SOS for PBS: My favorite TV critic, Aaron Barnhart of K.C. Star, does a postmortem of PBS's past & future in his review of new 'Upstairs, Downstairs'

ABBA - SOS (1975)
http://youtu.be/cvChjHcABPA


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.

That, of course, explains why he's so popular and why his blog, TV Barn, has been one of the leading entertainment blogs for years, as I've mentioned here in the past.
http://www.kansascity.com/entertainment/television/
http://www.tvbarn.com/newsletter/

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.

Read the rest of the article at: http://www.kansascity.com/2011/04/09/2784536/pbs-is-going-nowhere-with-upstairs.html

His killer ending:

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.

The backstory on Aaron Barnhart is here, if you're curious:
http://hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/search/label/Aaron%20Barnhart

http://www.pbs.org/


SOS for PBS? Bad news!
SOS by ABBA? Great news!



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 greatest ABBA fans and nobody-but-nobody sweats the details on the history and music of ABBA and Agnetha Fältskog like he does.

Shay's YouTube Channel for ABBA, with an emphasis on HQ picture and sound quality: http://www.youtube.com/user/2Shaymcn

His non-ABBA music YouTubeChannel:
http://www.youtube.com/user/SHAYMCN1

Meanwhile, over at the official ABBA Vevo Channel, they've got lots of the hits.
En español? Si, claro!
http://www.youtube.com/user/AbbaVEVO

See also:
Sara Russell's ABBA ON TV website: http://www.abbaontv.com/index.html

Video: Washington Post columnists Michael Gerson and E.J. Dionne define the year 2010 in American Politics on the PBS NewsHour

Washington Post columnists Michael Gerson and E.J. Dionne Define the Year 2010 in American Politics

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RsWIm3scPg

Michael Gerson's columns and archives are at:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/linkset/2007/09/26/LI2007092601982.html

E.J. Dionne's columns and archives are at:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/linkset/2005/04/22/LI2005042201099.html

Washington Post website:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/

PBS NewsHour Rundown blog, a recent addition to my reading list
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/

PBS NewsHour YouTube Channel
http://www.youtube.com/user/PBSNewsHour

New film trailer for Robin Hood, starring Russell Crowe & Cate Blanchett; Matthew Macfadyen & Keeley Hawes

Below, the TV commercial that'll be running during the
Super Bowl 44 telecast on Sunday.
Robin Hood opens nationally May 14th, 2010.

Starring: Russell Crowe as Robin Hood, Cate Blanchett as Maid Marian, William Hurt as William Marshall, Mark Strong as Sir Godfrey, Mark Addy as Friar Tuck, Oscar Isaac as Prince John, Danny Huston as King Richard, Eileen Atkins as Eleanor of Aquitaine, with Max von Sydow.
Directed by Ridley Scott

http://www.robinhoodthemovie.com/

Below, the longer trailer I previously posted here.

Matthew Macfadyen, who plays The Sheriff of Nothingham in Robin Hood is an actor I've been following for quite a while, as he is almost always pitch-perfect in every role he plays.
He first came to my attention when he was so compelling as the brilliant but emotionally conflicted MI-5 agent Tom Quinn in TV's Spooks (MI-5), and then played Mr. Darcy in the terrific 2006 film production I loved of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, opposite the beautiful and beguiling Keira Knightley.



More recently he was fabulous as the lead of Arthur Clennam in the Andrew Davies adaption of the BBC-1 TV miniseries of Charles Dickens' Little Dorrit, which was telecast here on PBS as part of Masterpiece Classic, which, in my opinion, may've been the single best thing on TV last year. It deserved to win the 2009 Emmy for Best Miniseries it garnered.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/littledorrit/index.html

The quality of every single episode was so amazing that I just hated when it came to an end on Sunday nights and I had to wait another week to see what happened.
I may've even loved it more than I did Cranford, which is saying something.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/cranford/index.html

Months later, I was somewhat surprised to discover how many people I knew who confessed to me that, while they don't "usually watch PBS," they got hooked on this production because it was so damn believable.

If you agree, be sure to watch writer Andrew Davies discuss the characters and his adaption of Dickens here: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/littledorrit/slideshow.html

Next Masterpiece Classic program is Northanger Abbey,
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/northangerabbey/index.html

As if being so good in top-rate TV shows and films wasn't enough to create envy, Matthew Macfadyen is also the husband of the fabulous actress Keeley Hawes, who was MI5 agent Zoe in Spooks and who more recently starred in BBC America's Ashes to Ashes.



Keeley, as a brunette, is exactly like the girl I married in a recurring dream I had when I was in high school in North Miami Beach, and life here in hum-drum South Florida was just too boring to contemplate when I wasn't involved with sports or politics.
In my dream, she and I lived in Essex but commuted to the City for our great jobs, me in advertising and her in film/TV.
In later dreams, we had a daughter that looked a bit like, well, Romola Garai -who just played Emma- but who sings more like Essex's own adorable Pixie Lott.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/emma/index.html
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/emma/watch.html


Thanks a Lott, Pixie: Students in her home town get a music lesson in the form of a free gig
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1248806/Thanks-Lott-Pixie-students-home-town-music-lesson-form-free-gig.html

Dopey Gitmo "expert" and author Mahvish Rukhsana Khan

I don't want to belabor this particular point, since it has nothing at all to do with my part of South Florida, per se, the usual main course on this blog, but I also didn't want to let it be like the 1,001 other things I've wanted to comment on here or at South Beach Hoosier over the past 18 months and never got around to mentioning for whatever reasons, usually timeliness.
Instead, I'm just going to say it and leave it to a future post to pick up the conversation.
And then get some sleep.


After watching the series finale of the excellent ITV WWII series, Foyle's War, on PBS as part of their Masterpiece Mystery-about veteran Detective Chief Superintendent Christopher Foyle and his colleagues batting crimes and mysteries in the seaside town of Hastings during the war- roughly about 12:30 a.m., I flipped over to C-SPAN's Book TV to see who was on.
(See http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/foyleswar/ , http://www.foyleswar.com/ and http://www.booktv.org/ )

The segment airing was After Words: Mahvish Rukhsana Khan author of "My Guantanamo Diary: The Detainees and the Stories They Told Me" interviewed by Nancy Snow, senior research fellow at the USC Center on Public Diplomacy which I'd seen parts of earlier in the day.

For purposes of information, while I was growing-up in the 1970's in North Miami Beach, I lived in a house next door to a wonderfully kind older Central European couple who loved gardening, both of whom were concentration camp survivors.
We had many, many conversations, the moral and philosophical points of which remain with me today.

Two of the undercurrents of the last episode of Foyle's War, "All Over," were the growing sense of anticipation that the war would be ending -V-E Day- and the growing anti-German sentiment and sense of revulsion following the news of the liberation of the Belsen concentration camp and what had transpired there.
http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/article.php?lang=en&ModuleId=10005224

So, half-asleep, I was not quite prepared to suddenly hear recent law school grad and newly minted author Mahvish Rukhsana Khan -whom you and I have never heard of for good reason- express her p.o.v. that, after roughly 30 visits to Cuba, she really thought the U.S. treated the Gitmo detainees just like the Nazis treated Jews.

Even more improbably, if possible, after admitting that -shocker!- she never met any of the high-risk detainees, she expressed her disappointment at finding out that a man she was to meet accused of being either an Al Qaeda/Taliban member/sympathizer(?), actually looked much more like a kindly old man, not one of the 9/11 hijackers.

As it turned out, the man apparently had been a pediatrician in Afghanistan after the Russians retreated, and Khan went on at some length to talk about how middle-class the doctor was in his personal views.

Yet Khan admitted that while she was in Gitmo, she really wanted, perhaps even secretly hoped for, was to see a detainee who more closely approximated the physical appearance of the popular image of what a 'terrorist" looked like, but she never did.

A few moments later, almost as if I'd written it for entirely comic purposes, like two ships passing in the night, moderator Nancy Snow, a Cal State-Fullerton prof, expressed the p.o.v. that the truth is always much more complicated than simple black and white.
Who could argue with that simple maxim?

Yet Snow said it in such a smug, condescending way that it was readily apparent to me that she intended the remark to stand as a chastisement to U.S. popular opinion.
As if we were all just rabble, rolling around like a marble in an old car's trunk, completely unaware of any of the the complexities of the matter that someone of Snow's station knew implicitly.

What made it funny from my perspective was the fact that it was author Khan, whom Snow had already been interviewing for over a half hour, who had expressed the un-sophisticated stereotypical B&W p.o.v. she'd criticized, not some imaginary straw man named USA or the viewers.

Snow was so insistent on playing the role of the moral scold that she didn't let the facts get in the way.
You almost have to admire her, even while you're glad you were never stuck in one of her classes, since it must be sheer torture.
----------------------------------------
One more general criticism before I hit the sack:
Can I be the only person in the country who's noticed the steady decline of Book TV's interviewers and moderators?
They seem to be putting just about anyone on C-SPAN 2 these days, and that's not to even get at how bad the Book TV website has gotten, with LESS complete information available on the books there than ever before.


Nancy Snow is a senior research fellow at the University of Southern California Center on Public Diplomacy. She is also an associate communications professor at California State University, Fullerton and adjunct communications professor at the University of Southern California. Ms. Snow is the author of three books, including "Information War: American Propaganda, Free Speech & Opinion Control Since 9/11 public