Oprah must really be desperate:

NY Post:

But I’m a “deep cut” kind of movie lover, someone who likes to see absolutely everything in the hopes of digging up a gem everyone else appears to have missed. The only thing I love more than my secret stash of  cinematic gems, is the sharing of them. And the beauty of Lumet is that he had a number of sleepers, chief among them one of my wife’s all-time favorites, A Stranger Among Us with Melanie Griffith. The film was written by our own Robert Avrech and not only ranks as a terrific murder mystery/urban thriller, but also a delicately crafted love letter to both human dignity and the Jewish faith. Beneath all the drama and mystery, you’ll find a life-affirming subtext and thematic drive that tenderly examines the big issues of  fidelity, faith, and loyalty in ways movies then, and especially now, simply don’t anymore. For this reason it stands out in Lumet’s work, which is both a credit to the director and my friend Robert.  

Here are some others worth seeking out if you haven’t already…

Garbo Talks (1984): One of Lumet’s few escapist films with a perfectly cast Ron Silver as a Manhattan worker bee who drops everything to fulfill his dying mother’s (a never better Anne Bancroft) wish to meet the elusive Greta Garbo.

Running On Empty (1988): A sleeper and near-masterpiece I ranked as #18 in my countdown of the Top 25 Greatest Left-Wing Films of All Time. 

Q & A 1990: A relentlessly brutal noir piece with an unforgettable central performance from Nick Nolte as a depraved police detective slowly spiraling out of violent control as a young district attorney (Timothy Hutton) attempts to bring him down. Armand Assante and Luis Guzman were never better in a couple of supporting roles that made me a lifelong fan of both.

Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead (2007): The best compliment I can pay this unbelievably engrossing thriller (on of the best of that year) that stirs your guts with a stick, is that it plays like the kind of movie a first-time director would create to make his mark and take his place in the world of cinema. This is Lumet’s “Reservoir Dogs,” a young man’s film made by a then 83 year-old living legend with nothing to prove.

Sure, Lumet was a left-wing filmmaker, but he was so damned brilliant you didn’t notice and after you did, you simply didn’t care. My thanks to Mr. Lumet for the many, many, hours of pleasure he has brought — and thanks to DVD, will continue to bring into my life.

May he rest in peace.

I now turn you over to… The New York Times.

There was a considerable span of time where NBC was the dominant force in television.  They were behind a long series of hit shows that included The Cosby Show, Cheers, Night Court, Will and Grace, Seinfeld, Hill Street Blues, etc.  NBC’s “Must See TV” lineup gave people reasons to stay conscious on a Thursday evening that didn’t involve preparing their livers for a Friday night of clubbing.  Something happened in 2004.  Maybe it was the re-election of George W.  Bush or maybe it was the ending of their last truly great series “Friends,” but at some point in time that year, something broke both NBC’s spirit and their brain.  

It started simply enough.  Then Network President, Jeff Zucker, tried to replace “Friends” with two sub standard shows, Coupling and Joey.  Coupling was a British show that NBC tried to bring to an American audience.  The problem was that this program was the Brits low rent version of Friends.  Replacing a popular show, with something that looks a little like it, but without the charm is sort of like trying to replace your first love with a latex based product bought at a Fredrick’s of Hollywood outlet.  It’s just not the same.  Coupling didn’t work out and neither did the show, Joey.  Building a spin-off around the least intriguing character of the Friends cast was a mistake on par with the New Coke, the show After M.A.S.H. and “Hope and Change.”  After that the bad decisions just kept on coming. 

They cancelled My Name is Earl (a show three years removed from its ratings peak, but still viable with over six million viewers) and replaced it with the horrible Parks and Recreation.  From a ratings perspective, My Name is Earl was (at its worst) more successful then Parks and Recreation was at its best. 

From 2004 to 2010, NBC was the broadcast network version of the Trail of Tears.  They piled blunder on top of blunder with nonsensical moves that included trying to turn their massive layoffs of hundreds of workers and deep cost cuts into a marketing campaign.  They veiled their failures in with the publicity campaign NBC 2.0. Nobody was buying this, and the networks average rating sank to 3.1.  NBC followed up this marketing disaster by resurrecting such shows nobody wanted to see rise from the grave.  Despite this, Knight Rider and American Gladiators were brought back from the dead.  During the writers’ strike, network President, Jeff Zucker, believed it would be a good idea to go on prime time television and mock the people who actually bring to life what we see when we tune into a program.  

While all of the above would be considered lethal errors, the crown jewel of incompetence that NBC managed to perpetrate involved The Tonight Show.  In 2004 Zucker gave Jay Leno a five year heads up that Conan O’Brien would be taking over Johnny Carson’s seat in 2009.  After leading up to the Leno/O’Brien transition for half a decade Conan only lasted 8 months as the in the job.  He left the network (after they paid him $33 million to go away) and Jay Leno was reinstalled as The Tonight Show host.  

This laundry list of gaffes would be acceptable for any network owned by a guy named Shemp, but not for NBC.  This is something that the powers that be at Comcast probably realize, and there will probably be some big changes coming to the Peacock network. 

Nobody knows what Comcast will do with the network, but just about anything they do that doesn’t involve water boarding the cast of The Office has got be an improvement on the current product.  Comcast, being a cable provider, has been exposed to a diverse world of programming that is well beyond the borders of the media bubble that Zucker and his sycophants lived in.  It is likely they would not have botched The Tonight Show handoff, resurrected Knight Rider, or passed on bringing Battlestar Galactica to network television.  

Those of us who love television are waiting with great anticipation to see what happens to the Peacock under the new regime.

In terms of their plots, “24” and “Lost” have very little in common. “24,” which ran for eight years on Fox, was about a counter-terrorism agent named Jack Bauer. Each episode detailed an hour in the life of Bauer and his work fighting against terrorists and threats to the United States. “Lost,” on the other hand, ran for six years on ABC and told the story of a group of plane crash survivors who land on a strange and mysterious island and had to learn to live on that island while dealing with a “smoke monster” and a group of mysterious individuals on the island’s other side.

Admittedly, I have not seen every episode of “Lost” (I recently watched the first few seasons  and the sixth season when it aired), and I likely missed a few random episodes of “24″ along the way, but it only takes an episode or two of each program for a viewer to realize that these shows are not typical network fare. Firstly, both addressed issues that are seldom brought up on network television. This USA Today article about “Lost” in mid-May noted:

“Lost covered topics not usually seen on series TV, with an array of references from the Casmir effect in physics to philosophers both famous, including John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and more obscure, such as Jeremy Bentham.”

“Lost” also dealt with questions of faith, destiny, and redemption and was not afraid to answer them. On the other hand, “24” dealt with the topic of counter-terrorism in this country. It had its own share of controversies (including the choice of villains) but it also added to the debate about torture and harsh interrogation techniques — a debate that will likely continue with references to “24.”

Neither of these popular shows was built as a typical episodic program, which is one of the best things about them. Both relied and celebrated viewer loyalty. With other shows, such as “CSI” or “Law & Order,” fans could watch on a casual basis. Many of the episodes are self-contained and formulaic. I have nothing against that format, but I applaud shows that decide to pursue a more unique course, as well.

With shows like “24” and “Lost,” watching an episode here or there was difficult. With “Lost,”  there were clues and foreshadowing in varying episodes and a lot of the episodes and story-lines built off of one another. For instance, it’s difficult to fully understand John Locke, one of the lead characters, without being aware of his complete back-story. You had to watch a lot of episodes to see what happened to Locke before he crashed on the island. On the other hand, each season of “24” was a day in the life of its protagonist. Each episode built on the previous one, which in turn continued the excitement throughout the season. Missing an episode might mean that a viewer missed a resolution to a previously presented conflict or the death of a major character.

The willingness to kill off major characters was also an exciting part of both programs. With a lot of network shows, the same characters (both in major and minor roles) remain for long periods. However, both “24” and “Lost” were willing to write off certain characters to serve the purpose of the story and because of that there were a lot of casualties (some welcome, but many unwelcome). These deaths were sometimes shocking and showed viewers that the stories wouldn’t be predictable thanks to writers willing to make tough choices.  

This is not the only similarity between the two. Both were also critically acclaimed and both won a Best Drama Emmy during their runs. They also featured large casts.

Finally, both should serve as encouraging signs that television can and should take risks and find success outside of normal formats. So let’s hope that this summer season has a few surprises on the schedule so we know the networks are still willing to take risks for the sake of  a satisfying story.

I’ve always heard that misery loves company.  If true, misery in America has more company these days than it knows what do with. 

I realize that conservatives have felt this way ever since the Democrats nominated the Chicago crony of Bill Ayers, Jeremiah Wright, Tony Rezko, Rod Blagojevich and the assorted felons at ACORN, to be our president, but why aren’t millions of honest, decent, hard-working Democrats up in arms?  I can guarantee that if a Republican president had done half the things that Obama has pulled off in his first half year, most of us on the right would be calling for his head.  At the very least, none of us would be kissing his heinie. 

Even before grabbing up car companies and banks, he got the ball rolling with a trillion dollar, 1100-page pork-filled stimulus package that had to be passed, he insisted, within a few short hours or America was going to be turned into a pumpkin.  Well, without anyone having had time to read anything but the price tag, it was passed into law.  Obama then took his own sweet time signing it.  In the months since its passage, the unemployment rate has soared, entire states are going belly up and, apparently, nobody seems to know what happened to the money. 

Then there’s the Waxman-Markey cap and trade bill, which started out in life at a thousand pages, and then had a 300-page amendment tacked on to it in the dead of night.  It was as if Dr. Frankenstein, after carefully inspecting his nightmarish creation, decided that what the monster really needed was a second head and a hunchback.  Again, nobody had time to read the bill, but that didn’t prevent 219 congressmen, including eight Republicans who scurried out from under a rock just long enough to make certain that Christmas, or perhaps I mean Ramadan, would come early for the President. 

As I recall, when he was a candidate, Obama assured us that taxes would be decreased for 95% of all Americans.  Inasmuch as the Heritage Foundation estimates that the cap and trade bill will wind up costing the average middle class taxpayer nearly $3,000 in additional energy costs, I guess a tax isn’t a tax if you don’t call it one.  Of course Obama and Al Gore and their liberal lackeys don’t mention the jobs that people in the oil and coal industries will lose while we’re busily building windmills.  Perhaps those folks who were formerly occupied supplying the wherewithal so that America could continue to be a major industrial nation can be hired to stand around and generate energy by blowing at the windmills.

Maybe what Obama meant when he claimed we’d be paying less in taxes was that we’d all be on the dole before the next election rolled around.  

During the campaign, when Obama vowed that, if elected, he would create or save four million jobs, I speculated that he meant that if at some point there were four million Americans who were still working, he could say he’d kept his campaign promise.  I swear I meant it as a joke. 

Inasmuch as Obama seems to be doing all he can to turn America into a left-wing third world nation, it stands to reason that he was far more perturbed by a military coup in Honduras than by innocent blood being spilled in the streets after a rigged election in Iran. 

It’s amazing, if you stop and think about it, that George H.W. Bush lost his bid for re-election because he was goofy enough to say, “Read my lips…no new taxes,” but Obama does his level best to bankrupt America and destroy the middle class, and yet continues to ride nearly as high in the popularity polls as Michael Jackson.  Imagine if the man could moonwalk. 

But, I guess a lot of us who find ourselves going down the financial drain don’t really mind so long as we can watch Prince Obama and his princess holding hands on their $250,000 date night in New York City. 

It’s almost enough to make a person pity Bernard Madoff.  That poor shmuck got a 150-year prison sentence, and he only screwed Americans out of about 65 billion dollars.