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THE UNTOUCHABLES (1959-1963). In its four short seasons in primetime, the fact-based series about 1930s federal agent Eliot Ness (Robert Stack) and his band really set some standards: as one of the period's most brazenly violent shows and, to this day, one of TV's most effective adaptations of noir style. Since the series is now (2007) being syndicated, a reappraisal seemed in order.
Later for home life: Stack's Ness. First-season episodes focus heavily on Ness' war on Prohibition mobsters. Al Capone (scar-faced Neville Brand at his most dangerously impulsive) and Frank Nitti (Bruce Gordon, declaiming louder than the riotous pinstripes on his suit jacket) are the best, but as the series unwinds, the rogues gallery swells with an A-list of B-level gunsels: bookish Nehemiah Persoff (as Jake "Greasy Thumb" Guzik), all-purpose Eastern Euro ethnics Jack Kruschen and Harold J. Stone, the coolly homicidal Henry Silva. Watch an episode like "The Tri-State Gang" ( Life of Riley 's William Bendix as an eerily female-phobic crew boss) or "Tunnel of Horror" (dealer Martin Balsam passes smack at an amusement park) and you realize just how logy current TV storytelling is. This show was about tales, which meant credible motivation, action and consequences, usually with a heaping complement of tommy-gunning, ice-pick sticking, three-on-one pummeling and exploding autos. No time is wasted on the characters' home life (unless it's a crucial witness scared to testify because he fears exposure of his illegal-immigrant ex-hooker wife) or endless introspection. Old-time journo Walter Winchell's burp-gun narration is miles from the coy voice-overs of Desperate Housewives and Grey's Anatomy . If The Untouchables plays in your town, check into its brash b&w world. Though the series has yet to be issued on DVD, some of the '80s VHS two-fers are available at Amazon. -G.S. Ecdysiast ecstasy : In the mid-'60s, a nightclub in San Francisco's North Beach featured stripper "Elion Ness." Downbeat update: The dull early-'90s remake of the series, notable only for the Capone portrayal by William Forysthe, who resembled a cross between Billy Corgan and a young Hermann Goering.
It seems safe to say that all of American popular culture is now kabuki, the entire panoply of movies, records, magazines and media stuck permanently on endless replay. And nowhere is ritualized reenactment of same-old scenarios more pervasive than on TV. The accumulation of readymades that comprise any hour drama would give Duchamp a coronary. Thank God for small favors. The unrelieved lameness of network television--the weary, chess-board maneuvering of stock characters and situations and the medium's insistence that all of this is "hot" and new--is a fertile goofspace. What other response is there but to howl? (The wincing stage is easily bypassed.) Emergency-room kabuki: the careening gurney and barked imperatives ("Get me 30 cc of hexachloraphene! I want a saline drip now!"). The squad-room sweatbox kabuki: Good and bad cop work over a suspect in the only station-house room that's never been painted or ventilated ("OK, get him outta here!"). The awkward-moment kabuki (see The O.C.): "So...you come here often?" "Actually, yeah. I mean no, I..." "Me neither. I mean, I don't, er. Would you like to go outside? It's getting kinda stuffy in here." Las Vegas (NBC, Mondays, 9 pm) is only the third or fourth network drama set in Sin City, but it's hands-down the funniest. (Unintentionally. The "It's camp, but they're doing it with a wink" excuse wore out with Shatner's Transformed Man and Eszterhas' Showgirls.) It's even genetically linked to its immediate predecessor, Vegas (1978-81): From certain angles, co-star Josh Duhamel (Win a Date with Tad Hamilton) replays the boyish facial features of the earlier show's lead, Robert Urich as L.V. PI Dan Tanna. The set-up: Ed Deline (James Caan) is chief of security at the luxurious Montecito casino. Scanning closed-circuit screens within his control lair or roaming the casino floor like a made-guy hall monitor, ginger-haired Ed is aided by earnest Danny McCoy (Duhamel) and resident bitch Sam (Vanessa Marcil of 90210). On hand for, respectively, heart and hipness are special-events coordinator Mary (Nikki Cox) and urbane black valet Mike Cannon (James Lesure). Brit pit-boss Nessa Holt (Marsha Thompson) is back-up bitch. (Both Sam and Nessa are of the pervasive TV phylum Unflappable Female.)
Ninety percent of the time, Big Ed's pack struts through the Montecito, like its cop-show counterparts or rock-concert soundmen, braying into cell phones that they've spotted this or that card shark, con man or deadbeat. Their prowling ground is wild indeed: noisy, overlit and delivered to the viewer in smack-jolt hyper zooms every two or three minutes. Booker Mary keeps the place well stocked, with wet t-shirt contests, a medieval dinner show (whose blowhard King Arthur makes Richard Harris seem a piker) and Chippendale's tear-aways (when "firemen" raid a bachelorette party, you'll never guess what happens). Despite the unending flow of flim-flam men and bamboozlers that keeps Deline and his crew busy, there's never a police presence. As in the new real world, everything's privatized. When Sam is taken into the desert by a stalker (we know he's bad: he's not handsome), Ed blithely calls the cops for a copter, just for back-up, in the unlikely event it's needed. Otherwise, the staff does its own rousting. This has included kicking an investigative reporter out of the casino--and pursuing her to a nightclub to kick her out of town (her story threatened to expose a decadent Senator who was a Montecito regular), tailing Ed's wife on her secret meetings with the lead singer of Sugar Ray (the pair planned a birthday surprise for Ed) and roughing up Ed's old CIA buddy who tried pulling an Ocean's 11. Caught, the pal admitted he did it because he "missed the action" of the old days. Don't we all?
 Key man: Mike Cannon
In less than one full season, Las Vegas has done exemplary work in two key areas: comic-relief kabuki and status kabuki. More laugh-worthy than intended was the B story in which the Caan-man received a surprise visit from his mother. Forget the fact that, in real life, his mom would have to be 130 years old; wouldn't you know that all of Big Ed's menace and muscle turns to Jello with the battleaxe's arrival, and that she regales his staff with tales of their boss' childhood shortcomings and family nicknames, much to his embarrassment? The show also makes a constant point of ritually harassing those Vegas visitors who aren't, you know, quite as with-it as the Montecito's young, comely, power-adjacent crew. In recent weeks, Danny, Sam, Mary and Netta have raised eyebrows at a gosh-darn Midwestern couple come to participate in a mass wedding (unable to control themselves in Sin Town, they run wild and try to kill each other), a nerdy local who breaks the bank and decides to spend the night in his comped suite with his cash (instead of stashing it in the casino's vault) and a band of bayou brothers who, once they hit their jackpot, revert to type by destroying the lounge in a good ole beer brawl. Then there was the gauche, Fran Drescher-type "agent" who tried to foist her client, unfunny comic "Ben Ladin," on Mary. (Source: Hill Street Blues episode featuring hard-to-book comedian "Vic Hitler.")
But the coolest clambake of readymades was the one thrown for the grand opening of the New Orleans Montecito. I mean, why even boat down the Big Muddy if you're not gonna catch you a mess of stereotypes and fried roles? Las Vegas in Louisiana did not disappoint. Here came a sumptuous buffet of stale goods, not the least of which were the masked Mardi Gras party in the cemetery (source: Easy Rider) and the obligatory initiation of the stranger into arcane local customs. In the latter, at a river-bank cookout, a slightly tipsy McCoy recoils when a sexy dame seductively slips a crustacean between his teeth. "What's that?!" he shouts, spitting it out. "Crawfish" comes the answer. McCoy's adverse reaction shows that the worldly Nevadan, so attuned to squares in his midst back home, is an upstanding citizen of TV-world, which remains informed not by human experience (what American hasn't heard of Cajun food?) so much as by the conventions of TV-world. Local cuisine figures, too, in Sam's visit to one of New Orleans' many voodoo shops (the Yellow Pages are bulging with them), in search of a spell to catch a perp who's eluded the Montecito team. After a few minutes of gris-gris and mystical muttering from Marie Leveau, Sam, unfazed by the experience, reports to Big Ed that, to make the conjurer's spell work, she had to eat a rat. The black-magic racket is looking more like Survivor every day.
Cajuns, accordions, beans and rice rounded out the episode. Exquisitely tedious was Dennis Hopper as the enigmatic chief of police. His accent ebbing and flowing like the tidewater on Chandeleur Sound, old Den-hop, too, is now tattered window dressing; who else to cast when you need a laconic, morally bankrupt authority figure? With its decent ratings, Las Vegas should get renewed for another season of predictable (and amusing) plots and badinage. I just hope they keep my favorite bit of mini-kabuki. It
seems to grace every episode. At some point, Big Ed or Danny McCoy,
hunkered in their voyeurs command post, will sight something on
the surveillance tape that piques their interest. That furtive figure
darting into the men's room or idling by the quarter slots, who
is it? Could it be their prey? "Stop tape. Rewind. Now zoom
in on that frame," orders Ed in his hoarse whisper. "Gimme
a close-up. Isolate the face. Enlarge it 20 per cent. Now give me
just the eyes." Invariably, Ed, disappointed, sighs. "Nobody. Tony Picolo, small-time bag man from Jersey. Small potatoes." Too bad. So great. -P.L.
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NAKED CITY (1958-1963). From the late ’50s to early ’60s, the Big Apple got a weekly b&w valentine in the form of Naked City. Route 66 vet Stirling Silliphant consulted on scripts often penned by Howard Rodman – the rococo leading the baroque, as it were. Many of the titles are pretentious Shakespearian quotes or merely cryptic jive. Faux lyrical neuroticism in the f.g., boss Gotham locations in the b.g. Paul Burke was the sensitive cop, Harry Bellaver the shlub cop, Horace McMahon their crusty but heart o’ gold lieutenant and Nancy Malone Burke’s equally sensitive actress squeeze. After a Reed Hadley-type portentous voice-over, some ethnic, professional, economic or social group would be the focus of a crime that usually involved a tortured loner. Workaday professional criminals do not exist in Naked City, where delusional nutcases and white-collar crackups are the norm. Future name thesps (Martin Sheen, Robert Duvall, Bruce Dern, etc.) can often be glimpsed in bit parts, while others (Sandy Dennis) got their first leading roles here. Several of the directors went on to feature film work. Currently, three volumes (three DVDs, each featuring four hour-long episodes) are available, as well as half a dozen single DVDs of several episodes each. The first contain shows from ’61 to ’63 in chron order. The single sets concentrate on the late ’50s, when NC was still a half-hour series. True, some episodes stand more as examples of dated verbosity either moral or (worse) cutesy/whimsical than as actual gems, but they all show a fascinating attempt to present “adult” TV. Standouts in the first set are Roddy McDowall’s egomaniacal beatnik actor turned killer in “The Fault in Our Stars” and Mickey Rooney’s put-upon shnook-turned-lethal-prankster in “Ooftus Goofus” (the Mick in a knight’s armor threatens to kamikaze a packed boxing stadium with a concealed bomb!). “Fingers of Henri Tourelle” is a clever mystery set in a midtown shmatta empire. Jack Warden’s former war hero alky beserks downtown on a D-Day-inspired kill spree in “The Face of the Enemy,” and Jack Klugman wails as a phobic neighborhood capo in “Let Me Die Before I Wake”. The second set leads off with the arty but entertainingly directed “Today the Man Who Kills The Ants Is Coming” -- a cop’s mental breakdown looking like it was channeled through Jean-Luc Godard. The feyness of “The Multiplicity of Herbert Konish” is redeemed in part by the always-welcome Village beatnik scenes. Another WW II vet (Dan Duryea) pulls an early “Death Wish” with a sick twist by tarting up his mousy daughter (the fab Barbara Harris) so he can kick the crap out of anyone who comes on to her. Horribly scarred Richard Jordan as a Quasimodo-like nocturnal loner finds romance and employment and Maureen Stapleton’s talent makes “Kill Me When I’m Young So I Can Die Happy,” about a suicidal city employee, more charming than mawkish. Finally, “Dust Devil on a Quiet Street” gets all worked up investigating the tenuous line between fantasy and reality in a seethingly violence-prone acting student. –D.B. Get Naked: Box Set One, Set Two or Set Three. Related study: See our TUBE feature Route 66: A New Culture Got Its Existential Kicks on TV’s Hippest Roadshow. LOUIE NYE. Recently, I heard a public-radio piece on the man - I think he was some kind of academic - from whom Peter Falk allegedly "borrowed" the halting, rumpled style of TV's Lt. Columbo. It was an interesting revelation, except for one thing: It was likely the series' writers, not Falk, who designed and refined the role of the shambling shamus. The actor may tweak the character, but mostly he is doing what he's told by a director, who's trying to make real the ideas placed on the page by the screenwriter. But there are exceptions. In his book Hi-Ho Steverino!, Steve Allen explains that his original 1950s Tonight Show was "five percent scripted and 95 percent ad lib." While writers Stan Burns, Herb Sargent, Leonard Stern and others put words in their mouths, it's hard to think that such prominent Allen-show regulars as Louie Nye - who'd been hailed as one of the country's brightest young stand-up comics even before he joined Allen's cast in 1956 - didn't have a hand in shaping the parts they played. Especially parts like Nye's Gordon Hathaway. The hipster Mad-Ave ad exec remains the most widely known character associated with Nye, who died this week [October 2005] at age 92. But there were so many, all cooked to perfection then garnished with delectable silliness: mushmouthed mob dons, swinger cads, fey cowboys and nostril-flaring thespians. And there was Sonny Drysale. On the premiere season of The Beverly Hillbillies (and again in 1966, in the "Sonny Drysdale Returns" episode), Nye played the son of the Clampetts' staid banker Milburn Drysdale. Here, it probably was the show's writers who dreamed up the role: middle-aged Louie, in bearskin coat and college beanie, prancing around with a ukulele - it was the image of a spoiled college kid from the 1930s, which is probably when the series' creatives themselves matriculated. No matter: Nye's over-the-falls treatment invests Sonny with a rich ludicrousness that, as often as not, stole the show from Jed and Jethro and the core cast. (He often seemed to hit the same manic timbre as Jonathan Winters.) Evidence of Nye's greatness, itself so '50s- and '60s-tied, is available, though accessing it takes some effort. See our SCREEN chapter for an appreciation of his part in James Garner's The Wheeler Dealers, and check SOUNDS to learn of his cool lost single, "Teenage Beatnik" (click on "Haywire Hall of Fame"). Rarest of the rare and unlikely to be reissued any time soon are his comedy LPs, Heigh-Ho Madison Avenue; Songs of the Advertising Game by Louis Nye & the Status Seekers (Riverside) and Here's Nye in Your Eye (United Artists). Dig the former's "Martinis & Miltown" or "Ode to an Ulcer" and be transported to a time of suddenly unbuttoned-down minds and, as James Wolcott, wrote of Allen himself, men who "had the true spirit of a comic anarchist fluttering like a red flag in their souls." -G.S. UPDATE: EDWARD ANDREWS'
FEAR FACTOR A hail fellow well met, small-town burgher Hutch likes
to get down with the best of them. At a pre-coronation "private
party" in the Ho Hofs’ convention hotel, Hutch & co.
party way out of bounds, spritzing hotel help with seltzer, shaking
hands with each other wearing concealed joy buzzers – and egging
on two distaff "dancers" whom a thoughtful bellhop has sent
up to the suite for entertainment. In a replay of his attempted mackage
scene from Unguarded Moment, drunk and disheveled Hutch paws
at one gal, who resists. In a lobster-red rage, he grabs her, then
pushes her, and the gal plummets out an open window. Hutch eventually confesses and is charged with manslaughter, but not before he and his fellow upstanding clubmates stage an unsuccessful coverup. Andrews is at his morally squishiest here, eyes furtively darting, equal amounts of fear, shame and sweat pouring from his every cell. He’s best at the story’s climax – seated with his Ho Hof cohorts at police headquarters, trying to conceal his guilt as a blind "witness" from an apartment adjacent to the hotel recounts the window-side struggle she’d heard the night before and asserting that she’d recognize the participants’ voices if she heard them again. Isn’t it ironic? The blind dame is played by the same actress (Doro Merande) who nailed Andrews’ murderous-hubby character in the Thriller episode "A Third for Pinochle." –P.L.
LAREDO (1965-67). Truthfully, more a quirky curio than a cool artifact, Laredo was one of the last of the original TV westerns to debut. If Wild Wild West, which commenced its run around the same time, tossed some new irons on the campfire (Jules Verne sci-fi and James Bond spy-fi), Laredo turned the whole genre into a joke. Texas Rangers under the command of Captain Parmalee (Phil Carey, star of the mid-’60s "Hello, my name is Granny Goose" commercials), Neville Brand, Peter Brown and company misbehave and collect misadventures like injun scalps, but it’s all a bit thin.
The series has never been issued on VHS or DVD, but
a web site (www.highwaypatroltv.com)
urges fans to petition TVLand to air the show--and offers episode
guides, a photo gallery, even audio of the series’ ominous
theme and authoritarian voiceover. -G.S. M SQUAD: (1957-1960).
Located somewhere between L.A.’s Dragnet and Frisco’s
Lineup, this b&w policer starred Lee Marvin as detective
Lt. Frank Ballinger of Chi-town’s elite Metro Squad. A generous
amount of in-town shooting (though not as much as the New York-based
Naked City), Marvin’s mahogany-hard demeanor (no smiles
or small talk) and Count Basie’s brassy crime-jazz theme give
M Squad an edge over most post-Webb cop shops. Never released
on video or DVD. -G.S.
(JOHNNY) STACCATO (1959-60; NBC, ABC)... From the first TV P.I. era, this John Cassavetes starrer played P.F. Sloan to Peter Gunn's Dylan. Like Gunn, Staccato hung at a Village jazz hole (here Waldo's), but JS was always, like, more involved--sitting in on piano with Jack Costanza & His Bongo Quartet, spending a half-hour episode talking a suicidal killer down from a ledge, rescuing a Cuban boxer doped and duped by a bad dame. Method met hard-boiled in unsolarized space (Johnny only came out at night or parked himself at the bar in Waldo's subterranean batcave), and no male looked cooler than the dark-orbed Cass at this juncture. -Sal Zero Jr. To date unreleased on video or DVD, but the show did spawn a French Web site ("en noir et blanc et une ambiance polar noir extra"): Try fr.emissions.ca. JUANITA BYNUM, ROD PARSLEY: Rockin' the Pulpit (TBN)... As I write, new-time religionists are everywhere. Surf TBN and you'll catch the brick-busting mullet-men of Extreme Impact, Nehru'd healer Benny Hinn and the updated Kenneth Copeland, wild-eyed still but mock sedate in Cobain plaids. But the true new breed's doing it trad: show-boatin' and sanctified Sister Juanita Bynum struts, sasses and cakewalks for Yaweh in the most action-packed sermons on the circuit: "I don't think y'all heard me!" she shouts, coaxing calls and ecstatic response. Rev. Rod Parsley is '50s rock 'n' roll, a great ball of fire and brimstone in a four-button suit, stage-stalking, declaiming, blowing word-jazz for all it's worth. Describing his Kentucky kidhood, deep-voiced Parse rhapsodizes about "the sound of fatback baking in a flat black skillet." Its sounds like an exhortation straight out of Trout Mask Replica. Perry Lane Check local listings for TBN schedule in your area. Related God-squad stuff: See "Can I Get A Witness? Televangelism's Holy Hit Parade" elsewhere in TUBE.
See also EDWARD ANDREWS, newly dug in our Screen section. The Faux South Rises Again: Dukin’ It Out With Bo & Luke! Boy, we told you so (in Too Cool; seeTUBE): The Dukes of Hazzard revival is (finally) upon us and all our kin. Fake accents, funnycars and Daisy Dukes go on for days in the new DVD The Dukes of Hazzard: The Complete First Season, which puts the series’ initial 13 episodes onto three discs. Thrill anew to overripe baddy Boss Hogg, and lift your jaw off the linoleum as you behold the stoopidest character of TV’s first four decades in James Best’s Sheriff Roscoe P. Coletrane. You’ll have to wait for The Complete Last Season [1982-83], though, to bask in one of the sleaziest cathode cons ever perpetrated. That’s when actors Tom Wopat (Luke) and John Schneider (Bo) walked off the show in a dispute with the producers and their characters were inexplicably replaced by their “cousins,” Coy and Vance Hazzard (Byron Cherry and Christopher Mayer). Hot damn!
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Not to toot
our own horn, but the 1982 and 1991 books upon which this site is
based spent much ink celebrating the joys of bad TV. (See our 
The wham of Sam: rat on, baby
CHIC-A-GO-GO: 1996-present, Chicago Access
Network. The Simpsons and Curb Your Enthusiasm notwithstanding,
this weekly dance party "for kids of all ages" may be the
coolest TV of the last 10 years. The brainchild of roctober
zine-maker Jake Austen, it's a low-budget American Bandstand,
hipster-targeted (guest performers: Cramps, Monks, Swamp Dogg, Rudy
Ray Moore, Come Ons) but open to all. Puppetronic host Ratso and real-live
Mia intro bands and tell great bad jokes, the skits are fun (how about
a one-act play by T. Valentine of "Hello, Lucille, Are You A
Lesbian?" fame), but the dancers are the draw: pre-teens, young-
and middle-agers, old folks, some in costume (or at least Mexican
wrestler masks), all grooving spontaneously to James Brown or the
Pretty Things. Trying to tell a stranger about rock & roll is
a cinch: sit 'em down in front of Chic-a-go-go. Rush to 
