Category Archives: Television

SNL50

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Prometheus at 30 Rock

I was in college when Saturday Night Live debuted. I wasn’t watching TV in ’75, so I must have missed it. Eventually, I started to watch it and a while later, as I got older, I switched from watching it live, to catching it later on Sunday morning. Last night, they aired a special presentation of the show in primetime, and I managed to catch that live. The show has turned fifty this year and is celebrating its longevity with a nostalgic trip down memory lane. Last night’s special was much like the regular show, many of the sketches fell flat, but a few of them struck comedy gold. It has always been that way with this show, where a few laughs are enough to sustain the show and paper over its more numerous flops. Last year, the show’s prequel tried to recapture the craziness of its origin that has now morphed into a culture defining institution. It did a good enough job, but looking back, it is hard to believe what it has grown into today. Lorene Michaels the show’s creator is now eighty and last night’s show kept posing the question of his replacement. My bet is on Seth Meyers.

Saturday Night

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Saturday Night

In Shakespeare in Love, Geoffrey Rush is accosted by villains wanting their investment money back. He is questioned how will the play (you know) go on? Rush answers, “I don’t know. It’s a mystery.” That is the theme for the frenetic ninety minutes preceding the launch of what is now known as Saturday Night Live (SNL). Fifty years ago, the show was called Saturday Night. and in the runup to that first episode it’s not ready for primetime players were living up to their name. This inside baseball, making sausage, behind the scenes look at what has become an institution is enjoyable if only for posing the question, did that really happen? Since the movie ends with the show going live, we had to watch that original episode next, which was much better than one would expect.

Game of Thrones

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Dragon Prison Cell Emblem

Today, we left Dubrovnik, but first a leisurely breakfast in Old Town, followed by a second cup of coffee elsewhere and then some souvenir shopping. The bus from Old Town to the ferry was frenetic to say the least, but we made it with time to spare. We had lunch while waiting for the ferry. ⛴️ The boat ride was a five hour tour.

Dubrovnik was the real life stand in for the Game of Thrones capitol, King’s Landing. The emblem pictured is from the “Dragon” prison cell, named after the figure of a dragon that was carved on the right hand side of the doorway. It was part of the block of cells in the Rector’s Palace which housed the more hardened criminals.

Bad Monkey

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Key West Chickens

Carl Hiaasen, a reporter turned writer is all about South Florida. He used to write for the Miami Hearld, before he turned to writing books. His bound works can be loosely divided into two categories, young adult fiction and crime stories. All set in Florida. In the first category, Hoot, a story about burrowing owls and the ecologetic fight to save them has already been made into a movie. In the second category, Bad Monkey appears to be the first of these works to be getting the Hollywood treatment. While not actually having read either of these stories, I have had them both read to me via books on tape, all the while driving on cross country road trips. For Bad Monkey we were even going to Key West where that novel is set. In the early days of post-retirement road trips, we would often choose an audiobook to listen to that was set in the locale of our destination. Now we have satellite radio and just blast tunes as we trundle on down the road. Here is a link to the raving New York Times review of this book.

Bad Monkey is scheduled to begin streaming on Apple TV in August. It will star Vince Vaughn as Andrew Yancy the Key West detective who has been demoted to food inspector. I have high hopes for this series, because this show is being created by Bill Lawerence of Ted Lasso fame. Hiaasen has already written a slew of Yancy detective stories, making the possibility for multiple seasons.

A Gentleman in Moscow

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By Nikita Karimov on Unsplash

It must almost be summertime, because all of my TV shows are wrapping up their seasons. First there was Sugar, and now it is A Gentleman in Moscow. This period drama, based upon the novel by Amor Towles, follows Ewan McGregor as Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov (Ewan McGregor)—Sasha to his friends, or “Your Excellency” to the dwindling minority of Russians who still recognize honorifics, is an aristocrat caught up in the Russian turmoil of the first half of the 20th-century. Beginning after the Bolshevik Revolution and running through to Khrushchev and the Cold War, this is a story told through a series of vignettes, that punctuate the history of that time. He is spared a bullet, when a tribunal attributes a famous revolutionary poem to him. He is instead sentenced to a lifetime of house arrest in the downtown Moscow Metropol Hotel.

Even a gilded cage is still a cage and getting kicked upstairs from his luxury suite to the drafty servant’s quarters above, only hastens the dissipation of the novelty of his situation. This leaves Rostov to entertain himself as best he can, as he counts the days of his imprisonment. This story is fiction, but the Metropol Hotel is real and still stands across the street from the Kremlin. Played with boundless optimism by McGregor, over the years, Rostov gradually adopts the family that he never knew from the hotel’s staff and guests. Occasionally the historical events occurring outside the hotel intrude, but they must usually take a backseat to the personal stories that populate Rostov’s world within the hotel.

Sugar

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LA – City of the Stars

Sugar, a noir, mystery, Sci-Fi, detective series has just concluded on Apple TV+. Starring Colin Farrel in the titular role and set-in modern-day Los Angeles it is more than anything an homage to Hollywood and its historical films that made the movies what they are today. It is also a show with a congenital allergy to spoilers. John Sugar is a man who is singularly gifted at finding people. This series opens in Tokyo, where John has just found a female kidnap victim. A victim who happens to be related to a yakuza crime lord. Sugar offers the kidnapper one last chance to come clean but ends up having to call-in the yakuza anyway. Arriving, Sugar is ushered out, sealing the kidnapper’s fate.

He returns to LA, his base of operations and where the remainder of this eight-part series is set. His next case is another missing girl. Granddaughter of Hollywood royalty and a drug addict, her disappearance is a matter of some ambivalence to the family, saying she will eventually turn up, she always does.

John Sugar himself is a mystery and a bit of a stereotype too, seemingly wealthy, obsessed with old movies, a linguist, he suffers from some sort of physical-neurological condition. He also drives a classic blue Corvette convertible that is hardly low profile. This list of characteristics leaves you with the epidemy of a hardboiled LA detective, in the mold of Jack Nicholson’s Chinatown.

Everything is going to plan, the case is developing nicely, a few bodies have popped up, when out of left field a curveball is thrown that throws the audience for a loop. Many were not happy with this surprise. Still, in the end, Sugar was able to stick the landing. The question remains though what happens next. Will there be another season or not. With a divided audience this is anyone’s guess.