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
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
I’m not going to pretend I watched a minute of The 62nd Annual Grammy Awards but a lot of other people did. In Canada, an overnight, estimated 1,790,000 tuned in to the music industry salute on Citytv. In the U.S., despite controversies leading up to the telecast, 16.5 million-plus watched on CBS in initial estimates
If you’re watching CBS tonight (Friday) and you notice the I Love Lucy episode is in colour, don’t tough that dial! Since there haven’t been any dials on TV screens in 25 years, that should be easy. The good news is that CBS is broadcasting another fully restored and digitized episode from the 1951-’57 series
Throughout December, I’ll be re-posting features on some holiday TV favourites. Today’s salute is to A Charlie Brown Christmas, which first aired in December of 1965. The following post first ran four years ago, on the 50th anniversary of the special. Good grief! Has it really been 50 years since I first watched, along with
Snuff out the Tiki torch and toss away the Doritos. Rudy Boesch has left the island. The grizzled Navy SEAL veteran and inaugural Survivor contestant passed away Nov. 1 at 91. Boesch and the 15 other Survivor originals were a sensation when the reality show premiered in the summer of 2000. I was in my
It’s not an overstatement to say that the most influential sitcom in the history of television premiered 68 years ago today — I Love Lucy. Lucille Ball, a one time RKO chorus girl who stood out in a string of feature film dramas and comedies in the late ’30s and ’40s, became TV’s biggest star
Toronto native Sabrina Jalees co-stars with multiple Emmy winner Patricia Heaton this season on the new sitcom Carol’s Second Act (premiering Thursday on CBS and Global). The two of them had just stepped off a first class flight from Los Angeles when I interviewed them this past June at Corus headquarters in Toronto. Jalees, best