Deep insights into the culture and events surrounding televisions first half-century, and beyond.... more
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The TV Room
By David Soref - SorefTV
FAQs about The TV Room:
How many episodes does The TV Room have?
The podcast currently has 26 episodes available.
The TV Room episodes:
March 07, 2022Cisco Pike (Part 1) Special guest Ian Rosen joins the podcast for a review of the 70s cult classic film Cisco Pike (1971). Starring: Kris Kristofferson, Gene Hackman, Karen Black.Also discussed in this episode: 1970s dystopia, Venice beach murals, Roscoe Lee Browne, marijuana smuggling, weed dealing, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, smoking in cinema, Severn Darden, The French Connection....more January 08, 2019Remembering John Denver on His 75th Birthday www.soref.tv...more October 04, 2018Goliath Starring Billy Bob Thornton: An Impressionistic Review LINKS:Soref.TV websiteFacebookTwitterA brief update on my personal status. An introduction to Goliath Season 1, and a character study of Billy McBride, as he rolls out of bed, stumbles out into perfect Santa Monica weather, opportunistically grabs a handful of fries from a discarded food tray, steals the sports section from someone's newspaper, and manages to step in dog droppings on his short walk over to the bar next door to begin his day.We point out that rather than being a fictional motel and dive bar created for the show, the Ocean Lodge and Chez Jay are in fact a very real part of the Santa Monica landscape. We then sidebar into a brief review of Southern California beach culture's evolution from beatnik to Baywatch; we discuss the Gidget phenomenon, the elevation of L.A. surf culture, how Goliath represents a callback to a simpler if grittier Westside, and to what extent Billy McBride is the reincarnation of Jim Rockford and Fletch.
Also mentioned: The role Three's Company played in making the beaches of Santa Monica famous.
We then bear witness to Billy McBride's bad relationships with women, his poor parenting skills, and his failure as a lawyer.We get introduced to the character of Patty Solis-Papagian, the cutthroat law firm of Cooperman McBride, and more of Billy McBride's backstory.
We revisit Billy McBride at Chez Jay, this time in nighttime mode, watching him struggle for alpha male status with a stray dog in the parking lot, behave like a barfly inside Chez Jay, and still somehow appear charming to women.After more Jim Rockford comparisons, we introduce the character of Donald Cooperman, Billy McBride's onetime law partner, and now arch-nemesis, played by William Hurt as you've never seen him before.
We sidebar onto the subject of parking lots and their prominent if unsung place in L.A. lifestyles. We bring it back home to Billy's convertible getting slimed with fish guts in the Chez Jay parking lot, and to a quasi-comically choreographed water ballet involving two Penske rental trucks, several pallets of paperwork, and a very angry Patty Solis-Papagian in the parking lot of the Ocean Lodge motel.
We revisit the life and times of Raymond Chandler and Chandler's semi-mythological detective noir version of Santa Monica, known as Bay City, based on a time and place when gambling boats operated 24/7 in international waters just off the Santa Monica pier, and did a brisk business.
We bring it all back home by visiting another L.A. institution: Traffic on the freeway, and how it may or may not play into the creative process of the L.A. screenwriter.
...more June 04, 2018May 2018 Monthly Update A quick update on the upcoming TV Room season (it's about Patty Hearst and the SLA!). Remembering Tom Wolfe and Philip Roth, by comparing them to Hunter S. Thompson and John Updike, and revisiting the New Journalism of the 1960s....more May 01, 2018TV Room Status Update ...more March 07, 2018Tania: The Story of Patty Hearst and the S.L.A. (pt 1) Could there be a stranger time and place than the Bay Area in the 1970s? The saga of Patty Hearst and the SLA would seem to say no.In this two-part episode of the TV Room, we revisit those events and review some of the tapes Patty and the SLA released to the media throughout the ordeal, which the public eagerly lapped up, and which chronicled the transformation of a frightened 19-year old kidnap victim into a gun-toting revolutionary....more December 19, 2017Stranger Things (….That ’80s Show??) Topics discussed include: Digital Natives vs. Digital Neanderthals..How a little startup called Netflix killed off the 20th Century...1983: Whose year was it anyway? 1983 was Time's Year of the Computer, but with shag carpeting, plaid furniture, and breadbox-sized telephones...Freaks and Geeks, Risky Business and WarGames...The Upside Down qualities of water and electricity...The return of Winona Ryder and the return of Matthew Modine...and the timelessness of kids on bikes....more October 16, 2017Remembering Tom Petty (and Video Concert Hall) In 1980, album oriented rock was high art, radio was king, and music videos were mere novelty items featured on an obscure cable program called Video Concert Hall. There was no better embodiment of these ideals at the time than Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers and their breakthrough album "Damn the Torpedoes," particularly the single "Here Comes My Girl," which stands out as a great love song as well as a breakout music video from before there was even MTV....more September 15, 201711. The Yellow Kid Arrives on the Scene With the rise of the daily newspaper came the first media pop star. That he happened to be a cartoon should come as no surprise considering there were no movies or radio yet, just the "paper stage" of the Sunday comics--in living color no less.The Yellow Kid was the crown jewel of the Sunday papers, coveted by both Pulitzer and Hearst, and even appearing in both their papers at the same time for awhile. His likeness was used to sell everything from candy to whiskey, but less than three years after his debut, the Yellow Kid was gone....more July 12, 201710. The Era of Yellow Journalism: Prologue EPISODE TRANSCRIPTYellow journalism. Everybody’s heard of it, but few can define it. What is understood is that yellow journalism is a bad form of a normally good thing, like yellow snow. But that’s about it.In the old days, calling someone yellow was like calling them chicken. So maybe calling someone a yellow journalist was like calling someone a chicken hawk, which is a term we use today for politicians who wrap themselves in the flag and push for war but avoided the draft themselves in the Vietnam era when their own bacon would have been on the line.That understanding of yellow journalism rings true to our ears because the cause that is most associated with yellow journalism is the Spanish American War, and the cause most associated with chicken hawkery is the Iraq invasion of 2003.If you were paying attention in 2002 and 3, you might have heard a few comparisons being made between the looming Iraq war and the long ago Spanish American War. But you had to be paying real close attention; and few people were.Or maybe the analogy rings true to our ears because of what Dylan said in the lyrics of Tombstone Blues:Maybe. But in any event, yellow journalism is not chicken journalism.There really is no definitive answer for where the name yellow journalism comes from, but there are a couple of likely explanations. One is that ‘yellow’ refers to one of the splashy colored inks that daily papers began using in the 1890s to make their papers stand out against the black and white of the competition. So describing a particular publication as yellow journalism would be a way of saying that it put flair over substance; not even style, just flair.The other explanation is that ‘yellow journalism’ comes from the term ‘yellow papers’, which was a nickname given to the two New York newspapers that both ran a comic strip in the 1890s called the Yellow Kid, and which happened to be the newspapers belonging to William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer.We’ll get into the subject of the Yellow Kid in more detail in the next episode. For now, here is a list of the four basic attributes of yellow journalism, according to wikipedia:* The use of scare headlines in huge print.* Lavish use of pictures or imaginary drawings.* Use of faked interviews, misleading headlines, pseudoscience, and the false testimony of so-called experts.And 4, dramatic sympathy with the underdog against the system.Now, that last one stands out, because it sounds like it ought to be a good thing, right? Sympathy with the underdog, against the system.And if you listened to the last podcast, it should remind you of a person of interest named Joseph Pulitzer. We described him in fairly heroic terms for the way he made journalism for the people, and for the reforms his newspapers were able to bring to the table during the Gilded Age, penetrating its previously impregnable mantra of laissez faire, let it be.And then, as the story goes, which we will get into, William Randolph Hearst came to town. And suddenly the rules changed. It wasn’t just folksy journalism anymore. It was something more volatile.This is when the era of Yellow Journalism began.And, we should make a distinction here between the Era of Yellow Journalism, capital Y capital J, and regular old lower case yellow journalism, the generic term that we still use today to describe a certain type of reportage.The Era of Yellow Journalism really only lasted from about 1895 to 1898, but its impact lasted far beyond,...more
FAQs about The TV Room:
How many episodes does The TV Room have?
The podcast currently has 26 episodes available.