Best-bets for March 23: a king, a queen, a frog

1) “Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light” opener, 9 p.m., PBS. “Wolf Hall” was the potent story of Henry VIII (Damian Lewis, shown here) and Thomas Cromwell (Mark Rylance), an ex-blacksmith who was his fixer. A decade latter, this excellent sequel wraps Cromwell’s story. After executing Anne Boleyn, Henry covets a marriage to Jane Seymour (Kate Phillips). Read more…

Week’s top-10 for March 24: “Bachelor,” basketball & Ben from Baltimore

1) “The Joe Schmo Show” finale, 9 p.m. Tuesday, TBS. This clever show has an ending that’s even better than we’d imagined. From the beginning, it made one real guy (shown here) think he’s in a reality show. The others – friends, foes, weirdos – are actors. Now comes an ethical dilemma and then the shell-shock news. The result has a little humor and a lot of warmth. Read more…

Best-bets for March 21: Reba/Rex & rebounders

1) “Happy’s Place” season-finale, 8 p.m., NBC. This show has ts flaws, due to dumbing down Gabby and Isabella. But it has improved, has been renewed and tonight focuses on two of its best characters, Bobbie and Emmett. Some people push for a romance … which makes sense: The actors (Reba McEntire and Rex Linn, shown here in a previous episode) have been a real-life couple for years. Read more…

It’s time for Troy and Drake and all the saints

As the college basketball tournament begins, we can meet varied places.
There’s Kansas, which is a state, and Bryant, which is a Gumbel. There’s Liberty, which is a concept, and Auburn, which is a color. There’s Wofford (shown here) and Lipscomb and McNeese and more.
That’s the egalitarian notion of the NCAA tourney. It has spots for Texas, with 53,000 students, and Wofford, with 1,600. It has Yale, which has provided five American presidents, and others which haven’t even had an Undersecretary of Transportation. Read more…

Here’s TV’s history … going way back

(Here, from the start, is the book-in-progress, “Television, and How It Got That Way.” I’ll continue to post new chapters separately under “Stories.” After that, however, I’ll move each to its spot here.
This is Section One – “The Good Old Days (sometimes)” – and Chapter One.

To see how far TV has come, let’s step back a bit.
We’ll go to 1952 in Clintonville, a Wisconsin town of 4,600, known for big, tough trucks and (back then) big, tough football players.
I’m in the living room with my sister, our parents, a grandmother and a grandfather. Stationed a reasonable distance from the TV set, we are watching … well, a man playing records.
The man says what record he’s playing and starts it. Sometimes, the camera shows the record going around; sometimes it shows the man watching the record go around. Read more…

A fourth network? The “pipe dream” persisted

(This is the latest chapter of a book-in-progress, “Television, and How It Got That Way.” If you scroll up one, you’ll see all of the chapters so far, including this one, in their places in the book.)

For 30 years, a fourth TV network seemed like mere myth.
That was after the death of DuMont and before the birth of Fox. There were several tries, all imploding quickly.
One such fizzle (a 1967 latenight show led by Bill Dana, shown here) was declared by Jack Gould, the New York Times TV critic, to seal things. It was “further evidence that expansion of commercial TV is little more than a pipe dream.” Read more…