and now, A DEGREE ABSOLUTE! episode one — Arrival

Creator/star Patrick McGoohan listens to our 2021 podcast about his TV show on a Zune in this 1967 photo.

View fullsize

Four years and seven score ago, Pal-For-Life Glen Weldon suggested to me we do a podcast deconstructing The Prisoner, Patrick McGoohan’s short-lived, long-tailed allegorical spy-fi TV series that flummoxed and infuriated viewers with its final episode decades before The Sopranos or LOST or Mad Men would do the same. We are neither of us men of haste. We dragged our heels about doing it for so long that its initial news hook — the 50th anniversary of the series, which ran for 17 episodes in England in 1967-8 and in the U.S. the following summer — came and went, only to be replaced by a far more dire one. We’ve all been more or less confined to our homes for a year and counting.

Like the show’s mysterious title character, Number Six, we are all vexed by circumstance and desperate to escape. Unlike Number Six, we are friendly and personable to people of any and all genders. But you’ll be the judge of that, we hope. You’ve heard Glen & me share the studio on a number of episodes of Pop Culture Happy Hour over the years — I’m still not thrilled that he called me “sconce-jawed” that one time on the Man of Steel episode — but this the is first All-New, All-Different, All-Glen, All-Chris podcast, and its senses-shattering first episode is available right now.

Ladies, gentlemen, and nonbinary individuals, I give you… A Degree Absolute!

Boldly Gone: Free Thoughts on the Proceedings of Star Trek at 50, and Gene Roddenberry and fandom, for Rolling Stone

Leonard Nimoy's unflappable Mr. Spock communes with the Horta in "Devil in the Dark," from 1967. (CBS Consumer Products / Star Trek Archive)

I basically got into journalism because I wanted to write for Rolling Stone. That took longer to happen than I'd hoped it might, but it was a real thrill to get to do this piece for them yesterday, reflecting on What Star Trek Hath Wrought the occasion of the franchise's 50th anniversary.

Last night, the National Air and Space Museum showed "The Man Trap," the first Trek episode broadcast (albeit not the first one produced), at 8:30 p.m. Eastern — the same time NBC had shown it 50 years earlier. It's a really fun episode that demonstrates that the rich character relationships were present in the Original Series right from the beginning, and that most of the comedy in Trek was fully intentional. (Also that what was progressive in 1966 is decidedly not in 2016. But that's how progress works.)

Thanks to Scott Tobias for suggesting me for it, and to David Fear for editing the essay. 

Let's Do the Numbers! Talkin' Yuletunes on Marketplace

My face betrays the intense concentration required to form sentences in real time.

I'm not allowed to post the video of my Dec. 10 appearance on CNN's The Lead with Jake Tapper, (here's its blog accompaniment) and I don't have a photo from my appearance on Marketplace yesterday. So here's a screen cap from the CNN bit and a link to the Marketplace segment, wherein host Kai Ryssdal asks me a question for which I am completely unprepared.

Is there hope for a new classic Christmas song? | Marketplace.org.

I'll be wrapping up my talking-about-Christmas-songs tour with a segment on KPCC's AirTalk this afternoon at 3:30 Eastern. I heard that show a lot when I lived in Southern California circa 2000-2005, so I'm excited for that. UPDATE: Hear that segment here.

And of course, if you haven't grabbed my latest yulemix, Children, Go Where I Send Thee!, that awaits your loving attention here.

Merry Christmas!

Theater on the TV: Discussing Stupid Fucking Bird and The Hampton Years on WETA's Around Town

In the unlikely event you've nothing better to do on this rainy Friday afternoon than watch Robert Aubry Davis and Jane Horowitz offer insightful comments about a couple of current plays while I blink my eyes and wobble my head around and emit words, then by all means: Gawk away as we discuss Stupid Fucking Bird and The Hampton Years on Around Town.

Watch Stupid F---ing Bird on PBS.

Watch The Hampton Years on PBS.

ALSO: I reviewed Stupid Fucking Bird in the City Paper this week.