Broadway – but with my PR hat on.  Because the whole point of them being on those talk shows is to promote the mini-series!!  And it’s overwhelming world’s-better promotion to explain who someone is and why the audience should care instead of saying, “You don’t know her.”  And one would think that, at the very least, the actress playing someone famous would want the audience to know that “I am playing someone really famous and incredible” rather than “I’m playing someone you don’t know.”

Here are a few videos.  The first is a more general featurette about the mini-series -- with the filmmakers talking about it, along with brief clips.

Second, this is a more extended scene from the first episode.  It comes from when the movie Cabaret is being made in Europe, and director Fosse arguing with legendary producer Cy Feuer (played, as mentioned, by Paul Reiser), about a problem with the gorilla suit that the costume department has come up with for the important and controversial song, "If You Could See Her Through My Eyes."  

And finally, here are the real Gwen Verdon and Bob Fosse together in the 1958 movie version of Damn Yankees, ​that Verdon had won the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical on Broadway.  Fosse choreographed the movie adaptation, and this was his only appearance in the film, which was uncredited.

By the way, over on his website, Mark Evanier passed along the fun observation that at the very end of the scene, as the two of them run off-stage, the film's male star Tab Hunter tells them how great they are -- and says, "That was terrific, Fosse!"  Now, what I don't know is if this was a screw-up, though if so, one would think it would have been easily caught -- or if (because the character is so minor, it's not even referenced in the end credits) that this was an inside joke for giving the character a name.  Either way, they sure did dance together...

Thanks to my The West Wing buddy Shelly Goldstein for the heads-up on this.  The Lady Shellington and I used to call one another after each episode and joyfully analyze the bejeepers out of it.  How this special video from a couple years ago, made during the Obama Administration, slipped through our joint awareness is beyond me.

The background is a famous episode in which a subplot concerned Big Block of Cheese Day, which was from the days of Andrew Jackson.  A...well, big block of cheese was stationed in the White House for the general public, but the larger point was for people to have access to the administration for making comments and complaints.
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As a bonus, here is an interview with the show's creator Aaron Sorkin and one of the stars Bradley Whitford when they appeared on The Late Show with James Corden.  It's enjoyable, but what stands out is a story that Whitford tells about rehearsing his lines one day when they were on location in Washington, D.C.
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Yesterday, I wrote about the show, Lights Out: Nat "King" Cole, which takes place during the final performance of his TV series on NBC.  One of the unexpected scenes is when his guest is a very young Billy Preston, who later went on to be a great rock star in the last '60s.  It turns out that that was true, if not exactly in the timing, then close -- I have no idea if Preston's appearance was on the final show, but he most definitely was a guest.

In fact, here's a clip from that actual TV appearance of 11-year-old Billy Preston with Nat "King" Cole in 1957.
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And as a bonus, here's a grown-up Billy Preston on Soul Train with probably his biggest hit, "Nothing from Nothing."
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The other day, I wrote here about this week's episode of the IFC faux-documentary series, Documentary Now! and posted a video of it.  The show was a parody of the famous documentary by DA Pennebaker on the making of the Broadway cast album of the Stephen Sondheim musical, Company.
 
I hope you got to see it -- it was absolutely wonderful, even if one hasn’t seen the original it’s spoofing.  Though if you have seen it (and if one knows Sondheim’s reputation for being obsessively meticulous), it’s a total joy, full of tiny, throwaway moments that are gems, down to the wardrobe for the character who’s supposed to be like Elaine Stritch.
 
The good news is that if you missed it, I believe it will be available On Demand starting tomorrow, March 1, in the IFC section listed under Season 3.  But if not (or if you don’t want to wait until then or until it is eventually available On Demand), you can watch it online by signing into the IFC website using your cable company username and password by clicking on this link here.
 
The show was co-written by standup John Mulaney, who I like a lot (and who plays the Sondheim-ish character) and Seth Meyers, and they both did the song lyrics, as well.
 
If you haven't seen the original documentary, I embedded it here a few years ago, though it's no longer available online.  However, you can get it on Netflix.  It’s great to see for itself, but most especially in conjunction with this.  This is the Netflix link)
 
And here's a fun clip from near the opening of the show.  That's Taran Killam of Saturday Nigh Live as the music director who is producing the album.
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With the Oscars out of the way, I thought I would nonetheless stick with movies for another day.

​Turner Classic Movies is finishing up its annual, glorious "31 Days of Oscar," where each presentation over that period are either Oscar winners, or had a least one nomination.  It's always a joyous time of year for just great movie-watching.  Movie after movie.  And the channel itself does wonderful job throughout the year with presenting and promoting old and classic and even just ordinary movies as its commercial and cultural mission.  Which brings me to what I fully acknowledge is nothing more than a Point of Personal Privilege.  Which in this case takes its form as a rant.

Tiny details are not especially important in the grand scheme of far-larger landscapes, and much of this is just quibbles.  And admittedly, as I said, a personal rant.  Though I think in the end it has a larger point because TCM heralds itself as the guardian of movies and the source of record, so such things matter in that context.  And for a long while, other than when the late Robert Osborne wasn't on the air, the results at TCM for its commentary are fairly empty.  To be clear, Osborne wasn't just a "movie geek" as bios describe some of their new hosts, but an actual movie historian who studied and knew and understood the details.  I have no idea how much research TCM's other hosts do about movies, and how much of what they say is written by others.  But the holes are too often so massive you could drive the train from the end of Bridge on the River Kwai through it.

Ben Mankiewicz has great movie-family pedigree, but I never get a sense that he has all that much love or even appreciation for movies.  And if he does, it doesn't come through.  It's not that his bookend commentaries on movies are far too often surface, pointless and tend to miss what is actually important historically and cinematically, but regularly veer off into other movies that have almost zero connection to the movie at hand.

This is more about what has come since, when TCM has brought in some new hosts, though I've only seen their Sunday addition, Australian Alicia Malone -- one of their "movie geeks," who at least has written about movies  Again, though, i don't know if she does her own research and on-air commentary, or relies on a staff, or if it's a mix of both, but over the last couple of weeks, when I first saw, her there have been issues that are glaring regardless of who did the writing.

To be clear, what I'm about to mention are just a very few examples and as such will come across as petty.  But it's only three because there are only three, but rather because I haven't written down all the others over time -- from her, Mankiewicz and others.  I've just gnashed my teeth and moved on.  And so these three serve, not as the evidence of what I'm saying, but examples of the larger issue of how uninformative and surface the channel in its commentary has become.

Last week, the channel showed the musical Bye Bye Birdie.  In her description, Malone admirably said who wrote the screenplay -- and she gets big points for that, since most people leave out the screenwriter.  But she didn't mention Charles Strouse and Lee Adams, who wrote the songs!  How do you talk about a musical and not mention who wrote the songs??  Even if you didn't write the commentary yourself, you'd think a person reading it would notice that beforehand and ask for the information to be included.  And when talking about how Paul Lynde recreated his role from the stage production...she didn't mention that...oh, the movie's star, Dick Van Dyke, one of the most beloved actors in American TV and film history. not only was also recreating his Broadway stage role...but had won a Tony Award for it!!  Moreover, it was the Broadway role, in fact, that helped get him hired for his legendary TV series, The Dick Van Dyke Show.  Seriously, if you're going to mention Paul Lynde recreating his stage role, how does one leave all that out??  Something a movie geek should know, or that a researcher would easily find out.

The movie was followed on the schedule that day by Oliver!  Or as it's actually, officially known -- since he wrote the book, music and lyrics -- "Lionel Bart's Oliver!"  And in Ms. Malone's commentary on the movie, nowhere did she once ever even mention the name...Lionel Bart.  How on earth do you do a commentary on Oliver!  -- sorry, on "Lionel Bart's Oliver!" -- and not even mention Lionel Bart??!  Forget for a moment that it's Lionel Bart you're not mentioning in "Lionel Bart's Oliver!"...once again, how do you not mention who wrote the music and lyrics (whoever the person is) for a musical??!!  

I let all that slide until the next Sunday, yesterday, when they aired the movie musical High Society.  Ms. Malone began by talking about last week they had three movie musicals based on Broadway musicals, and this week they have three more.  Except High Society is not based on a Broadway musical, but was an original.  (Yes, it's based on a movie which is based on a Broadway play, but that's very different.)  She also kept referring to the film as a "remake" of film and stage play, The Philadelphia Story.  But it's not -- any more than My Fair Lady is a "remake" of Pygmalion, or West Side Story is a "remake" of Romeo and Juliet.  It's a totally different creature, a musical adaptation.  That's another animal entirely from a "remake."  More to the point was a story she told about the film's Oscar nominations --

She mentioned High Society's two nominations for Best Song and Best Music Scoring.  And then told the tale of how there was a mix-up with "Best Story," confusing High Society with a film of the same title the previous year, until the other writers noticed it on the list of eligible movies and informed the Academy.  And then she added that the Motion Picture Academy apparently let those earlier writers keep the plaque with their nomination, noting with a smile that "I don't know if that's true, but I hope it is."  The problem is that just moments earlier, she said that the movie only got two nominations -- neither of which you'll recall was for Best Story.  So, by her own words, just seconds earlier, there is zero possible way that the writers would have kept a "Best Story" nomination plaque.  Since, by her own words, it didn't get a Best Story nomination!  And it doesn't matter if she did the research about that anecdote or someone else did -- anyone reading the copy could have easily noticed that.

To be fair, the movie that followed High Society on the TCM schedule was The Music Man, and she did a respectable job introducing it.  There was much more she could have added, like that the film's director Morton DaCosa (who she mentions) also directed the Broadway production.  A small, but valuable item, as long as you're mentioning him.  And that several cast members of the movie other than Robert Preston recreated their Broadway roles.  Pert Kelton (as Mama Paroo), The Buffalo Bills barbershop quarter, and Harry Hickox (who played the adversarial traveling salesman).  But still, it was a solid introduction.

And she also did a reasonable job with the following movie, 1776.  Yet even at this it was largely surface.  For instance, she mentioned that Peter Hunt directed the film -- but not that he had also directed the stage version.  She mentioned, too, that the production used much of the original Broadway cast -- but not that for the other roles, almost everyone else in the movie had also appeared in either a touring production or subsequent Broadway cast of 1776.  And while she mentioned that the film only did moderately-well and got mediocre reviews, she importantly left out the reason why!  I mean, if you're going to criticize a movie (especially one you're about to present), while that's fair, though odd with no context, it would seem proper to point out the reason for the criticism:  that 40 minutes of the movie had been cut out!  And left unsaid is that it's only been in recent years after intense research tracking down lost material and meticulous restoration (including footage that very conservative producer Jack L. Warner had ordered destroyed for it being too liberal) that the finally-approved "Director's Cut" movie -- which is now what TCM shows, as the filmmaker intended -- has finally received its share of long-overdue acclaim. Bizarrely, and I personally think unnecessarily, she even doubled-down after the film by quoting from bad reviews, rather than noting that the stage version (which is what this final just shown far-more closely matches) had not only won the Tony Award as Best Musical, but also the Pulitzer Prize..

As I said, I know that this is all niggling.  And it's only just a small handful of observations.  To be clear, it's actually not meant as a specific singling-out of Alicia Malone -- who does seem to have a knowledge of and love of movies, far more than the channel's main host Ben Mankiewicz -- just that with the luck of the draw she's the person I've most recently seen and can comment on.  (And have generally gotten to the point where I skip past what Mankiewicz has to say.)  But I repeat.  It's the culmination of A LOT of errors and glaring, core omissions I've seen on TCM for quite a while now, none of which I've written down or can remember the details of, and these are only the small handful of examples from just two days the past week to serve as examples of the larger issue.  And -- importantly -- because TCM prides and markets itself as the depository of movies as an important part of American culture (something they do a great job of in their presentation and much else, including festivals, seminars and original featurettes), it's not nit-picking to notice when they slide so far off the track so often in their commentary of that history.

​There, I got that out of the way.  For now.

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 --