In October of 2006, I headed out to the Music Hall in Toronto to see Tonight Show legend Ed McMahon. I had interviewed the veteran sidekick on the phone a few days earlier for the Toronto Sun (read that story here). He sounded excited to be coming to a place called the “Music Hall,” and
Two thousand and eight was a tough year for TV critics. Many were re-assigned or lost their jobs altogether, caught in the squeeze of higher newsprint costs, lower advertising revenues and the apparent generational shift away from daily newspapers. Roger Ebert suggested in an article a month ago that film critics–also dropping like, well, canaries–were
If you are a fan of B-movies from the ’50s, or ’60s TV shows like My Three Sons, you had to be a fan of Beverly Garland. The blond-haired actress passed away Friday at 82. Read her obit in the L.A. Times here. Garland was one of those throaty, no-nonsense women who kicked ass in
For decades, if you wrote a letter to Starweek magazine, asking for an address to write to a star, or to get information on your favorite TV show, the guy who answered your letter was Eirik Knutzen. So it was with sadness to read in the TCA newsletter sent to critics today that Knutzen passed
Paul Newman, who died Friday after a long battle with cancer (read the well-prepared Associated Press obit here), was one of those iconic film stars who rarely bothered with television. One memorable cameo came during the very first Late Show with David Letterman in 1993. New to CBS and the Ed Sullivan Theatre, Letterman playfully
Frequent readers of this blog (you know who you both are) already know my nerdy little secret. The one show this bleary-eyed TV critic PVR’s every night and watches the next day isn’t Hole In The Wall or America’s Got Cramps or whatever the hell else they’re sticking us with this fall. It is a
Sad, shocking news about Tim Russert, the NBC News correspondent and Meet The Press host who died Friday of a heart attack at 58. Russert was a proud native of Buffalo. N.Y., and boasted that he attended the famous 1969 Woodstock concert “in a Buffalo Bills jersey with a case of beer.” Before he went
Earle Hagen, composer of The Dick Van Dyke Show and The Andy Griffith Show themes, died Monday in Los Angeles. He was 88, which is a sweet number to reach if you are a composer, especially if you play the piano (88 keys). Read his L.A. Times obit here. A former big band trombonist, Hagen