Word: gomer
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Cinema: From Maverick and The Flintstones to Gomer Pyle and Mission: Impossible, rerun mania grips Hollywood...
...projects just keep on coming, as studios ransack America's collective subliterate unconscious for new hits from old shows: American Gladiators (with Cliffhanger's Renny Harlin producing); Bewitched (Penny Marshall); The Brady Bunch; F Troop; Gentle Ben; Gilligan's Island; Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.; The Green Hornet; Hawaii Five-0; Hogan's Heroes (from writer- producer John Hughes); The Invaders; Lost in Space; My Favorite Martian; The Rifleman; The Saint and many, many more...
When public TV was launched, there were only the three networks. You could watch Gomer Pyle or Land of the Giants or Lawrence Welk. Public TV was singular, glorious, redemptive. Today, of course, there is a democratic hurly- burly glut of cable and home video. Imagine if Americans had been presented in 1968 with a referendum: either a single channel broadcasting a mix of news, documentaries, children's shows and performance, or else a dozen intermittently worthy channels, two with nothing but news, two with nothing but congressional sessions, one with nothing but kids' shows, several with music, two with...
Still, surely it is preferable to have television dramas and sitcoms addressing important dilemmas now and then -- single motherhood, for example, or drug addiction or wife battering. Better that than to revert entirely to Gomer Pyle and Gilligan's Island and My Little Margie...
...Slick Willie talks like John Wayne but acts like Gomer Pyle...