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Night Watch
Like you, I've been suspicious of all this Hulu business. TV already encroaches too much on my life. And then late one night I found myself taking this Mental Floss quiz on The White Shadow, which was one of those shows I remember digging as a kid; white NBA player (Ken Howard) suffers a career-ending knee injury and, as a favor to an old Boston College teammate who's now a princpal at an inner city LA High School, becomes the school's basketball coach. And then I realized that nearly all three seasons of the critically acclaimed, ahead-of-its-time show, are available, instantaneously and for free, on hulu. Let's just say I've been watching a lot of White Shadow in the last few weeks. All I really remembered about the show was that there was a guy named Salami, a guy named Goldstein, a guy named Coolidge, a guy named Hayward and that they all sang in the showers after games.
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Back row (l to r) Jackson, Coolidge, Goldstein, Reese, Coach Reeves Front row (l to r) Gonzalez, Thorpe, Hayward, Salami |
What's kind of amazing, watching this show some 30 years later, is how frank it is about issues that start with race and class but which extend to religion, rape and even homosexuality (there's an episode early in season one that features an introverted preppy kid whose parents transfer him to Carver in hopes that the rough, inner-city school will toughen him up, essentially beat the gay out of him).
It's all a little clunky, in that way where 70s and 80s dramas hadn''t yet figured out that you can block a TV show like a movie, and yet the writing's pretty ace, even if the young actors ' the most famous of whom were Timothy Van Patten (Salami) and Byron Stewart who improbably reprised his role as Warren Coolidge on St. Elsewhere ' are occasionally figuring things out on camera. The show's pilot is above; "Just One of the Boys," the episode dealing with homosexuality, is after the jump.
Oh, and the show has what's got to be one of the top-five television theme songs ever.
First it's just a song about... stale side dishes, maybe. And then it gets insane. Behold the horrors of the human form!
Academy Award nominated Whit Stillman's The Last Days of Disco is unavailable on DVD. What gives, people? Sure, it's not as good as his debut Metropolitan, but few movies are.
From Janet Maslin's Times review:
In ''The Last Days of Disco,'' [Stillman] is again concerned with the youthful malaise of the privileged, and he once again renders his characters' fretfulness in deft, funny and improbably touching ways. Wild nights of the disco age are not dealt with here, because this is not a film about wild characters. It's about tame ones who poignantly, in the brief spell of liberation between the end of college and the start of serious careers, may be experiencing more fun and freedom than they ever will again.
Iowa State Senator Mike Gronstal explains why he won't so-sponsor a bill to amend the state's constitution and block the court's recent decision to allow gay marriage.
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