TVSquad

A roundup of TV people from in front of the camera and behind the scenes who have passed away.

• Mel Harris: He was an exec at both Paramount and Sony Television who helped launch USA Network, Star Trek: TNG, and Entertainment Tonight. He was also one of the first executives in the 70s to push the idea of selling movies to the public on videotapes. He died of cancer at age 65.

A few years ago I introduced on this blog the concept of Fanesia (sorry for the weird formatting on that page, not sure what happened), where a fan chooses to get amnesia over a plot point that happened on a TV show. Examples I used before include The Lone Gunmen dying on The X-Files, Toby being the leak on The West Wing, the entire last episode of Seinfeld, and Mark Greene dying on ER. Nope, in my mind, those things never happened.

Here are five more Fanesia moments, involving such shows as Will & Grace, Guiding Light, and Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Stanley Kamel, who played Dr. Charles Kroger on the USA hit series Monk, was found dead in his Hollywood house earlier today. No cause of death has been announced yet. He was 65.

Kamel has had an incredibly long career in TV and the movies. He was a regular on such series as Beverly Hills, 90210, Melrose Place, Murder One, L.A. Law, and Cagney and Lacey, and appeared in dozens of TV shows over the years, including The West Wing, MacGyver, The Golden Girls, Hunter, Star Trek: TNG, Murder, She Wrote, Reba, The Guardian, General Hospital, NYPD Blue, 7th Heaven, The Mod Squad, Mannix, The Rookies, Three's Company, Emergency, Kojak, and many more. Besides episodes of Monk, he was also filming a feature film titled For Better Or Worse, and a new movie, The Urn, which will be released later this year.

We'll update this post once we found out what exactly happened. Access Hollywood and the other shows will have more later today.

Update: Kamel died of a heart attack.

It's becoming clear that if you plan on buying every season of a TV show, at least the more popular ones, you might want to wait a couple of years (if you can wait, that is). They're coming out with more and more "complete sets" and if you buy the sets individually you're probably paying more (and missing out on some extras, though that's not always the case).

Here's another one. CBS/Paramount will release a complete set for Star Trek: The Next Generation on October 2, to celebrate the show's 20th anniversary.

Title: The Big Goodbye
Original Air Date: January 11, 1988
Written By: Tracy Torme
Directed by: Joseph L. Scanlan
Episode: S01E012
Stardate: 41997.7

The Enterprise is on a diplomatic mission to Alderaan, and the imperial senate will not stand for -- oh. Wait. Sorry. Wrong Star. Let's start over, shall we?

The Enterprise is on a diplomatic mission to meet the Jarada, an alien species with a peculiar affinity for protocol: if Picard doesn't speak a particular greeting in exactly the right way at exactly the right time, the Jaradan won't join the Federation, and they'll take all their mythical Jaradan weed with them.

Picard and Counselor Troi have been practicing his speech for hours, because it is just about the most important thing Picard has done since convincing Q that humanity isn't a bunch of asscocks. Because he is so aware of the significance of the meeting, he naturally closes up his books and heads down to the holodeck to goof off. (If my son Ryan, who is about to enter college, is reading this, please don't follow his example if you intend to graduate in four years. Keep studying. Your grades and my money thank you.)

Picard tells us in his personal log that he's looking forward to trying out something new called a holodeck program: rather than simply recreating a time or a place (or both) it recreates an entire fictional universe inside the Enterprise (infinite recursion alert! Infinite recursion alert!) with characters and a story, sort of like LARPing, if LARPing wasn't totally lame.