I never watched Burn Notice on its original run. Watched it last year and enjoyed it.
Ooh, I finally got around to watching Burn Notice, and LOVED the guy’s inner monologues…
Covert intelligence involves a lot of waiting around. Know what it’s like being a spy? Like sitting in your dentist’s reception area twenty-four hours a day. You read magazines, sip coffee, and every so often, someone tries to kill you.
A good spy knows when to run, and when to surrender. Sometimes it’s best to remember that it’s a lot easier to dodge questions than it is to dodge bullets.
Thirty years of karate. Combat experience on five continents… Still haven’t found any defense against mom crying into my shirt.
(Sharon Gless was his mom, who was always shaming him into helping some friend, neighbor, or his brother…)
eta: Oh, and Bruce Campbell played an old school spy! Watch it!
I saw Spamalot on Broadway last Christmas. It’s basically a rehash of a lot of the jokes from Holy Grail. The thing is I watched that film so many times back in high school I basically had the whole script memorized at one point. So when seeing it performed on Broadway it wasn’t all that funny anymore, because I already knew all the jokes.
And the character identifications that would pop up - especially when they changed as we learned more about them.
Strange thing about the old Dragnet was that every episode was named “The Big (Whatever)”. Everything was big. I didn’t realize that until I saw a listing online.
It’s more than that Ellison wrote he screenplay.
It’s my overall favorite episode of science fiction television. Even if the narrator mistakenly says “Sumerican” instead of “Sumerian:” in the introduction.
Ellison wrote two screenplays for The Outer Limits – this one (which isn’t based on as pre0-existing story)m and “Soldier”, which is. James Cameron cited both as influences on The Terminator, and Ellison then sued him more than once, this getting his name at the top of the end credits. Much as I love Ellison’s works, I think this was a dick move. Cameron was openly acknowledging his debt to Ellison, who thus got credit. Now no future director is going to acknowledge the roots of his stories.
(Such as Dark City, which definitely owes a debt to Demon with a Glass Hand)
And The Matrix owes a debt to Dark City…
(This could go on forever.)
The Wachowskis were already making The Matrix when they saw Dark City. I think they already had the look and feel down.
I saw it, also on Broadway, a number of years ago. I had seen Holy Grail, but only once or twice and years before so I found it hilarious. I would go see Spamalot again if it ever played in my area. Interesting to see how perspectives change based on the knowledge of the materials.
I recently came across the original Mission: Impossible on BluRay and started it from the beginning. Anyone who’s a fan of the movies and hasn’t seen them is going to be stunned at just how static and action-free it is. I’m enjoying it by and large, but certain stylistic things yank me out of it: all espionage is done in pressed suits and dress shoes. The countries in which the IMF operates are (awkwardly, in the exposition) never named, just generic “our adversary” Eastern European or Central American countries in which everyone speaks English with community theatre “foreign” accents. I’ve read that the conceit gets dropped later on, but the fact that every episode starts with Steven Hill thoughtfully going through his dossier of agents and picking mostly the same ones every week is…an odd narrative choice to 2024 eyes. Don’t get me wrong, I’m enjoying it. Martin Landau is a joy to watch, and I also think Barbara Bain has some real screen presence. I’m impressed that there’s an agent of colour in 1969 (Greg Morris) who’s both a electronics genius and also gets to kick ass and take names. And it’s fun from a time capsule perspective. But it’s so frikkin’ stiff at times.
IMO the Mission Impossible movies completely missed the point of the TV show, and thus were hugely disappointing. The movies were fairly standard spy adventure dramas. In the TV show, the spy aspect was secondary. The main point was the creation, every week, of an elaborate practical joke that the viewer wouldn’t understand the full impact of until the end.
I consider myself an ordinary TV watcher, I like some stuff but don’t really arrange my life around it. Miami Vice was the first show I made sure I was around a TV when it came on (back then there wasn’t Demand). I LOVED that show. I re-watched a few episodes recently and it was not watchable. Sad.
The show was The Big Con. It was all subtle mind games. The movies are Bond films. Frankly they were better Bond films than their contemporary actual Bond films. but, I would have preferred the con game, and the assassination of the Jim Phelps character was movie blasphemy, but whadday gonna do? I still have the series episodes.
Speaking of the big con, I’d love to see the 70s show Switch again, about the ex-con man and the ex-xop working as PIs. I wonder if it was as good as I remember.
My family only started watching “Mission” at Season 2, the “Jim Phelps” era. and lost interest around Season 5. When I saw it was available on Netflix a few years back, I excitedly began watching it, remembering it as one of the best series of its era.
I was disappointed to find it repetitive and rather boring. The antagonists were always stereotypical evildoers from the Soviet bloc (a la Leonid Brezhnev) or South of the Border (a Castro clone.) There was no camera movement, only static shots (typical of TV dramas of the time), and there was zero action. Though it was interesting that the characters were written to emphasize that they accomplished their missions by wit, cunning and intelligence rather than fisticuffs, it was just too slow and dull, and I finally gave up on it after 3 or 4 episodes.
Another insanely popular show from the 1960s that is now dull beyond belief: “Bonanza.”
“The Avengers,” with Patrick MacNee and Diana Rigg, holds up pretty well, mostly because of the chemistry and repartee between the two of them.
And because Miss Rigg looked so smashing in a leather jumpsuit.
I absolutely love The Avengers. Frustratingly, I found a copy of the colour Emma Peel episodes shortly before the pandemic hit. The remastering is one of the absolute best I’ve ever seen. But hen in the past little while, box sets of the all the Emma Peel eps (B&W and colour) and all the Tara King eps with a crapton of bonus materials got released…I simply can’t spare the several hundred dollars for those, and it breaks my heart.
And agreed on the catsuit.
We recently watched all the Diana Rigg Avengers episodes. There were several I’d never seen before. They do hold up, because of the quirky humor.
I haven’t watched the old Mission: Impossible series in a LONG time, but I really did like them. They’re only “slow” if you’re expecting fast-paced big action . But that’s not what they were supposed to be. They were carefully planned “caper” adventures, in which Careful and convoluted planning produces a difficult and often unexpected route to the desired result. It’s not as “Con Game”, regardless of what people above have written.
Another feature of the first “Steven Briggs” season – Things went wrong with the plan and they had to improvise. They had less of this in the later seasons, although there was one memorable “Jim Phelps” episode where they did NOT get the assignment from "the secretary or the MI office. Phelps himself was kidnapped, and the rest of the team threw together a plot to rescue him. Felt like the old days.
I tried watching the first Tom Cruise movie and hated it. They destroyed the character of Phelps and everything that made the series good and memorable and substituted extreme stunts. Why did they even license the “MI” name if they were going to do that?
Now I gotta re-watch the old episodes and see if I still like it.
Speaking of spy stuff, I’ve been rewatching Chuck. Still holds up, IMHO.
Yes, it was a catsuit, not a jumpsuit. Either way, Miss Rigg set many young male hearts pounding, mine included.
These are no longer available for streaming on Netflix, but while they were, I got to see the earlier episodes with Honor Blackman as Cathy Gale. The production values were considerably lower, but she was also a good match for MacNee.
I always felt sorry for Linda Thorson as Tara King, Diana Rigg’s successor. It was a thankless task to follow a character like Emma Peel. And they set the character up as young and inexperienced, which dragged the stories down a bit as John Steed had to show her the ropes. Had they presented her as just as capable an Avenger as Mrs. Peel, she may have succeeded.
One year at college someone posted a list of upcoming movies. After each of them they put “starring Diana Rigg”. She was actually only in two or three of them, but that was still pretty good.
Glad to hear that! I’m a sucker for “ordinary guy ends up in complicated plot”, and there isn’t a more ordinary guy than Chuck. The rest of the cast is perfect (Adam Baldwin basically being his badass character from Firefly, Yvonne Whatsername and Sarah Whatsername from Everwood, and Chuck’s coworkers*).
*From the BuyMore™! What a great setting.
Look, try the pilot, see if you like it. And if you do, it just gets better.
Now 'scuse me, I have to go find me some Burn Notice and Chuck.… and Coronet Blue, but that doesn’t hold up as well.