Word: 80s
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Dabney Coleman established himself as Hollywood's go-to smarmy jerk in such sublimely '80s comedies as Nine to Five and Tootsie. But he hit his apex of riotous unlikability in this 1983-84 sitcom about local talk-show host Bill Bittinger. Selfish, lecherous and desperate to move up the career ladder, he irritated and deceived his crew (including a young Geena Davis) with impeccable smarminess. Bill presaged HBO's Larry Sanders and The Office's David Brent, but it took TV a decade or two to catch up with him. Thankfully...
...that passion is being aroused, oddly, by possibly the catchiest, most democratic radio format yet invented. Jack mixes up a lot of '80s music--some classic rock, a slew of one-hit wonders, a few oldies, a touch of Top 40 and a tiny bit of rap. It has surgically removed everything that is annoying about radio. In most markets, Jack is just music--no weather, no traffic, no song IDs--and is completely automated, so there aren't even any wrongheaded DJs to endure. At 1,200 songs, the playlists are three times bigger than average, so it doesn...
Some of the reasons for Jack's surge are self-evident. Listeners like shorter commercial breaks and more songs. And Jack is centered on the '80s, which is still fascinating kids in high school and college. But the programming is shrewd in the way it affirms the identity of its listeners. At its heart, Jack is a nostalgia station for Generation X, but it disguises that fact with carefully selected obscure tunes (Walking Away by Information Society, Pop Goes the Weasel by 3rd Bass) that make listeners feel erudite and hip. Then there are the laconic, faux-rebellious promos...
Perry brags that unlike previous '80s-based stations that only played rock, Jack mixes the broad array of metal, R&B and synth that truly represented the era. In high school cafeterias, the differences between those genres once defined which lunch table you sat at, but now any song from the era brings back muted, whitewashed memories of youth...
...more character model than creator of the book, which Cammell guessed Brando never completely read. That was typical of their relationship, with Cammell remaining, in Thomson's word, Brando's supplicant, alternately embraced and dismissed by the star as Brando's career faded into lazy inconsequence in the early '80s. In his private domain, however, the actor was an absolute monarch: "a small mind in hideous contrast with the overlarge body," as Thomson characterizes him in his New Biographical Dictionary of Film. The pair accepted an advance for the novel from a British publisher in 1982, but Brando eventually repaid...