Friday, November 8, 2013

Tim Talman, Barbara Hale on Ironside, and the L.A. Chronicle


I was shown this article on the subject of getting William Talman’s son Tim into the role of Hamilton in Robert Downey Jr.’s Perry movie: http://www.examiner.com/article/let-s-get-tim-talman-cast-the-role-his-father-made-famous

I still find it a very intriguing idea and it would be awesome if something could actually come of it. I’m hoping for good things from this movie anyway, and I would hope for even more if they made an amazing casting decision like that.

I think it would really be a feather in their cap overall. As the article points out, a large number of the viewing audience for this film would be people who have been watching the television series. By and large, a connection with the series such as William’s son being cast as Hamilton would be a very sweet and exciting thing for us and I believe it would increase popularity and anticipation for the project.

I saw the Barbara Hale episode of Ironside. Fans of the interaction between Perry and Della should definitely enjoy the scenes between Raymond and Barbara. It’s the only time I’ve seen them playing characters together other than Perry and Della, and the chemistry between them is still incredible and so perfect. You can tell they’re happy to be working together again.

But I was disappointed that Barbara really wasn’t in the episode that much. I was hoping it would be one of those occasions where the female guest-star was the main guest-star and would have copious amounts of screentime. Instead, unless something was cut, she only had about three scenes. They’re wonderful scenes, but they’re over all too soon.

The episode itself, I feel, isn’t even close to being one of the show’s best. It’s a theatre-centric piece and awfully cheesy, as it seems most theatre-centric scripts with Raymond are. It’s possible to have a theatre story that isn’t cheesy; I really enjoy the earlier episode Love, Peace, Brotherhood, and Murder as an example of this. But this one, Murder Impromptu, follows the way of the theatre-centric Perry episodes and drips with cheese. Considering that it’s Barbara Hale’s only Ironside episode, I can’t help wondering why it couldn’t have been much better (and featured much more of Barbara). Reuniting Barbara and Raymond should have been much more of a bells-and-whistles event!

And when I was watching creepy Perry episodes for Halloween, I noticed something rather odd. It seems that the respectable newspaper the Los Angeles Chronicle has degraded itself by season 9. It is apparently the paper for which that crummy reporter works in The Wrathful Wraith. Perry actually calls it a scandal sheet and mentions that no respectable paper will even handle that reporter’s stories!

So what happened to the poor paper? It seems like a very respectable paper in previous seasons, the constant friend by which the characters and viewers get all the news on cases. And of course in season 5’s opener The Jealous Journalist, we learn all about the paper and the struggles of those trying to run it. By the episode’s end, reader interest has increased and things seem to be going well for it again.

Did things go sour later and they ended up having to sell out to Theodore Marcuse’s character or another, similarly slimy person? Or was it just an accident that the Los Angeles Chronicle was used for close-ups of the reporter’s articles in The Wrathful Wraith and it wasn’t really the writer’s intention for that paper to have gone downhill? Perhaps it was used only in the interest of saving time and money and they figured no one would really notice.

I’d kind of prefer to think it’s one of the two latter reasons instead of that the paper spiraled out of control. But it’s hard to ignore the fact that it is indeed the Los Angeles Chronicle being used for the shots of the articles and hence, is dubbed a scandal sheet by Perry!

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