Friday Check-In: 'SCTV' returns to the spotlight

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This week's Friday Check-In newsletter coming up just as soon as my truth is a hog contest...

In The Twilight Zone Zone

It's been a busy week of Serling promotion, some of it recorded prior to my hospital misadventures, some done since I got sprung:

I guested on the podcast of Dana Gould, whom I also interviewed for the book, since he's a huge fan of both Twilight Zone and Planet of the Apes:

I joined Emily St. James and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Daniel Kraus for an episode of Screen Drafts where we picked the 13 best episodes of The Twilight Zone:

Speaking of Emily, she also interviewed me for her newsletter, Episodes, in this week's free installment:

I spent an hour on KQED talking Serling with host Mina Kim and her very smart callers — one of whom, it turned out, was also someone I interviewed for the book:

Catching up

Between recuperation and the way some screeners did and didn't become available in time, this started out as a somewhat lighter week than usual, before the death of a giant led to a last-minute tribute late Thursday. Here's what I published since last Friday's newsletter:

I was back in action on the TV Is Good podcast, as Kathryn and I talked about The Diplomat, The West Wing, and some guy named Rod Serling:

For What Else Is Alan Watching? bonus tier subscribers, I did a new Ask Alan mailbag, about actors I'll watch in anything, the return of Apu to The Simpsons, and unusual locales that would make good settings for TV shows:

I recapped this week's The Lowdown, an utterly delightful hour for which the only appropriate word was "dayenu."

And of course I had a lot to say about the life and legacy of the great Sir Patrick Stewart, who died at 86:

What's next?

Things to look for over the next week or so:

Monday brings a double dose of TV Is Good, with a new main feed episode where Kathryn and I discuss The Gilded Age and Arrested Development, and then our monthly Patreon episode, a look back at a great episode of the underrated, incredible Station Eleven. You can find that at Patreon.com/TVIsGoodPod
A recap of the next episode of The Lowdown.
I wanted to write about The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins this week, but wanted to wait for NBC to get me more screeners. Hopefully, they deliver in time for something for next week.
A review of Season Two of Black Doves, the darkly comic British spy show starring Keira Knightley and Ben Whishaw.
Thoughts on the return to Netflix of North of North, the comedy set in a remote, tiny, very cold village in Nunavut.

Depending on time, I may also weigh in on the return of the Owen Wilson golf comedy Stick, now with Rhea Seehorn.

In memoriam

Beyond Stewart, there were a number of notable TV passings this week, including another Star Trek alum:

Walter Koenig was, for good and for ill, immortalized as Pavel Chekov, the enthusiastic navigator of the Enterprise on the original Sixties Star Trek. He joined the cast in the second season as an attempt to bring in younger female viewers — Chekov of course had a Beatles haircut — but the idea of a bridge crew member with a thick Russian accent was considered radical for an American show at this point in the Cold War. Like the rest of the TOS supporting cast, Koenig never got enough to do on the show, but the movies offered him some highlights, including the body horror stuff with the brain eels in Wrath of Khan, and the comedic delights of Chekov looking for "nuclear wessels" in The Voyage Home. He also came up briefly during my Serling research, since he directed a stage production of a pair of Twilight Zone episodes in LA in 2002.
To me, Barbara Barrie will always be the mom in Breaking Away who supports her weird son and tells him about why she keeps a passport in her purse at all times. TV-wise, though, she's most notable for playing Liz Miller, Hal Linden's wife on Barney Miller. In the show's first season, Barney's apartment was a standing set and episodes often split their time between his home and work lives. Very soon, though, it became clear that the precinct was the show, and Liz was gradually phased out, with Barrie only appearing a couple of times after the first two seasons. Many years later, she was Brooke Shields' grandmother on Suddenly Susan (in a role played in the unaired pilot by a pre-Sopranos Nancy Marchand).
I knew Susan Saint James best as one half of the titular duo (along with Jane Curtin) on the Eighties family sitcom Kate & Allie. But that was essentially the third act of her career, after she broke through with a role on the late Sixties anthology series The Name of the Game, then played Rock Hudson's sleuthing spouse on the Seventies mystery wheel show McMillan & Wife. In all, she got eight different Emmy nominations for those series, winning once for Name of the Game. She was always an energetic on-screen presence, though she mostly stopped acting at a relatively young age, focusing on her family with longtime NBC executive Dick Ebersol. (They met when she hosted SNL in 1981, during the brief period when he was producing the show.)
Back in September, I wrote about how much I enjoyed Coyote vs. Acme. No small part of that was Eric Bauza's voice work as Bugs, Daffy, and most of the other classic Looney Tunes characters. Where everyone else mentioned this week lived into their 80s or 90s, Bauza was only 46, and died suddenly of heart disease. RIP.

Odds and/or ends

Though the six episodes of Police Squad! — the Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker cop show parody that was eventually spun off into the Naked Gun films — have floated around YouTube and in other bootleg forms for years, I'm not sure it's ever officially been available for streaming before. Starting Sunday, they'll be on Netflix, presumably with a slightly better image quality. Regardless, it features some of the funniest jokes ever put on television, including arguably the funniest joke, which is great out of context, but even better in.
Brief spoilers for Nobody Wants This Season Three, which dropped last week on Netflix. The season surprised me not only by resurrecting the idea of Sasha and Morgan being a couple, but making it by far this year's most compelling story. Despite my longstanding affection for Brody and Bell, there are times when Noah and Joanne suffer from The Protagonist Problem, where you're meant to be invested in them because they're the main characters not because they're the most interesting ones. Meanwhile, the chemistry between Timothy Simons and Justine Lupe was absolutely tremendous, and the writing and direction of their New York spotlight episode was romantic in a way that the show as a whole hasn't felt like in quite some time. I don't love every choice made after the trip to the Big Apple, but that one was outstanding.

SCTV is on the stream!

If you're enough of a TV nerd to subscribe to this newsletter, odds are that the title of the new Jimmy Kimmel-produced Netflix documentary SCTV: The Greatest Show You've Never Heard Of doesn't sound quite right. No, the Canadian-produced SCTV was never as famous as its American counterpart in Saturday Night Live. But it had one of the most stacked casts any sketch series has ever had, launching the careers of John Candy, Catherine O'Hara, Martin Short, Eugene Levy, Rick Moranis, Andrea Martin, Joe Flaherty, and Dave Thomas. (A young Harold Ramis was also the original head writer and a recurring player at the start of the show.) Characters introduced on the series, like Short's enthusiastic Ed Grimley or Moranis and Thomas' Canadian stereotypes Bob and Doug McKenzie, had lives that went beyond the series. And as we've unfortunately lost Candy, Ramis, Flaherty, and O'Hara over the years, SCTV is always a prominent part of their obituaries, not a footnote.

Still, because the six seasons of SCTV very much lived in the shadow of SNL, even after NBC began airing it in late night, it's understandable why Kimmel and everyone else involved in the documentary might feel protective of it. In its lifetime, it was never as popular, but it was more consistent, and more adventurous. And The Greatest Show You've Never Heard Of makes a decent argument that SCTV has had a greater impact on the language and structure of comedy over the last 50 years than SNL did.

Though the documentary is centered around a cast reunion that took place while O'Hara was still alive, its attempts to explore the dynamics among these great comedians are hit or miss. Thomas is candid about how the popularity of the McKenzie brothers — characters deliberately designed to be lowest common denominator humor, not at all representative of what SCTV aspired to most of the time — drove a wedge between him and Moranis and their co-stars. And there's some talk about Candy's larger-than-life persona, and the burst of energy Short brought when he joined the cast late in the run.

Mostly, though, the film works best as clip delivery system for SCTV itself, which made me realize the best thing about its existence: all of SCTV is now streaming on Netflix. So after you've seen O'Hara and the others watch themselves on TV, and seen famous fans like Tom Hanks and Bob Odenkirk and Kathryn Hahn talk about why they loved the series so much, you can very easily go watch it yourself. As soon as the credits rolled on the doc, I immediately jumped in to watch Levy's hack comedian Bobby Bittman co-star with O'Hara's sexpot Lola Heatherton in On the Waterfront Again, where they attempt to outdo Marlon Brando and Eva Marie Saint. This inevitably sent me down a rabbit hole that took me to the show's amazing parody of The Godfather, which somehow features Levy playing Floyd the Barber from The Andy Griffith Show; then to Levy as Alex Trebek losing his mind as host of a high school quiz show; and, of course, Rick Moranis as Michael McDonald, traveling from radio station to radio station to back up Christopher Cross on "Ride Like the Wind":

Like Looney Tunes and early The Simpsons, SCTV was laden with pretty old pop culture references, where the show was my first exposure to these people and films. The sketches worked despite my youthful ignorance, and I imagine they'll work that way today for any newcomers who didn't grow up watching the real-life versions of Bobby Bittman hanging around on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show couch for too long.

The documentary has its moments, particularly any time O'Hara and/or Martin are talking. But I'm mostly glad it gave me an excuse to rewatch parts of SCTV itself.

That's it for today! What does everybody else think?