Saturday Morning Brain Drain

It's a pity what happened to Cousin Mattie. HE USED TO BE SUCH AN INTERESTING PERSON

Abandon Hope, All Ye Who Enter

Yes, strap yourselves in, because you are about to embark on a trip through your Cousin Mattie’s fit of media madness.

What I watched:

I cannot tell you how much I love the series “A Very [fill in the bank] Scandal.” Each miniseries is three 1-hour episodes and they all are to be savored. This latest one is “A Very Royal Scandal,” which is about Prince Andrew’s catastrophic “Newsnight” interview on the BBC. Prince Andrew is played by Michael Sheen, the Man of 1,000 Faces.

The one before this was “
Watch A Very British Scandal | Prime Video – Amazon.com
” featuring the divorce between the Duke of Argyll (Paul Bettany) and his wife (Claire Foy, perhaps best known as QEII in the first two seasons of “The Crown.”) And then before that was “A Very English Scandal,” featuring Hugh Grant as Jeremy Thorpe, the leader of the Liberal Party in the 1960s–1970s, and my new boyfriend, Ben Whishaw…oh, Google it yourself, but Hugh Grant gives the performance of his career.

Starring Golden Globe-nominated actor Hugh Grant and based on a true story, “A Very English Scandal” tells the story of Jeremy Thorpe, a member of Parliament who, in 1979, was tried and later acquitted of conspiring to murder his ex-lover, Norman Scott. Beginning in the 1960s, Thorpe is the leader {etc.]

Have I ever gifted you all with this?

These guys have about a dozen shorts like this but this is my favorite.

I’ve been singing this a lot:

because we are a couple of slugs. We have left “Hawaii 5-0” because my boyfriend, Danny “Danno” Williams, left. We drifted over to “Murder, She Wrote,” because we couldn’t be more lame. Guest stars a-go-go. Including a very young Kristy McNichol who’s on the rodeo circuit in Manitoba (I think; somewhere in western Canada) and a very young Megan Mullally (the funny one from “Will & Grace”) who lives in the deep South somewhere. What I never remembered about “M,SW” is that most episodes weren’t set in Cabot Cove, so it wasn’t really like New England’s Mogadishu. Jess took the teaching job at NYU (eye roll) and she traveled out to LA a few times to oversee how her best-selling books are being transferred to the big and the little screens. Also, she has approximately 500 nieces and nephews (Kristy McNichol and Megan Mullally being just two of them), and it was guest star (“star”) paradise. In one episode she visits an “old friend” (oh yes, there are plenty of those) Juliet Prowse in Paris. Back in New York she sticks her nose into the business of a shady Italian restaurant owned by Sonny Bono.

I got to thinking, how many guest stars (“stars”) were available for work around then? I hit the mother lode with this video, which goes on for 45 minutes.

When we are companionably lying in bed we watch “M,SW” and “Love Boat,” and award each other points upon “celebrity” sighting. It’s like bird-watching. I got a recent high-five for recognizing one of the Love Boat’s Coral Room restaurant patrons as the manager from “WKRP in Cincinnati.” Les Nesmond was the villain in a “M, SW” episode and I completely missed that, so no points for me. Frank Bonner (Herb Talek) shows up on all these shows, so we have adopted the “No Herb Talek” rule. There’s a very strange two-parter where The Pacific Princess (that is the Love Boat’s real name) sets sail for Japan. Orientalism abounds. The opening scene shows cruise director Julie McCoy in full geisha costume mingling with the arriving guests, saying a few words in Japanese, and offering them what is probably sushi. Or, given where and when this was filmed, it could have been takeout from one of the LA branches of Benihana. And did you know that Benihana is still around?

One of the passengers is Tony Danza, who falls for a photographer who’s on assignment. So far, so good, but the photog tells him she doesn’t want to be going to Japan but her editor insisted upon it. Just wrap your mind around that concept. See, what happened was her father was stationed in the Pacific during WWII The Big One and took a bullet and never walked again. Tony Danza is upset because, as he confesses to Isaac the bartender, his father is Japanese. WHAT? Tony Danza?!?! I would have thrown a traditional clog at the screen if I owned one. And it just spirals downhill from there. There’s another geisha impersonator…well, let’s leave it at that.

What I Read: The usual firehose of local, state, national, and international news, which is obviously detrimental to my mental health. I managed to squeeze in Kingmaker, which is an incredibly gossipy bio of Pamela Harriman.

And now I’m going to try to clean up the horrible mess I’ve made of this formatting.

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About MatthewCrawley 402 Articles
I died in an automobile accident just over a century ago, right after my wife/cousin gave birth to my son.

16 Comments

  1. Let’s see… we finished Slow Horses which was great.  We watched Season 1 of an Italian detective show called Petra, which is about a socially difficult lady detective and her older, scruffy partner Monte.  Takes place in Genoa, which is a beautiful city.  Not too bad.

    I’m wondering if we should start Old Man.  Any thoughts on Old Man?

    Oh yeah, we also watched Perfect Days by Wim Wenders.  It’s about a Japanese guy who cleans toilets.  It was really excellent.

  2. In the process of watching Woman of the Hour on Netflix. Anna Kendrick’s directorial debut, it’s about the Rodney Alcala (The Dating Show Killer) and Kendrick’s character, Cheryl Bradshaw. Bradshaw was the contestant who picked him and then was like yeah no weird vibes not dating him.

    Kendrick does a fantastic job of just dialing into the everyday risk situations women are in. Like taken out of context, “go with a guy who says he’s a photographer” sounds like a horrible idea but given all the skeeze situations women are in, it’s another time of feeling like welp my discomfort doesn’t matter in this situation, don’t make a scene.

  3. I rewatched the first couple of episodes of Detroiters which finally broke free of Paramount and is on Netflix.

    Sam Richardson (Veep) and Tim Robinson (I Think You Should Leave) run a small ad agency in Detroit with a lot of cheesy clients. It’s really funny if you like knucklehead guys doing getting themselves into dumb situations.

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