Back in October I wrote about The Facts of Life: Season 7 in which I dealt with the general history and overall dynamics of the show. I suggest you go back and check that out so I don’t cover the same ground twice. The big addition that year was George Clooney. Not many series have as long and healthy a run as The Facts of Life, but as they age changes are forced on them. One of those changes that occurred in the opening episodes of Season 8 is Charlotte Rae’s (Mrs. Edna Garrett) decision to leave the show. The transition is handled gracefully with Edna’s marriage to a doctor who is leaving to help those in the third world by serving in the Peace Corps. This brings her sister, Beverly Ann Stickle (Cloris Leachman) to try and take up the mantle of house mother to the girls. I’m sure everyone knows the girls, named Blair, Jo, Tootie, and Mindy. The main purpose of releasing these programs from the 1980’s on DVD is to relive earlier times in our own lives as much as to see the programs themselves. Maybe mothers want to share life lessons with their daughters from a much simpler and, at this point, almost alien time. The show was part broad comedy and part melodrama, focusing on the teenage girls and their coming of age. The comedy on the show was, frankly, full of hamminess and cheesiness. With so much ham and cheese, you weren’t hungry after one episode, so imagine bingeing on a season of shows. The life lessons learned were basic but well-intentioned and good-natured. On one level, things have changed enormously since the 1980’s, but core values and human decency are still important. It’s hard to find that kind of innocence today in television programming, but it was almost required in those days.

Most of the episodes tend to run together with a predictable sameness with some rising to the top and some sinking to the bottom. One particularly difficult one to watch was an episode with Fabian and Bobby Rydel playing themselves, but then flashing back into the sixties when they were popular. I mentioned ham and cheese, but I forgot to mention corn. This was a lowlight of corniness with the girls playing 60’s teenagers and Leachman as a jaded beatnik. One of the highlights was an episode when the young orphan who was always hanging out with them, Andy Moffett (Mackensie Astin), was going to a heavy metal concert by a group called The Walking Dead. They were ahead of their time on that one.

The premise itself is relatively simple and requires no real past knowledge to get on board. Unit 15 is the elite unit of an unnamed Canadian metropolitan police force. The unit is led by Staff Sergeant Oliver Shaw (Gordon). Each episode begins with his roll call. Apparently in Canada it's called parade. He does the usual job of giving out riding partners and assignments and providing the general "hot" information for the shift turn-out. The show focuses on a group of rookie cops assigned here. This is where it gets tricky. They are still pretty much referred to as rookies, but it's the fifth season, and it's clear they've been there more than a year by now. The episodes follow their day tour. This is pretty much "Grey's Anatomy with guns".

It's an awkward show, to say the least. The police aspects of the show are actually above average. There's obviously some good creative writing on this team, and each of the police stories was pretty interesting. The show manages to look fresh and the criminal stuff not quite so hashed out. If Rookie Blue wanted to be a straight police drama, it could be a very good one. Only I suspect it's not what they really want to be. The only trouble with these good cop stories is they tend to get abbreviated so that we can get to the musical chairs of the romantic entanglements. That's the audience Rookie Blue is really gunning for, and that's where they lose me to a certain degree. Let's just say there's more kissing than cuffing going on here.

If there is a television series in the history of the industry as American or timeless as The Andy Griffith Show, I haven't seen it. You'd be hard-pressed to find someone with strong negative feelings about the series. It was one of those organic and comfortable productions that reached deep into the core of rural America. Even if we lived in a bustling city, there were aspects of the show that still rang true. It was populated with the kind of familiar faces that it wasn't hard for anyone in the audience to smile in remembrance of a character they've known in real life. And even after 50 years, the series still speaks to that certain aspect of the friendly small Southern town. A lot of the credit for that peaceful easy feeling must be credited to the titular star Andy Griffith himself.

It all started as an episode of The Danny Thomas Show called Danny Meets Andy Griffith in February of 1960. In October of that same year, the first episode of the show ran. That was the first time television audiences took a trip down to Mayberry. There they met Andy Taylor (Griffith), a widower with a young son named Opie, played by future Happy Days star and superstar director Ron (it was Ronnie then) Howard. The relationship could be summed up in the popular series opening that found the father and son heading to their favorite fishing hole with poles slung on their shoulders. All the while, the soon-to-be-famous whistled theme put us in just the right mood. Andy was helped out at the house by Aunt Bea (Bavier), who always had something "mighty fine" cooking or baking in the oven.

“Let’s go get those stinkin’ hyenas.”

For many years The Lion King was the highest grossing animated film of all time. It remains one of the most beloved films in history. It marked the last of the Disney classic animation triumphs. Combined with the Elton John and Tim Rice songs, it is one of those generational films. While there has never been a feature film follow-up at the box office, there have been a few attempts to keep the franchise alive, and why not? A direct- to-video film told the same story from the unique point of view of the popular characters Timon and Pumbaa. A full-fledged sequel appeared in another direct-to-video feature called The Lion King: Simba’s Pride. Now the baton is being passed to the next generation with a television series on the Disney Channel called The Lion Guard. The new story focus begins with the direct-to-video DVD release of The Lion Guard: The Return Of The Roar.

“Peering out from the dark shadows of America’s death row are the faces of evil. The faces of murderers. Men and women who commot the most heinous of crimes. Some elude capture for years, even decades. But eventually, these lowest forms of humanity find themselves on death row awaiting their final fate… execution.”

There appears to be a lot of controversy when it comes to the death penalty in the United States. I say appears, because even with all of the debate the polls show that Americans overwhelmingly support capital punishment. In fact, only 37% of Americans were opposed in the Gallup 2015 poll. That doesn’t mean there aren’t some concerns shared by most of us. In 1972 capital punishment was suspended by the Supreme Court in a landmark decision called Furman vs. Georgia. Contrary to popular belief, the Court did not find the death penalty to be unconstitutional. An “expert” in this series even makes that mistake. It found there was a lack of “fundamental fairness” in the sentencing guidelines. The worry was that minorities were getting a higher percentage of death sentences. Four years later in Gregg vs. Georgia, the Court was satisfied that such issues were addressed, and the death penalty was reinstated in most of the states in the country. We still have concerns over guidelines and methods of execution. No one agrees with the often decades it takes for most executions to actually happen. We may not agree with methods or system, but over 60% of us still support the practice.