To be precise, we’re saluting an unsung old sitcom that, as you’ll see, had a lot more going on than it’s usually given credit for.
To be more precise, this little life lesson comes from the old Redd Foxx series SANFORD AND SON…which turns out to be much, much funnier, truer, and more dangerous and disruptive than we remembered:
My mother has said every single one of these things to me. But she’s never called me a “creative” writer.
My father, OTOH, has said none of the above to me. Yet he always tells me, “You’re very creative with the truth.”
Anybody wonder about my motivation for doing what I do?
Yeah, we know it’s not quite the season, but this is an early bird special for all those people we meet who, when we tell ’em what we do (“I, uh, try to write for TV”) invariably reply, “Oh, I never watch television:”
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In case you had any doubts about Amazon’s TV production arm being for reals, Variety.Com today says that Amazon Studios is thisclose “to greenlighting a musical comedy series dubbed “Browsers.”
According to Variety, BROWSERS, written by David Javerbaum (THE DAILY SHOW, Emmys, Grammys, even Peabody Awards up the yinyang), was originally developed at CBS but didn’t make it past the script stage. Possibly because the premise – the adventures of 4 interns at a site not unlike HuffingtonPost.Com – seems to have even less potential than, oh, a series based on yours truly’s own duller-than-the-cobwebs-around-my-social-calendar life.
Still, good judgment has never been very important when it comes to television. And musicals can be fun if the music is listenable/dance-able. So we applaud Amazon for at least doing something and say, “Bring it on!”
…No matter how dead he is.
Which is my sweet, munchy, little way of saying that the very nice people at Shout! Factory have sent us a review copy of The Ernie Kovacs Collection: Volume 2, and I’m very glad I managed to, um, talk LB into giving it to me to review.
Kovacs was one of television’s founding fathers of comedy, goosing TV with his weirdness in the ’50s. To say he was offbeat is to barely scratch the surface. A true original, Ernie Kovacs was Bizarro without the white face, and you can spot his influence in the Monty Phython gang, the Muppets, and just about everything on Adult Swim.