Podcast Tuesday: "Blow Up Your TV"

Mary Tyler Moore and Dick Van Dyke bicker on The Dick Van Dyke Show.

Garry Marshall served a long and productive apprenticeship in show business before creating the megahit Happy Days in the 1970s. He wrote jokes for standup comedians and late night shows, then graduated to writing prime time sitcoms. One of the most famous shows he worked for in the mid-1960s was The Dick Van Dyke Show. Not only was this series a critically-acclaimed classic with very decent ratings, it also put Garry in contact with some people who were important figures in his life, such as creator Carl Reiner and director Jerry Paris.

I've been watching Dick Van Dyke reruns for decades now, but doing These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast has caused me to notice things in the show that I might have missed before. In particular, a 1966 episode called "Bad Reception in Albany" struck me as a precursor to Happy Days. The plot has comedy writer Rob Petrie (Van Dyke) trying and failing to watch a televised fashion show in an Albany, NY hotel overrun with rowdy, drunken conventioneers. It seems that a fraternal organization called the Seals have descended upon Albany the same weekend that Rob is there, causing him no end of trouble. Years later, Happy Days would have its own fraternal organization, the Leopards, and they would get into similar booze-fueled shenanigans.

This week on the podcast, we're talking about "Bad Reception" and the importance of The Dick Van Dyke Show in the history of Happy Days. As usual, this leads to us talking about a whole variety of subjects. If that interests you whatsoever, click the play button below.

Identifying the second-stringers from Little Golden Books

Not all of these characters are still superstars in 2026.

Like generations of American children since the 1940s, I grew up with Simon & Schuster's Little Golden Books. I was born in the mid-1970s, so my fondest memories of that venerable, much-loved literary franchise are of the titles released during that specific time period. From about 1973 to 1978, the standard back cover art for Little Golden Books featured a train populated by various licensed characters. Just seeing that familiar, friendly picture brings back a wave of nostalgia for me. I must have spent many accumulated hours studying it in my younger days, and I was glad to see it again on social media earlier today.

Upon closer inspection, though, I have a question: Who the hell are some of these characters?

The Beatles gave us a glimpse of their possible future... on their last song

No longer hungry: The Beatles as they appeared during their final photo shoot.

The future we didn't get.

To me, the breakup of The Beatles is no great mystery. It's simple math. When the group started in 1960, its members were about 20 years old and hungry for rock stardom and everything that went with it—women, money, houses, cars, publicity, screaming fans, etc. When the group ended in 1970, these men were about 30 years old and had had plenty of all that stuff. Too much, in fact. At every meal, no matter how delicious, there comes a point when you have to push your chair away from the table and declare that you've had enough. And so, they walked away under their own power while they still could.

I'm reminded of comedian Mitch Hedberg's description of pancakes: "All exciting at first, but then by the end, you're sick of 'em."

Many of The Beatles' contemporaries, like The Rolling Stones and The Who, decided to stay at the banquet for decades, even after the deaths of core members. Even the always-squabbling Kinks managed to outlast them. But the Fab Four remained stubbornly broken up, with each member of the quartet pursuing a solo career. Fans have naturally been curious about what kinds of albums John, Paul, George, and Ringo would have made if they had stayed together through the 1970s and beyond. Some fans have even created compilation albums and playlists with tracks taken from various Beatle solo LPs. 

But in 1970, just as they were disintegrating, The Beatles gave us a humorous glimpse into their own possible future as a band were they to remain together. Yes, I think there's a somewhat obscure Beatles B-side that demonstrates what would have happened to The Beatles if they hadn't broken up. And this song occupies a unique and important place in the group's discography.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 296: The Crooked Path of Timothy Farrell (1922-1989) [PART 3]

After this series, I may never read or write another word about Timothy Farrell ever again.

I learned a valuable lesson from the last two articles in this series. Namely, if I'm ever going to finish this series about B-movie actor turned disgraced lawman Timothy Farrell aka Timothy Sperl, I'm going to have to stick to just the highlights. Or the lowlights, I guess. 

So where were we? Okay, it was May 1974, and Sperl's criminal trial was underway. Witnesses were testifying about Sperl's alleged crimes as an LA. county marshal, which included: misappropriating funds, assigning his men to work at campaign events for Supervisor Jim Hayes, falsifying timesheets, destroying records, and interfering with civil service exams to favor particular candidates. Let's jump back into the timeline:

I've just seen what I've been told is 'Everything'

Nathan Fielder (left) questions Elizabeth Holmes in You Can See Everything.

What the hell did I just watch? 

But can you, really?

If it's possible to emerge from a three-hour movie knowing less about its subject than you did going in, then that's the experience I had watching Nathan Fielder's You Can See Everything, his supposedly all-access look at now-imprisoned Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes. 

After emerging from this surprisingly dreamlike and artsy film, I'm not sure if Holmes is a master manipulator or someone who genuinely cannot distinguish lies from the truth. I'm not sure how sincere Nathan Fielder, known for his deadpan demeanor and high-concept stunts/pranks (like Dumb Starbucks), intends this film to be. I'm not even 100% sure how to pronounce the name of actress Amanda Seyfried, who famously portrayed Holmes in Hulu's The Dropout and who reprises the role here. And, yes, that last one comes up as an issue in the film.

Is this movie a documentary about Holmes, revealing the flesh-and-blood woman behind the scandalous headlines? Sort of, though the lady herself disappears (to a Texas prison) about halfway through and is "present" only through brief phone calls and a hologram after that. Is it a meta-narrative about Fielder trying to make a movie about Holmes? Sort of, though Fielder doesn't really let us in on his editing process (which must have been an ordeal in and of itself). Is it a sequel to The Dropout? Again, sort of, though Seyfried is the only returning cast member from that series. Is it a three-hour meditation on the slippery, elusive nature of truth itself? That may be the most accurate label I can give it.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 295: The Crooked Path of Timothy Farrell (1922-1989) [PART 2]

Things were looking shady for Timothy Farrell in the mid-1970s.

NOTE: It had been my sincere hope to bring this series about actor Timothy Farrell to an end with today's article. However, as I began assembling this second installment, I realized I had far too many articles to sort through. I simply hadn't counted on Farrell's 1974 court case generating as much publicity as it did. This article started growing exponentially larger and did not seem like it was close to reaching a conclusion. In other words, I goofed. Rather than releasing nothing this week, I decided to publish what I had. Please bear with me. One way or another, I will bring this thing to a conclusion... eventually. Just not now. J.B.

A week ago today, we were discussing the up-and-down life of Timothy Farrell, a wavy-haired Los Angeles theater, film, and television actor who was part of Ed Wood's repertory company in the 1950s, appearing in Glen or Glenda (1953), The Violent Years (1956), and Jail Bait (1954). Under his real name, Timothy Sperl, he had an almost entirely separate career as a Los Angeles county marshal that started in 1947 and ended in 1974 amid allegations of corruption, embezzlement, and conspiracy. He then retreated from the public eye and died in obscurity but was one of the interview subjects in Rudolph Grey's Nightmare of Ecstasy: The Life and Art of Edward D. Wood, Jr. (1992).

More than a half-century later, questions still remain about Timothy Sperl's very public downfall. Was he really taking advantage of his job for financial and political gain or was he unfairly targeted by his enemies because he tried to increase minority representation in the marshal ranks and improve living conditions in the Los Angeles jails? Since the actor/lawman is dead and can no longer speak for himself, we are forced to rely on what various California newspapers reported about him decades ago. In that spirit, let us jump back to Friday, January 25, 1974, the day after Sperl was hit with a nine-count criminal indictment. He had already retained legal counsel, attorney Paul Caruso.

Podcast Tuesday: "Turd Ferguson: Assignment Tampa Bay"

Norman D. Golden II and Burt Reynolds in Cop and a Half.

Remember when cops dominated movies and TV? When I was growing up, they were the closest thing we had to real-life superheroes. From the 1970s to the 1990s, we thrilled to the big- screen and small-screen adventures of maverick plainclothesmen who drove flashy cars, carried powerful guns, routinely roughed up (or just flat-out killed) suspects before bringing them to trial, flagrantly ignored the rules, and infuriated their stressed-out superiors. They did what they had to do to keep the scum off the streets and protect the citizens. Sometimes, they were lone wolves. Other times, they'd be given humorously mismatched partners, who didn't even need to be cops. But we loved everything about them, right down to the clever catchphrases and gratuitous car chases.

That time seems very distant today and impossible to revive or replicate in the 21st century. Too much has happened since the '90s. Too many sad, scary headlines. Nevertheless, in this week's installment of These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast, we are revisiting the era of the fictional supercop. In particular, we are reviewing Henry Winkler's Cop and a Half (1993) starring Burt Reynolds. This movie was made during the post-Happy Days years when Henry walked away from acting and tried to reestablish himself as a producer and director. 

But Cop and a Half wasn't just a straightforward cop movie! Nope. Burt's character, Detective Nick McKenna, was given an unlikely partner: a wisecracking eight-year-old named Devon Butler (newcomer Norman D. Golden II). You have to understand, this was just a few years after Home Alone (1990). America wanted stories about precocious, resourceful kids who could make helpless fools of the grownups around them. And Hollywood was more than happy to supply these stories. You'll hear all about it on this week's show, which is conveniently available right here:

Where is God in Ken Russell's 'The Devils'?

Oliver Reed gives a tortured performance in The Devils.

I don't know who or what runs the universe. It might be a wise, benevolent, and all-powerful God. It might be nobody at all. Either answer is bound to disappoint somebody. But what I can be fairly sure of is that anybody who claims to know definitively what God is and what God wants—and has the evidence to "prove" it—is either being dishonest or delusional. 

I don't necessarily mean that as a complaint. There are considerable benefits to people claiming to speak on God's behalf, even if it's all baloney. In his "Sky Cake" routine, comedian Patton Oswalt explains how there would be no civilization as we know it today if "weaklings" in the past hadn't invented religion. But, human nature being what it is, we invariably take it too far. People will always want power, money, and status. We also want to impose our personal beliefs on large portions of the population, the more the better. And these desires have driven us to do awful things to one another in the name of God.

All this brings me to Ken Russell's The Devils (1971), a long-suppressed, much-censored film just now being released to theaters in its uncut glory. I'd been hearing about this infamous movie ever since I started hanging around Usenet movie forums in the 1990s, but I'd never even bothered to track down any version of it, since I knew I'd just be seeing a censored print. Now that an uncensored Devils is playing on theaters across the country, however, I knew I had to see it.