As some unknown force runs like a cosmic Bill Dozier across the multiverse…
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Update: Grayscale for it all probably helps sell the newsprint throwback vibe but part of the point was to emphasize tension in the mashup. Not to mention that color makes the episode title’s font more recognizable.
I’ll be sharing an overdue post on Star Trek here in the next few months, phasers crossed.
Meantime, I have this. I was moved to file it away three years ago while reading a
bunch of DC’s supernatural anthologies, and now I guess I know why. Yes, Strange New Worlds had already launched, but — although not exactly ripped from the screen — the panel didn’t quite seem to resonate with anything until this past week’s episode, “The Griffin Incident”. I won’t explain since that feels unnecessary if you’ve seen it and obnoxious if you haven’t yet and want to. Spoilers are fine in the comments, however, as I would love someone to at least headcanon away the pink dress.
Panel from “The Mask of Medusa” in The Unexpected #218 © 1981 DC Comics. Script:
Robert Kanigher. Pencils, Inks: Vic Catan. Colors: Jerry Serpe. Letters: Unknown.
Related: Mr. Pope Hail • Arch-Ray Vision • Ozy Ozy Ozy
My guess is that Chuck has strict instructions not to interrupt the “Barbers’ Picnic”.
Also, Barbers’ Picnic is my new band name and probably one of the activities in the parlor cabinet in the hotel on Widow’s Bay.
Did you think I’d segue from Peanuts’ currently syndicated repeats into talk of The Pitt instead?
... Stephen Colbert, and the swan song of The Late Show, including the return of Strike Force Five.
I’m not taking stock of the wider state of late-night TV, at least directly, right now.
My aim is to gather some of the most interesting coverage of and content related to Colbert’s exit from the 11 o’clock hour after nearly 30 years, dating back to his days as
a Daily Show correspondent, over 20 of them as a host and 10+ broadcasting from the Ed Sullivan Theater.
Hey! Stephen recently led a tour of the Sullivan’s auditorium for Architectural Digest [14:29]. Known as CBS Studio 50 when it housed Ed’s “rilly big shew” and built a century ago as Hammerstein’s Temple of Music by Arthur Hammerstein in honor of his father, it’s possessed — as Late Show viewers have seen — of such remarkable features as a majestic dome refurbished and retrofitted with deft, modern graphic elements by Colbert’s staff.
The above, like all further video links in this post, goes to YouTube.
I’d wager that most of you visiting don’t remember the first live-action Spider-Man
on screen.
Clearly, based on the image above, I don’t mean Tobey Maguire. Or Nicholas Hammond, who starred as Peter Parker over 12 episodes of The Amazing Spider-Man on CBS starting in 1978, spun out of a TV movie the year before — or even the stuntman inside the costume for most of that show, Fred Waugh. Or, for that matter, Shinji Tōdō; he led Toei's スパイダーマン [Supaidāman], a very loose adaptation of the Marvel character, which aired in Japan during roughly the same span as its American counterpart.
No, I’m talking about Danny Seagren.
I’d like to have ended the year with several posts on recommended viewing and
reading, but I should know by now that making plans is how you get the universe to laugh at you. Which actually isn’t a bad segue into talking about North of North.
The delightful series’ first season of eight half-hour episodes debuted in Canada last January and globally on Netflix in April. It’s happily been renewed for a second to bow in 2026. Pretty much every critical review or discussion I came across when it premiered all but apologized for pushing it, comparing its tone and/or environment to some of the brightest stars in the constellation of great television while cautioning that it was merely, to repeat my own self, delightful — and for those averse to the unfamiliar it might be a tough sell considering the only recognizable face in its cast for most viewers will be 24’s Mary Lynn Rajskub.
How I hadn’t come across “A Stranger Things Christmas” before this week, I’m not sure.
The video dates to 2016 but we’re in better late than never territory since the penultimate episodes of the series at hand drop today (and the grand finale on New Year’s Eve). While I’m unfamiliar with the work of co-creator Leigh Lahav, I look forward to exploring her channel further because this is absolutely perfect. [3:15]
Related: Happy Feet • Lead the Wild Rumpus, Stark • Coffee and Synchronicity
Mere weeks after rewatching 1941’s The Adventures of Captain Marvel as part
of the personal film festival I’d assembled for my 50th birthday, which I’ve neglected to dig into here for literal ages now, I was surprised and delighted to see its Billy Batson pop up on a 1974 episode of Shazam!
The CBS show was a staple of Saturday mornings during my childhood, as I noted in April of this year (and long before that). I’m hoping to write about the Republic serial at greater length the near future, but I first checked it out in high school — on a set of VHS tapes from West Coast Video — having read praise for it in Comics Buyer’s Guide; on both viewings, it lived up to its reputation as one of the finest of its kind. Even if Frank Coghlan Jr.’s Billy and Tom Tyler’s Captain Marvel don’t perfectly mirror their comic-book inspiration any more than do their Filmation counterparts — the serial gives us sparks and smoke in place of magic lightning, although it does have the ancient wizard himself rather than six Immortal Elders — we get some genuinely thrilling superheroics for the era.
TV critic Alan Sepinwall the other day shared that he’s been let go by Rolling Stone.
I’d already been meaning to change the link on his name in my Friends & Favorites
list, at the bottom of the blog’s sidebar, from his author page at the RS website to the landing page for his What’s Alan Watching? newsletter on Ghost. Just a short while ago he announced that his free dispatch, usually out weekly on Fridays and until recently hosted by Substack, would soon be supplemented by a paid tier. Now his plan is for two paid tiers: One will carry the sort of material he’d been writing for HitFix, then Uproxx, and for the past 7+ years Rolling Stone; the other will have the content originally conceived for the premium add-on, with access to a Discord server for ongoing conversations. I’ve followed him since recaps of the show that inspired his logo, and obviously I recommend subscribing or there’d be no point to this post.
You can sign up for any level and still read 150-ish past editions of the free newsletter
at the boldfaced link above.
So there he was, Richard Dawson, in all of his ’70s glory — with a dark blazer and medallion over gray turtleneck — seated behind a large, ornate desk in a room lined with bookshelves. The camera pulled in on him as credits appeared on-screen announcing that I’d found my way to some kind of documentary series or infomercial on talk shows that he was hosting.
I came upon this sight while seeming to browse television channels in a dream.
Waking up, I got the sense that I hadn’t actually been flipping channels but rather watching the results of artificial intelligence tasked with creating such a program. It was still a dream, of course, no matter the rationale behind what was on that monitor in my unconscious; as I rapidly became conscious, though, I found myself intensely musing on similarities between dreams and imagery generated by omnivorous algorithm.
Now a little ditty to celebrate the return of Doctor Who.
(He pronounces his name “shoo-tee”.)
Ncuti Gatwa
Would you take me by the hand
Ncuti Gatwa
Would you take me by the hand
Can you hear me
Riff on Steely Dan
Play it on your juke box
Can you hear me
Ncuti Gatwa
Ncuti Gatwa
One week after his 25-hour speech on the Senate floor began, Cory Booker spoke to Stephen Colbert on The Late Show with familiar eloquence.
“You and I are people of faith,” Booker told the host near the end of the conversation, “but there is a Civic Gospel in this country that we need more than ever.” He noted that the Declaration of Independence from a kingdom overseas was a declaration of interdependence among the people of this emerging nation as well. An extended version of the interview is now up on YouTube.
ABC will air Paradise, which bowed in January on its sister platform Hulu, over eight Mondays starting tonight at 10 p.m. ET.
I’m not sure I recommend it even to those who love everything in the pilot because,
for me, it all falls apart too much as the season concludes.
I’ve mentioned before on the blog — 15 years ago, granted — how much I loved Shazam!, Filmation’s live-action series based on the original Captain Marvel that aired Saturday mornings on CBS in the mid ’70s.
Not very long ago it was incorporated into a dream of mine. An immortal Elder from the show appeared to me but (a) he looked more like Batman foe Maxie Zeus as drawn by the great Don Newton than Zeus himself or any of the other legendary figures making up the acronym that is Billy Batson’s magic word — yet still in the style used to illustrate those figures in the ethereal vision sequences in which they appeared, unmoving — and (2) he freaked me out by lifting his arms up instead of remaining static. I think he was giving me a mission that had something to do with cats.
Unlike most dreams, I could trace the components of this one quite clearly to stuff
from my waking life. It came as Matt Re’s look at the stretch of Batman and Detective Comics written by Gerry Conway, which ran throughout 2024 on his blog Not a Hoax! Not a Dream!, was drawing to a close; a fair number of those stories were penciled by Newton. And more germanely to the post I’m writing now, I’d begun playing the intro to Shazam! in an act of self-soothing on an almost daily basis to center myself before getting down to this or that task amidst my latest health crises and the general insanity of life.
Here, appropriately enough for the day, is a labor of Questlove that opened his excellent documentary about Saturday Night Live’s musical legacy. You can watch the mashup montage directly in his Instagram post or as embedded a couple of paragraphs into an article on the NBC website. The entirety of Ladies and Gentlemen… 50 Years of SNL Music re-airs tomorrow night, Feb. 15th, from 8 to 11 p.m. ET on the network and is streamable on Peacock.
John MacDonald is credited as editor of the montage, and Oz Rodríguez as co-
director on the special. Questlove’s 2021 doc Summer of Soul, about the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival, is for my money one of the best films of the decade, period, and not just because I hadn’t seen Marilyn McCoo in too long; you can watch it on Hulu.
Peacock debuted four 1-hour chapters of a documentary series marking Saturday
Night Live’s 50th in January, with a concert featuring many past musical guests streaming tonight. SNL’s entire catalog of nearly 1,000 episodes is on the service as well. The anniversary special is set to air live on NBC Sunday night, Feb. 16th, at 8 p.m. ET, preceded by a red-carpet show at 7.
Don’t sleep on Ladies and Gentlemen… even if you’re far more interested in SNL’s comedic heritage than its musical guests. Music as part of that comedic heritage is also deftly explored, from sketch jingles and The Lonely Island shorts to celebrity impressions and musicians as hosts.
Related: Mad Mix • Swift Kicks • My Other Saturday Notes
Need a laugh?
I’m conflicted. The dissonance of firing up the blog again, rooting on my Phillies, and hoping to get out for my birthday this weekend despite such unending pain existing half a globe away is acute. Yet I just passed an hour listening to Episode 5 of the podcast Strike Force Five while doing some graphics work for an upcoming project and the only reason I’m not incapacitated from cackling out loud nearly the entire time is that my asthma’s so bad I’ve kind-of unconsciously trained myself not to push out breath as I’m silently convulsing in hysterics.
Strike Force Five united late-night hosts Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, John Oliver, Jimmy Fallon, and Seth Meyers in a series of highly candid, very lightly structured conversations, sponsored to bring in money for their staffs as the strike by the Writers’ Guild of America halted production of their programs. Twelve installments were released over six weeks.
I was talking with a friend recently and this happened.
We finally learned the name of the little guy who’s taken popular culture by storm on last week’s episode of The Mandalorian, and it reminded me that I never shared here the brief parody lyrics I posted on Twitter a year ago before we knew anything of his background.
Yoda clo-o-one
He is pale green in color
Plays with a knob and slumbers
Fifty years old, looks more
like fifty days (oh yeah)
Now you’re a kind of family
He led you down a nobler path
Mando, I hope that Yoda clone’s okay
Last Week Tonight with John Oliver was not on last week, but will be on tonight — and with John Oliver. What are the odds, I ask you?
If you’re looking forward to it then you might be interested in Oliver’s chat with Ari Velshi on the subject “The Rigors of Laughter” [38:58] from December. Velshi is a correspondent for NBC News and MSNBC who serves on the board of The Philadelphia Citizen, which presented the interview as part of a day of programming “that brings the most innovative urban thinkers and global thought leaders together to share and discuss bold ideas”. Although neither gentleman was quite sure how to interpret the conversation’s title, it focused on Last Week’s process and purpose.
There wasn’t much in their exchange I hadn’t already heard or read, and Oliver isn’t
as engrossingly hyper-articulate as fellow Daily Show alum Stephen Colbert when he’s questioned in such a setting, but it was still fun seeing Oliver express his delight over the absurd expenditures of time, money, and other resources that his staff concocts.
