Here’s a sobering thought: with the passing of Lyle Waggoner, — setting Dick Van Dyke’s half-season tenure aside — Carol Burnett and Vicky Lawrence are now the only surviving main cast members from The Carol Burnett Show. Wagoner died Tuesday, March 17 in Los Angeles after a short illness. He was 84. Here’s a couple
Sports fans are already climbing the walls with all the major leagues suspended until further notice. That now looks to be for much longer than just two or three weeks, jeopardizing everything from the NBC and NHL playoffs to the launch of the baseball season to The Masters and The Kentucky Derby. Sportsnet has already
Remember when all we had to worry about was more snow? The COVID-19 virus has many of us bunkered down in self issolation, hiding behind a fortress of toilet paper. Schools and sports leagues have been suspended and late night talk shows are either dark or performed in empty studios. For those looking towards their
I really wish I had met Earl Pomerantz, especially after reading Ken Levine’s wonderful tribute to his friend and fellow television writer. Pomerantz, a Canadian whose writing credits read like a Paley Centre tribute to the Golden Age of American sitcoms, died Saturday at 75. The Emmy award winner got his first TV writing gig
In the excellent new HBO documentary “Ali: vs. Cavett: The Tale of the Tapes,” civil rights activist and MSNBC host Al Sharpton observes that Dick Cavett “was the whitest of white guys in America. But he gave blacks that had been considered outside of the mainstream – like Ali – a chance to be heard,
I was there the day Robert Conrad ended his network television career. It was way back in my early days at TV Guide magazine, sometime in the late ’80s. Conrad, who died Saturday in Malibu at 84, was trying to make a TV comeback at the time. The macho TV star, who came to fame
Usually I beg off radio requests to pay homage to celebrities who have just died unless I have a personal story to tell. The latest request came with news of the passing of Kirk Douglas. The Hollywood legend passed away Wednesday at 103, and so many others have better stories to tell. Still, it was
By the time I started covering television in the mid-’80s, one of the titans of the industry was already switching sides — Fred Silverman. The native New Yorker, who passed away Thursday at 82, did what nobody before or since has ever accomplished — he was the top programming exec at each one of the