Below The Beltway

The guy responsible for one of the best-known television theme songs of all time has passed away:
Earle H. Hagen, a onetime big-band trombonist who wrote some of the most famous theme songs in television history, died Monday in Rancho Mirage, Calif., near Palm Springs. He was 88 and lived in Rancho Mirage.
(…)
He wrote the folksy, [...]

The writer’s strike may have only been the beginning of what looks to be a momentous media change:
With the exception of Fox’s surprisingly strong “American Idol” finale on Wednesday, the May ratings have been pretty atrocious across the board, in a strike-shortened year that’s already shaping up as the TV executives’ annushorribilis.
The worst part is [...]

If you were a kid growing up in the 1970s like I was, one of the big rights of passage came when your parents finally said you were old enough to watch The Tonight Show.
Not that self-indulgent dreck that’s on NBC every night with Jay Leno, the real Tonight Show with Johnny Carson and his [...]

An interesting article in The New York Times today talks about the changes being forced on television networks by the growing popularity of time-shifting technologies such as Digital Video Recorders:
This week, the television upfronts — in which the broadcast networks present their schedules to advertisers — will open with a mystery. Who stole six million [...]

It looks like Jack Bauer fans won’t have to wait until 2009 after all:
The original plan for “24 : Day 7” was for Jack Bauer to head to Africa for a couple of episodes. That didn’t work out. When the season was delayed due to the writer’s strike – it only just started resuming filming [...]

Even James Tiberius Kirk

More posters here
H/T: Scott’s Morning Brew

Well, this just morphs into several levels of coolness:

And, the cast list:
That’s our man, Jack (Kiefer Sutherland, of course), front and center, naturally, but here’s the rest of the cast, from left to right:
• Rhys Coiro, as FBI agent Sean Hillinger
• Janeane Garofalo, as FBI agent Janis Gold.
• Jeffrey Nordling, as FBI agent Larry Moss
• [...]

Will this scene from Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home make any sense to people who grew up after the end of the Cold War ?

Apparently, it’s not just Venezuela where The Simpsons are having public relations problems:
BUENOS AIRES, April 16 — If Homer Simpson and his family are planning any South American vacations in the near future, they might want to come up with a backup plan.
The television show “The Simpsons” is nothing short of a cultural phenomenon in [...]