TVSquad

I got a great letter this week from a TV fan named Jim R.

"Dear TV Squad, About 15 years ago, I watched an episode of a scifi/fantasy TV show wherein an Elvis impersonator traveled back in time to meet (and eventually kill) the real Elvis. Could you please tell me the name of this program? Thanks"

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

• John Phillip Law: He was a veteran actor best known for such films as Barbarella, The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, The Cassandra Crossing, Tarzan The Ape Man, and Hurry Sundown. He appeared in many TV shows over the years, including The Love Boat, Murder, She Wrote, It's A Living, and The Young and the Restless. He died in Los Angeles at age 70.

(S04E14) Out of all the dreams Allison has awakened from this season, tonight gets my vote for "Most Likely to Make You Jump Out of Bed and Scare the Crap Out of Your Sleeping Husband."

One thing you have to get used to if you are fan of Medium, is the ever present scene where somebody doesn't understand how Allison knows what she knows. Even though Joe, Davalos, Scanlon and most of her friends are well aware why Allison acts so strange, there are still plenty of people who are baffled by her behavior and, as a matter of course, have to react with disbelief and/or confusion. It gets old but it's a necessary evil. The most genuine of these reactions, however, come from the Dubois children.

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

• Boyd Coddington: He was a custom car designer and star of TLC's American Hot Rod. A former machinist at Disneyland, he opened up Boyd's Wheels in 1988 and won several awards for his car designs. He died of complications from surgery at age 63 in Whittier, CA.

• TV Land has a Beverly Hillbillies marathon all night.
• HBO has an Entourage marathon all night.
• Sci-Fi has The Twilight Zone all night.
• Discovery has a Mythbusters marathon.
• At 8, PBS has a new Live From Lincoln Center, with Joshua Bell and the New York Philharmonic.
• AMC has a Planet of the Apes marathon all night, starting with the original at 8.
• At 10, ABC has Dick Clark's Primetime New Year's Rockin' Eve 2008 (whew!) with Clark and Ryan Seacrest. It's interrupted at 11 for local news then picks up again at 11:35.
• At 11, FOX has New Year's Eve Live, with Cat Deeley and Spike Feresten.
• CNN has Anderson Cooper in Times Square starting at 11.
• Motorcycle stunt rider Robbie Maddison is going to attempt to jump a football field in Las Vegas tonight. ESPN has live coverage starting at 11.
• Also at 11: MTV has New Year's Eve coverage too, with Tila Tequila.
• At 11:35, NBC has New Year's Eve with Carson Daly.

Check your local TV listings for more.

I've been looking for a copy of this Playhouse 90 episode for years. VHS, DVD, some guy doing a puppet show version of it in his living room, whatever, I've really wanted to see it since seeing snippets of it on the excellent PBS American Masters episode "Submitted For Your Approval" (it's on one of the Twilight Zone DVDs). And now, thanks to YouTube, we can all watch it.

Well, most of it anyway. After the jump, I posted the opening of the show (complete with intros and commercials!), and then if you follow this link you can find other segments of the show (on the right), but I have no idea what order they go in because they aren't labeled. It's well worth watching though. I mean, look at the cast: Art Carney, Jack Klugman, Leslie Nielsen, Burt Reynolds, and the kid is Mickey Dolenz from The Monkees! They don't do TV like this anymore.

• Sci-Fi has a Twilight Zone marathon all day and night, while The History Channel has a marathon of Revolution.
• TCM has Yankee Doodle Dandy at 5:30, followed by The Howards of Virginia and 1776.
• At 8, PBS has A Capitol Fourth, with Tony Danza, Bebe Neuwirth, Elliot Yamin, Yolanda Adams, and Hayden Penttiere from Heroes. Wow, did they just pick names out of a celebrity hat or something?
• The CW has a new Hidden Palms at 8.
• At 9, NBC has the Macy's Fourth of July Spectacular, followed by a new Dateline.
• TBS has two new episodes of Tyler Perry's House of Payne starting at 9.
• At 10, CBS has the Boston Pops Fireworks Spectacular.

Check your local TV listings for more.

OK, if you're not all exhausted by the Sopranos talk and examination of that final scene, let me bring up yet another take on the episode, via a friend of TV critic Roger Catlin at The Hartford Courant.

During the scene in the safehouse in the episode, there an an episode of The Twilight Zone playing on the television. An alert viewer figured out that it was the 1963 episode "The Bard," where a TV writer gets help from the ghost of William Shakespeare, who gets angry at the meddling from advertisers and the network and eventually punches an actor (Burt Reynolds).

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

• Lois Gibson: She was a writer and story editor for such shows as The Fugitive, The Invaders, Quincy, M.E., and The Untouchables. She was also the wife of actor/comic Henry Gibson. She died in Malibu, CA at age 77.

A lot of people don't realize that the first James Bond wasn't Sean Connery on the big screen, it was Barry Nelson on television, on a 1954 episode of the CBS series Climax. Nelson played 007 in an adaptation of Casino Royale.

Nelson died in Buck's County, PA on April 7 while traveling. He was 89.

Besides the classic role of Bond, Nelson was a regular on the 50s series My Favorite Husband, and guest starred on several other shows, including The Twilight Zone, Murder, She Wrote, Fantasy Island, Magnum, P.I., Dallas, The Love Boat, Thriller, Cannon, Longstreet, The F.B.I., The Philco Playhouse, Alfred Hitchcock Presents and many others. On the big screen he was in several films, including The Shining, Airport, and Pete N' Tillie, and starred on stage in several productions.

Stuart Rosenberg is probably best known for directing big screen movies such as Cool Hand Luke, The Amityville Horror, Brubaker, The Pope of Greenwich Village, The Drowning Pool, and Voyage of the Damned, but he had an impressive TV resume as well.

Rosenberg directed several episodes of the original Twilight Zone, as well as episodes of The Untouchables, Ben Casey, The Defenders, Rawhide, For The People, Naked City, Bob Hope Presents The Chrysler Theater, The Nurses, and Alfred Hitchcock Presents. He also directed the TV movie Fame is the Name of the Game, which led to the TV series The Name of the Game.

Rosenberg died last week at his home in Beverly Hills of a heart attack.

Not long ago Kevin hepped us all to the new Chiller channel from NBC/Universal for DirecTV. Now we have a full schedule and some details on some more of the programs that will be a part of the new horror-themed channel. Here's what folks can look forward to:

• Alfred Hitchcock Presents
• New Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1985 version)
• Night Gallery
• Tales From the Crypt
• Friday the 13th: The Series
• Freddy's Nightmares
• G Vs. E
• American Gothic
• Monsters
• Twin Peaks

The new channel launches on March 1. Sitcoms Online has the full schedule here. As Kevin pointed out, it's all recycled content, but it's good recycled content (at least to a horror fan like myself), so I'm not complaining. Aside from the TV series, the new channel will also feature movies like The Shining, Psycho, Cat's Eye, The Andromeda Strain, and some of those great Abbot and Costello Meet [Blank] flicks.

One final thought: No Tales From the Darkside? What's up with that nonsense?

I loves myself some Twilight Zone, but when I watch repeats of the classic series I can't help but notice that the dialogue in Rod Serling's scripts was somewhat overwrought. I sometimes have trouble watching certain episodes and not imagining Serling hunched over his typewriter, giggling to himself at how clever he's being. That's not necessarily a criticism -- if anything, it's that mix of segments that made you roll your eyes and ones that truly gripped you that kept the series interesting and still makes it stand out even today.

The SciFi Channel is airing a Twilight Zone marathon that will run from 9am on December 31 through 5am on January 2. As much as I'd love to record every episode, that's a bit much for ye olde Tivo to handle, so I had to cherry pick my favorite episodes and just record those. Someday I'll do what Bob did and buy the complete set on DVD, but for now I'll have to make due with what SciFi offers me. At least it's the original Rod Serling version and not any of those god-awful remakes that popped up later, though I think even fans like myself have to remember that not every episode of the original Twilight Zone was perfect. Some of them were rather heavy-handed and cornball, but memory sometimes has a way of only recalling the best of some things.

Speaking of the complete DVD set, you can watch some of the DVD extras on the SciFi site, including actor commentaries.