A quick programming note: tonight, Friday July 3, CBS is airing back to back and colourized episodes of The Dick Van Dyke Show as a tribute to the late, great creator of the series, Carl Reiner. They’ve actually called the special The Dick Van Dyke Show — in Living Colour! A Tribute to Carl Reiner,
One of the great elder statesmen of American broadcast news is coming to Canada. Following the retirement of Walter Cronkite in 1981, Dan Rather spent 24 years in the big chair as anchor of the CBS Evening News. Before that, he was CBS’s man in Dallas on the fateful day when U.S. president John F.
It is mid-May, 2020. By now, the major US broadcast networks have usually had their blockbuster upfront presentations in New York. Canadian broadcast execs would be flying down to Los Angeles this week to scoop up shows during the annual “Hollywood Screenings.” Not this week and not this year. The COVID-19 pandemic had shut down
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