P-I-L-O-T
The Bob Newhart Show
Very busy
professional lives in Chicago, the odd moment, the odd neighbor, the odd tree.
A successful
analysis might be said to proceed from the tree, and no mistake.
Ted’s Moment of
Glory
The Mary Tyler Moore
Show
“Ted Baxter’s
farewell,” as announced by himself.
This produces a
complete impression, as one should say, of the press and its power in howsoever
straitened circumstances, vis-à-vis the “quizmaster”.
Gulliver in Lilliput,
the American husband lying on the floor of his suite at Grosvenor House, his
back is out, the Wimbledon tickets are in his wife’s purse where she
hasn’t looked.
Another husband
is late for his honeymoon, detained at the airport for cocaine possession (a
mix-up), the bride thinks it’s because they fought on the plane, drunk.
A widow and her
daughter meet an elderly psychosomatic Scotsman, he takes the mother out to the
Theatre Royal.
An English TV
star from California, her ex-husband lives on a Greek island with an abstract
sculptor named Maria or Max, dying.
Top people
(Michael Richards and Julie Hagerty, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Madeline Kahn and
Richard Mulligan—as Dick Van Dyke, yet—Patricia Clarkson and Kelsey
Grammer) cover the roles beautifully filmed, a work of genius.
The actor
“who sounds like a beer” (Guinness) and “the good one”
(Gielgud) are mentioned in the pub after the play, it was Gielgud who discerned
the importance of being earnest in that play, Simon says much the same thing
stylistically.
Thus William
Franklyn standing behind the hotel desk, sliding an ashtray over to receive his
handkerchief back from the forlorn bride at her wits’ end.