Before Gotham, there was Gotham Central

One of the most anticipated hour-long dramas of 2014 is Gotham, which premieres tonight on Fox and takes place in a Gotham City where Bruce Wayne, the millionaire who fights crime as Batman, is only a boy whose parents have just been murdered, and the supervillains he'll later face aren't quite supervillains yet. Yep, it's another prequel, and any time there's a prequel on the big screen or the small one, Patton Oswalt's old bit about the pointlessness of prequels comes to mind ("I don't give a shit where the stuff I love comes from! I just love the stuff I love! Hey, do you like Angelina Jolie? Does she give you a big boner? Well, here's Jon Voight's ballsack! That's right! The pink, glistening ballsack she swam out of!").

But Gotham appears to be far from pointless, inconsequential and Jon Voight ballsack-y because it's neither about Batman nor yet another origin story about his early days as a crimefighter, for now, that is--why beat that dead horse again after Batman: Mask of the Phantasm and Batman Begins?--plus lil' Wayne is only a minor character (David Mazouz plays Bruce). One promising sign about the new show--developed by Rome and Mentalist creator Bruno Heller and visualized by Danny Cannon, who directed the Gotham pilot and is best known for shaping the distinctive look of the original CSI--is that it's taking narrative and stylistic cues (as well as a few characters) from the now-defunct DC Comics procedural Gotham Central. That crime comic proved that a risky concept like a series that takes place in the Batman universe but doesn't center on Batman or another costumed hero--which sounds an awful lot like what Heller wants to accomplish with Gotham--can work.

In Gotham Central, the protagonists were detectives from the Gotham City Police Department's Major Crimes Unit, while Batman was a peripheral character, and Batman's cop ally Jim Gordon, who, at the time of Gotham Central's run, had retired from his job as police commissioner, made very few appearances. But on Gotham, the cast of cop characters is a lot smaller, and Gordon is the central character. Instead of the more familiar-looking authority figure in the pornstache, the Gordon we see on Gotham is a pornstache-less and much younger detective who hasn't risen in the GCPD ranks yet and is played by Ben McKenzie from both Southland and--before the cop show phase--The O.C., bitch. (McKenzie also previously voiced Batman in Batman: Year One, an animated 2011 adaptation of DC's 1987 "Batman: Year One" storyline.)

Like in Gotham Central, the entry points into the twisted, grandiose and operatic world of Gotham are detectives: in this case, Gordon and his older partner Harvey Bullock (Donal Logue from the much-missed Terriers). While watching Gotham (which, by the way, is scored by Graeme Revell, whose previous comic book adaptation scoring credits include The Crow and Sin City) doesn't require reading any issues of Gotham Central to understand what's going on, it's always a good time to discover Gotham Central in digital form or trade paperback (TPB) form.

Gotham Central was one of DC's most underrated titles of the '00s, despite winning an Eisner Award and a Harvey Award, the two most coveted awards in the comics industry. It's also a great standalone crime comic that's perfect for either crime genre fans who have never gotten into comics; readers who grew frustrated with superhero comics because of their overly convoluted mythologies (or the lousy quality of much of the writing, especially material written for characters of color) and quit reading comics for a while; or readers who simply don't care for either superhero comics or the character of Batman himself.

"Yo, what could possibly be racist about a white billionaire running around at night exacting vigilante violence?," said Yo, Is This Racist? wisecracker Andrew Ti, when he responded on Tumblr to a reader's question about whether Batman is a racist franchise or not (Ti thinks it is and doesn't care if he pisses off Batman nerds, whom he finds to be racist too). Whether their dislike for Batman is because racist fanboys worship him or because he's an overexposed character, readers who don't care for him will likely find Gotham Central to be up their alley because Batman isn't the hero of the series--the detectives are--and Gotham Central's view of the Dark Knight is interesting and complicated (and even more so than the Rashomon-inspired 1992 Batman: The Animated Series episode "P.O.V.," which looks like a rough draft for Gotham Central).

Just like the detectives who have to compete with Batman's presence on the streets or tolerate it, Gotham Central is split between siding with him and finding his brand of justice to be either flawed or an interference in the MCU's work, like when a criminal winds up not getting convicted because Batman arrested him (Batman is basically Captain Freedom from Hill Street Blues, except he's not a joke, he barely speaks and he's as much of an imposing force on the streets as the Latino and Irish gangs Captain Furillo frequently had to make deals with). Drama-wise, alternating between both sides is a more compelling position to take than simply viewing Batman as a dark knight in shining armor.

Gotham Central is one of the few comics I have every single issue of because of the consistent quality of the writing (aside from a couple of annoying tie-ins to DC crossover events) and illustrator Michael Lark's suitably noirish and--to borrow a word from Gotham Central co-writer Greg Rucka regarding Lark's steez, "photojournalistic"--artwork. All 40 Gotham Central issues are available digitally from DC or as TPB collections. The following five Gotham Central arcs are must-reads, because of either the writing or substantial appearances by characters who are featured on Gotham.

"In the Line of Duty" (issues 1 to 2)

"We take it all from the regular person's POV, much like Marvels did," said Gotham Central co-writer Ed Brubaker about how his series' approach mirrored the acclaimed 1994 Kurt Busiek/Alex Ross miniseries' approach in a 2003 Comic Book Resources interview. Brubaker, who transformed the Captain America superhero comic into an espionage series and writes terrific crime comics like Criminal, and Rucka, who created the espionage comic Queen & Country and the P.I. comic Stumptown, kicked off Gotham Central's run with a relentlessly paced two-issue storyline in which the MCU must figure out how to take down a cop-killing Mr. Freeze. In keeping with the regular person's POV, Freeze is only shown when he comes into contact with any cops (as is Batman). Brubaker and Rucka's version of Freeze is more sadistic and vicious than the acclaimed reimagining of Freeze as a vengeful victim of corporate cruelty on Batman: The Animated Series, the show that remains the best screen version of the Batverse (sorry, Christopher Nolan trilogy), unless Gotham exceeds expectations.

Salamat, Chan Is Missing

The following piece was written three years ago as an exclusive article for an aborted print compilation of both a webcomic I drew and several of the posts I've written for this blog, and all the posts that were going to be collected in the book were about lesser-known films I dig. I was going to put the book together by myself and self-publish it, but I ultimately decided not to publish it because I'm not exactly well-known, so no one would want to buy it. I even drew an illustration that would have accompanied the piece, which is a lengthy discussion of a favorite movie of mine, a pivotal work in the history of Asian American cinema that dropped in April 1982 in New York and then three months later in San Francisco.

I was too young to be interested in movies when Chan Is Missing hit the art-house circuit. The only movie I gave a shit about in 1982 was The Great Muppet Caper on HBO. Ten or 11 years later, my tastes in film had matured to the point where I was ready to tackle a black-and-white art-house oddity like Chan Is Missing. I first caught it on KQED, the perfect San Francisco station to watch--with no interruptions, although with lots of audio dropouts that removed the F-bombs--what I consider one of the best San Francisco films, much like how two of my other favorite films, Do the Right Thing and the recently Proopified 1974 Taking of Pelham One Two Three, are great New York films, and how another favorite film of mine, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, is a great L.A. film.

I've updated the piece about this 1982 classic a bit, and I'm unveiling it for the first time now because it's Asian Heritage Islander American Pacific Month or whatever it's being called this year.

Thank you, Chan Is Missing, for recognizing that there are actually Filipinos in San Francisco and for depicting Filipino characters who aren't maids, houseboys or sex slaves. Even though those characters--a philosophical Manilatown senior center manager named Presco (Presco Tabios) and the title figure's elderly friend Frankie (Frankie Alarcon)--don't get a lot of screen time in Chan Is Missing, the sequence they appear in is one of the film's most enjoyable sequences, and it's not just because I'm Filipino, and hey, it's an American film representing us flatteringly!

In director Wayne Wang's 1982 breakthrough film, which he shot in black and white on a $22,000 budget, Chinatown cabbie Jo (Wood Moy) and his nephew Steve (Marc Hayashi) are scouring the streets of San Francisco to track down their business partner Chan Hung, who mysteriously disappeared and took with him $4,000 that Jo and Steve need in order to start their own cab company. At one point, Chan's trail leads the amateur sleuths to a Manilatown senior center where Chan is a frequent visitor because he's a fan of the mariachi musicians who entertain the center's manong (elderly Filipino) regulars.

Wang takes a minute to drink in the laid-back atmosphere of the senior center where Chan, a recent immigrant who hasn't had the easiest time assimilating into American culture, felt accepted despite his different nationality. During the interlude, elderly couples are seen dancing to a recording of "Sabor a Mi" by Los Lobos (back when they were known as Los Lobos del Este de L.A.), and we see why Chan felt so at ease at the senior center.

The manongs' enthusiasm for dance and Latin music is infectious, and it's not an unnatural-looking enthusiasm like in that insipid early '90s Pepsi ad where elderly actors pretended to get their dance on to Young MC's "Bust a Move" while awkwardly using phrases they just learned on the set after the director played them a tape of a first-season episode of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air between takes. The fact that the Manilatown old-timers weren't actors--they were regulars at the actual Manilatown Senior Center, captured by Wang's camera--might have something to do with their natural-looking enthusiasm.

That documentary realism--Wang did location shooting in areas of San Francisco like Manilatown that Hollywood rarely ventures into--is a reason why I'm more taken with Wang's indie snapshot of Chinatown and Manilatown than with a product of the studio era with a similarly all-Asian American cast like the quaint, mostly confined-to-the-studio-backlot 1961 screen version of Flower Drum Song, which Chan Is Missing references in a charming closing montage that's accompanied by the original 1958 recording of "Grant Avenue."

While promoting his 2008 indie films A Thousand Years of Good Prayers and The Princess of Nebraska (Wang still makes indies when he's not directing Lifetime channel-friendly studio fare I'm not exactly dying to see), Wang told an interviewer from AsianWeek that he made Chan Is Missing as a response to previous examples of Asian American cinema. "Documentaries and fictional Asian American films were very seriously sort of talking about how we were discriminated against, and how difficult our history was, blah blah blah blah blah, in a way [that] was almost too serious. And almost like perhaps complaining about our experiences. Or trying to be too rah-rah about how positive we have to be," Wang said. "So Chan Is Missing was kinda looking at the complexity of Chinatown in a different way."

Chan Is Missing's impact on Asian American filmmakers or writers, whether they're Chinese or Filipino, is so immense that Wang's film is still being discussed and prodded and poked, primarily in Asian American film classes at universities, while those '70s films Wang was referring to are largely forgotten. It's also a film that--except for a couple of dated-sounding Chinese pop songs on the soundtrack, the occasional sight of poofy hair and the pronunciation of "FOB" (short for "Fresh Off the Boat") as "ef-oh-bee" instead of the presently more common "fob"--looks timeless. (Charles Burnett's similarly shot 1977 indie Killer of Sheep has that timeless quality too.) Sure, the Flower Drum Song movie has its charms (among them are Nancy Kwan's legs), but if I check out a clip from that movie, I know right away I'm watching something from 1961. Chan Is Missing is the Homicide: Life on the Street to Flower Drum Song's NYPD Blue: the scruffier and more improvisational and down-to-earth work that feels more alive and relevant than the better-known, mostly backlot-based and sometimes forced and self-conscious latter work.

BBC's Luther may be as close as we can get to that TV version of Gotham Central some of us GC readers always wanted to see

The BBC One cops-vs.-serial killers procedural Luther, which concludes its second season on BBC America tonight, isn't a perfect show, but it's more enjoyable than most procedurals, due to an imposing and lively but never hammy turn by former Wire star Idris Elba (an actual lead of color who still has his show!) and a distinctive, not-so-generic look.

(Photo source: Luther Caps)

The '60s Batman had the Dutch angles and Homicide: Life on the Street had the jump cuts and washed-out color scheme (something Homicide phased out in its later and less interesting seasons). Luther likes to take its actors and place them at the bottom left and right corners of the screen so that they're surrounded by lots of negative space. If I recall correctly, a Luther crew member said the crew favored this framing effect because it makes it appear as if comic book-style thought bubbles are about to surface above the actors' heads.

(Photo source: Luther Caps)

The framing effect, which was more prominent in Luther's first season (did some Beeb higher-up put NBC exec-vs.-Homicide-style pressure on the Luther crew to do less of it?), also enhances the show's sense of dread and unease. It dwarfs the actors and manages to make the tall Elba look as small as the runty white psychos he's been chasing this season (at times, Luther feels like a serious version of Chris Rock's post-Columbine stand-up routine about crazy white kids who scare the shit out of him, like the goofily named Trenchcoat Mafia).

Luther evokes dread and unease more effectively than most shows. The mute, hammer-wielding LARP-er who terrorized working folk in the penultimate episode of Luther's second season is scarier and more menacing than anything during Luther's American ratings competition, FX's trying-way-too-hard-to-be-scary American Horror Story. The LARP-er's muteness and the episode's preference for filming his killings from a distance or having them take place off-screen--we're subjected only to gruesome hammer-to-skull sound effects--both make his acts of violence more disturbing. And though it's resorted to the tired and annoying device of children in peril that's been used by torture-porn procedurals like Criminal Minds, Luther rarely feels as sadistic as that show (below an A.V. Club piece about Criminal Minds and its short-lived spinoff Suspect Behavior, a commenter astutely noted that "Middle America eat [sic] this crap up with a spoon. It genuinely baffles me that middle aged and conservative Americans have made this show such a mainstream hit.").

That quality of being unnerving without getting sadistic or graphic recalls Gotham Central, the much-missed DC Comics crime title that writers Ed Brubaker and Greg Rucka told from the point of view of Gotham City homicide detectives who resent Batman (Gotham Central was a bleak book, but it wasn't as sadistic as most of DC's puerile attempts at edginess, perhaps because Brubaker and Rucka write like grown-ups instead of horny and torture-porn-obsessed adolescents). From "the operatic theatricality" that crime novelist and Luther creator Neil Cross once said he's brought to DCI John Luther's adversaries to that aforementioned framing effect that creates the illusion of thought bubbles, the larger-than-life Luther is basically a comic book--or as John's teenage charge Jenny Jones (Aimee-Ffion Edwards) would prefer, graphic novel--but it's a very good one, which Gotham Central was.

The people who run Sleuth have no Cloo

When NBCUniversal (now one word instead of two) added Sleuth to its stable of cable channels in 2006, it was an alright idea for a channel: Nick at Nite with guns. For its first couple of years, Sleuth's 24-hour lineup was comprised of reruns of NBCUniversal-owned cop or detective shows like Dragnet, Magnum, P.I., Miami Vice and the always-worth-revisiting Homicide: Life on the Street.

But like so many other channels, of course, Sleuth has strayed from its original purpose. These days, DirecTV channel 308 is an ill-defined dumping ground for reruns of current original shows from its sister station USA (Royal Pains, In Plain Sight)--and Walker, Texas Ranger. With content like a doctor show (Royal Pains), a cop show with very little detective work because of its focus on witness protection (In Plain Sight) and a cop show with no detective work that's only watchable when Conan O'Brien's around to butt in with snarky and appalled commentary (Walker), the name Sleuth doesn't make much sense anymore. Cloo--the new name that Sleuth will assume on a yet-to-be-confirmed future date a la the still-inane 2009 conversion of its other sister station Sci Fi to Syfy--makes even less sense. What's next? NBCUniversal rebranding USA as YouSA? (They also own Telemundo. Maybe they should rename it YouEse.)

Occasionally, Sleuth has done something nice like temporarily revive a show I've longed to see again (Keen Eddie, The Rockford Files) or air a 007 marathon or the surprisingly good 1973 made-for-TV caper movie/unsold anthology show pilot The Alpha Caper, which isn't on DVD and stars Henry Fonda as a forcibly retired parole officer who teams up with the ex-cons he used to watch over--two of whom are played by Leonard Nimoy and Larry Hagman--to hijack a shipment of gold. But otherwise, as a fan of the private eye and caper genres, I've found Sleuth to be a wasted opportunity, regurgitating too many of the same broadcast network procedural reruns that can already be found on USA (House, NCIS).

Unless it's airing a White Collar episode I've never seen before or a Burn Notice rerun with a useful spy tip I need to jot down, Sleuth isn't worth my time. The channel's so cheap it doesn't have any on-air hosts or any original programming that could have given Sleuth a distinctive personality, like how breezy procedurals have become USA's forte or how FX has become synonymous with edgy comedies and gritty and violent but intelligently written dramas (the only original show that Sleuth has produced is a 2006 I Love the '80s-style special about "America's Top Sleuths").

It's owned by NBCUniversal and it's called Sleuth (that is until the name change to Cloo takes place), so why isn't the channel diving into the NBCUniversal library, with its vast history of influential crime shows, and pulling out classic sleuthy properties like Columbo (R.I.P. Peter Falk) or the other NBC Mystery Movie shows? Shouldn't a channel called Sleuth be a little, uh, sleuthier?

Also, as someone who stopped finding Law & Order interesting after an ailing Jerry Orbach left the mothership (although the later pairing of Jesse L. Martin and Jeremy Sisto was a great and too-brief one during the mothership's Law half, as was the duo of Chris Noth and Annabella Sciorra on Criminal Intent), I don't think Sleuth needs to be another repository for Criminal Intent and Special Victims Unit reruns (TNT has exclusive rights to reruns of the mothership, which explains its absence on the NBCUniversal channels' schedules). Okay, maybe Criminal Intent is tolerable once every weekday, but a five-hour Goren-thon like the ones Sleuth often does is overkill. Plus, Sleuth is the sixth channel on the dial that currently airs Criminal Intent reruns, after USA, Bravo, Oxygen, WGN and the local MyNetworkTV affiliate. Enough already, man.

I think of the late David Mills whenever I hear "Wikka Wrap"

From left to right: At a panel for his 2003 NBC creation Kingpin, David Mills was joined by his Kingpin actors Angela Alvarado Rosa, Brian "Most Likely Flashing Back to a Black-and-White Clip of Beaver Cleaver Sleeping in Class" Benben and Shay Roundtree.

Tonight is the second-season premiere of HBO's Treme, the last TV show that journalist-turned-scriptwriter David Mills wrote for before his untimely death last year. I was a fan of Mills' TV writing since his Homicide: Life on the Street period, and in the pre-Twitter days before showrunners like Community's Dan Harmon and Leverage's John Rogers have embraced the Internet and frequently tweet back their shows' vocal fans, Mills was one of the few writers from TV who didn't treat the online community like a bug stuck to his shoe and interacted with viewers of his TV work on Usenet and his blog Undercover Black Man. As one could see from Mills' blogroll, he voraciously read other blogs, including my own. Because of the lack of responses to most of my blog posts, I've sometimes considered abandoning this blog or shutting it down, but then I'd remember that Mills used to read my blog, and that would make me reconsider.

A few days before Treme's Easter night season premiere, I was searching through my closet full of stacks of backup audio and data CDs to recover iTunes song downloads I lost when my PC went kaput in 2009, and I unearthed the 1981 British single "Wikka Wrap" by The Evasions. I downloaded "Wikka Wrap" on iTunes right after Mills wrote a brief post about the chune for Undercover Black Man. I always liked that Tom Browne and Chic-referencing song (which I was first exposed to via Coolio's "1, 2, 3, 4"), but I had a difficult time trying to locate it online because I never knew what the artist name and song title were--until those two items were ID'd by Mills, who loved music (particularly P-Funk) as much as the massive amounts of TV he grew up ingesting. I thanked Mills in the comments section. It was the only time we ever spoke to each other.

It's funny how I used to imagine the lead "vocalist" during "Wikka Wrap" to be a Tony Sinclair-esque black guy (but as Mills pointed out, the "Wikka" chap was actually composer Graham de Wilde doing a parody of a not-exactly-black British TV personality named Alan Whicker) because it ties into mistaken racial identity, a subject the African American blogger observed with humor, whether in his "Misidentified Black Person of the Week" posts or his blog's name, an in-joke about how because of his light skin (and maybe also because of his sometimes--*bleh*--right-leaning posts), he would often be perceived as white or Mexican.

So after the passing of this brilliant Wire and Treme writer who departed too soon, whenever I hear "Wikka Wrap," I always think of Mills and that little comments section exchange we had over this British R&B track we both dug.

David Mills (1961-2010)

I enjoyed Mills' work on Homicide: Life on the Street and The Wire (his contributions to The Wire were the episodes "Soft Eyes" and "React Quotes"), and I regularly read his blog Undercover Black Man (I was jazzed when he added me to his huge blogroll), so his passing, which I learned from a G4 news ticker last night, is unfortunately not a joke and is a shock to me. As one can see from his UBM posts, Mills had incredible taste in music, so it was no surprise that he was a P-Funk expert who co-wrote a book about the Funk Mob and named one of his Homicide episodes after "Bop Gun (Endangered Species)."

The former Washington Post reporter researched a different kind of mob when he created the 2003 drug trade drama Kingpin. Mills' final TV series Treme (pronounced trih-MAY) reunited him with several Wire staffers, including his college friend David Simon, who co-created the new series and also collaborated with Mills on an Emmy-winning HBO adaptation of his own book The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood. Treme--not the first scripted TV series to use post-Katrina New Orleans as a backdrop but most likely to be the best--drops on HBO in 11 days.


Your funk was the best, UBM.

A funny, (somewhat) Thanksgiving-related post

Every time I pass some gas (silently) after Thanksgiving dinner, I'm reminded of the 1998 TeeVee.net blog post "When Bad Actors Happen to Good Shows" by Philip Michaels, which unfortunately disappeared from TeeVee.net's archives. (The post can be seen in its entirety here. Good lookin' out, Wayback Machine.)

So I'm posting excerpts from this scathing TeeVee.net jab at both the writing during the later seasons of one of my favorite '90s shows, Homicide: Life on the Street (1993-99), and Jon Seda, who was in his element as a cast member on Taye Diggs' too-short-lived legal drama Kevin Hill (2004-05) but was a terrible, out-of-place addition to the Homicide cast.

When Bad Actors Happen To Good Shows
by Philip Michaels - March 27, 1998

It happens every Thanksgiving or Easter or Christmas. All the relatives get together at my parents' humble little cottage for a big old family dinner. My mom spends 12 hours in the kitchen. We all put on our Sunday finery. And then, once the potatoes have been mashed and the corn has been buttered and the cranberries have been lovingly removed from the can and stirred up to make them look like they were fresh, we all sit down as a family to have a civilized, pleasant meal.

And we give it our best, just like Frasier's David Hyde Pierce exhorts us to do in those "The More You Know" commercials on NBC. The fine china sparkles. The conversation is spirited. The ham is succulent. And love -- honest-to-goodness family love -- is heavy in the air.

Which is about when, towards the end of the meal, my dad lets out an eardrum-busting, picture-rattling fart.

And that's the cue for everything to go to Hell. My sister starts crying and my brother-in-law just sadly shakes his head and my mother screams at my father and then demands to know why I haven't gotten married before she hastily adds that she'll still love me even if I move to West Hollywood with a hair stylist named Brad, which is about the time that she runs from the room bawling about how nobody has any time for her.

Which is my dad's cue to fart again.

My point -- other than the fact that any psychologist out there who just read those last few paragraphs is probably thinking, "Hello, grant money!" -- is that it only takes one small mishap to take something wonderfully sublime and absent-mindedly flush it down the crapper. That's true of anything, whether we're talking about disaster-plagued family get-togethers or once-phenomenal television programs.

And that brings me to Homicide...


... Jon Seda is the fart at my Thanksgiving dinner.

Seda's Falsone embodies every tough-as-nails-cop-with-a-heart-of-gold cliche that's ever graced the boob tube, right down to his Mott Street accent and emphatic hand gestures. It's almost as if Falsone was airlifted into Homicide straight out of NYPD Blue or Brooklyn South. You expect to see Nicholas Turturro burst on to the Homicide set, demanding that Jon Seda give him his identity back...

Bad enough that the Falsone character is trite. But stack him up against the other cops on Homicide with all their quirks and complexities, and Falsone assumes all the full-bodied richness of a cardboard cutout. Braugher's Pembleton visibly wrestles with his demons and doubts every week. Secor's Bayliss has spent each of the show's six seasons struggling to find happiness that always seems to be out of reach. Even Munch's sarcastic veneer is just his way of shielding himself from the unending horror of poking over one dead body after another.

And Falsone? Well, Falsone keeps muttering about how much he loves his kid...


Bad Actors have doomed Good Shows in the past, they're laying waste to them in the present, and they will continue to wreak their havoc in the future unless America's couch potatoes stay eternally vigilant. Even now, in the seedy back offices of Hollywood, powerful producers and dissolute agents are conspiring in secret to ruin your favorite TV programs. Jamie Farr as an FBI agent on X-Files. William Shatner as a brilliant Army defense attorney on JAG. Shannen Doherty as Rachel's long-lost sister on Friends.

And do you really want to be responsible for that?

Act now. Make angry phone calls to TV producers. Write long, polemical letters to corpulent network executives. March down to their offices and give long-winded speeches until building security guards are forced to break out the pepper spray. Whatever you do, let the TV Powers That Be know you won't tolerate Bad Actors lousing up Good Shows, no matter how much Jamie Farr needs the work.

Otherwise, when my old man farts at your Thanksgiving dinner, you'll have no one to blame but yourself.

Paul Newman (1925-2008)

If you've never seen the Newman cult favorite Slap Shot, you're missing out on one of the 10 greatest sports flicks of all time. After reading about the death of Newman, whose performances I've always enjoyed watching because of what Alan Sepinwall calls Newman's "anti-vanity," I immediately popped into my DVD player the only Newman movie in my DVD collection, Slap Shot. (I wish I had a copy of Nobody's Fool in my collection, but Slap Shot sufficed.)

Every time someone posts a list of their favorite sports movies, they tend to pick the earnest ones (Rocky, Rudy, Field of Dreams, The Pride of the Yankees) as their favorites. You know, movies that make grown men cry? To borrow a classic Kay Howard line from Homicide: Life on the Street, "Oh, make me puke!" I prefer the more off-kilter and humorous sports flicks like Slap Shot, Diggstown, Breaking Away and Shaolin Soccer.

Nobody's Fool may be my favorite Newman movie, but Slap Shot contains my favorite Newman character, Reggie Dunlop, the aging hockey coach with a rather relaxed attitude towards on-the-rink behavior. Dunlop's insults are so delightfully foul-mouthed and politically incorrect that I'd hate to see what this movie is like when it airs on basic cable ("You know, your son looks like a fuddy-duddy to me. You better get married again 'cause he's gonna wind up with somebody's sock in his mouth before you can say Jack Robinson.").

I doubt TCM will include Slap Shot in its inevitable Newman marathon tribute. Even though TCM never censors its movies, I don't think they've ever aired a movie that's filled to the brim with F-bombs like Slap Shot.

Moviegoers in 1959 winced when they saw Jimmy Stewart discuss panties and sperm in the courtroom in Anatomy of a Murder. They probably had a coronary when they heard Newman curse up a storm in Slap Shot.

No wonder Newman considered Dunlop to be his favorite character and called Slap Shot the most fun movie shoot he ever did. I guess he didn't mind wearing what has to be some of the ugliest pants in movie history. (Plaid trousers? That pair of bell-bottom leather pants Newman tried to rock later in the film? Not even someone as cool as Newman in Slap Shot, Kurt Russell in Escape from New York or Eddie Murphy in his concert movies could persuade me to slip into a pair of leather pants. There are two things I'll never wear: leather pants and open-toed shoes. They're the least manly-looking pieces of fashion ever invented.)

It's interesting that Newman's final role was in another sports movie (and an animated one too!), Cars. I'm glad he went out as a talking Hudson Hornet instead of a planet-eating lardass.