Agnes Moorehead and the Invaders

1961’s The Invaders is one of the best-remembered Twilight Zone episodes, with an ending like one of those five-page Marvel Comics science fiction tales. 

This fantastic story is sold by Agnes Moorehead’s silent performance as a woman Richard Matheson’s script describes as having “…been alone for many years; a strong, simple person whose existence is primitive and whose only problem is acquiring enough food to eat.”

Director Douglas Heyes recalled, “The reason I suggested her was that she had done a radio show called Sorry, Wrong Number which was a half-hour tour de force where she used nothing but her voice, and I said, ‘Here’s a half-hour tour de force where the woman doesn’t use her voice at all!”

In Tepid Blood

Although it was masterfully done, Feud Season Two left me feeling that I didn’t really care what happened to Truman Capote or his Swans.

Truman destroyed a great talent with booze and pills, and practiced treachery to boot. And the Swans were Sondheim’s Ladies Who Lunch, permanently pickled in their own frustrations.

People who have every imaginable resource handed to them and nevertheless manage to remain unhappy tend to drain the well of sympathy.

'Succession' Dramatizes a Death Knell

I do like the fact that the concluding chapters of HBO's Succession are honing in on how a sufficiently corrupt “news” channel can, almost casually, destroy a democracy. 

Too bad this dramatic warning didn't air a quarter-century ago when we had a better chance of survival.

The Power of Mr. Rogers

'Whosoever holds the hammer, if he be worthy...'

I once interviewed children’s television host Fred Rogers about superheroes, an issue that concerned him. He had once taken his TV audience onto the set of The Incredible Hulk to explain that Bill Bixby and Lou Ferrigno were really two different people, that it’s all just make-believe.

Mr. Rogers said superheroes are natural for children. “The first superheroes, of course, are the parents themselves,” he said. “There is a very natural stage in the development of the human personality in which we believe that we ourselves are omnipotent, and that our parents are omnipotent, and that we’re able to do anything. But we have to help children gently along the way to realize that nobody is omnipotent, and neither are the heroes on television.”

I asked him why he stressed “gently.”

 “Because even though children would love to think that they could take on the world and win, it can also be very frightening to they to think that they are omnipotent — and that what they think will, indeed, happen.

“One of the things that our Hulk program came from was reading about kids who were killing themselves playing superheroes, and also knowing how widespread superhero play is among children. It’s important for adults to know how blurred the lines are between reality and fantasy in young children’s minds.”

I asked why he thought children find superheroes so attractive.

“Children are small. There are all kinds of powerful things in their environment over which they feel they have control. When they get angry, they often project that anger onto people and things around them, expecting them to have the same intensity of feeling. So in order to overcome the fear which results from being little in a big, scary world, children often pretend that they have superhuman powers — powers even greater than the big people and things around them. Seeing superheroes on television and in comic books feeds that ‘personal pretend.’ In the face of very difficult circumstances, everybody wishes once in a while that he or she had superhuman ways of dealing with difficulty.

“As usual, we’re not condemning fantasy. It’s often the basis for resolution and invention. What we’re doing is helping children to understand that human beings can pretend about being super-strong, super-big, super-fast, etc. but that it’s their real selves which do all the important things in the world. It’s essential for their play to be safe so they can grow and develop into what’s really super about each one of them.”

Beyond lifting Thor’s hammer, Fred Rogers also achieved that other ultimate proof of goodness. He’s been attacked by Fox News.

Dark Shadows in Four Colors

Dark Shadows was neither fish nor fowl, though it might arguably have been bat. Neither a traditional soap opera nor a prime-time broadcast fantasy program, the show had a quirky freshness that captured the interest of America’s kids in the late 1960s.

That success seemed somewhat accidental. Beginning June 27, 1966, on ABC, Dark Shadows was at first just a gothic story of the type frequently consumed in paperback form by the housewives who presumably still made up most of the audience for daytime soaps.

The brainchild of producer Dan Curtis and a descendent of the Jane Eyre/Turn of the Screw school of literature, the show featured a mysterious Maine mansion and a vaguely imperiled governess named Victoria Winters. Curtis purportedly came up with the idea for the show in a dream about an enigmatic young woman on a train.

It wasn’t until 200 episodes into its run that kids began to race home from school to catch the show, which aired at 3 p.m. central time. That’s when vampire Barnabas Collins (Jonathan Frid) arrived to kick the show’s most outré elements into high gear.

The Universal monsters of the 1940s were popular with children through Late Show airings and the Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine, and the soap opera capitalized on that, offering not only a vampire but witches, werewolves, ghosts, zombies, time travel and parallel universes.

The show had various reincarnations in other media, including a contemporaneous Gold Key comic book series illustrated by long-time Martian Manhunter artist Joe Certa. Frankly, the soap, with its cheap production values and windy plots, was never quite as good as we wanted it to be. The comic book, freed from the show’s protracted story lines, was better, and in fact outlasted the TV show by five years, running through 1976.

The semi-sympathetic portrayal of Barnabas marked something of a milestone in popular culture, pointing the way toward all the subsequent stories that would present vampires not as mere monsters but primarily as tragic victims.

Barnabas’s nemesis, the witch Angelique (a/k/a Cassandra), was a favorite of mine. She was played by the beautiful Lara Parker, who also left a legacy in another milestone of fantasy television. Parker portrayed Laura Banner, the wife of Dr. David Banner, in the 1977 pilot for The Incredible Hulk TV series. Never heard and seen only in an opening dream sequence, her role nevertheless provided a touching and powerful dramatic impetus to the story. Because Dr. Banner (Bill Bixby) hadn’t had sufficient strength to save her during a car crash, he became obsessed with the research that would trigger his tragedy. 

What If Cary Grant Were a Private Eye?

Names like Superman, Batman, Iron Man and Spider-Man may sound silly, but there’s something sillier still.

At least those heroes chose their melodramatic noms de guerre. How much sillier is it when a hero just coincidentally happens to have a melodramatic name that advertises his profession? You know, like Doc Savage, Mike Hammer and Peter Gunn. The name of a later TV private eye, Remington Steele, was conceived as a parody of the name “Peter Gunn.”

Freudian implications aside, Gunn was the polished and poised protagonist in a stylish private eye TV series created by Blake Edwards that aired from 1958 to 1961. He was played by Craig Stevens, an actor who might be better remembered today if his looks, sartorial splendor and savoir faire had not so closely resembled Cary Grant’s.

One cool cat, Pete operated out of a jazz club called Mother’s in some waterfront city. His girl — the equally obviously named Edie Hart — was the lead singer at the club. Her smooth elegance mirrored Gunn’s, only slightly smudged at moments by hints of her frustration at Gunn’s matrimonial elusiveness.

Gunn was cool enough to make it into a comic book, Dell’s Four Color 1087 (April-June 1960), giving artist Mike Sekowsky a rest from the superhero-packed panels of DC’s Justice League of America. Sekowsky got a chance to show what he might have done with a realistically illustrated Rip Kirby-style newspaper strip.

The television series is remembered today largely for the permanent link it forged between action-adventure and jazz, thanks to composer Henry Mancini, who filled the episodes with original music. His Peter Gunn Theme remains iconic, and was the direct ancestor of The James Bond Theme. David Anthony Kraft and I had the privilege of seeing Mancini’s orchestra perform the piece at a university concert in 1973.

Few people know, however, that the famous theme has lyrics. Here they are, in part (and they sound like Edie Hart being heartfelt):

Every night your line is busy

All that buzzin’ makes me dizzy

Couldn’t count on all my fingers

All the dates you had with swingers

Bye bye

Bye, baby

I'm gonna kiss you goodbye

And walk right through that doorway

So long

I'm leaving

This is the last time we’ll meet

On the street going your way…

Never Seen Mad Men? Here's Why You Should

Mad Men was a stylishly executed, sprawling and sophisticated novel of a show about the historic illusions of American society — the facade of postwar suburban perfection, the ignored injustice of 1960s attitudes toward blacks, gays and women in a society “with justice for all,” and a man who successfully sells lies in a backstabbing profession of lies on Madison Avenue. 

The series’ underlying joke is that the man himself is a lie, and its running theme is the characters’ confused groping toward truth.

Napoleon Solo and the Nostalgia Affair

In 1964, audiences watched the stylish adventures of an Ian Fleming superspy named … Napoleon Solo.

At traffic lights, on his way to a producer’s office, young actor Robert Vaughn had leafed through the script for a series called Solo. He realized immediately that it was “James Bond on television” and was sold.

With the film Dr. No and its sequel From Russia With Love, Ian Fleming’s hero had already become a successful franchise. And the biggest hits — Goldfinger and Thunderball — were yet to come.

In fact, the Solo producers had consulted with Fleming about their TV idea. With Bond movies in production, Fleming couldn’t participate much, but he did give them two character names — Napoleon Solo and April Dancer (eventually The Girl from UNCLE in a spinoff series).

One other Fleming-inspired idea was the name UNCLE. In his 9^th Bond novel Thunderball, published in 1961, Fleming had winked at the mid-century bureaucratic passion for acronyms by calling Ernst Stavro Blofeld’s criminal syndicate SPECTRE (the Special Executive for Counter-intelligence, Revenge, Terrorism and Extortion).  The TV show’s UNCLE (the United Network Command for Law Enforcement) established the practice as a fictional superspy cliché, and KAOS, SHIELD, THUNDER and others followed. Hydra, Marvel Comics’ evil cabal, is now probably even more famous than SPECTRE.

The Man from UNCLE triggered and then surfed the massive wave of popularity for spy fiction that followed in American popular culture. Even perpetually panting teenager Archie Andrews pitched in as the Man from RIVERDALE.

The suave Solo and his stoic partner Illya Kuryakin were often pitted against Thrush, an organization described by Solo as believing “…the world should have a two-party system — the masters and the slaves.” The series started out excellently, but progressively lost focus, succumbing to “camp” claptrap. But it had made its mark.

“It was in a time of war,” McCallum recalled. “It was in a very agonizing time in the United States because of the Vietnam war, the cold war. It was a difficult time for people and ‘Man from UNCLE’ came along and was totally, as they used to say, tongue in cheek… People managed to escape for an hour with a Russian working with an American.”

America’s dark times even cast their shadow over The Man from UNCLE pilot, which suspended filming because of President Kennedy’s assassination.

On TV, anyway, evil could still be thwarted, and The Man from UNCLE attracted eager fans. Airing on NBC from 1964 to 1968, the series not only prompted a spinoff but numerous paperback novels, several movies, a latter-day pulp magazine and two comic books.

Solo and Kuryakin’s missions were always called “affairs,” and my favorite of the paperback titles was of course “The Unfair Fare Affair.”

The Challenge of 'I Love Lucy'

Behind the cameras at the filming of the classic sitcom 'I Love Lucy'

When I Love Lucy began, the wealthiest person on the set was the cameraman.

Well, the director of photography, really. German native Karl Freund had filmed Dracula and Murders in the Rue Morgue, and won an Oscar for The Good Earth. Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz knew him from the film Du Barry Was a Lady, and knew he’d invented a popular light meter, and that he certainly didn’t need to do a sitcom. Yet that’s what Desi wanted him to do.

In Ball of Fire: The Tumultuous Life and Comic Art of Lucille Ball, Stefan Kanfer noted that Desi wanted to stage the show as a play, filmed in front of a live audience of 300 with three cameras that were to be synchronized on one sound track. The film could therefore be easily edited from master shot to medium shot to close-up.

That couldn’t be done, Freund told him. Those shots would all have to be lit differently for decent quality.

“Well, I know that nobody has done it up to now, but I figured that if there was anybody in the world who could do it, it would be Karl Freund,” Desi replied.

Intrigued by the project, “Papa” Freund ultimately  signed on for union scale. “Papa was loaded anyway,” Desi said. “He could buy and sell Lucy and me three or four times. The money he had made out of the light meter alone, plus a lot of acreage in orange trees he owned in the San Fernando Valley, made him a man of considerable means. The challenge was what got him, and that’s what I was counting on.”

Those Embarrassing Capes and Masks

Dr. Solar tried superheroics without a costume in 1963...

In the comics, particularly those with relatively crude art, the costumes served to easily identify and dramatically focus attention on the protagonists. But that function is served, in movies and television, by the looks, manners and stage presence of the stars, so garish costumes are superfluous.
Superhero costumes were probably not quite as odd-looking in the 1930s as they are today.

After all, American audiences were accustomed to seeing bold colors, capes and tights that emphasized the breathtaking bodies of men and women who could perform astonishing physical feats that even defied gravity. They were circus performers, acrobats and trapeze artists, and their garments must have seemed a natural fit for fast-moving four-color individuals like Flash Gordon and Superman.

But circuses have faded even as superheroes have flourished, and nobody dresses like that anymore. And that makes costumes problematic when popular characters are transferred to the screen.

In the 1930s, the superhero costume wasn’t quite the fetish it became. Superman, for example, would go into action without it when he had to in his early comic book exploits. Oddly, he did wear the costume in his radio adventures, even though he took care that no one could see him acting as Superman for the first few years of his show.

But the costume convention took a firm hold of the popular imagination during the 1940s and 1950s. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby tried to defy it in the fresh approach they took to their 1961 title The Fantastic Four, only to find that the readers demanded costumes. And by the third issue, they got them. Gold Key tried the same thing in 1963 with their Dr. Solar, the Man of the Atom, holding out until the fifth issue before giving their nuclear-powered hero a costume, mask and dual identity.

...But found that he finally had to surrender to comic book convention

In the comics, particularly those with relatively crude art, the costumes served to easily identify and dramatically focus attention on the protagonists. But that function is served, in movies and television, by the looks, manners and stage presence of the stars, so garish costumes are superfluous. And also, talented comic book artists can cast costumes in the light of thrilling, flowing romanticism, but on TV and in movies, real people have to wear the things.

TV, in particular, is a medium comfortable with the mundane, and not so comfortable with the outlandish. TV’s Superman had a costume in the 1950s, but that was clearly a children’s show. The costumes in 1966’s hit Batman TV show only helped to emphasize how campy and absurd the whole idea of superheroes was, and that parody element was echoed in the superhero sitcoms Captain Nice and Mr. Terrific in 1967. The one show that tried to take costumed heroes seriously, 1967’s Green Hornet, only lasted one season.

And it wasn’t that TV audiences of the era didn’t care for superheroes — they proved that by making hits of the non-costumed Six Million Dollar Man in 1974 and its spinoff The Bionic Woman in 1976.

Lynda Carter was successful as the flag-costumed Wonder Woman in 1975 in part because her show initially had a nostalgia angle, pitting her against Nazis in World War II. And The Incredible Hulk was well received in 1978, but didn’t have a costume, just green skin. The companion series Spider-Man featured a costumed hero and failed in 1977, in part because it was so poorly executed.

Producer Stephen Cannell had a hit with a costumed superhero in The Greatest American Hero in 1981, and he managed it by being clever in his approach. Cannell required from the beginning that the hero’s super powers would be contained in his caped alien costume. So he’d have to wear it, and could still play against it.

Then came 1990’s The Flash, a costumed superhero who lasted only a season. Then 1993’s successful Lois & Clark, which deemphasized the costumed hero even in its title. Then 1997’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer, who needed no costume. Then 2001’s Smallville, which gave us Superman without a costume (and became the longest-running Superman TV series). And then 2014’s Gotham, which gave us Batman’s world without Batman, kind of the ultimate cheeky TV move, I’d say.

The costumed superhero has been successfully revived on TV with Arrow, The Flash and Supergirl. In 2015, Marvel’s Daredevil redeemed the costumed superhero on TV, even though the character’s full costume is seen only at the end of the first season. And now we have Marvel’s Jessica Jones, which astutely uses the costume as a metaphor. The super-powered heroine — alliteratively named as a wink at all the Bruce Banners, Clark Kents, Billy Batsons, Peter Parkers and Sue Storms out there — is presented as once having tried to be a costumed hero, or its equivalent. But Jessica, whom I like to call Supergoth, learned the hard way that her world is too dark and cheerless for fancy dress.

Paladin: Am Superhero Will Travel

Have Gun Will Travel was a CBS western made successful in part because it slipped the conventions of the superhero story into TV’s version of the Old West. The star, Richard Boone, was a descendant of Daniel Boone. The hero was an erudite gunfighter based in San Francisco who had a secret identity (Paladin was only his nom de guerre), a symbol (a chess knight) and tricky devices (like a hidden Derringer). When he rode forth to help those in need, he even wore a kind of costume (all black). Inevitably, he was also a comic book hero (Dell’s Paladin comic books were published from 1958-61, with art by Alberto Giolitti).

Caped Wonder Stuns City on CBS

Melissa Benoist as the Girl of Steel in the CBS series "Supergirl."

Well, CBS’s Supergirl is terrific. For one thing, it’s perfectly cast. Melissa Benoist brings that Chris Reeve goofy charm to Kara, and is winningly sunny without being sappy — no easy feat. The romantic comedy/heroic adventure mix seems to work well. And CGI has finally reached the point of being able to do justice to a Kryptonian on the tube.

The fact that Kara is Superman's “older” cousin, also sent from the doomed planet Krypton to protect him as a baby, is a nice touch from one of the comic book versions.

Trapped in the Phantom Zone at age 13, she arrives on Earth years later, after Superman is an established hero. He places her with foster parents, the Danvers, played by Dean Cain and Helen Slater, in another nice touch (They played Supergirl in the movies and Superman in Lois & Clark).

Kara has spent the years since trying to fit in, and works for Cat Grant in a Devil Wears Prada situation (alongside Jimmy Olsen, who has left the Daily Planet, having been sent by Superman to check up on her).

My single misgiving about the series is that, like Arrow and The Flash, it gives us yet another superhero “pit crew." Superheroes, by definition, are the last people who should need help. Or a lot of backchat. This show, Daredevil — I never thought we'd see superhero TV shows this good. And they’re poles apart in attitude and atmosphere, but both about genuine heroes.

'Daredevil:' The Best Superhero TV Show, Period

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that Daredevil is the best superhero show that has ever appeared on television. In its first season, the Netflix series striking a perfect balance between the fantastic and the credible without ever losing sight of the adventure and the moral struggle that is central to the superhero genre. The show keeps Daredevil (Charlie Cox as blind attorney Matt Murdock) in fairly constant and convincing peril, something that rarely happens in stories where your hero is a superman.

What Happens on Screen Can't Happen

I was watching some of Marky Mark’s “Italian Job” remake on Netflix yesterday, and while it was enjoyable, I realized that parts of it were just as implausible as any superhero movie.

Superhero movies are required to be unrealistic, of course, but crime capers are not. Maybe the problem is not that we have too many superhero movies (heaven forfend!), but that virtually ALL Hollywood movies now range from implausible to impossible. The something that’s missing in the cinema is the same something that’s often missing in our culture, I think. The realm of possibility has been entirely displaced by the dream world of wish fulfillment.

No more “Chinatowns,” for example (a film in which events remain plausible, if strange). People with a taste for realism now must turn to long-form, novel-like cable TV serials like “Mad Men.”

The Long and Happy Fall of 'Mad Men'

In July of 2007, Sally Renaud and I decided we were both in the mood for a classy soap opera, and heard about this new show that was starting on AMC July 19. So we agreed to watch it and compare notes the next day. We felt as if we were the only people who’d seen the episode, which we loved — particularly its surprise ending. Because of that, the show felt kind of like our personal possession from the beginning. In October 2008, with Bush’s Wall Street disaster in full swing, I noted in my journal, “The market continues in free fall like Don Draper in the ‘Mad Men’ credits.”

Now, eight years on, the final episode will air this Sunday. Our long fall has been gentle, the view spectacular, and many lives have flashed before our eyes.

Little Girl Found in "The Twilight Zone"

Matheson's Twilight Zone episodes include "The Invaders" and "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet"

One of the spookiest of the episodes in Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone was Little Girl Lost by Richard Matheson.

Matheson, the writer who inspired Stephen King, was the creative force behind such novels as The Shrinking Man, I Am Legend and A Stir of Echoes and such films as The Night Stalker, What Dreams May Come and Somewhere in Time.

In Little Girl Lost, suburban parents can hear their small daughter crying, but can’t see her because she has fallen through a dimensional hole in her bedroom. And that hole is closing.

Strangely enough, the 1953 short story on which Matheson based the episode was inspired by a real-life event.

“Our older girl, Tina — the same name as in the story — was crying, and I went into the room,” Matheson recalled in Twilight and Other Zones: The Dark Worlds of Richard Matheson. “Actually, the apartment was so small, it was just a wooden army cot that she slept on at that time. I felt around and she wasn’t on the bed, and I thought, ‘Oh, my Lord, the poor kid fell on the floor,’ then I felt on the floor and she wasn’t there. When I felt under the bed I couldn’t find her. She had gone under the bed and rolled all the way to the wall, and that’s where I found her. Then, of course, given the diabolical writer’s mind, you know, after the kid stops crying, you think of a story.”

Robert Sampson, Sarah Marshall and Charles Aidman in "LGL"

The episode, one of more than a dozen Matheson wrote for Twilight Zone, is clearly an uncredited inspiration for the 1983 horror film Poltergeist, in which an identical situation occurs.

Matheson became sadly accustomed to having a greater cultural influence than he was paid for. His novel I Am Legend, about a lone man holding out against a world overrun by vampires, has been filmed three times officially, and once unofficially as George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. And that film, of course, gave birth to the plague of zombies that haunts us to this very day.

From "Smallville" to "Gotham:" TV's Travels and Travails with Superheroes

Reb Brown played Captain America in two late-1970s TV movies: Ah, no.

Shows like “Smallville” and “Gotham” reflect the intersection of an immensely popular genre with a medium considered to be ill-suited to present that genre. Such shows necessarily try to have it both ways.

The costumed romanticism and colorful childish conventions of superhero comics do not blend well with the mundane, realistic surfaces preferred by television (even though TV's plots are anything but realistic). 

"The Bionic Woman:" TV prefers its super people sensibly dressed.

This is one of the reasons why shows about costumed characters like Spider-Man and Captain America failed so badly on 1970s TV, while normally dressed bionic super-spies and the Incredible Hulk succeeded. The Hulk was, after all, just a Universal Pictures monster writ large, coupled with the familiar TV formula of "The Fugitive." I remember a long sequence on a Spider-Man TV episode that was actually given over to a car chase — the very dullest of television conventions weighing down a character who should have soared.
Even several years earlier, in 1971, Marvel’s blind superhero Daredevil arguably became, in TV writer Stirling Silliphant’s hands, a private detective named Longstreet, played by James Franciscus. Silliphant had consulted with Stan Lee about a Daredevil TV series before he created Mike Longstreet. The character’s heightened remaining senses could pick up clues others missed, and he could fight with spectacular martial arts abilities taught to him by Bruce Lee. Dramatic radio, the theatre of the mind, was hospitable to immensely popular superheroes like the Shadow, the Lone Ranger and the Green Hornet even before the comic book variety arrived, and welcomed Superman almost as soon as he landed. Costumed characters are no dramatic obstacle when you’re the one imagining how they look. Movies, with their bigger budgets and audiences seated in the cavernous dark before a giant glowing screen, also find it easy to trade in the fantastic. But the living-room medium remains uncomfortable with anything that looks out of place in a living room. Superhero comics prefer the fantastic to look fantastic, while television prefers the fantastic to look pedestrian.

Robot, Ninja and Gay Guy

Ryan Churchill, Brian Giovanni and Travis Richey in RNGG

My favorite webisode series is Travis Richey's low-key saga of a robot, a ninja and a gay guy who share a West Hollywood apartment. A sitcom parody that is funnier than several network sitcoms, the series illustrates what you can do with virtually no budget but clever writing. It has the delightful slanted sensibility of "Bewitched" without the lameness. Watch the webisodes here, and read an interview with the creator here.

Joss Whedon, Agent of FUN

Yes, THAT’S what I was waiting for in ABC’s “Agent of SHIELD ” — the flying sports car from Marvel’s “Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD” comic book feature in the 1960s. Creator Joss Whedon always knows the right iconic touch to include.

The "Agents of SHIELD" interrogation scene, for example, was pure Joss Whedon gold. "Gramsy?"

And at the center of this pilot episode was a fine ambiguity about what makes a “good guy super hero.” Isn't the man who fired him a villain? And shouldn't he therefore be crushed?

Plus, at the finish, did I not hear the echo of a Joad-like plea for the much-shit-upon American common man?

Yes, this series will be fine. Whedon always strikes the right balance of humor and melodrama, familiarity and surprise.

“The Man from UNCLE” movie people had better get it right, because I think they’ve just been beaten to the punch by a series that has crossed their concept with “Torchwood.” Ironically, the SHIELD comic books were inspired, of course, by “The Man from UNCLE.”

Where There's a Will

Jeff Daniels as Will McAvoy

“The Newsroom’s” Will McAvoy is unaffable, contemptuous of ignorance, prickly, witty, dismissive, guarded, savagely eloquent, deeply sentimental, uncompromisingly professional, easily hurt by those he cares for and possessed of a Bruce Wayne-like compulsion to punch bullies right in the snoot.

In other words, he’s a character fully realized by Aaron Sorkin and Jeff Daniels.

At first glance, McAvoy is unlikeable, but finally he’s impossible to dislike — a characteristic well suited for the show’s romantic comedy elements.