The Philosophical Optimist

            After our previous salute to the excellent short-lived series Dead Like Me , we now turn to an even more tragic tale, the tale of Ned and Stacey.   While Debra Messing's later homage to all things queer, Will & Grace , went on for season after asinine season, making us laugh in spite of ourselves even as our IQs plunged with every episode, her earlier, far more intelligent series was killed after only two seasons, just as it was poised to really get good.   The key to Ned and Stacey , a show about two shallow people who contract a fake marriage for the purposes of mutual exploitation (the tag line: "To get a promotion, I needed a wife.   To get a life, I needed his apartment") was that the show was not just about them, but also about Stacey's sister Amanda and her husband Eric.             Eric and Amanda Moyer served as a foil to the eponymous...

[Since I did not have time to compose the essay I wanted this month, I here present the first of two short entries from an earlier blog of mine.  Although these posts were first written about 10 years ago or so, I think what they say is still relevant, perhaps more than ever.]             William Butler Yeats, in his poem   "The Second Coming," said "the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity"; so it seems ever to be.   As a fan of such great dramatists as Shaw and Shakespeare (not in that order), I want to believe that great drama can still be written, and that such great drama can be found not just on the stage, but on the screens, both big and small.   However, Yeats' words remind me that it is the way of the world for things to fall apart, and I am continually disappointed to find an inverse proportion prevailing between the brilliance of a television show, and the length...

            Teaching freshman-level courses at a community college has—from time to time, at least—provided me ample time and creative energy to think about other things.  One topic of my reflections lately [1] has been Craig Ferguson, host of "the Late Late Show" on CBS.  After some time, I have decided that Ferguson is a genius, if not a prophet (the latter being a subcategory of the former).              My realization of this began when Ferguson had philosopher Cornel West on his show, and West commented to Ferguson on the topic of spirituality, "You have a spirituality in your honesty."   This, I realized, is the nature of Ferguson's genius, the genius of honesty to be found in any good satirist.  However, before considering that, we should consider another element of Ferguson's greatness, one not unrelated to his honesty: his talen...

To the Good People of Star Trek:             First of all, let me just say: thank you; thank you for bringing Star Trek back to television, and for making in Discovery two of the best seasons of television ever.   I am sure I am but one of many people who have written to congratulate you on your excellent work, but I do hope one more letter of praise will not be too much.   I have quite enjoyed watching you work with the material you have inherited; you have been faithful to what has come before without letting it limit your creativity.   Kudos on creating great new characters like Saru and Stamets (my two favorites), and on brilliantly fleshing out old characters like Christopher Pike, Harry Mudd, and the family Sarek (but where does Sybok fit in to this story, I wonder?).   And as for Captain Gabriel Lorca, even though he did turn out to be a murderous Terran, he is still my third favorite Starfleet c...