It’s Saturday morning and TV Land is showing something other than Bonanza and Gunsmoke?
n fact, it appears that they’re running The Andy Griffith Show through 8:00pm tonight.  Oddly enough, unless the listings are just wrong, every episode being shown today seems to have been produced in 1961.  It’s entirely possible: back then, a television season consisted of more than 30 episodes rather than the 20 or so we get now.
And when it comes to The Andy Griffith Show, the episodes made prior to 1965 had two additional things going for …

“Canon is only important to certain people because they have to cling to their knowledge of the minutiae.” —Leonard Nimoy

I have not seen the new Star Trek movie, yet, but you don’t have to have watched it to have heard about the big controversy it’s apparently causing among diehard fans.
It’s all about something called canon.
Canon is basically decisions made in the present as a story is being told that will one day be viewed as an unshakable past that is supposed to forever guide the future.
To put it less philosophically, …

So you’re watching a television show or a movie and you see an actor whose name escapes you.
In the old days, you could always catch the name in the credits. These days, you’ll need eagle-eye vision and a magnifying glass. Probably a DVR, too. And a little luck.
That’s because the credits — if they exist at all these days — are usually retyped in a nearly-microscoping typeface and shoved to the side for a stream of promos. Or they’re sped up so fast that you’ll never have …

Last Thursday, in a heavily-promoted episode of CSI:, William Petersen’s character of Gil Grissom left the Las Vegas crime lab, presumably for the last time, but in TV, you never know.
It was a nice episode, maybe a little sappy at times, but when the main star of a show departs, particularly when the character he portrays has been something of a father-figure to the rest of the characters, a little sappiness is expected.  It’s part of the closure that — like it or not — we want to see on …

Every now and then, I’ll switch on closed captioning, just to see what displays.  I just watched an episode of The Andy Griffith Show, the one called “Citizen’s Arrest,” in which Gomer arrests Barney for making an illegal U-turn.  In one scene, Opie tells Gomer that Barney got angry and resigned as deputy.
Here’s the exchange:
GOMER: You say Barney quit? He really quit?
OPIE: Yep.  He’s off Pa’s force.
But in the world of the hearing impaired, closed captioning turns Opie’s line into this:
Yep.  He’s off Paw’s force.

Paw?
I wonder if the captioners …

More sad news: Hollywood has lost one of classic television’s most beloved stars. Don Knotts, whose bumbling Deputy Barney Fife has entertained generations, died Friday night. He was 81.
Knotts’ entertainment career began shortly after graduating high school. Despite some early failures, he made it to the stage in “No Time for Sergeants,” where he met a fellow actor with whom he would build a lifelong friendship: Andy Griffith. Years later, when he learned that Griffith was preparing for a pilot for a situation comedy in which …