≡ Category: Current Affairs, Life, Television | ≅ Comments
David Simon once called his HBO series, The Wire, “a political tract masquerading as a cop show.” Think of it as a five season, 3600 minute, artistic depiction of the escalating breakdown of urban society. The show is art. But it is also life in the biggest sense. And it’s why some thinkers have likened [...]
≡ Category: Science, Television | ≅ Comments
Michael Pollan’s best-selling book, Botany of Desire, is now a film, and you can watch it online, courtesy of PBS. (Click to watch complete film.) The film takes you inside our relationship with the plant world, and shows “how four familiar species — the apple, the tulip, cannabis and the potato — evolved to satisfy [...]
≡ Category: Music, Television | ≅ Comments
A little birthday present. John Lennon would have been 69 years old today. This memorable interview, recorded in 1971, features John and Yoko in a candid, relaxed and wide-ranging conversation with one of America’s leading talk show hosts at the time. To watch the full interview, see Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, [...]
≡ Category: Education, Media, Television | ≅ Comments
News from the Wired Campus Blog:
PBS and NPR are now posting taped interviews and videos of lectures by academics, adding to the growing number of free lectures online.
Their site, called Forum Network, says it makes thousands of lectures available, including the Harvard professor Michael Sandel’s take on calculating happiness in a lecture called “How to [...]
≡ Category: Television | ≅ Comments
Last Friday marked the 50th anniversary of The Twilight Zone’s debut on American television, a big occasion for fans of sci-fi, horror and suspense. To celebrate the anniversary, TV Squad pulled together a list of the 10 best episodes of Rod Serling’s show. At the top, you might put the episode called “Eye of the [...]
≡ Category: Television | ≅ Comments
Thanks to Duke University, you can now access a digital archive of vintage television commercials dating from the 1950s to the 1980s. Eventually, this collection will feature close to 12,000 digitized commercials, and it will let you see how America’s traditional brands (IBM, Maxwell House, American Express, Avis, etc) evolved through the medium of mainstream commercial [...]
≡ Category: Literature, Television | ≅ Comments
If you’ve watched The Wire, you know him as Jimmy McNulty, the smart, boozing Baltimore cop that likes an occasional romp and goes rogue here and there. Now, here’s your chance to see another side of Dominic, the side that’s more at home, at least geographically speaking. Here we have, as Ed tells us, the [...]
≡ Category: Television | ≅ Comments
As many may now know, David Carradine was found dead this morning in Thailand. Above, we feature him acting in the popular 1970’s television series Kung Fu. ”In this clip from the pilot episode of Kung Fu, Caine (David Carradine) is discussing life with a fellow expatriate. Their discussion touches on the unity of opposites, which is symbolised [...]
≡ Category: Television | ≅ Comments
Above, we feature Frank Lloyd Wright, who appeared on What’s My Line?, America’s longest-running game show, back in June 1956. During its eighteen seasons, the show featured many cultural VIPs, including Alfred Hitchcock, Salvador Dali, Groucho Marx, Carl Sandburg and others.
Along similar lines, it’s worth noting that YouTube now hosts a series of old-time television shows. Within this [...]
≡ Category: Film, Television | ≅ Comments
The Australian National Film and Sound Archive provides free and worldwide access to over 1,000 film and television titles – a treasury of down-under video 100 years in the making. In a partnership with the major networks and other learning organizations, the Archive has commissioned expert curators to annotate the holdings, which provides for a rich [...]
≡ Category: Television | ≅ Comments
Here Bill Moyers sits down with David Simon, executive producer of The Wire, the stunning HBO production. As anyone who has watched the show knows, The Wire is not just a splendid drama. It is, as Simon has once called it, “a political tract masquerading as a cop show.” It takes a penetrating and aesthetically rich [...]
≡ Category: Television | ≅ Comments
A light (and, for me, nostalgic) way to ease into the weekend…
Over at Marvel.com, they’re streaming episodes from the original Spider-Man TV series that hit the airwaves back in 1967. A new episode will be posted every Thursday. Above, you’ll find Episode 1, and see where it all began.
≡ Category: Literature, Philosophy, Television | ≅ Comments
I’m no fan of Ayn Rand, but I found this footage intriguing. Back before 60 Minutes, Mike Wallace had his own TV interview show, The Mike Wallace Interview, which aired from 1957 to 1960. And what you get is Mike Wallace asking probing questions to celebrities of the day (and peddling cigarettes). An archive of [...]
≡ Category: Film, Television | ≅ Comments
Above, you can watch Orson Welles’ last interview and public appearance. The clip brings you back to October 10, 1985, when the great filmmaker, then 70 years old, appeared on the Merv Griffin show and talked a good deal about aging and his aging generation. Just two hours later, Welles would die of a heart [...]
≡ Category: Music, Television | ≅ Comments
As you’ll recall, we mentioned a few days ago that Bob Dylan allowed “Blowin’ in the Wind” to be used in a British commercial. Never before had Dylan allowed that to happen, at least in Britain. For one of our readers, there was a small silver lining. The company using the classic song (the Co-operative [...]
≡ Category: Television | ≅ Comments
On the lighter side for a sleepy Sunday ….
“The Big Snooze” (1946) was the last cartoon that animation director Bob Clampett ever worked on for Warner Brothers. The title? It’s an obvious play on the Raymond Chandler novel, The Big Sleep, which was also turned into a film (starring Bogart and Bacall) in 1946. And the sleeping [...]
≡ Category: Television | ≅ Comments
In 1979, Andy Warhol spent $40,000 on a broadcast-quality camera and started dabbling in creating television programs that he aired on Manhattan public access cable channels. (Get more on the story here.) One episode featured Warhol, Bianca Jagger and Steven Spielberg simply hanging out on a bed. And here’s how their conversation went down:
via BoingBoing
≡ Category: Television | ≅ Comments
Eartha Kitt also left us this week. She won fame on Broadway, in movies and cabaret, and through music and films. But my inner four year old will always remember her role as Catwoman on the 1960s TV series “Batman.” (Actually, I’ll really remember her for the leading role she played in my first memorable childhood [...]
≡ Category: Comedy, Television | ≅ Comments
Bad clothes, really bad TV sets, not so good hair, and some briefly good comedy — that’s what you get when Woody Allen hits the Dick Cavett Show in or around 1970. Watch it below, and get other segments here, here, and here. And find it on our YouTube Favorites.
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≡ Category: Television | ≅ Comments
Some have put it on the level of a Tolstoy novel. Others have made the comparison to Dickens. No matter how you slice it, The Wire is TV at its best. Below, we have posted a fast-moving summary of the first four seasons, which was made in the same format as the viral video The Nine [...]
≡ Category: Film, Television | ≅ Comments
One of my friends from way back, Sheerly Avni, has just posted an interview with Joss Whedon, who has now dominated in four media categories: film (Serenity), television (Buffy the Vampire Slayer), comics (Runaways, The Astonishing X-Men) and finally the internet. (Dr. Horrible’s Singalong Blog). The interview was conducted for Mother Jones, so there’s a [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs, Television | ≅ Comments
I’ve spent the past several months working through The Wire on DVD. A simply brilliant show. (Here’s a recap of Season 1 in case you don’t know what you’re missing. And for even more recaps click here.) Now some members of the cast, the good guys and the bad, have rolled out a commercial encouraging [...]
≡ Category: Television | ≅ Comments
First it was indie movies; now it’s classic TV shows. Thanks to a deal with CBS, you can now watch classic television shows on YouTube. Here, you’ll find Beverly Hills, 90210, MacGyver, and even Star Trek – not exactly high-culture, but you can’t win every time.
For more edifying series of YouTube videos, see our piece: Intelligent Life [...]
≡ Category: Television | ≅ Comments
From the new series of Microsoft ads…
≡ Category: Current Affairs, Television | ≅ Comments
The Wire — it has monopolized my DVD player since May. As many of you hopefully know, it’s a stunning production. And if you haven’t seen it, do yourself a favor. Get a Netflix subscription and devote your attention to it for the next few months.
David Simon (the show’s creator) has called his HBO series [...]
≡ Category: Television | ≅ Comments
On Sunday night, HBO aired its new film “Recount,” which delved back into the controversial Florida recount that determined the outcome of America’s 2000 presidential election. Days before the film (watch the trailer here) hit the airwaves, Charlie Rose conducted an interview with Kevin Spacey (actor in the film), Jeffrey Toobin (Senior Legal Analyst at [...]
≡ Category: Television | ≅ Comments
A quick fyi: Season 2 of the television version of This American Life starts tonight at 10 pm on Showtime, and we’ve posted below the brief trailer for the new show. Meanwhile, the radio version remains the most downloaded podcast on iTunes ( iTunes – Feed – Web Site). It has been that way for [...]
≡ Category: Apple, Television | ≅ Comments
Across the pond, Apple is running a series of ads fashioned after the “Mac v. PC” commercials that have run so successfully in the States. Although the vocabulary and accent are naturally different, the gist of the British ads is essentially the same. Yes, Apple’s schtick translates well, and I’m declaring the third one [...]
≡ Category: Comedy, Television | ≅ Comments
Nerve and IFC have pulled together a fun list that counts down the 50 funniest sketches in television history. Happily, the list features many video clips, and this inspired us to post one of our own. Here we have John Belushi, appearing on Saturday Night Live in the late 1970s, performing a classic bit called [...]
≡ Category: Film, Media, Television, Video - Arts & Culture, Web/Tech | ≅ Comments
One of the things they promised us in the heyday of the 1990s Internet boom was the end of television and a brave new world of high quality video online, on demand. Well, we’re still waiting. Youtube is great for short clips, but not designed for the technical (or legal) challenge of serving up whole [...]
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