Mark Evanier's Blog, page 34

An Honest Question

Donald Trump just put up a post on Truth Social that just said, "Paid Insurrectionists!" One assumes he's referring to some group or all groups protesting ICE in Los Angeles. This is not the first time he's made that accusation about protestors who oppose his policies…as if it's not possible that someone could honestly think he's wrong and is only holding that sign because they were paid, possibly by George Soros. We've heard others make such charges or dismiss protestors or grieving parents as "Crisis Actors," as if that's a well-known profession.

Here's what I'm wondering: Has that accusation ever been verified for any sizeable mob? I can imagine someone somewhere has paid ten or twenty people to go and demonstrate for or against something…and I know unions sometimes pay pickets to walk picket lines. But a crowd in the hundreds? And I think Trump has said that about mobs of a thousand and up. Didn't he claim that when Kamala was drawing larger crowds to her rallies than he was to his?

That sounds like something that would be real easy to expose. Someone who opposed the demonstration could easily sign up to be part of it and then go public with the check or the printed instructions sheet or a recruiting e-mail or something. How do you keep something like that secret? I would think that someone who was willing to march for a cause or candidate they didn't believe in just because they were paid would gladly accept cash to admit they were paid to be there.

I'm not talking about someone paying to bus people in or to supply them with signs or refreshments. I'm talking about the charge that "Those people don't really support [or not support] that cause or candidate! They're just pretending they do for money!" Has that ever been verified about any large protest or rally? Anywhere?

A Message From Los Angeles

I'm sitting here in my home, working on a script with one eye on the Tony Awards. I'm many miles from where any protests are taking place or where any of the 2,000 National Guardsmen dispatched here on the orders of Donald Trump are doing whatever it is they were sent here to do. So far, it seems like they were sent here as part of a lie. That lie is that my city is overrun by violent immigrants who must be rounded up or punished or deported…or something.

How do I know it's a lie? Well, I've seen no evidence supporting it either in the news or on the streets. Last time I looked at the local news, the protests seemed pretty small — we have more destructive mobs when an L.A. sports team wins a championship — and isolated incidents. If it gets worse, it'll probably be the presence of the National Guard that makes it worse. The governor, the mayor of L.A. and the local police officials would be welcoming them if that was not the case.

Invitation to the Dunce

John Ficarra and Sam Viviano — respectively, the former editor-in-chief of MAD magazine and its Art Director — were fortunate enough to be invited to Donald Trump's big birthday celebration and parade on June 14th. They shared the wonderful invitation they received with the Albany Times Union and that newspaper published it for all the world to see. Go take a look at it.

Just To Remind You…

The 78th Annual Tony Awards are being doled out tonight at Radio City Music Hall in New York. They're viewable on CBS and I assume you know how to find CBS on your TV or iPhone or iPad or Galaxy Phone or computer browser or Etch-a-Sketch or whatever the hell you have. The live show on most CBS stations will be followed by a full replay of the event…and my, broadcast television has changed from not-that-long-ago when CBS demanded that the Tonys occupy the smallest time slot possible and not a second more.

That presentation starts at 8 PM East Coast Time and you're smart enough to figure out what that translates to where you live. It will be preceded at 6:40 PM — again, that's East Coast Time — by a pre-show which will be streamed on the Live Music channel on Pluto TV. Here's what I believe (I could be wrong) is a link to the Live Music channel on Pluto TV which usually runs programs which are not live. In fact, most of them are ancient episodes of Showtime at the Apollo, which is about as "not live" as you can get.

Pluto TV is free but you may need to sign up for a free account in order to watch…and then again, you may not. Life can be strange that way.

Today's Video Link

In 1973, ABC tried something which probably sounded good in the meetings but didn't work as well as they'd hoped.  In their 11:30 PM weeknight slot, they had The Dick Cavett Show, which was critically acclaimed and attracting enough viewers to show a modest profit.  But alas, it wasn't beating Johnny Carson in the ratings and there were reportedly execs then at the network who felt such a feat was, no matter what anyone said, possible.  They pared Cavett back to one week per month and declared that henceforth, whatever appeared in that time slot was part of something called ABC's Wide World of Entertainment.

In other words, rotating shows. I suppose that worked somewhere at some point on one of the three networks we had then but no example springs to mind. Usually, if people like a show enough to watch it, they want to watch it every day or every week. As I understand it, ABC tried this particular experiment figuring that at least one of three things would happen…

One of the shows they slotted into their "wheel" would attract enough of a following to make it a regular, Johnny-beating series five (or so) nights per week.One or more of the new shows would click is such a way that it could go from being a late night tryout to being a regular prime-time hit. Or…The entire ABC's Wide World of Entertainment would score higher ratings than Carson…or at least higher than Cavett.

And of course, none of these three things happened. It certainly didn't happen with Jack Paar Tonite. One out of every four weeks, you got a talk show bringing the former host of The Tonight Show back to television after being away for many years. It was just a sad, little-watched show, in large part because Paar hadn't updated his act and, frankly, wasn't that interesting in 1973. I wrote about this show in this blog post and linked you to a video of its first episode. If you want, you can watch it and decide for yourself why Mr. Paar was soon scurrying back into retirement.

The other two weeks, they featured a wide array of specials, some of them one-shots while others recurred now and again. There were — among many other efforts — rock music specials under the name In Concert, a spooky anthology series from Great Britain called Thriller, Playboy specials, a news magazine hosted by Geraldo Rivera called Good Night, America, and a funny news program called Comedy News. It is a slightly-fuzzy episode of Comedy News that we have for you today.

I remember watching and liking Comedy News but feeling that it was often one of those good half-hour shows stretched to a longer length. This particular installment features Mort Sahl, Dick Gregory, Bob & Ray, Peter Schickele, Spencer Quinn (I don't know who that is), Joan Rivers, Fannie Flagg, Anthony Holland, Marian Mercer and your anchormen, Andrew Duncan and Kenneth Mars. I remember other episodes including Stan Freberg (a major reason I watched), Robert Klein, Richard Pryor, Richard Dawson and many others.

Here's this one and thanks to "John G" for alerting me that it was online. The video starts with a few seconds of the end of the local (Los Angeles) 11 PM Eyewitness News, which is kind of what Comedy News was parodying. Inattentive viewers might not have realized that the allegedly real news show had ended and the spoof had begun…

Tony Talk

We have heard nothing about Boop! The Musical being added to the list of shows performing at the Tony Awards tomorrow night…so either that ain't gonna happen or they've added it and are keeping it ultra-super-duper-secret to make it a huge surprise. Since the show's sets would have to be moved in and out at some point and the company would have to block and rehearse, it's tough to believe the latter is possible.

So I'll predict that the only love the show will get on the telecast will be a big audience cheering when the name of Jasmine Amy Rogers is read as a nominee for Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role in a Musical…an award she won't win. Something could be said if — and this, I hear, is likely — the show's director Jerry Mitchell wins for Best Choreography but I don't think that award is presented on-air.

It is worth reminding ourselves that award shows like this don't always get it right. As I've mentioned here, I was once on a committee for the Television Academy that looked into ways to make the awards for animated shows fairer. The committee never reached any conclusions — or if it did, I didn't participate in the final reaching. But the conclusion I came to on my own was that the awards weren't fairly decided and that all the people involved in this kind of thing wanted for was them to be looked on as important and as a really big, legitimate "win" for those whose names wound up in the envelopes.

A gent named Chris Peterson who heads up a widely-read blog about the theatre wrote this piece listing some times he feels the Tonys picked the wrong Best Musical…and it's certainly true that sometimes, a show which didn't nab the trophy has had a longer life and earned more respect than the one that did that year. I don't think I agree with all his examples but that's kind of the point.

FACT CHECK: A Saturday Special

Those backing Trump's "Big, Beautiful Bill" say it would do certain (good) things for Medicaid and other ways via much of the population receives its health care. Those opposing the bill say it would do other (bad) things to those people. FactCheck.org tackles the question of what it would really do…or might do.

Politifact takes a look at what's in the oft-mentioned Epstein Files. I'm kinda skeptical this will ever lead to anything major — maybe to some embarrassment but not to anything that will change the allocation of power in our government. In this article, a lawyer who's poked around in it says, "If they were playing partisan politics then Trump would have released stuff with Bill Clinton in it and Biden would have released the parts with Trump." But these guys were playing partisan politics…all of them.

Snopes has a primer on the end of the Donald/Elon bromance…so far.

And Steve Benen takes a look at Trump's insistence on investigating Joe Biden and the Biden administration while still admitting he has no proof of anything amiss.

Today's Video Link

It's been quite a while since I had a Julien Neel video up here. Here he is with a Beach Boys classic, of all selections…

Red Scary Story

Good Night and Good Luck is, among other things, the name of a play currently packin' 'em in Broadway. In it, George Clooney plays veteran CBS newscaster Edward R. Murrow back in the fifties, standing up to those who saw Commies hiding under every bed and in every closet. It's about to conclude a very successful limited run in New York and this Saturday, CNN (of all channels) will broadcast its next-to-last performance live. It starts at 7 PM Eastern Time. For more details, click here.

Go Read It!

Ken Jennings, host and one-time champ of Jeopardy! writes about the value of facts in our society and how it's becoming beastly hard to find them at times. When the man's right, he's right.