TVSquad

Don Lipp passed away last Thursday at age 70. No, I didn't recognize the name either, but as I was reading his obituary I had this incredible flashback to the mid-70s and one of the game shows he produced: The Moneymaze! (I've seen it spelled two ways - The Moneymaze and The Money Maze.)

I remember I was excited when it premiered, because it had this outrageously large, complex (and probably expensive) maze set. Couples would compete against other couples, and when it got to the maze part one spouse would guide the other through the maze on the way to a big money prize.

• At 8, ABC has a special Jimmy Kimmel Live, followed by the Lakers/Magic game.
• NBC has a new I'm A Celebrity ... Get Me Out Of Here at 8, followed by the series premiere of The Listener.
• TCM has a classic Dick Cavett interview with Ingmar Bergman at 8, followed by The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries.
• Also at 8: Versus has the Red Wings/Penguins game.
• At 9, FOX has a new So You Think You Can Dance.
• USA has the season premiere of Burn Notice at 9, then the series premiere of Royal Pains.
• TLC has a new American Chopper at 8, followed by a new Street Customs.
• At 10, Comedy Central has the series premiere of Tosh.0 at 10 (two episodes).
• Bravo has a new episode of The Fashion Show at 10.

Check your local TV listings for more.

After the jump, the late night talk shows.

What's going on at the other TV blogs via the internets.

• Wanna save Friday Night Lights? Send light bulbs to NBC!
• Are there cartoons where Sylvester the Cat actually wins in the end?
• Survivor got the lowest debut ratings in the show's history the other night.
• Conan O'Brien and an audience member ran through the MSNBC studios yesterday.
• Did you know Dick Cavett is keeping a blog at The New York Times site?
• Will the final episodes of Scrubs go straight to DVD?
• Jeopardy! champ Ken Jennings has a new book out.

Pioneers of Television (in stores today) is a pretty big title for a documentary series, especially one that lasts only four episodes. You wonder, what are they going to mention and what are they going to leave out? This PBS show isn't the most comprehensive look I've seen on each of its subjects, but for one miniseries in one package, it's actually well put together, and you're going to see some TV footage, photos, and interviews I bet you've never seen before.

I'm too young to have watched the Dick Cavett Show, thought I did enjoy his cameo in A Nightmare on Elm Street 3.

Anyway, thanks to YouTube and other such sites folks like me can finally see clips from some of these old TV shows, and I must say I'm glad I came across the one below with Jerry Lewis.

Lewis talks about his critics, and it's impressive, to me anyway, that he's willing to listen to a critic who doesn't like him if the critic is competent and has a clear love of film. He even claims to have written to critics and thanked them for negative reviews. Now that we have the blogosphere it's hard for me to imagine such an exchange taking place. If anything, I'd imagine an actor would respond to a negative review by posting something nasty about the reviewer on their own blog. And then I would write about that exchange on this blog.

The video is after the jump. After the commercial break is a brief Q&A with the audience, which isn't especially interesting or revealing.

Nye was a veteran stage, TV and movie actress. She died of lung cancer last Friday at her home in New York City.

Besides her long career on the Williamstown, MA and Broadyway stages (Half A Sixpence, Second String, The Man Who Came To Dinner, The Trojan Women, Real Inspector Hound, and others), she appeared in episodes of Hart to Hart, St. Elswhere, Hallmark Hall of Fame, and other shows, and had two different recurring roles on Guiding Light. One as Susan Piper in the mid 80s, and one as Carrie Carruthers in 2003, in one of the stupidest plot lines I ever saw on the show (please, don't get me started...).

Nye might be equally famous for who she was married to: talk show host and writer Dick Cavett.

This September, Turner Classic Movies will air a one-time, one-hour Dick Cavett Show special in which the famous TV talker will sit down with filmmaker and comedy legend Mel Brooks. The special will be filmed before a live audience on an updated version of the set of the original series. In addition to the new interview with Brooks, who is currently adapting his movie Young Frankenstein into a musical, TCM has also secured the rights to Cavett's "classic" interviews with the likes of Robert Mitchum, Bette Davis, Ingmar Bergman, Alfred Hitchcock, Woody Allen, Groucho Marx, and Katharine Hepburn. Those interviews will also air during the month of September. Now I just have to remind myself to remind my Tivo to record the Woody Allen, Alfred Hitchcock, and Groucho Marx episodes.

Every once in a while, we here at TV Squad give our opinions about what we'd like to see/not see on television. And since last week was my one-year anniversary here, I figured I'd give my current list:

1. Bring back game shows. I don't mean a syndicated game show or a game show/reality show like Survivor or American Idol, I'm talking about real, honest to goodness, daytime game shows on the networks. The Price Is Right is the only one left, and the rest of the schedule has been taken over by the likes of Maury Povich, Dr. Phil, The View, Starting Over, and a third hour of The Today Show. Wouldn't it be great to just dump all those shows and bring back a Card Sharks, a Concentration, a Blockbusters, a High Rollers, a Sale of the Century. Hell, I'd watch Match Game again over Jerry Springer.