With Value-Added Video -- Buy The Sunday NY Times for These Great Stories, Or Read It Online
UPDATE: Hi, if you've landed here by a Google search, make sure that you click on the tag "90210 (TV Show)" which is right here and at the bottom of this post to see all my posts on the new show. And if you came via an image search, please don't hotlink to my images on your site. If you must, copy them and store them at whatever image hosting sight you use. Typepad hates it when people piggyback on my bandwidth. Thanks.
Okay, these stories aren't about the critical issues of our day, they're about, well ... 90210 and The Mary Tyler Moore Show on DVD.
Dave Itzkoff in his oral history of the classic with a look forward to the new CW Network buzz show:
JENNIE GARTH I heard a rumor that Aaron Spelling was going to be doing a show, and I thought, “Oh my God, if I could work with Aaron Spelling, that would be the best thing ever.” I went in and met with Aaron and read in his giant office with the shaggy carpet, and there were cigarettes sitting out on the table for anyone that wanted them. I was very impressed by that. I was like: “Wow, you can smoke in here? That’s crazy.”
I remember I was walking away from the building, and he opened the window and said something like, “Good job, kid!”
For me I was like: “Are you sure? Because I’m nobody.”
And, on the facing page, Entertainment Weekly's Mark Harris moonlights with a piece finally explaining why Mary, Rhoda, Lou, Ted, Murray, Gordie the weatherman, Phyllis, Sue Anne, Georgette, et. al. has taken so long to make its way to your DVD player:
What knocked the series off the fast track, according to Steven Feldstein, senior vice president for corporate and marketing communications at 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, was a glutted marketplace. “We looked at the landscape of the TV-to-DVD business and stepped back,” he said. “The other studios were dumping stuff that nobody wanted onto DVD. I mean, ‘What you talkin’ ’bout, Willis?’ Come on. People were dumping everything.”
Frustrated “Mary” fans found one another, communicating on Web sites like Television Without Pity and sitcomsonline.com, and trading information and rumors via review posts on amazon.com. One of them even found Mr. Feldstein’s number and called him. “It was a conversation like you’d expect from a fan of ‘Mary Tyler Moore,’ ” he said. “Very polite. But he wanted to understand the perceived injustice and talk about how it could be remedied.”
So, click over there, and come back later after I drink more coffee and take Homer to the park.
MTM Chuckles montage by 1heckofaguy.com. Click over there and thank him for me.
Oh, and I don't recommend trying to get these media execs on the phone, you could burn through a lot of your mobile minutes trying to get the right Steven Feldstein in Los Angeles, for example.
After the jump, it's not the best quality, but it is the penultimate scene, the funeral, from the Chuckles Bites the Dust episode. Classic.
