I’ve been watching most available Doctor Who episodes since “An Unearthly Child” and am on Season 18, the last with Fourth Doctor Tom Baker and Lalla Ward’s Romana. I just found out about these adverts for Prime Computer. They aired only in Australia and were written by Baker, presumably prior to the dissolution of his relationship with Lalla Ward. Interactive indeed.
Tag Archives: TV
UNIT and redshirts
It’s hard to tell who will have the shorter career — a UNIT soldier or a redshirt on Kirk’s Enterprise.
Me
North and South, Mrs. Hale on Milton (Manchester)
Mrs. Hale, the woman displaced by her husband’s conscientious concerns from the bucolic south of England to the industrial northern city of Milton (Manchester), has opinions about Milton and its residents. From the 2004 BBC series based on Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South:
The people here don’t want learning. They don’t want books and culture. It’s all money and smoke. That’s what they eat and breathe.
Not just in 19th-century Milton.
Review: Miss Scarlet and the Duke
Moonlighting but with better settings, costumes, accents, and plots.
Hawaii Five-O (1968-1980)
In any conversation about memorable TV theme musics and openings, Hawaii Five-O has to make the cut. It starts with a drum set up, followed by dramatic racing brass backed by winds as a wave curls, then various images speed by — urban landscapes, Jack Lord on a high-rise balcony (lord of all he surveys), a car that somehow turns upside down, native Hawaiians (including a dancer who would go on to become a business professor), ocean, a glowering statue called “Lady Columbia,”1 jets and jet engine closeup (a reminder that Hawaii is an island chain), ocean sunsets, a dancer, nightfall (after which crime comes out, because now we’ll see the other members of Five-O, Danno, Kono, and Chin), and finally a flashing police light zooming down one of the city’s mean streets. (Any street can look mean in the dark with only incandescence, fluorescence, or neon to light the way.)
My parents may have watched the show in the early years, but if they did their viewing fell off because I don’t remember seeing it much. My dad preferred the Norman Lear sitcoms like All in the Family, The Jeffersons, and Maude, while my mother favored family-oriented fare like The Waltons and Little House on the Prairie.
I didn’t think of this when it was still current, but when it debuted Hawaii was a very young state, which must have made it even more exotic to the American audience. The state boasted an ethnic diversity unfamiliar to many Americans at the time. It’s also about as far west as the country could expand.
My dad had served in Hawaii before World War II and loved it (except for the pineapples — ”I never want to see another pineapple again.”). He hated Florida (hot and humid) but said he’d go to Hawaii in a heartbeat — a hesitant heartbeat. He knew what he loved about Hawaii was destined to be ruined by its desirability. The signs of overdevelopment were there before the war, which sped them along. When the camera zooms in on Jack Lord, he’s on the balcony of the Ilikai Hotel & Luxury Suites in Honolulu that opened in 1964 — only four years before the series began (1968–80). Someone who seemed to be familiar with Hawaii noted that at the time the Ilikai was the most prominent building on the island, but not anymore.
With the exception of a few storylines, Hawaii Five-O was filmed on location. That undoubtedly attracted some of the guest stars who appeared. As for me, I hated that nearly every TV show was set in southern California. Where were the forest and leaf colors and snows and classic houses of my native western New York (the Niagara Frontier)? Where were the wetlands of Georgia, the soft green hills of Virginia, the bays and inlets of Maine and Massachusetts, even the Petrified Forest of Arizona? Where was the America that wasn’t the streets of Los Angeles? Even shows that were supposed to be set in small-town America looked like southern California. Even alien landscapes on Star Trek looked like southern California. (When they were stuck in a planet’s glaciated past that couldn’t occur in southern California, it looked like a soundstage.) Hawaii Five-O may not have had snow, ice, big conifers, or any of the familiar hallmarks of the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic, or Midwest, but at least it didn’t look like Los Angeles. Mostly.
Like Los Angeles, Hawaii Five-O’s setting looks seedy and gritty, full of bars and replete with gambling, drugs, dancers, and many other temptations I don’t want to know about.
What I’ve learned about Steve McGarrett
McGarrett wouldn’t last long in his job today. He calls his secretaries, who spend a lot of time making and serving coffee, “love,” “honey,” and other inappropriate endearments. No one said boo in 1968, although one protests mildly about making coffee on Sunday. He also calls female witnesses “honey.”
In another throwback, Five-O officers and secretaries call McGarrett “Boss.” McGarrett calls Chin Ho Kelly “Fatso,” but only when he’s in a hospital bed or holding onto a gunshot wound. I’m sure that makes Chin Ho and his injuries feel better.
McGarrett has a bigger, better decorated office than many mainland CEOs. It’s on a par with the governor’s.
McGarrett takes off his mainland suit long enough each day to go for a morning run on the beach, which is convenient for the ex-serviceman who shoots him three times at close range and still can’t kill him.
In at least one two episodes, McGarrett’s car is parked perpendicular to the end of three slots. Scofflaw.
His peel-out parking style doesn’t keep him from being last at the crime scene.
You can feel Danno’s eyes roll when McGarrett declares, “No, it’s too neat. It fits too well. You could wrap it up, put a bow on it, and mail it in.” Or, “You’ll make a good cop one of these days, Danno.”
McGarrett is direct. When someone comes back to report, he usually barks out: “Go” or “What do you got?”
At the same time, he’s often skeptical about what they “got.” “I don’t buy it” or “It’s too neat.”
What I’ve learned about the “rest”
Danno is McGarrett’s no. 1, so he’s second in command of a team of four. No wonder he always looks anxious.
Chin Ho has family everywhere. Whenever McGarrett needs to know something, he sends Chin to ask a family member, or Kono says he heard news from a Chin Ho cousin.
Kono is street smart. We know that because he butchers English deliberately in a ways I have never heard before. (Think double negatives times 10 for starters.)
The governor of the 50th state likes to tell McGarrett, “I don’t have to tell you how bad [the crime du jour] is for tourism and business.” McGarrett visibly thinks, “It’s probably not so great for the victims, either, sir.”
Five-O
When McGarrett says, “Five-O” and whips out the badge, the tourists seem to know what he’s talking about. Did their travel agents brief them on the state police because they knew they were likely to witness one of Hawaii’s many, many crimes?
Five-O’s mainland suits and creeping dark sedans aren’t conspicuous in Hawaii at all.
Why Hawaii is appealing to tourists
I have no idea, because:
- To deal with killers and other criminals, McGarrett has the island(s) sealed off so many times that it’s a wonder they have tourists anymore.
- Hawaii attracts serial killers (which is odd since it’s hard for them to leave once McGarrett seals off the rock). In one episode, a hillbilly family arrives in Hawaii with 150 suspected murders behind them on the mainland. They dig right in to their avocation once on the island.
- Stabbings seem to be almost as popular as shootings, and both are more gory than in other police shows of the era.
- The real draw may be bubonic plague. It makes an appearance in two of the few episodes I’ve seen. (It’s also a reason for sealing off the islands. “Hawaiian vacation was lovely, Myrtle, but now we can’t leave because bubonic plague is going around.”)
Casting
Korean-American actor Soon-Tek Oh convincingly plays a nervously ruthless “red Chinese” agent, but I can’t say as much for Ricardo Montalban as a murderous Japanese deserter — who happens to have a crisp Castilian accent. That’s weird enough, but he’s being pursued by the “bushidō,” a secret society. Maybe the writer meant samurai, who adhere to bushidō, but since we’re talking secret, ninja sounds more likely. That’s what happened to TV writers who worked before Google. Whether samurai or ninja, they are remarkably ineffective at offing the Japanese gangster with the bad makeup job and Castilian accent.
6/11/2018 addition: Mark Lenard (Spock’s father on Star Trek) as a mentally ill Japanese ninja(!) who doesn’t know the war’s been over for 28 years and tries to blow up Pearl Harbor and half of Honolulu. Notably, McGarrett thinks a ninja is a warrior until he’s corrected by a karate master.
Ahead of its time
Hawaii has the Hawaii Institute of Technology. And, at a time when I’d heard of computers mainly in the context of science fiction, Hawaii has an “On-line Police Information System.”
Finally
Most poignant line: At the end of an episode in which a political appointee is murdered after turning pro-development, Kono looks out over a site being bulldozed for cheap boxy housing and says, “Look at that. One day we’ll be strangers in our own land.”
The strangest exchange I’ve heard so far occurs when Danno tells Steve he’s always one step ahead.
Steve: That’s why I got the big office.
Danno (turning around as he walks out): Peace and joy, strong brother.
1A symbol of motherhood on the far wall at the National Cemetery of the Pacific, also known as Punchbowl, she watches over the dead.
Maigret, Rowan Atkinson style
I saw BritBox through my Amazon Fire (TV) Stick (doesn’t that sound like something you’d take camping?) and resisted the temptation to subscribe for the one show I knew was on it. For someone who watches little TV, I seem to pay a small fortune each month for the privilege.
Then I saw that Rowan Atkinson, known to me from random Blackadder and Mr. Bean clips, had portrayed Georges Simenon’s Inspector Maigret. I was intrigued.
When I was younger (actually, young), I devoured a lot of the Maigret books. I can’t say I remember a lot about them individually, mainly an air of determination and sadness about Maigret as he and his detectives methodically ferret out all kinds of criminals, mostly in the atmospheric Paris that American tourists don’t see. I liked Maigret — he seems to be introverted, thoughtful, insightful, passive-aggressive as needed, and weary but relentless.
When the Michael Gambon series came out, I watched every episode I was aware of. It was a long time ago, but I think I remember he exuded that weariness even as he eventually gets his man (or woman). The depths of the human mind are exhausting.
Now here’s Atkinson putting on the big man’s trenchcoat and filling his shoes and ubiquitous pipe. Of course I signed up for BritBox — especially when I found out it carries the Gambon Maigret, Sherlock Holmes with Jeremy Brett, Miss Marple with Joan Hickson, and Poirot with David Suchet (which disappeared from Netflix).
I watched series 1 today. Atkinson and the rest of the cast do not disappoint (Lucy Cohu as a not-at-all dowdy Madame Maigret, Leo Staar as Inspector LaPointe, Shaun Dingwall as Inspector Janvier, Aidan McArdle as the uptight Judge Comeliau, Mark Heap as Dr. Moers, and many others). Atkinson’s Maigret absorbs everything around him, every detail, insignificant and incongruous. In Maigret Sets a Trap, he seems impervious to the barbs of public (and public official) opinion, but those barbs help drive him on, even when he’s taken off the case just as his trap yields the first solid evidence in months. He slings them back at his suspect, a failure who’s desperate to be more than the mama’s boy he was raised to be.
In Maigret’s Dead Man, which seems unfortunately timed due to its immigrant theme, Maigret is equally undaunted by attempts to take him away from his “dead man,” which his superiors think must be an underworld crime, and move him and his men to a series of brutal murders/robberies in rural Picardie. Maigret’s on the case, whether he knows it or not, despite the “cold” he and his select detectives choose to come down with. In both cases, Maigret displays emotion mostly when he is with his caged suspect, and even then it’s muted. He’s calm but relentless as the suspects squirm under his pointed suggestions and questions. The only suspect who seems unfazed by him is Maria in Maigret’s Dead Man, but that could be because she’s speaking (and swearing) through a sympathetic interpreter — sympathetic, that is, until he’s shown photos of her criminal handiwork. If he lived in Maria’s world every day, he’d be as weary as Maigret seems.
I was surprised to recognize the mastermind in Maigret’s Dead Man —he’d played the dull, reliable Henry in North and South, the man with the set jaw who looks on silently and no doubt bitterly as Margaret changes trains to head north with John. The actor’s name is John Light, and that firm jaw must be his trademark—it’s exacerbated by North and South’s painfully high, stiff collars. While he’s boring as can be in North and South, here he’s a charming, coldly violent sociopath. In the end he tells Maigret the dead man was “nothing” — a little man like Maigret himself. It was strange to watch this venom drip from the man who wordlessly hands Margaret her bag so she can indecorously run off with another man. Anyway, I didn’t expect to see John Light in anything after North and South and am glad that I did.
Overall, Atkinson made me forget the little Blackadder and Mr. Bean I’ve seen and convinced me he’s Maigret. Now that I have BritBox, I’ll have to find time to go back and let Michael Gambon convince me as well. So much Maigret, so little time!
Emergency! (or what I’ve learned about firefighting in LA County)
When I was a teenager in the 1970s, I wasn’t fond of watching TV. On summer days and evenings, I was outdoors, riding my bike or hanging out with a friend. During the winter, I focused on school activities, homework, and reading (was I as boring as that sounds?). I watched Star Trek reruns, Buffalo Sabres games (although I listened mostly to the Ted Darling play-by-play on the radio), and oddball shows now and then. I loved How the West Was Won (the series with James Arness). Kung Fu fascinated me (don’t ask). I disliked most sitcoms, and shows like Baretta, T.J. Hooker, Starsky & Hutch, and CHIPS, and all their endless car chases. They were interchangeable and predictable and far too urban without being gritty.
I was working from home one day when I discovered Emergency! on COZI during lunch. I don’t know why I stuck with it, but I watch it when I can.
Emergency! was shot at an actual Los Angeles County fire station, so I’ve learned a lot about the area outside the city. Most of it makes me happy I don’t live there.
The fire station is nestled between an interstate (I-405, the San Diego Expressway) and a refinery (identified on a fan’s website as Atlantic Richfield). The immediate area is flat, cemented over, and depressing as can be. It looks like the inspiration for the memorable lines from “Big Yellow Taxi”: “They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.” If I were a firefighter, I’d want to be out on calls — except the calls may be to chemical plants and train derailments.
Here’s what I’ve learned since watching the efforts of Station 51, the Rampart General Hospital staff, and their supporting cast.
Station 51 and Los Angeles County
Fire station crews are tiny. We have our firefighter paramedics, Roy DeSoto and Johnny Gage, plus Mike (driver and actual Los Angeles County firefighter with a SAG card), Marco and Chet (sporting awesome 1970s-style mustaches), and Cap (Hank Stanley). KMG-365. Note: I discovered that in earlier episodes, Chet’s upper lip is buck naked. Chet without a mustache is like the 1970s without the Village People.
You can save a guy’s life over and over, and he can save yours over and over, but back at the station you can return effortlessly to being mortal enemies (Gage and Chet).
There’s one police officer for a goodly section of Los Angeles County — Vince. He wears a helmet, which made me think he’s a motorcycle cop — until I noticed he drives off in a cruiser. He has no partner. Isn’t that unusual?
Rampart General Hospital relies heavily on one pair of ambulance attendants. No wonder it takes them so long to arrive at the scene. They rarely show up before the squad. I don’t think they’ve ever spoken, but they do take orders from the firefighters.
Once I did see a different ambulance pair, but realized that they were responding to a night incident with the night shift paramedics and that this was one of the two-hour Emergency! movies.
Speaking of Vince-without-a-partner and the ambulance attendants (all two of them), Los Angeles County seems to have one speaking dispatcher. During his rare appearances, he’s usually seen from the side, occasionally with others in the background. Just as Mike Stoker was a working firefighter, he was a working dispatcher for the county (and uncredited on the show).
In the pilot, some of the ambulances appear to be your typical ambulance type, but one that carts an electrocution victim to the hospital looks like a hearse. This may be foreshadowing because without on-scene defibrillation, the victim dies soon after arrival. At least the hearses, er, ambulances shown in the early seasons are white or a cheery color like yellow. I’m glad that style was discontinued in later seasons.
Whenever Squad 51 leaves the station, there’s not much traffic. You’d think there’d be more traffic on a major four-lane street in an industrial area. They must not have gotten calls during shift changes.
If I didn’t know better, I’d think Gage can’t drive. DeSoto always drives the squad. (In real life the crew did a limited number of shots of the squad leaving the station, and Kevin Tighe happened to be driving — not unlike the Cartwrights, wealthy as they are, having only one set of working clothes so stock footage could be recycled many, many times.) In a rare exception, we see Gage move the squad at the scene to a spot closer to the victim, and later in the same episode he hops into the driver’s seat and takes off. I guess he can drive after all.
Given the freeway behind and the refinery in front, I don’t want to see what their lungs look like. That’s before taking into account work hazards like smoke inhalation and chemical exposure.
Speaking of chemicals, firefighters have to be well educated about them. They have to know how volatile, toxic, etc., they are, and how to neutralize them. Not only do they deal with house fires, but also factory and lab fires, plane and helicopter crashes, train derailments, and truck accidents. And, of course, explosions.
In Los Angeles County, simple rope is a must. Lots and lots of rope. You can’t have enough rope. Rope comes in handy because many accidents happen in canyons. As flat as the area around the station is, the county itself isn’t. People drive off roads into canyons, fall off motorcycles and bicycles into canyons, and otherwise find themselves in canyons.
If the canyons don’t claim you, the cliffs of the seashore will.
And if the seashore doesn’t get you, a high-rise or a high area in an industrial plant will.
In at least one episode, the station is called to an area where the houses are right off the road — no front yards and no room for error if a driver isn’t sharp. As we accompany our heroes, we learn that these houses are on stilts holding them up over a canyon behind them. Take up sleepwalking and plunge to your death — right from the comfort of your own home.
It’s critical for the Los Angeles County dispatcher to tell Station 51 whether to approach from the top or bottom (see “canyons”). We don’t have that issue in Cook County, Illinois.
When you lose something in the grass, look very carefully because you could startle a venomous snake like a rattler. Gage finds that out the hard way. In a canyon, of course.
Wildfires look terrifying. When you’re told to get out, you get out. They can spread and surround you fast — especially if you’re in a canyon. How do firefighters contain such large-scale conflagrations and put them out?
Los Angeles County has a lot of dirt roads.
I learn about rescue equipment I’ve never heard of. My favorites are the Porta Power, a super jack that helps our heroes lift cars and other weights off victims, or open doors, and the Stokes, a rigid basket that’s perfect for getting seriously injured people out of precarious situations (see “canyons”).
We also see how various hoses, nozzles, pressures, and so forth are used. This is a TV program that’s not afraid to use jargon, with viewers who are not afraid to hear it.
D5W and Ringer’s lactate treat almost everything. One or the other is prescribed by the ER doctors on most calls. When an IV is inserted, a paramedic has to ride along in the ambulance. (The ambulance attendees are mostly there for muscle to move the victims from the scene to the vehicle and from the vehicle to the ER treatment room.) That takes the paramedic out of circulation for the next call, which frustrates DeSoto and Gage, especially in one episode where some of the conditions don’t seem serious enough to warrant an IV.
Depending on your condition (bisecting aneurysm), you can have normal blood pressure in one arm and very high blood pressure in the other.
I’ve finally gotten my head wrapped around atrial fibrillation vs. ventricular fibrillation. (And I’ve had CPR training.) Unlike some other shows, Emergency! gets ventricular fibrillation right. Once you flatline, there’s no coming back.
Station 51 has a mascot, and he’s not a Dalmatian. No, he’s a basset hound named Henry. While Cap is studying to become a battalion chief, he finds Chet polishing equipment with Henry’s ears. He’s pretty sure that’s not by the book. Better Henry’s ears than Chet’s mustache, I say.
Rampart General Hospital
People in the 1970s were polite. They usually ask the Rampart doctor or nurse if it’s okay to smoke in the hospital. The answer is usually “yes.” Do not try this today.
Rampart nurses were still wearing the traditional nurse cap in addition to white dresses and clunky white shoes. (I went shoe shopping with a nurse once. The choices were clunky white, clunkier white, and chunkiest white.) The nurse cap had disappeared in the United States some time in the 1980s with the switch to scrubs.
I wonder why a county hospital in a highly populated area wouldn’t have more than one ER nurse? Yet Dixie often seems to be it. To be fair, others occasionally turn up in the treatment rooms, but more often than not DeSoto, Gage, or one of the ambulance guys is left to hold the IV bag.
Between car accidents, heart attacks, suicide attempts, poisonings, overdoses, fires, industrial mishaps, etc., the ER doctors and Dixie consume a lot of coffee. When they aren’t drinking coffee, DeSoto and Gage are stealing from the pot. Who makes the coffee and washes the cups with all those emergencies?
Emergency! miscellany
A lot of 1960s and 1970s TV shows featured actors wearing spectacularly bad wigs, and Emergency! is one of them. False hair abounds, and not only on men with little or no hair. It’s like all the time was devoted to makeup, and there wasn’t enough time to style hair properly.
In the pilot, a propeller severs a teenager’s arm. Our heroes, not yet paramedics because the paramedic program at that time is still one legislator’s dream, go to the scene, calculate the direction based on rotation, and find the missing arm, which remains out of our sight. You can only imagine how gruesome this work is without convenient camera angles and stage props to shield us.
In another incident, an epileptic boy climbs up a very high expressway pillar and can’t get down. Cap and the paramedics ask the Rampart doctors if the stress of being up there and being rescued could trigger a grand mal seizure. The doctors have to look it up. I’m screaming, “OF COURSE IT COULD!” I don’t even play a doctor on TV.
The people DeSoto and Gage rescue and the doctors save (or not) bleed very little and have the courtesy to suffer burns on covered parts of the body. Not that there aren’t hints of worse. A worker, his leg firmly trapped, has to choose between being crushed by a building wall or having his leg amputated so he can be freed in time. (Spoiler: He chooses amputation, but just as our heroes are swallowing their hesitation and getting ready to carve, his leg is freed. The wall topples almost immediately.)
On occasion, the paramedics are called on to rescue animals. Fortunately for them, in one episode the missing Grover turns up in a pen along with other dogs displaced by a wildfire. In another, it’s animal control officers who search for a baby goat among the flames and smoke and Dr. Brackett who’s bullied by his team into operating on it and its heart issues, guided over the phone by a congenial veterinarian.
One of the show’s most impressive conflagrations occurs when a worker flips a lit cigarette into a Dumpster during a propane transfer at a massive research complex (think lots of chemicals). Explosion after explosion. My first thought was, shouldn’t smoking materials of any kind be prohibited in such an environment? And why would a smoker choose to work day in and day out around propane?
I haven’t seen every episode, but perhaps my favorite among those I have seen is one in which a man manages to embed an unexploded grenade in his abdomen. This is one case where the ER doctors must make a house call. It appeals to me because the sometimes high-and-mighty Dr. Brackett gets a taste of the risks DeSoto and Gage and their peers face every day — sometimes several times a day. DeSoto and Gage become surgical nurses by necessity and earn Dr. Brackett’s praise and respect for their performance. I liked that. A lot.
Final words about Emergency!
It’s hard for me to say why I like Emergency! Part of it is the focus on medicine — I see health care as related to detective work. Sometimes the case is obvious. Sometimes you have to find more clues and put them together. I’m happy when I make the right diagnosis — Type 1 diabetes, tick bite, subdural hematoma — and when I learn about unfamiliar symptoms and conditions. When a Vietnam veteran uncharacteristically turns violent toward his wife, I don’t assume he suffers from PTSD — I wonder if he has a brain ailment (he does — a tumor).
While there are references to civilian life (DeSoto’s wife and children, Gage’s search for dates and the amateurish scheming he drags DeSoto into), there’s little emphasis on the personal. Early on, Dr. Brackett and Dixie are shown dating, but other than that we spend most of our time focused on the job — the mundane day-to-day life at the station of eating, gabbing, playing cards, and killing time punctuated at random intervals by emergency calls, and the ER at Rampart General (where they keep the coffee). We may not see our heroes at home, but we know enough about them to imagine what life is like outside the station and hospital.
Many episodes are not wrapped up neatly at the end. We see the paramedics work hard, but sometimes we don’t find out if the victims survive after they arrive at Rampart. There’s something satisfying about that — it’s more like life than TV.
Emergency! tackled issues that weren’t talked about much at the time, including middle-class child abuse and attempted suicide by a child, with the abuser portrayed by an attractive, chain-smoking Mariette Hartley. Dr. Brackett is not distracted, however, in his quest to confront mom, enlighten dad, and end the abuse.
Throughout their successes and occasional failures, our heroes remain passionate about saving lives in the field, where seconds count (see “ventricular fibrillation” above). Except for the occasional shenanigans (see “Gage” and “scheming” above), DeSoto and Gage remain regular, down-to-earth guys, frustrated more by their limitations than by the lack of accolades. They just do their job — and an interesting one it is to watch.
Anne of Green Gables: The Continuing Story
Finally I treated myself to the complete Anne of Green Gables DVD set — the 25-year-old VHS tapes just don’t display the Prince Edward Island scenery to its best advantage on a flat-screen TV.
Besides reading most of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne series, I’ve seen the Sullivan Entertainment Anne of Green Gables and Anne of Avonlea more times than I can remember. Anne is the ideal for an INFP like me; I like to think that once upon a time I had her potential, minus the ambition.
I’ve seen that regular Anne devotees don’t like The Continuing Story installment and read that due to a copyright dispute Sullivan couldn’t use material from Montgomery’s later books as he had for Anne of Avonlea. Many fans, perhaps unaware of this issue, hate this series because it deviates so widely from the established story and has some nasty continuity errors (for example, Anne and Gilbert would have been well into middle age by World War I).
I don’t hate The Continuing Story because it deviates from the Anne story and its timeline. I hate it because it’s a weak story that has nothing to do with Anne of Green Gables. Even if you can imagine that it’s not about Anne Shirley and Gilbert Blythe of Avonlea and that is just another movie set during World War I, the plot is such a convoluted, implausible mishmosh and the visuals so flat that it’s a bad showing all around. It doesn’t help that, while Anne and Gilbert are supposed to be in their early 20s, Megan Follows and Jonathan Crombie were in their early 30s when the series was filmed — well past the freshness of college and first jobs.
If all else shone, the continuity issues would be the kind of details I could overlook as poetic license. But nothing in this series works — nothing. All the elements that coalesced to make the previous installments conquer and capture millions of hearts across the globe are missing from this unrelentingly grim, joyless mess.
Anne of Green Gables: The Continuing Story — Plot
Conflict is at the heart of any plot, and as a girl and later as a young woman Anne’s tendency to daydream, act on impulse, and lash out in temper led her into any number of scrapes, some more serious than others. Her romantic fixation on Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott” sets off her trouble at the very beginning and later leads to a fateful accident and rescue. When she isn’t daydreaming, writing, or sharing her hopes with Marilla or bosom friend Diana, she’s sparring with Avonlea’s busybody and gossip in chief, Rachel Lynde. Part of the reason Anne is beloved is because we like to see ourselves in her and because we recognize the dramas of girlhood which become more significant when she begins her teaching career in Anne of Avonlea. Despite the Rachel Lyndes, the Pringles, and the Katherine Brookes of the world, Anne, her imagination, and her vision prevail. That’s what we love — the idealism and the conviction that imagination doesn’t have to be suppressed or obliterated by conventional society, that it can thrive despite the human and social obstacles.
Anne and Gilbert are past the broken-slate stage of life, and The Continuing Story needed a more mature plot and conflict. Sullivan takes us from the small-town squabbles of Avonlea (first series) and the politics of private-school teaching (second series) to the conflict to end all conflicts — World War I. Our heroine, whose most nerve-wracking moments to date have been reciting poetry to sophisticates and islanders at the White Sands Hotel, awaiting test scores to see if she beat Gilbert Blythe academically, facing down the Pringle clan, and more of the same, now finds herself dodging bullets, shells, and spies in a torturous plot that plays on none of her beloved qualities.
Near the beginning Anne meets a publisher who wants adventure books written for women (although not by women). That’s what The Continuing Story tries to be — a woman’s adventure story, with a wife braving the front in France during WWI to find her MIA husband, a sort of Ernest Hemingway SuperLite. Despite the shelling, the bullets, the amputations, and the sense that there’s supposed to be ever-present danger, there’s no dramatic tension in sight, and the story drags on and on and on. I watched the second chapter for what seemed like a long, dreary time, then decided I needed a break. When I checked the time marker on the DVD for the remaining time, I saw that I had watched 10 minutes. Ten minutes! It felt like at least 30 or more. This is not exactly the desired denouement for a good war or adventure film.
There’s a plethora of implausible coincidences (for example, Anne manages to run into Fred Wright and Jack almost the moment she reaches the French front), but every attempt at dramatic tension falls flatter than a crepe — so flat that even if you had been told every spoiler ahead of viewing The Continuing Story, it wouldn’t ruin the series for you. It’s that dull and lifeless.
Anne of Green Gables: The Continuing Story — Setting
As you’d guess from the plot, you’re not going to be spending much time on Prince Edward Island or even in eastern Canada — most of the film is set in New York, London, France, and Germany. The indoor scenes could be anywhere — indeed, they were filmed in Canada — so there’s no sense of New York, London, or any other location. These vintage buildings, and the tight outdoor shots designed to hide geography and sets, made me yearn for the strong sense of place and community both the books and previous series are known for.
As for embattled France, it too consists of tight shots that make Gil’s field hospital and the various camps look just like what they are — sets. The uniformly low, gray skies add to the effect, and so do the scenes of soldiers, nuns, Red Cross workers, doctors, and nurses running willy nilly back and forth — it’s as though they’re there to add senseless movement and energy and to keep the already small spaces filled. Instead of looking like people caught in the chaos and terror of war, they look like extras whose director hasn’t given them direction, leaving them to flit about randomly.
New York, France, London, and Germany are sandwiched between establishing and concluding scenes set closer to the places Anne’s admirers have come to love. In an interesting, ill-conceived twist, Sullivan seems determined to obliterate the one place that is dear to everyone — Green Gables. In five short years, an absentee Anne has allowed what “people in Avonlea say [is] the prettiest acreage on the north shore” (Marilla) to become the kind of rundown shanty you might see in Pennsylvania when the farm’s been abandoned for decades. If you’re thinking, “Anne would never have let this happen to the home Matthew and Marilla kept up so meticulously,” you’re right. How could such a desirable house and farm have become so decrepit in a mere five years? How could Anne let it? The shutters are loose and askew, the fences are broken, and — best of all — there’s not an inch of paint left on the weathered boards of the house. Renters! Then, when Gil and Anne try to save Green Gables, they accidentally set fire to the once-airy, now mysteriously dark, forbidding house. It’s as if Sullivan wanted to obliterate the very heart of the work that made his name and fortune. This brings us to . . .
Anne of Green Gables: The Continuing Story — Characters
Anne Shirley, bright, imaginative, inventive, dreamy, inspired by Tennyson and devoted to Gilbert once she realizes she loves him, is recognizable only because she’s played by Megan Follows. First, Sullivan has her being cozy with Fred Wright (yes, bosom friend Diana’s dull but good husband) as well as an unlikeable adventure writer named Jack whom she meets in New York and, improbably, in several other places. He may be an adventurer and spy, but Jack manages not to be any more interesting than Fred — which should be irrelevant, because Anne is just now starting life with Gilbert after years of separation. The Anne we know isn’t that light or feckless.
The Anne who once yearned for puffed sleeves and pearls now sports tailored suits and dresses with gaudy geometric patterns — stylish, yes, but not reflective of her tastes. No matter where she is or what her circumstances, Anne always looks like she just stepped out of a popular fashion catalog. She doesn’t look like someone scraping by. Beyond the clothes, hats, and trim hairdo reminiscent of Katherine Brooke’s, Anne retains nothing of her old self. When she isn’t being distracted by Fred or Jack, she’s so single minded in her search for Gilbert that all sense of personality is lost. Imagination, the literature of romance, the attachment to community, even her smile, are lost to the grimly unrelenting bore she becomes. War changes people, but from the beginning Anne isn’t Anne.
Once Anne declared her feelings for Gilbert, fans wanted to see them together as two strong-willed, bright people in love with all the joys and conflicts that come with it. To avoid that possibility, Sullivan makes Gilbert disappear for more than half the movie. Indeed, Jack the uninspiring adventure writer seems to get as much screen time as our Gilbert. For huge swathes of footage, Fred Wright is more front and center than the male lead. Even when Gilbert does reappear, Anne leaves him to talk to Jack. Gilbert has been transformed into a earnest young doctor, a two-dimensional shadow of his adolescent self, when he had not only a mind and a heart, but a personality.
In the meantime, bosom friend Diana has become such a tiresome snob that her own high-and-mighty mother, Mrs. Barry, has to rebuke her. Mrs. Lynde, Moody Spurgeon, and Josie Pye (now Mrs. Spurgeon) make token appearances, with Josie magically become a shrill, self-righteous patriot.
Anne of Green Gables: The Continuing Story is ironically named; there’s nothing about this story that is recognizable, let alone familiar. When I watch Anne of Green Gables and Anne of Avonlea again, I won’t envision a future state where Green Gables is a wreck, Gilbert has the charm of a post office, Diana is a fashionably dressed fishwife, and Anne foregoes Tennyson for a nun’s habit and a spy’s mission. I have an imagination, and I can imagine this abomination away. Like a certain Dallas storyline, it was all a bad dream — a nightmare that never happened.
Bob Newhart’s dreary 1970s Chicago
In the credits and the background of The Bob Newhart Show, Chicago is invariably dreary, with uniformly gray skies. It’s as if the show were set in a perpetual early winter, after the autumn is bright with color and before the winter is bright with snow.
This is how Chicago really looks in spring and parts of summer:
or this:
and, all right, occasionally this:
Relics: Turning the TV antenna
No matter what kind of home entertainment setup you have, it probably features a clear cable or satellite picture, even if it’s not digital or high definition, and a remote control that means having to get up only for the necessities (input and output).
In the 1960s and 1970s chez Schirf, I didn’t grow up with the crisp lines and vibrant colors that Comcast delivers today to my high-definition box and 32-inch TV. To capture the available TV signals broadcast by stations in Western New York and Ontario, Canada, we used a TV antenna.
I don’t know about anyone else’s TV antenna, but ours needed nearly constant adjustment, which depended on the station we were watching. In good weather, the three major network stations in Buffalo (ABC, CBS, and NBC) came in clearly most of the time, while the local UHF stations and those across the way in Ontario were marred by visual “snow” and aural static. Depending on weather and other conditions, it might not be watchable.
That’s where turning the antenna came in.
On Saturday afternoons at 1 p.m., my dad watched wrestling broadcast by a Kitchener, Ontario station. That meant that, at some time before 1, after lunch and washing the dishes, one of us would be dispatched to turn the antenna, while some else stood near the TV and the window to call out directions: “No, getting worse . . . turn the other way . . . keep going . . . no, too far . . . back . . . that’s good . . . there!”
The antenna was at the top of a long pole set into a pipe in the ground, which I’m sure was my dad’s do-it-yourself setup. The pole was tall, the hole had widened over the years, and the antenna made the whole thing a little top heavy, especially if there was a wind. It was heavy and hard to turn, and had to be turned slowly. I remember standing outside in the weather, fighting the wind. Of course, the same wind could sometimes turn the antenna enough to make the picture snowy, and sometimes the picture would alternate between bad and worse as the wind rocked the antenna. The picture might be bad but tolerable if the program on was one you really wanted to watch. When it was unwatchable, it was time to find an alternative channel or turn off the TV — there was no Internet to turn to.
In the early 1990s, Chicago Cable TV mistakenly cut off my cable. To my surprise, Walgreens still sold rabbit ears with a UHF loop, so I bought a pair. My apartment was at the end of a courtyard, which may have been why they didn’t work very well. I kept them until I moved in 2003, when I tossed many non-necessities. I’m not sure how they’d connect to the flat-screen LG TV I bought in July 2010.
TV antenna are still sold; the FCC provides a guide to “Antennas and Digital Television.” When I’ve traveled through small towns and rural areas, I’ve seen some antennas, although they are outnumbered by satellite dishes. I spotted these two on the return trip from Kankakee River State Park, although I’m guessing that no one has to go out to turn them and that no one has to stand inside by the window calling out directions about picture quality. And that, like the rest of us, these residents are continuing the time-honored tradition of complaining that “there’s nothing good on TV.” Whether you have eight channels or 800, there’s only so much “reality” you can take.
I’d settle for curling in Canada.