FOLLOW me on my popular Twitter feed. Just click this photo! @hbbtruth - David - Common sense on #Politics #PublicPolicy #Sports #PopCulture in USA, Great Britain, Sweden and France, via my life in #Texas #Memphis #Miami #IU #Chicago #DC #FL 🛫🌍📺📽️🏈. Photo is of Elvis and Joan Blackman in 'Blue Hawaii'
Beautiful Stockholm at night, looking west towards Gamla Stan
SOS for PBS! My favorite TV critic, Aaron Barnhart of the Kansas City Star does a skillful postmortem on PBS' recent past and bleak drama programming future in his Sunday review of the new incarnation of 'Upstairs, Downstairs'; he's 100% right!
Aaron uses the scalpel adroitly and knows how to get to the heart of the matter in a way that's both amusing and logical for readers, while also sharing lots of useful historical context to better illustrate his prescient comments.
It's why TV Barn has been on my blog roll ever since I started this blog over four years ago.That's not by accident.
The Kansas City Star PBS is going nowhere with ‘Upstairs, Downstairs’ By Aaron Barnhart Posted on Sat, Apr. 09, 2011 10:15 PM
After a 34-year hiatus, “Upstairs, Downstairs” is returning to PBS and, perhaps unintentionally, serving as a reminder of what public television used to be and the kind of trouble it’s in today.
If you are past a certain age, you will likely remember the original “Upstairs, Downstairs.” It was dreamed up by Jean Marsh and Eileen Atkins, two actresses in their 40s who were inspired by “The Forsyte Saga,” the popular adaptation of John Galsworthy’s novels of upper-crust life that aired on the BBC in 1967.
In a few months, when NPR steers out of these troubled waters — as it surely will, under new leadership — it will be the little tugboat with an aging cruise ship in tow, a vessel too weak to power itself anymore, the good ship PBS.
ABBA - SOS (As seen on Don Kirshner's Rock Concert; taped in Los Angeles, November 1975) http://youtu.be/_JzXhC2yV9c Shay is one of the world's greatestABBA fans and nobody-but-nobody sweats the details on the history and music of ABBA and Agnetha Fältskog like he does. Shay'sYouTube Channel forABBA, with an emphasis on HQ picture and sound quality:http://www.youtube.com/user/2Shaymcn His non-ABBAmusicYouTubeChannel: http://www.youtube.com/user/SHAYMCN1
Well, after months of waiting, and with CSI Miami shuffled off to Sunday night at 10 p.m..Hawaii Five-o returns to network TV tonight, with bells and whistles and a full-court media PR schmooze-fest orchestrated by CBS-TV, with gleeful assistance from hundreds of websites and blogs that have been chronicling the return for months.
For awhile, I thought I'd do that, too, but why be the fifth-wheel when the first four are already working, so I've been sitting on this for months. But first, to appreciate how much people have longed for a QUALITY re-make of this show, it's important to see what came before.
From the banal to the brilliant: Surfside 6 to Hawaii Five-o in the blink of an eye. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAqxpGgXdU0
Hawaii Five 0 - Intro
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AepyGm9Me6w
Theme from Hawaii Five-O. University of Notre Dame Marching Band Sept. 18, 2010, at Michigan State University, East Lansing MI., USA.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dxrBbyKZ3A
TV Barn The awesomest ‘Hawaii Five-0′ marching band video ever by Aaron Barnhart September 20, 2010
Remember when NBC, the fourth-most-watched network on TV (unless USA is having a good night), told you they were remaking “Bionic Woman” and “Knight Rider” and then you tuned in and realized that these were just signs that NBC had hung on entirely different shows that happened to have a cyborgian female and a cyborgian internal-combustion vehicle in them?, CBS is taking a different tack with its remake of 1970s police staple “Hawaii Five-0.”
True, it’s been turned into a buddy action show rather a procedural starring Jack Lord and his hair. But in many ways, as you’ll see tonight, there are attempts to honor viewers’ memories of the show — which makes sense, since at least some of “Five-0′s” run was seen by millions of boys who are now men in Nielsen’s 25-to-54-year-old demo.
Read the rest of the post at: http://www.tvbarn.com/tv-barn/the-awesomest-hawaii-five-0-marching-band-video-ever/ http://www.tvbarn.com/
Hawaii Five-0 - Rebooting the Theme http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4Loyy7MmwY
Hawaii Five-0 -Meet the Team http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRZ3vuYP-iY
Hawaii Five-0 - Riding the Wave http://www.cbs.com/primetime/hawaii_five_0/video/?ttag=mktg_hawaiifive0
Hawaii Five-0 - Hollywood Meets Hawaii http://www.cbs.com/primetime/hawaii_five_0/video/?pid=nv7w3YgZ3bXJH_p_c_n32uZiQTshGqZj&vs=Default&play=true
http://www.cbs.com/primetime/hawaii_five_0/
New York Times For ‘Hawaii Five-0,’ a Music-Filled Push From CBS By Stuart Elliott
There have been police dramas on television called “Hawaii,” “Hawaiian Eye” and “Hawaiian Heat,” but the biggest gangbuster was “Hawaii Five-O,” which appeared on CBS from 1968 to 1980. Lush scenery in living color, a catchy theme song and a memorable catchphrase, “Book ’em, Danno,” all contributed to a successful run in prime time.
Because, as Fred Allen once said, imitation is the sincerest form of television, it is not surprising that CBS is remaking the series; the new version will be broadcast at 10 p.m. (Eastern and Pacific) on Mondays, starting on Sept. 20. The revived “Hawaii Five-0”— with a zero in place of the “O,” perhaps to signal it is version 2.0 — is one of five new series that CBS plans for the 2010-11 season.
Read the rest of the article: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/30/business/media/30adco.html
Based on something I observed myself on the tube this morning, I sent this head's-up email earlier this afternoon to longtime South Beach Hoosier favorite Aaron Barnhart, TV critic of the Kansas City Star and the genius creator of the TV Barn website, http://blogs.kansascity.com/tvbarn/index.htmlone of the top TV sites in the country for the thoughtful and discerning TV viewer. It doesn't really require much explanation to see where I'm coming from here. ________________________________ September 15th, 2008
Dear Aaron:
Just a head's-up for something you'll likely be hearing about and maybe even seeing video of in the next few days.
Last night, thanks to DirecTV airing KHOU-TV 11 telecasts of Hurricane Ike coverage on Channel 361, discontinued as of today, I was able to watch something you rarely see any more on live TV: angry personal invective by a reporter/anchor who felt unencumbered by either common sense or ethics.
Naturally, this blow-up was completely misplaced and a real classic example of 'shooting the messenger,' something that you'd think someone in the TV news business would appreciate better than most folks.
Last night/early this morning, one of KHOU-TV's male anchors hosting their Hurricane Ike coverage from the studio really lit into the media rep for Entergy for the Houston area still largely being in the dark, his seeming to think it was a matter of simple incompetency, not pure logistics and manpower.
The rep said the company had aid agreements with other power companies and that people were coming in from 19 other states to help Texans get their power restored, had planes flying people around the state to get them in a position to do their job first thing Monday morning, were doing aerial surveys and had everyone in the company out in the field.
But he also admitted that it would likely be Monday or even Tuesday morning before they could add up all the disparate info and get a realistic idea of when power would be restored.
Obviously, here in South Florida, it's drilled into people that you have to be responsible for yourself and your own family for at least the first 72-96 hours after a disaster. (Not that people are!)
There's no cavalry coming into town to knock on your door after a day or so to ask you if you want some grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup with your drums of drinking water, like a waiter. (After Hurricane Wilma in 2005, I was out of power for over 11 days.)
So, less than 48 hours after Ike hits, this anchor at Channel 11 is giving the Entergy guy enormous grief for everything not moving fast enough to suit him.
Finally after a few minutes of this, the Entergy media rep said that he'd had enough, that he wasn't going to put up with any more negative media reporting not based on the facts on the ground, when everybody in the company was doing their best under trying circumstances to get power restored. (Their homes are out, too!)
And the anchor just kept going on and on about what a poor job Entergy was doing...
It was pretty wild drama to stumble upon by accident, but made worse by my not being able to tape it right away, and the station not showing the name graphic of the anchor while he was on his tangent, which is why I can't tell you his name or the name of the female anchor at the studio desk with him. (Ed. Note: Or if they did, I was too stunned to notice it.) Sorry about that!
The power rep explained that his company's customers were not all clustered in just a few easy-to-resolve urban areas like CenterPoint Energy Inc., but were instead spread out over a much larger geographical area, including most of the rural communities affected by Ike.
The anchor couldn't care less.
He repeated his claim that Centerpoint was clearly doing a much better job, and then it got even more heated.
Despite the fact that from the very beginning, and to their great credit, KHOU was posting nearly everything they broadcast onto videos you could see on their website, not surprisingly, this particular encounter is not yet on the station's website. At least not yet, as of 12:30 p.m. Eastern
Best video I've seen thus far is this one, which has a lot more than what is officially described here, including the dozens of oil barges in the Gulf waiting to get into port, who had to stay away from the area while the hurricane was on the way. It starts repeating after about 18 minutes into the video, with VO descriptions of Blackhawk helicopters landing and President Bush coming Houston on Tuesday:
Below is a perfect example of what has everyone down there upset, with most of the coverage being too urban/Houston-based, even while there are towns and completely underwater or destroyed. Just like Katrina and media fascination with New Orleans!http://www.khou.com/news/local/stories/khou080915_tnt_guardsmen_food.7a5e7c1f.html
See bayousinker'scomments! I concur 100%.
Meanwhile, the best spot-on column of the weekend is this one in yesterday's Houston Chronicle by Lisa FalkenbergMaybe some live and never learn, along with the reader comments.
That could just as well describe people in South Florida and the Keys in particular, where alcoholics at Key West bars uttering their philosophical banalities during hurricane evacuations draw Miami TV cameras like flies -over and over and over! It never ends! http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/falkenberg/6000302.html
By the way, my interest in this hurricane hitting Galveston and Houston is more than passing, since just before Christmas in 1855, my maternal ancestors arrived in America via Galveston by ship from Prussian-controlled Poland. They put all their belongings in an ox-driven wagon and walked for days to get to the Texas Hill Country they'd heard about in Poland, becoming Texas Hill Country pioneers in the process. My family has lived in the Cowboy Capital of Bandera ever since then.
Aaron, I hope that you can use your great industry connections to get and post the video of that KHOU reporter losing his cool to your great TV Barn site sometime soon. As always, your website continues to rock!
Adios! Dave -------------------------- If I get any info on that TV encounter from this morning, I'll post it here so you can see it for yourself.
By the way, two of my favorite financial reporters will be on Charlie Rose tonight talking about all the ramifications of the Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch stories, Charles Gasparino of Newsweek and Andrew Ross Sorkin of the New York Times., who edits their great daily financial e-mail newsletter DealBook. His column archives are at: http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/andrew_ross_sorkin/index.html Watch it on Channel 17 at midnight, since you never really know when WPBT-2 is going to air it, despite their schedule, just one of the reason's it's the country's worst PBS station.
