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In 1968, when I was 8 years old, Adam-12 came on the air. It lasted seven seasons and made household names out of Martin Milner and Kent McCord. Many of you have probably seen it on Nick At Night or TV Land.
The premise of the show is that seven year veteran Pete Malloy (MIlner) is a mentor to probationary officer Jim Reed (McCord). Milner had last been seen living the road life in the TV series Route 66, but that show had been off the air for four years by 1968, and Milner came back as older and more grizzled than his chiseled partner. There was no denying McCord’s eye appeal.
The show was basically a “day in the life” saga about two L.A. patrolmen, with very little connecting narrative between episodes. The show was half an hour long, or 24 minutes of air time. I remember looking forward to the show every week, although at age eight I probably did not see the first season much if at all.
And so I have taken up the idea of watching the series from start to finish, which totals 175 episodes, and which I can do for the price of my Netflix subscription, but which you can do at Hulu for free, if you don’t mind the commercials.
I’m here tonight to recommend episode 17 from Season 1, It All Happened So Fast. Without giving too much away, there is only a single story line, and it all takes place at the scene of a crime and then back at headquarters, and there are no more than half a dozen speaking parts. McCord does a brilliant job as Reed in a very high strung situation, and as I watched it I began to wonder if he’d been nominated for an Emmy Award for the episode. He was not, nor was he ever nominated for any acting award.
The series itself is a quaint throwback to a time when people smoked whenever and wherever they wanted to, women were “dames” and, of course, teenagers were all stoners who loved to commit crimes for the sheer thrill of tormenting the pigs.
Still, it moves along well, the characters are clearly defined, there is a quirky sense of realism that shows such as “Hill Street Blues” would later seek to replace with earthiness and chaos, and no matter how you slice it, Milner and McCord work well together. I’m having a great time watching it.
And I highly recommend the above episode. You don’t need to watch the preceding episodes to appreciate it, at least I don’t think you do.
Walt Bennett @ July 1, 2009
Posted in: Life | Comments (4)
I have a lot to say about what I see as the “slacker generation”, by whom I mean young adults who have not yet chosen a path for their lives, and are either still in school or are wandering aimlessly about the job market.
Back in my youth, in the 1970s, we had our kids who had no ambition, and generally 3 or 4 of them could be found hanging out here or there, not really doing much of anything and not really bothering anybody. We made minimal note of their existence and paid them little mind. They had their world, we had ours.
Today’s slackers have a thousand more ways to pass the time, a thousand ways to fool themselves into thinking that there just might be a point to their lives. One of the all-time great social experiments will be bearing all sorts of demographic statistical booty for decades to come. If we ever wonder why each decade our productive output shrinks on a per capita basis, we may one day wander back to these days, when so many people came of age and said “Eh.”
Which brings me back around to UCLA, about which I wrote yesterday.
James Franco, the up and coming actor and recent UCLA graduate, had been invited to speak at the commencement for the UCLA College Of Arts And Letters. One student put up a Facebook page in protest at Franco’s youth and inexperience. I took umbrage at both the insinuation that Franco was inadequate, and at he heavy-handed way the students went about taking him down, when all the man had done was accept an invitation.
This left the college in a bind, with commencement a week away. They solved this problem by inviting Brad Delson, Linkin Park guitarist, who readily accepted.
Suddenly, the issue was no longer youth and inexperience. After all, Delson and Franco are both 31. And it could not be about the shallowness of his career path: both guys are in show biz. No, now it was about, well let’s see: Delson got his degree in 1999, while Franco dawdled and did not get his until 2008. Delson is raising a family; Franco is single. Delson has begun to develop his philanthropic side; Franco, as far as the world knows, has not.
Suddenly, a “contemporary” was OK under certain circumstances. Such as: “We got our little protest on, got somewhere with it…what’s next?”
In other words, the Great UCLA Slacker Protest was just their flavor of the week.
Walt Bennett @ June 8, 2009
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On November 2, 2008 in this very space, I wrote the following:
President Obama, you do not get to cry poverty to us, not this time, not after a $750 billion transfer of wealth from the workers of this country to the fat-cat bankers and professional investors. Not this time, when we have a unified progressive Executive and Legislative branch for the first time in over a generation. Not this time, when the world economy is melting down, entire nations are going broke, and many millions of people will be thrust into unemployment through no fault of their own. Not this time, when we need real solutions to the problems of everyday people in this country and in so much of the world. Not this time, Mr. President. Don’t cry poverty to us.
Last Thursday, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke told a House committee:
“Unless we demonstrate a strong commitment to fiscal sustainability in the longer term, we will have neither financial stability nor healthy economic growth.”
He also said this:
“We expect that the recovery will only gradually gain momentum and that economic slack will diminish slowly,” he said. “In particular, businesses are likely to be cautious about hiring, and the unemployment rate is likely to rise for a time, even after economic growth resumes.”
Give the man credit for not being shy about it: “There will be more unemployed, but we are done giving out stimulus money. The fat cats got theirs, the working man gets none.”
This, while the U.S. Government consents to the breakdown of GM and the loss of thousands of jobs. This while the unemployment rate continues to rise, now at 9.1 percent of the labor force that hasn’t given up looking for work yet. This while the barely-discussed retail sector continues to take a pounding which will surely get worse when more and more jobs evaporate.
And here’s the real secret: Bernanke really is fine with it. Why?
Because the unemployed are desperate and motivated. They will work cheap, they will do any job, they will suffer most any condition and if they won’t, somebody else will.
In other words, it is the cheap labor provided by the unemployed that fuels what passes in the capitalist world for “economic recovery.”
And for those who get too desperate, there’s always jail.
Here on the Obama watch we are asking this question: Mr. President: What are you going to do in order to break this cycle of punishing the innocent and rewarding the guilty?
What, didn’t we vote for enough change?
Walt Bennett @ June 7, 2009
