Category Archives: TV

Tales of the Unexpected — Fat Chance (04/05/80)

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The episode opens oddly with several people leaving work.  Mavis leaves Burge Chemist, Dr. Applegate leaves his practice,  an unnamed woman leaves the Slimming Clinic, and Frances leaves Boyles & Sanders Solicitors.

Dr. Applegate goes to Burge Chemist.  John Burge has been skimming pills off other prescriptions to sell to Applegate.  This extra cash helps Burge finance his adulterous affair.  To be fair, he complains that his wife Mary has ballooned up to “11 Stone, 12 Pounds” (163 pounds).  So I guess that woman leaving the Slimming Clinic was not an employee.

Uh-oh, this just in from the CDC:

So this 1980 behemoth is still smaller than the average US woman today?  Yikes!  But who believes anything the CDC says anymore?

Burge meets up with his wife’s attractive best friend Frances.  She refers to Mary as a pig and Burge rebukes her.  He says, “Women are awful — men have some kind of loyalty” . . . before they start smooching in an alley.   Then Burge admits he does think of his wife as “a fat, fat, fat pig.”  They laugh when he describes her being weighed by hanging her from a crane like a sow.

While Mary is watching TV and eating bonbons at home, Frances suggests that Burge get a divorce.  They agree that Frances will later see if Mary had ever thought about it.  Mary says that her husband would not divorce her because she would take him for every penny pence.

The next night when Burge comes home, Mary is shaving her legs, propped up on the kitchen table, with his electric razor.  So weight isn’t the only problem.

This really is the simplest of stories.  It is loaded with details and characters that are unnecessary, yet everything works.  I could take a few paragraphs to go through the mechanics, or write one spoilerific sentence and be done for the month.  Hmmm, I know which I would choose.

Burge gives his wife a box of chocolates that he has poisoned, and she regifts them to Frances to eat on her plane trip to America.

I might sound dismissive, but this really is a great episode and a classic ending.  Yes, Burge has killed Frances but she might not even be dead yet; and there’s not a damn thing he can do about it because she is over the Atlantic.

Not only that, but Mary gave Frances the chocolates because she was committed to slimming down to save her marriage.  So he accidentally killed Frances and won’t even have the newly svelte Mary because the poison will be easily traceable to him.

But he will know nothing for sure until the plane lands in 6 hours . . . 5 with a tailwind.

Other Stuff:

After all the recent stories of Roald Dahl’s work being rewritten by censorious fascist do-gooders, here Dahl is cancelled completely.  In this case, he was replaced by an apparently woke writer who is best known for his novel about a transvestite.

OK, OK, the writer is the great Robert Bloch, and this was 43 years ago.  I had assumed that this series was based 100% on Dahl’s work as, up until now, it had been.  Maybe this is a good thing.  God knows Ray Bradbury Theatre could have used a little fresh DNA in the gene pool.

Science Fiction Theatre – Bolt of Lightning (02/01/57)

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Reverting back to SFT’s trope of never naming locations, Truman Bradley tells us “at a large eastern university, an explosion occurred recently in the laboratory of Dr. Edmond Blake.”  The army is impressed by this explosion that “generated millions of BTUs, enough to vaporize the entire building, including the steel girders.”  They have called in Dr. Sheldon Thorpe [1] to explain how steel melted, and the apparent controlled demolition of Dining Hall 7.

Hey, take off that hat!

As is frequently the case on SFT, the old/dead scientist has a hot daughter.  Sheldon visits Cynthia to discuss her father’s work.  As they talk, she casually feeds her father’s papers into the fireplace.  Hey wait, that last one said Epstein Flight Log!  Sheldon stops her, but she says there are some things people were not meant to know.

Cynthia admits she does not know what her father was working on, so even she does not know what people should not know.  Trivia:  She later becomes Director of COVID censorship at Twitter.  However, feeling overheated by the fire and seeing a chance to double his per diem, Sheldon recruits Cynthia to help him.

She first takes him to Madam DiCosa”s restaurant where Blake ate everyday.  Sheldon pronounces it Nicosa even though they are standing right in front of the freakin’ sign!  That’s OK, IMDb spells it DeCosa.    She says she saw a glowing ball land on Dr. Blake’s roof before it melted.  She believes it was punishment by the aliens for Dr. Blake making too many discoveries too quickly, but it could have been the union.

They next visit Blake’s chess partner Mr. Adams.   He says that Blake often discussed flying saucers.  Cynthia interrupts to say that her father might have been curious, but certainly did not believe in flying saucers.  Adam mansplains that Blake did take the flying saucers seriously, and was also interested in lightning.

They next go to the gym where Blake got a weekly rubdown for his arthritis.  The masseuse says Blake was not usually much of a talker, but he did say that flying saucers might be real.  I found this dialogue hilariously delivered:

Masseuse (who Sheldon has never met):  I was talking about my retiring to a chicken ranch.  You know, I’ve been studying up on the hatching of chickens.

Sheldon (in his stoic Gary Cooper voice): No, I didn’t know.

That reminds the masseuse that Blake did get excited one time.  Well, twice, but one time because their conversation gave him the idea for a new kind of chicken incubator using a magnetic field.

Sheldon continues his investigation at casa de Blake.  He finds some scribbling on a table and wants to take it to his lab.  Cynthia refuses.  She is worried all this talk of flying saucers and weekly male massages will tarnish his reputation.

Cynthia finally allows the table to be taken.  Sheldon examines it with “infra-red and x-ray film” even though the symbols are visible and a couple are just Lucky Charms.

After his analysis, he tells Cynthia not to worry about her father’s reputation.  “He never believed in flying saucers.  He undoubtedly questioned those crackpots [2] you saw him with to gather information.”  He continues, “Your father was trying to duplicate flying saucers under laboratory conditions.”  So, he wanted to duplicate something he believed did not exist?

Sheldon builds a device from Blake’s notes.  It causes a feed-back loop and explodes.  He is, however, able to see practical applications for a less explodey model.  Why, irrigation channels could be cut into the desert!  Canals could connect waterways to increase trade to poor landlocked countries!  But the army general really only gets hard when the beam blows up a 10 cent model jet airplane.

One more episode left.  At this rate, I will need a new series in about a year.

Other Stuff:

  • [1]  Portrayed by discount Gary Cooper, Bruce Bennett.
  • [2]  Who are these “crackpots”?  1)  An immigrant who opened her own restaurant, 2)  Blake’s well-dressed chess opponent, and 3)  a entrepreneur who is planning a career in chicken farming.
  • Proximity Alert:  Bruce Bennett’s 4th appearance this season.  Give someone else a chance!

Alfred Hitchcock Presents – The Pearl Necklace (05/02/61)

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Charlotte and Mark are playing tennis — him in long pants and her in a knee-length skirt.  This struck me not so much because of the formality and oppressive transphobic  cis-gender conformity imposed by Big Tennis in the past, but by how great California weather must be.  Here in sweaty South Florida, such a stunt would be suicide.  It is also nice if you can play on a private court at a huge estate with rolling hills and an old geezer watching.  What?

Oh, that’s Charlotte’s boss, 65 year old Howard Rutherford.  He reminds Charlotte her lunch hour is about over and tells her fiancé Mark to beat it.

Rutherford reminds her he is worth $11 million, and this is back when that was a lot of money. [1]  His ex-wives have been taken care of, and not in the usual AHP way.  They have been paid off so a new Mrs. Rutherford would be his sole heir.  He puts his hand on her leg and says she is a lucky gal.  He estimates that because of his bad heart, he has only a few months to live.  With no heirs, she would get his entire estate rather than, say, leaving it to that depressing Children’s Hospital down the street. [2]

Charlotte protests that she is going to marry Mark.  Rutherford is very practical, saying there will be plenty of time to marry Mark after he croaks in a year or so.  She still declines, but he suggests she run it by Mark.

When Mark hears the arrangement would only be for about a year, it sounds like a good deal to him.  Especially since this is before Viagra was invented.

I love the economy of these 30 minute episodes.  There is a quick cut to soon after the the Rutherfords’ wedding.  Rutherford gives his wife a necklace with a single pearl on it:  “A token of an old man’s love and gratitude for sharing his last days.”  He says he regrets that he won’t be around to give her more.

Another quick cut to the couple having dinner at opposite ends of a long table like the Citizens Kane  Citizen Kanes.  Rutherford impressively rolls a single pearl down the long table to Charlotte.  As she catches it, we see she is wearing a necklace with five pearls on it — one for each anniversary.

Charlotte sneaks out to see Mark.  She wants to get a divorce so she and Mark can be together.  He is committed to waiting for the old man to die “so the money doesn’t go to some seedy charity.”  Mark says all the lonely nights are rough for him too, but his argument is somewhat undercut when a girlfriend walks in.  Charlotte slaps him and storms out.

Another quick-cut to Rutherford giving his wife another pearl — for their fifteenth anniversary!  He again voices his fear that this will be the last one.

Mark comes to the house after seeing in the paper that Rutherford is sick.  Charlotte sees that Mark has a 10 year old son, Billy, from a previous marriage, so I guess the mother is the one who walked in on them.  Charlotte invites the boy back to play tennis tomorrow.  Mark sees this as a sign that he can maybe get back together with Charlotte, but she is having none of that.

After spending time with the boy over the summer, Charlotte says she and Rutherford want to pay for the boy to go to prep school and then to a fancy college so he can learn to embrace communism and hate the country that gave his benefactor the opportunities to succeed so Billy could have every advantage.  If all goes well, he’ll be calling them racists by Christmas Break

Cut to their 25th anniversary.  Rutherford finally dies.

Suddenly, I couldn’t get a decent well-lit shot without the logo. Elon Musk had the right idea — fire half the coders before they destroy the product. I’m also looking at you Microsoft, Adobe, and WordPress!

Mark comes to visit.  Charlotte gloats about inheriting all the money.  Her glee at Mark’s being left with nothing is truly infuriating.  However, Mark is even more concerned about her impending marriage — to Billy!

An all-around great episode.  Just goes to show you (and by you, I mean me) that you can have a great AHP episode without a murder.  It was a surprising choice to have Charlotte grow to love the old man pretty quickly.  It could have been a very different story, but I trust the pros at AHP to make the right choice.

The other thing that is baffling is AHP again flirting with incest . . . and getting away with it!  In the same year that Rob and Laura Petrie were sleeping in separate beds, AHP has a woman whoring herself out for money, her cuckolded fiancée secretly banging another chick, and her marrying her ex-fiancée’s young son — a boy that she had de facto adopted when he was 10 years old.  OK, it’s only incest under the Pornhub definition, but it’s still pretty weird.

Other Stuff:

  • [1]  This is a little like Indecent Proposal, but 32 years later the offer was only $1M.  True, that proposal was for just one night, but it was offered by 1993 Robert Redford, and not 2023 Robert Redford.
  • [2]  To be fair, he did add a codicil giving them $2M if they did not ever play the 1-877-KARS4KIDS jingle again while he was alive.
  • Ted Jack Cassidy (Mark) was Ted Baxter’s brother on MTM, starred in the first Columbo (directed by Stephen Spielberg), and was David Cassidy’s father.  He died in a fire at age 49.
  • I was planning to post about the AHP version of Poison that I had somehow missed years ago in its proper rotation.  Turns out, though, that I actually liked the Tales of the Unexpected version better.  Where’s the fun in that?
  • Kudos to Michael Burns for not ending up with the ignominious fate of many kid actors (i.e. dead, drug addict, adult actor).  He went on to be an author, a professor, and horse breeder.
  • Inevitably:

One Step Beyond – Ordeal on Locust Street (09/22/59)

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Host John Newland shows us a house in Boston.  He says the door is kept locked at all times.   The curtains on the window are always drawn.  If they show a Pizza Guy driving up, I’ll get chills.

Anna Parish and her mother are planning for Anna’s beau Danny to visit the house — the first time anyone has been inside since they moved to Boston.  As they work on the Boston Baked Beans and Boston Cream Pie, they are surprised to hear someone shriek outside.  Mrs. Parish assures her daughter that no one can see in the windows.

Outside, Mr. Parish catches Danny still looking toward the window.  “What is it?” Danny cries.  He is shocked and tells Mr. & Mrs. Parish he had heard stories, but now “I saw for myself!  A red velvet chair!”  Well, that is an affront to good taste, but hardly worth screaming like a girl.  He continues, “That’s what was so horrible!  A red velvet chair with a high back!”  OK, lazy-boy, we get it.  Oh wait, he goes on to describe the occupant of the chair which he says would have seemed more at home in the sea than in a house. 

Over Anna’s objections, Mrs. Parish tells him that is her son, i.e. Anna’s brother.  Mrs. Parish assures him the problem is not hereditary or contagious but that they all got two shots and multiple boosters because Twitter experts unanimously told them too.  Danny contemplates missing out on Anna’s Pie and a hoped-for Southie, then flees like he just met Marilyn Munster’s family.

Anna screams that she hates her brother.  Mrs. Parish gives her two really good slaps. [2] Anna runs out of the room.  Her father tells his wife that either they put Jason “some place” or he will leave her.  So that’s the end of Mr. Parish.

Mrs. Parish brings in a defrocked doctor who has had success using a “mind force.”

Dr. Brown hypnotizes Anna as an example.  He does the usual tricks.  He has her raise her hand, act as if she had been burned, ignore the pain of a pin-prick, and check her 401(k) without digging her MAGA hat out of the closet.  He suggests to her that she will forget the pain of Danny running away and, hey, are those beans for anybody?

After reviving Anna, Doc Brown gets the key to Jason’s room.  The scene is from Jason’s POV.  He explains to Jason how he lost his medical license because he doubted the efficacy of masks, but might make an exception in this case.  He also warns that this might take a while.  We see the doctor take his scaley hands.  

Three months later, on Christmas Eve, Mr. Parish comes back home.  He has brought someone with him who will take Jason to a hospital.  Ma Parish is distraught; she will hear nothing of Jason being taken from his home.  She even gets a pistol out of the desk.  

As she is about to ventilate Mr. Parish, Anna enters the room, all smiles.  With her is Jason, now a handsome, unblemished young man.  Doc Brown’s crazy hypno-therapy got him out of that room!  Although the two of them living in there eating beans everyday for 3 months was probably also a factor.

John Newland tells us Doc Brown did not live to see hypnosis become accepted in the medical community.  No shit — I probably won’t either.  

Well, I guess OSB realized what I’ve said from the start.  Sticking to their slim slice of the genre pie was not sustainable.  There was just too much “sameness” to the ghost stories regardless of what time period and majority-white country they took place in.[1]  I appreciate their attempt to branch out, but this was a titular Step in the wrong direction.

Hypnosis might have its place in certain stories, or in helping people quit smoking, but this does not seem a likely application.  Just using the mind caused genetic deformities to disappear, caused scales to fall from his body, and left no scarring.  That’s a leap, even on the Christmas episode of a show about the supernatural. [3]

Other Stuff:

  • [1]  I’ve lost count (and interest) how many OSB episodes are set outside the USA, but they did seem to shoot for about 50%.  As I’ve mentioned before, they never got to Africa or Asia.  Well, they did have an episode in India, but I guess you can’t say “the Orient” any more.
  • [2]  Note to self:  Learn to make GIFs.  Also: running low on peanut butter.
  • [3]  Rules broken:  1) I’ve skipped other episodes about kids with “issues”, but Jason seemed to be older; even though I guess he had been a guppy at one time.  2) I usually skip Christmas episodes because they are so predictable and mawkish.  OSB tricked me by making the episode last 3 months.  And it felt that way, too.

Suspense – The Doors on the Thirteenth Floor (05/31/49)

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We open on two dead women having lunch.  Well they’re dead now, not in the scene below.  Although the one on the left is iffy. [1]

Agatha asks Sally [5] (pop quiz, hotshot: which is which?) how work is going.  Sally says the hours are long, but it keeps her in New York.  She also mentions seeing a lot of George who lives in her building.

Well, hey, George drops by the table and greets his Aunt Agatha.  He says he is surprised Sally isn’t working.  She says, “The typewriter’s under the table” although I’ve never heard it called that.  George has brought a taxi to pick up his elderly aunt.  She has not finished her tea so tells him to have the taxi wait.  Sadly, he does not have enough cash.  Agatha gives Sally that knowing look.  They hear thunder, so Agatha decides to leave after all.  She gives Sally cash to pay the bill and asks her to drop by her apartment that night.

This is some swell apartment building with a doorman, a mailman, a bellhop, and an elevator operator.  Unfortunately, they are all one creepy guy named Andy.  He takes George, Agatha, and her neighbor Harry Crane [2] up to the 13th floor.  On the way, Harry complains that Agatha is playing her radio next door too loudly at night.  Although, because the show is Edgar Bergen & Charlie McCarthy, it is actually coming from across the alley. [6]   They get out on 13, but George asks Andy to wait because the elevator doesn’t have a meter like the taxi.  Agatha asks him to stay, but he says he has things to do.

After he leaves, she notices that a jade Buddha and some other items (a pyrite Joseph Smith and a rare Reese’s Jesus made out of chocolate and peanut butter) are missing.  The window is open.  She calls the cops, but a beefy hand covers her mouth.

Sally comes home.  She knocks on Agatha’s door, but gets no answer.  Harry comes out into the hall and tells her 1) it is too late to be knocking on doors, 2) her smelly cat sneaks into his window at night and wakes him up, and 3) he believes FDR is still alive and we never landed on Guam.

After she puts away the groceries, she decides to try Agatha’s door again.  She discovers her own door will not open.  She does not see what we see — an eye staring in through her peephole!  She tries to make a call, but the phone is dead.  Yikes!

She writes a note for the milkman that I-am-trapped-by-a-killer-please-for-the-love-of-God-let-me-out!, and also no more cheese because it makes the cat fart.  She slides it halfway under the door, but seconds later notices the paper has already been taken.  Through the peephole, she sees Andy leaving Agatha’s apartment.  Well wait, was he doing wind-sprints from Agatha’s door, to Sally’s door to grab the note, back to Agatha’s door, then fleeing Agatha’s door again?  She tries to get the attention of the Peeping Tom across the alley, but his wife busts him before she can get her blouse off.

Next, she ties a note to her cat’s collar and sends it out on the ledge to Harry’s window. [3]  A little later Harry knocks on her door, and she opens it right up. Hunh?  OK, maybe someone unlocked it from the outside, but she did not know that and she did not hesitate for a second to open it.  Anyhoo, he chews her out for letting the cat go in his window again.  She tries to explain about her door and seeing Andy, but he doesn’t care.

She tries the fire door to go drag George into this, but it won’t open.  She sees a paper on the floor.  But wait, this note is folded up like the one she attached to her cat, not flat like the one she shoved under the door.  How the heck would that have gotten there?  I guess Crane could have dropped it when he returned the cat, but why should this be worth dwelling on?  Even if it was the milkman note, so what?  She goes to Agatha’s apartment, but does not see her.  There is a single shoe beside the refrigerator. She opens the refrigerator door and screams in revulsion at some old cottage cheese, and the old woman’s body.  Oh, wait, that’s not cottage cheese.  Sally staggers to the phone and calls the police.

At the same time, Andy and George are dragging a large wicker basket from the elevator to Agatha’s door.  Andy says he killed Agatha because she came home early and caught him in her apartment, and that he fortuitously just got a great deal  on the basket at at Pier 1.  They open the door and drag the basket in — wait, if  Andy has a master key, why did he come in through the window for the heist?  And, hey, where is Sally?

Andy and George argue over how Agatha’s leg came to be sticking out of the door, and whether she might still be alive.  As they argue, there is a shockingly well-composed shot of Sally hiding in the living room.

The men begin pulling Agatha out of the refrigerator and the credits begin.  Well that didn’t resolve much.  The abrupt conclusion on Tubi is noted by reviewers at IMDb.  It just seemed egregious even for this series, so I searched for another copy of the episode at YouTube after finding nothing at Pornhub.  Sure enough, the last 2 minutes had the climax.  At YouTube, I mean, not Pornhub.

Sally tries to flee the apartment, but George catches her.  She distracts him, runs out into the hallway and locks Agatha’s door.  What kind of crazy apartment building is this where tenants can be locked in?  Where does this take place, Wuhan?  No wonder the cat is always trying to escape.  Naturally Harry comes out to complain about the noise and fluoride in the water.  He threatens to call the police, and Sally begs him to.

Of course, the episode is dreadful by today’s standards.  But is that really an excuse?  They had made some pretty good movies by this time.  Hitchcock had several suspense classics under his belt, but who could ever see them there? [4] All the pieces were there, but the low budget, live TV, poor picture quality, and intrusive organ music undermine the whole production.

Maybe it is better to judge these episodes on what they were attempting.  There were a couple of set pieces designed for the titular suspense here, so they did make an effort.  I guess what I’m trying to say is, what the hell happened to this country where we can’t count all the votes in 2 freakin’ weeks?

Other Stuff:

  • [1]  Nell Harrison (Agatha) was born in 1880.  She might be the earliest-born actor I’ve encountered here yet.  18 years after this episode, in a stretch, she played “Old Woman” in The Producers.  Paging Oscar!
  • [2]  Harry is played by Russell Collins who I previously anointed as the greatest actor in history.  To be honest, he isn’t very good here, but it is one of his first roles.
  • [3]  In a quaint sign of live TV, she can’t make the note stay attached.  Luckily she releases the cat just outside her window so we can’t see her hands as she drops it.  Bravo!  However, she also releases it in the opposite direction of Harry’s apartment.
  • And how crazy do you have to be to use a cat for anything on live TV?
  • [4]  Blatant fat-shaming.  And isn’t the phrase fat-shaming just more fat-shaming?
  • [5]  Where are all the Sallys today?  Seems like a fine name, with attractive connotations.  Sally Ride was cool, Sally Field is still cute at 95.
  • [6]  If this doesn’t make sense, have a séance and ask your grandparents; or a dead nerd.