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 …

“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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …