In the fall of 2006, two new television shows, essentially about the same thing, premiered on network television. “30 Rock”, written by and starring Tina Fey, was a half hour sitcom about a late night sketch comedy show like Saturday Night Live (from where Ms. Fey hailed). It also starred Alec Baldwin, Tracy Morgan and Jane Krakowski. It was a huge hit and ran for seven seasons.

The other show was “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip”. Again about the writers and producers of a late night sketch comedy show, this one being an hour-long drama. Created and written by Aaron Sorkin, who was coming off the hugely successful and groundbreaking “West Wing”, it ran for one season before being cancelled.

I never really watched 30 Rock and was devoted to Studio 60. My son and I would stay up until 10:00 to watch it instead of setting the DVR. So what happened? If this was such a great show, as the initial critical reviews also touted, why didn’t it last? Before we get to that, let’s first discuss what made this show so magical, at least in the beginning.

First there was the cast:  Pulling from “Friends” and “West Wing” we get Matthew Perry (Matt Albie) and Bradley Whitford (Danny Trip) respectively. They play the exiled former co-execs of Studio 60. Amanda Peete (Jordan McDeer) is the new head of the network NBS. Sarah Paulson (Harriet Hayes) plays one of the three big stars on the show and is the former love interest of Matt. Steven Weber (formerly of the hit show “Wings”) plays Jack Rudolph the chairman of the network (As Allessandra Stanley points out in her September 2006 New York Times review it wasn’t long before he’s stealing every scene he is in). I agree, Jack became one of my favorite characters. The supporting characters are great too (e.g., ex-West Winger Timothy Busfield as production manager Cal Shanley). It was an ensemble tour-de-force.

Second, the writing: Sorkin’s characters were fully formed and multidimensional especially the female leads Peete and Paulson. It’s the West Wing approach all over again. The pilot episode starts with its own cold open as we watch the current executive producer of Studio 60 (Played by Judd Hirsch) melt down with Network-esqe rage on national television. Meanwhile Jordan is being toasted at a lustrous Hollywood dinner when the cell phones of everyone in attendance go off alerting them to the catastrophe that is unfolding at this week’s show. This all sets the stage for Jordan to lure Matt and Danny back to the show. The first half of the season unfurls from there and it is close to perfection with episodes like “The Focus Group” and the very clever two-part “Nevada Day” (with an excellent guest star turn from John Goodman)[1]. “

The other thing that was fun about Studio 60 was the show within the show. Each week they were putting on 90 minutes of sketch comedy. There were real guest hosts (e.g., Rob Reiner) and musical guests (e.g. Sting in his lute playing stage). There were also actual skits like “Nicholas Cage Couples Counselor” and a Family Feud-style number called “Science Schmience” (with Rob Reiner).

Stanley also points out in her early season review that Studio 60 had among its charms, a romantic view of television. There is no better example of this than Jordan’s relentless drive to up the quality of programming on NBS. She clashes with Jack over a reality show that is sure to be hit but it also “disgustingly” manipulative. The disagreement winds getting arbitrated by their boss Wilson White (played with glorious gruffness by Ed Asner). He sums up his decision to let Jordan have her way by saying “If you want her to cook the meal you have to let her buy the groceries”. When Jordan asks afterward whom White was referring to, Jack doesn’t miss a beat, replying, “Bill Parcells, a coach that hasn’t won a playoff game in nine years.”

For the first half of the season every episode was better than the last. The Christmas show, though still excellent, was a harbinger of where things would go wrong in the second half.

So what happened? A number of things combined to doom this show that started off to be something really special.  In no particular order:

1. The storyline of Danny falling for Jordan, introduced in the Christmas show, didn’t work. It defused the dynamic tension between them that had been so carefully nurtured for the first ten episodes. It felt forced and like very ordinary television (The romantic angle that was working was between Matt and Harriett.)

2. For some reason Sorkin checked out during the second half of the season, phoning it in while he focused on writing the film “Charlie Wilson’s War”.

3. Was prime TV ready for a drama that didn’t involve cops, lawyers or doctors? They went for politics (“West Wing”) but perhaps a TV show about TV was a bridge to far.[2]

4. The show was very expensive. The all-star cast alone must have cost a fortune. It was a lot to bear when the ratings started to slide.

Nevertheless I have a very soft spot for Studio 60. Find it on Netflix or Amazon and at least watch the first half of the season. It’s smart, funny and well written with fully drawn characters. It’s still some of the best television I’ve ever watched.

ARTS ROUNDUP

Watching – “Goliath” (Amazon) – Billy Bob Thornton is playing against type as Billy McBride a down and out lawyer exiled from the large firm he created. Set in Los Angeles, Billy is drinking his time away in a local Santa Monica bar when is drawn back into the life by a wrongful death suit that involves his old firm. Also starring William Hurt as the head of Billy’s old law firm and Maria Bello as his ex-wife and partner at the firm. Very cool show. Thanks to my friend Tim for telling me I needed to watch this show. He was right.

Listening – Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit, “Live from the Ryman”. I’ve known about Isbell for some time but have never really listened to him. I heard about this new album on the weekly email from AllMusic  (a recap of the week’s new releases across all musical categories). The sound is country-style writing in an alt-rock setting. Isbell is an expert wordsmith and sounds a bit like Warren Haynes (Govt Mule). It’s all good stuff especially the rockers like “Cumberland Gap” and “Super 8”. My friend Pat convinced me to finally give Isbell a listen.

Reading – “November Road” by Lou Berney. I heard about Berney in a recent Wall Street Journal article [link]. In his latest novel The Kennedy assassination becomes the catalyst that sends two different people on the run. New Orleans fixer Frank Guidry is running from his mob boss who Frank realizes had something to do with the assassination. This knowledge has made Guidry expendable. Charlotte Roy has decided to run from her dead-end Oklahoma life, and a drunkard, deadbeat husband. She takes off with her two young daughters, and an ailing dog, for California. Frank and Charlotte cross paths in New Mexico. Charlotte needs a ride and Frank needs the cover of a family. They head for Las Vegas where Frank hopes to sort out his situation.  Trust me you’ll like this one. Now I’m off for some of Berney’s back catalogue.

[1]The episode takes place in the town of Pahrump, Nevada. When Jack receives a phone call about the situation that is unfolding his first response is “Say the name of the town again.”

[2]Maybe the times are different in the 21^stcentury. The “Name of the Game”, which ran from 1968 to 1971, was about a publishing house.

When I was growing up television was lights years different than what we have today. In the late sixties through the late seventies there was no cable television, and even when it arrived around 1978 it was the Stone Age compared to what we have now.[1]We had seven channels 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 11 and 13. National broadcast TV was 2 (CBS), 4 (NBC) and 7 (ABC), which astonishingly is the same today. The local channels were 5 (Metromedia), 9 (WOR) and 11 (WPIX). Channel 13, as it is today, was public broadcasting (PBS).

The original programming was on 2, 4 and 7. The day went something like this: news and game shows in the morning; soap operas, more game shows and old movies in the afternoon. Local and national news at dinnertime and then original programming in the evening. The local sports teams were on 9 (Mets) and 11 (Yankees). And that was it folks, six channels, no remote. You wanted to change the channel you had to hoist yourself up out of the Barcalounger.  And no DVR, you had to sit through the commercials.

Not that different from what we have today except that channel 5 is now Fox, a national broadcast channel. Also today we also have a gazillion other channels with a cornucopia of mostly unwatchable programming.[2]This is just another example of the law of diminishing returns. The number of channels expands faster than the supply of quality content. You see this in sports like Major League Baseball and the NFL. Expanding the number of teams increases revenues but seriously dilutes the talent pool i.e., having more teams doesn’t mean that number of talented players increases.

Today the quality original programming has mostly moved from the major national broadcast channels out to the premium (HBO, Showtime), quasi-premium (FX) and streaming (Netflix, Amazon, Hulu) providers.  This has basically sucked the creative life out of broadcast TV leaving only reality shows, painful sitcoms and derivative hour long dramas about cops,fire fighters and doctors (sometimes all in the same show).

Back in the days of my youth though the supply of content only had three places to go and looking back there were some pretty cools shows.I remember when I was in college we wouldn’t go out until after we watched the Saturday night trifecta of MASH, Love Boat and The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Today Saturday night programming is a wasteland of unwatchable dreck but back then it was packed with the best shows. Admittedly we had our dopey stuff like F-Troop. Here’s a sampling of some of my favorites from back when dinosaurs roamed the earth.

The Name of the Game– This was perhaps one of the coolest shows of the era.  It was about a magazine publishing house and one of the three main characters would be featured each week (Robert Stack, Gene Barry and Tony Franciosa). Susan Saint James was the editorial assistant to each of them so she was featured each week. It only lasted three seasons but it was so ahead of its time.

Lost In Space– Loved this show. A stowaway (Jonathan Harris playing the scheming Dr. Smith)  sends the spaceship (carrying the Robinson family and Major West) hurtling off course from it destination of Alpha Centauri. They crash land on a planet, that miraculously has breathable air, and now they have fix to the ship and figure out where they are. The Robot (“Danger Will Robinson!”), jet packs, hostile aliens… who needs Star Wars?

Bewitched– Picture “Leave It To Beaver”where Mrs. Cleaver is a witch and you pretty much have the premise for this show. Elizabeth Montgomery plays Samantha Stephens married to normal mortal Darrin (played by two different actors over the course of the show’s run). Agnes Moorehead plays her witchy mother Endora. Samantha is trying to live the normal life of a housewife but that never lasts too long before she twitches her nose and unleashes a spell that wreaks havoc. Equally fun is the nosey neighbor across the street, Mrs. Kravitz, who is convinced something strange is going on over at the Stephen’s house.

Hawaii Five-O– Jack Lord patrolling the mean streets of Honolulu in suit and tie. The 21^stcentury re-boot pales in comparison. Book ‘em Danno.

The Wild, Wild West  – A spy story set in a western. Robert Conrad and Ross Gordon are the agents going up against villains and schemes to bring down the nation. Lots of James Bond-like trick gadgets and that cool evolving panel thing on the screen every time they went to a commercial. Again the re-boots missed the essence of this classic.

The Monkees– A made for TV band that closed each show with a music video years before MTV. Matching outfits, souped up GTO, goofy storylines… I’m a believer!

McMillan and Wife– I’m not saying these were the most politically correct times, try getting away with this title today. McMillan(“Mac”) is the San Francisco Police Commissioner played by Rock Hudson and his wife Sally (Susan Saint James fresh from the Name of the Game), is his unofficial assistant helping Rock untangle the latest mystery. The early seasons are the best.

Night Gallery– Rod Serling‘s follow up to his very scary Twilight Zone series was in some ways just as spooky. Each week Serling, who could creep you our just with his intros, would introduce paintings that figured in that evening’s three mini-episodes. Lost a lot sleep after watching this one.  Watch the episode  “The Doll”. Whoa!

ARTS ROUNDUP

Reading – “Ready Player One”by Ernest Cline. It took me a while to get into this one. The world’s a mess and everyone takes refuge in the virtual reality world of The Oasis where people interact through their avatars. The Oasis founder, now dead, has left the players with a contest, more of a quest, to find the “Easter egg” and be the ruler of this virtual world. It’s a group of young protagonists versus an evil corporation for control of The Oasis. Whether intended the story also speaks to the loneliness of people retreating from the real world to lose themselves in their technology.

Watching – “Broadchurch”Season 2. This season deals with wrapping up the murder from the first season while introducing the double murder that Detective Alec Hardy (David Tennant) failed to solve before coming to Broadchurch. He and fellow detective Ellie Miller (Olivia Colman) are straddling both cases. It ‘s a complicated and addictive series.

Listening – “Miles Davis and John Coltrane, The Final Tour”. This is number six of the Miles Davis bootleg series.[3]It features complete shows from Paris (2), Copenhagen and Stockholm (2). Recorded in 1960 and featuring material from the Davis classic “Kind of Blue”, this was the last time Davis and John Coltrane toured together. The set lists feature extended versions of Davis songs like “So What” and “All Blues”.

[1]We had a box that sat on the TV that you had to get up move switches to select channels (remotes were soon to follow). Other than HBO and CNN I’m not sure what other channels were available but it did take the number of channels up to about twenty-five.

[2]We’ve all done the “death” scroll where you start at about channel 30 and get up to the low 100’s before giving up and booting up the Apple TV.

[3]I missed a big one in my last post about artists issuing unreleased material: Jimi Hendrix.  The man’s estate has put out much more material than he released during his too-short career. If you are a true fan of his music it’s a bottomless trove.

“These are people who want you to write sanctimonious stories about the genius of the rock stars, and they will ruin rock and roll and strangle everything we love about it. They are trying to buy respectability for a form that is gloriously and righteously dumb. Now, you’re smart enough to know that. And the day it ceases to be dumb is the day that it ceases to be real, right?” [1]

Here’s to big, dumb rock and roll (BDR). Let’s take a moment to appreciate rock bands that don’t take themselves too seriously.

BDR is the essence of rock and roll: Primal beats, loud guitars and simple lyrics (usually about girls, cars or partying or all of the above). Driving around in the summer with the top down and this crap blaring out of your car stereo. It was the best!

I was thinking about this recently driving in my car (iPod surfing, no convertible) listening to “The Best of Humble Pie”. You have to love these guys. We’re not talking “Blonde On Blonde” folks. Songs like “I Don’t Need No Doctor” (live at the Fillmore East) and “30 Days In The Hole” are totally ridiculous and totally infectious.[2]

The 70’s were ground zero for BDR. Examples of this sub-genre include bands like Cheap Trick (“I Want You To Want Me” is classic BDR),ac/dc (“You Shook Me All Night Long”) and T-Rex (“Bang a Gong” with goofy lyrics that include lines like “You’re built like a car you’ve got that hubcap diamond star halo”).

Punk rock in the mid-seventies was a response to the growing pretentiousness of the major rock bands. And talk about BDR (e.g., The Ramones) it didn’t get much dumber which was the point: simple, no frills guitar rock.

And then there is Kiss, the kings of BDR. It doesn’t get any better (read dumber) than this (“I want to rock all night and party every day”). Add the stage war paint and you have BDR perfection. Kiss was so revered that future generations of rock bands regularly gave them shout outs:

“Playing Kiss records beautiful and stoned”

“Heavy Metal Drummer”, Wilco

“…rolling numbers, rock and rolling, got my Kiss records out.”

“Surrender”, Cheap Trick

”Kiss they were the ones…”

“Black”, Pete Yorn

It reminds me of the early days of Saturday Night Live where Dan Aykroyd played Leonard Pinth-Garnell (a recurring character) the host of Bad Playhouse (a takeoff on those stuffy high-brow PBS shows). Clad in a black tuxedo Aykroyd introduces some piece of performance art (e.g., Bad One-Man Theatre). After the brief (and awful) performance they cut back to Aykroyd for his final comment, one of my favorites being “Terrifically bad, utterly pointless”.

Which pretty much sums up what big dumb rock and roll is all about (“utterly pointless”) and why we love it so. For those about to rock (dumbly) we salute you!

[1] Phillip Seymour Hoffman as rock critic Lester Bangs in the movie “Almost Famous”. Another great Lester Bangs quote from the movie: “…Live “American Woman” (by the Guess Who)? The most brilliant piece of gobbled goop ever!” Click here for the complete clip of Hoffman’s Lester Bangs monologue.

[2] Humble Pie might be most famous for launching the career of Peter Frampton who played guitar in the band behind lead singer Steve Marriott.

Let’s talk about television. I’ve been watching MASH reruns after dinner lately. I started thinking about all the really successful TV series through the years. Most of these long-running shows were ensemble pieces. The other thing about them is the actors rarely came anywhere close to this level of success again. Some churn through soon canceled star turns, while a good number of them were never heard from again. I’m reminded of that line from an Eagles song: “I don’t know why fortune smiles on some and lets the rest go free”[1]. Here are a few examples of this phenomenon.

MASH – In the end almost none of the actors went on to do anything, other than maybe game shows[2], other than Alan Alda, who became a character actor in film (“The Aviator”) and TV (“West Wing”).

FRIENDS – Jennifer Aniston has gone on to moderate film success (she’s mostly stayed away from television). The others have tried starring in numerous television series with little or no success. I tried watching “Cougar Town” once, the Courtney Cox show. I lasted to the first commercial. Unwatchable. I liked Matthew Perry in Studio Sixty on the Sunset Strip (Another ensemble show that I thought was great, but was canceled after one season. There’s a blog about this show somewhere down the line.) but there hasn’t been much to show since.

THE WEST WING – It’s hard to see Bradley Whitford as anyone other than Josh Lyman (though again I thought he was great as Danny Tripp on Studio Sixty). Whitford has tried a few other shows after Studio Sixty that also didn’t last. Alison Janney (CJ Craig) has been successful with a sit-com, “Mom”, as well as movies and stage work. Rob Lowe is also finding work in ensemble TV dramas, most recently “Code Black”.

SIENFELD – This one is a bit of an exception to the thesis. We all knew Jerry Seinfeld, who has gone back to standup and some smaller projects on cable (“Comedians In Cars”), would continue to thrive. But it is Julia Louis-Dreyfus whose career has jumped to new heights with “Veep” another long-running, award winning series.

DOWNTON ABBEY – Granted the show is almost all English actors so it will not be as easy to track their progress now that this series ended. Hugh Bonneville (Lord Grantham) continues to work, most recently in a PBS Shakespeare mini-series. Michelle Dockery (Lady Mary) has done a complete turn from type in her new TNT series “Good Behavior” where she plays an ex-con, drug addict on the run with a professional assassin.

What can explain this? It may be as simple as the fact that when a show is successful and runs up to eight seasons or more that the actors become “branded” as their characters. It’s becomes difficult to see them as anyone other than President Jed Bartlett or Lady Mary.

For some these roles are a culmination of a long running but moderately successful career e.g., Martin Sheen on The West Wing or Harry Morgan on MASH. For others it is the early part, or beginning, of their careers e.g., Gary Burghoff as Radar on MASH.

Some getting a whiff of the show’s early success, and completely misjudging their star power (or perhaps trying to avoid this branding effect on their career), decided to leave their series.[3] This also has rarely worked e.g., McLean Stevenson (Colonel Blake) leaving MASH or Dan Stevens (Matthew Crawley) exiting Downton Abbey. They experienced moderate success at best.

Perhaps the best explanation is this: A successful ensemble show is alchemy of the best parts of each of the actors. There is no real star. The show becomes the star, not the actors. This may or may not be true but it is difficult to argue with the career success of most of the actors after these iconic shows end. Hopefully they made the best of it during their show’s long run. History seems to indicate it’s all downhill from there.

[1] “The Sad Café” on “The Long Run”

[2] There was also Jamie Farr (the cross-dressing Max Klinger) who sponsored an LPGA golf event for 28 years.

[3] Killing off the character seems to be the preferred method for explaining the early exit.

There was an article in the New York Times magazine a few weeks back that caught my attention. It was a special edition on the 25 most influential musicians today. Anyway I didn’t know many of them but on the last page was a article about Metallica and how they’d finally put out an album that sounded like Metallica. The point being that since their 1990’s self-titled mega-hit, know as the “The Black Album”, they had put out a series of records that were deemed by their fans as deviating too far from their signature sound. But now they were back and all was right in the world of Metallica fans. This made me think about an artist’s obligation to factor into their creative process the expectations of their fans.

Any change in artistic direction can risk the alienation of a band’s fans. Think Dylan going electric or Springsteen’s “Nebraska” album. It happens all the time. I was a huge REM fan until they left the IRS label for Warner Brothers in 1988. Their sound and material changed, to my ears, in a big way. What I first loved about the band had changed. I moved on and followed them only casually after that.

Perhaps the most telling example was my initial experience with Neil Young. I discovered Young through my sister’s copy of “After The Goldrush”. This was around 1972 and the follow-up album “Harvest” had been just released. I feverishly went about filling in the back catalogue of all things Neil. There were his other solo albums, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young output (“Déjà Vu and “Four Way Street”), a bootleg from his 1971 acoustic tour and even Buffalo Springfield’s Greatest Hits (to which I took an endless amount of ridicule from my friends when I purchased it at our local mall). I devoured these records and waited eagerly for his next album, the follow-up to Harvest. In the fall of 1973 it finally arrived in the form of “Time Fades Away” a live album of all new songs from the previous winter’s tour. To say this was a departure from what I had come to know as Neil Young music was an understatement. Not that there weren’t some Neil-like songs including the classic “Don’t Be Denied” and some nice solo piano songs. But most of it was a pretty rough, ramshackle affair.

The following year in the summer of 1974 came “On The Beach”, now viewed as one of his classic albums, with a set of songs reflecting the whole Watergate, Patty Hearst zeitgeist of the seventies. No “Southern Man” or “Down By The River” (the raging guitar solos of the early albums having all but disappeared) just a jangling, paranoid set of tunes on side one followed by the somber, mostly acoustic, trilogy on side two.

It would be another year until the third offering of the Ditch Trilogy[1] hit the racks in the form of “Tonight’s The Night”. By now I had all but given up hope of getting some of the Neil Young music I had been weaned on. TTN, with its black cover with Neil peering out from behind shades, was a frightening, drunken, out of tune affair, which was more or less an audio wake for two fellow musician friends who had fallen to heroin. Neil wailed like an alley cat as the band (the remnants of Crazy Horse, Stray Gator Ben Keith and Nils Lofgren) lurched and careened behind him. I remember my friend and I each buying this album the day it came out. Listening to TTN back in my bedroom we looked at each other, both thinking, “what is this?”

The sun finally peaked through a few months later with the release of “Zuma”, a raging electric guitar laden return to form with the re-formulated Crazy Horse. Ah, the Neil for which I’d been waiting for two plus years.

Looking back now we know it was just Neil being Neil, which is doing whatever the hell he felt like with no thought of the commercial consequences.[2] Which brings us back, admittedly I took the long way around, to the article about Metallica. Playing to type may be the way to sell a lot of records but art it is not. The artist creates according to his muse and the fans follow, or not. .

Emerson wrote, “What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think.”[3] That certainly applies to Neil Young and his career. Here’s hoping that Metallica was following its muse when they made their latest album and not just them trying to be the old Metallica.

Arts Roundup

Watching – The Night Manager is an adaption of a John le Carre novel starring Hugh Lourie and Tom Hiddleston. Lourie plays Richard “Dickie” Roper, a notorious arms dealer. Hiddleston plays Jonathon Pine, an MI-6 operative embedded in Roper’s organization. Six spellbinding episodes. Lourie is an excellent villain. Hiddleston is icy cool as he burrows deeper into Roper’s world. It’s on Amazon Prime. Terrific stuff.

Listening – Real Estate is a band from Ridgewood, NJ (about five miles from me). Their fourth album, “In Mind” has just been released. I’ve been listening to it for a couple of weeks. A somewhat low-key affair. I hear parts Teenage Fan Club (vocally) and Death Cab For Cutie. Their bio lists The Feelies as a major influence. It grows on you.

[1] When asked why he didn’t follow up Harvest with a similarly commercial album Young replied that Harvest had put him in the middle of the road, which was boring. He decided to head for the ditch, which was a rougher ride but he met more interesting people. These three albums became know as the “ditch” trilogy.

[2] Young actually got sued in the nineteen eighties, during his genre experiment period, by his label, Geffen Records, for producing records that were “unrepresentative” of Neil Young music.

[3] From the essay “Self-Reliance”.

Here’s the best of what I’ve read, watched and listened to in 2016.

Books

1. “Razor Girl”, Carl Hiaasen – OMG, laugh out loud funny as Hiaasen chronicles the latest band of Florida crazies and their schemes.
2. “Before the Fall”, Noah Hawley– This is the best book I read this year. Crazy mystery about a private plane crash off Martha’s Vineyard. Read this book.
3. “The Travelers”, Chris Pavone – Somewhat a return to form for the author of the breakout hit “Expats”. Pavone returns with a tale about a travel writer who gets caught up in international intrigue where all is not (as you would expect with Pavone’s thrillers) what is seems.
4. “City on Fire”, Garth Risk Hallberg – Big, complex, multiple character book with intertwined stories set in NYC from late 1976 to summer of 1977.
5. “Home”, Harlan Coben – One of my favorites series with two of the great main characters in Myron Bolitor and his sidekick Win. If you haven’t read this series it is worth going back to the start with 1995’s “Deal Breaker”.

Movies/TV – I am way behind on new television and movies… but of what I did get to these were my favorites:

1. The Crown (Netflix) – I wrote about this one recently. Clare Foy plays the young Queen Elizabeth in this four season Netflix series. A bit of methadone for those dealing with Downton Abby withdrawal.
2. Soundbreaking: Stories From The Cutting Edge of Recorded Music (PBS) – All you music lovers out there find the reruns of this eight-part PBS special on the recording of popular music over the past 50 years.
3. Madame Secretary (CBS) – Losing a little steam in its third season but still very watchable and Tea Leoni holds it all together.
4. Arrival – The one movie on this list (as I said I am way behind). Amy Adams stars as a linguist dealing with one of the alien ships that have “arrived” in various parts of the world. It’s a story about communication and the concept of time. I didn’t really completely understand what was going on but I enjoyed it all the same.
5. Good Behavior (TNT) – Michelle Dockery goes 180 degrees from Lady Mary on Downton Abbey to play an ex-con, meth addict who becomes partners, not willingly, with a professional assassin.
6. The Americans (FX)– I just finished the third season and this is one of the best shows of the modern television era. Makes you think about your neighbors.

Music

Albums – I listen to a fair amount of new music but to be honest not much sticks in terms of wanting to hear the whole album again. Here’s the few that made the grade in 2016:

1. Kasami Washington, “The Epic” – Is it ever. Sax player Washington emerges fully formed with this three-record jazz/funk extravaganza. I picked up the vinyl at Spinster Records in Dallas earlier this year.
2. Lydia Loveless, “Real” – Third full length LP from Loveless. At first I thought she had filed off her rough edges a bit too much and was veering off into Taylor Swift land. But not to worry, upon further listens, and a recent show in NYC, she’s as scrappy and rocking as ever.
3. Car Seat Headrest, “Teens In Denial” – These guys are on all of the best of lists so I thought I give them a try. The lead singer sounds a lot like Ray Davies of The Kinks (at least to me). Good solid record. They have a lot of this album on YouTube if you want to check them out.
4. Dinosaur Jr., “A Glimpse of What You’re Not” – J Mascis at his guitar shredding best, 20 years on with the original lineup.

Songs – I also keep a list of memorable songs from artists I’ve tried in the last year:

1. Kings of Leon, “Waste A Moment” – Classic late-period KOL arena-style tune.
2. John Fullbright, “When You’re Here” – A sappy love song but a good one.
3. Datura4 , “Out With The Tide” – This Australian band is a crazy mix of styles from this one that opens the record to others that sound like ZZ Top, Aerosmith and on it goes. This song has a bit of a T. Rex vibe.
4. The Record Company , “Off The Ground” – This is a band to watch. This swampy, tune with its slithering slide guitar sounds more like a seasoned roadhouse blues band than a first album from a bunch of young guys from LA.

Happy New Year!

So it had to happen. Cameron Crowe’s Showtime series “Roadies” was cancelled after its initial season. In some ways the show (and much of Crowe’s recent films) was out of step with what succeeds (sells) on the big and small screen today (see Madmen, Sopranos, Billions…). No special effects, guns, lawyers, cops, criminals, etc., just a story about the road crew supporting a rock band (the fictional Staton House Band) on their national tour. Is there a place for a feel good show like this on television today? Apparently not.

Criticisms of the show included the knock that it was less about the actual “work” of the road crew and too much about the melodrama of the private lives of the crew. This is a fair point though early on (the first episode) we did see the crew actually working but this didn’t last long. The constant flow of real musician cameos might have been a bit overdone at times especially in the season finale. But to Crowe’s credit he didn’t lean completely on his fellow boomer pals and mixed in current popular musicians like Halsey and Gary Clark Jr. And it was a likeable cast with “comfort food” type stories and plenty of inside “jokes” about the music industry, which is probably why the audience was limited. There was even the “Song of the Day” and a soundtrack for each episode.

I’m not sure what prompted the cancellation. These types of things usually come down to low ratings or costs (or both). Costs couldn’t have factored too much in the decision with the virtually no-name cast (Luke Wilson being the most well-known name) and the set consisted of the back stage area in a sports arena (all virtually the same). The show had a nice quirkiness to it. Like an entire episode dedicated to an all night bus ride where Phil (elder statesman and ex-road manager) recounts his days being road manager for Lynyrd Skynyrd; or the somewhat creepy band archivist, Mike Finger; and Kelly Ann’s brother Wesley who joins the crew after being fired by Pearl Jam.

It would have been nice to give the show another season to settle in and find its groove (not like HBO’s “Vinyl” which was just so wacko that it had to be shot to put the audience and the cast out of its misery). In the end it was just out of step with the times, which is a shame. If you liked “Almost Famous” give “Roadies” a try. You’ll probably be able to find it on Amazon soon.

I’m adding a new addendum to the posts with what I am…

Listening to: Led Zeppelin, “The Complete BBC Recordings”. It covers the band’s BBC recordings from 1969-71 before they got crazy big. These guys rock huge.

Reading: Carl Hiaason, “Razor Girl”. Just finished this one. It has the same protagonist as the previous his book “Bad Monkey”. Over the top hilarious with the author’s usual cutting satire about his home state of Florida and the nitwits that inhabit it.

Watching: “Stranger Things” (Netflix). The story centers on a group of young boys and the mysterious disappearance of one of their friends. Winona Ryder, in a near constant state of hysteria, plays the missing boy’s mother. A strange lab facility in their town figures in the goings on. It has a very Stephen King feel to it.