What are you watching?

I was a big Get Smart fan as a kid and got the whole set as a Christmas gift one year, but I haven’t seen the show in a long time. I’m kind of afraid I’m going to spoil the good memories if I watch it again! 

Rewatching “The Mad Tea Party” (dir. James Sheldon, writ. Peter S. Fischer), episode eight of the one season (sadly) of Ellery Queen (1975-1976).



(Confusing but necessary exposition: Manfred Lee and Frederic Dannay were two cousins who wrote mystery books under the pen name “Ellery Queen.” They also named their detective character “Ellery Queen.” So it’s necessary to distinguish between Ellery Queen the writer, Ellery Queen the character—and Ellery Queen the show.)

It’s the only episode based on an Ellery Queen story—and, perhaps for that reason, usually considered one of the show’s best. Quite a TV cast, too: Jim Backus, Rhonda Fleming, and Larry Hagman in addition to regulars Jim Hutton as Ellery and David Wayne as his father, New York police inspector Richard Queen.

The show always had great Elmer Bernstein music, great production values (a ’70s show that’s convincingly ’40s!), great guest casts, and much-above-average mysteries. The creators were Richard Levinson and William Link, the team also behind Columbo and (with Ellery Queen writer Peter S. Fischer) Murder, She Wrote, who really understood Golden Age mysteries—what makes them tick, how clues, suspicion, and reader viewer psychology work, etc. While Ellery Queen isn’t as good as Columbo, which usually succeeds on both plot and character levels, it’s better than Murder, She Wrote, which has a few neat mysteries (nearly all of those repurposed from EQ’s scrapped second season) but for the most part only really works as something to watch on a rainy day.

Compared with most of MSW (though not with the best mysteries of Agatha Christie, John Dickson Carr, and, yes, Ellery Queen), EQ’s plotting was hyper-complex: The main clue in one episode is how a key ring falls in someone’s pocket. In fact, Levinson and Link said that complexity turned off viewers and resulted in NBC’s shuttering EQ—the reason they made the plots simpler for MSW. (Funnily enough, Columbo, Levinson and Link’s most successful show, is just as complex as EQ, but the inverted detective story format tends to disguise that.)

Anyway, “The Mad Tea Party.” It has one of Ellery Queen the writer’s best plot gimmicks, a tricky variation on a clue invented by A.E.W. Mason. It also has one of the great red herrings in the genre, one that will lead almost every first-time reader (or, here, viewer) astray. Fischer, like Levinson and Link, understood how to plant clues and spread suspicion.

Unfortunately, the person playing the villain hams up a bit more than the other actors, and the viewer may pick this person out a little too early. And Fischer makes a major mistake by showing a confrontation between the victim and the (off-camera) villain, which Another mistake: the too-frequent references to Sgt. Velie. Viewers who know Queen’s plot will know why. While director Sheldon does a fine job at dark-and-stormy night atmosphere, too, he never quite conjures up the Carrollian lunacy the plot calls for. 

Old pro David Wayne was consistently great as Insp. Queen, but Hutton—ehh. As a kid I liked his performance, but watching this now he just seems bland and, not to put too fine a point on it, bad, with poor line readings. He does have some good moments in this series, as far as I can remember (“Judas Tree,” I think, is the one he looks into a car mirror and talks to the audience?), but his acting as an absentminded, childlike genius just doesn’t convince.

Still, this is a fun little mystery. And, despite my comments, I do like this show, particularly for the mystery elements.

Not sure if this counts as “classic,” but…

I’m sick, so I spent most of yesterday sitting on my duff and watching TV. As Barbara Stanwyck puts it in The Lady Eve: “What a life!”

One show I was happy to see again was Jonathan Creek, which ran regularly on the BBC from 1997-2004 and has come back for one more season, a bunch of specials, and whenever else writer David Renwick needs more money. None of the post-2000 specials, and certainly not that horrendous most recent season, beats the show’s original run: It had probably the most fun, complex-but-fairly-clued mysteries of any mystery show ever.

Take the setup for the Halloween episode, 1998’s “Danse Macabre” (S2:E1, dir. Sandy Johnson, writ. Renwick).



A tawdry horror writer, just returned from a Halloween costume party, is shot by a man in a skeleton costume. The skeleton then kidnaps the writer’s daughter, carries her to a garage, and closes the door. The garage is completely surrounded the entire time by truthful witnesses and the police, but when the garage door is opened, the skeleton has vanished. By the way, all that takes place on a dark and stormy night.

Now, that isn’t remotely realistic, but it’s the sort of wild, ridiculous, gets-the-brain-working mystery plotting I love. And the episode is jam-packed with great clues: empty paint cans, missing shoes, why and how the writer predicted her death a week earlier.

For better or worse, the show was/is extremely plot-centered. The characters tend to be either bland or unlikable; the jokes tend to be kind of tasteless. Jonathan Creek (Alan Davies) was doing the long-haired-misanthropic-genius-in-trench-coat routine long before Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock Holmes, but unlike Sherlock he has no one to humanize him: His Watson, journalist Maggie Magellan (Caroline Quentin), is even more unlikable than he is, and the only other recurring character, magician Adam Klaus (Stuart Milligan) is an amoral imbecile who gets improbably stupider as the show goes on.

What kept the show afloat is just how fun the situations and solutions are. “Danse Macabre’s” solution isn’t too hard to deduce—the first time I saw this ep, I followed Jonathan’s deductions about the paint cans and figured out how the “impossible” mystery was worked—but it’s such a great solution nonetheless, such a smart magic trick.

The first two seasons and the 1998 Christmas special are so nicely plotted and so entertaining that the flaws seem minuscule; the show’s negatives only really show themselves when Renwick started running out of plot ideas.

This review seems more negative than I intended… I loved watching “Danse Macabre” again. The quick, confident direction means no longueurs, the clues are smoothly integrated, the problem is tons of fun, the solution is a delight. Recommended.

Again, this doesn’t count as classic, but I can’t find a good thread in the TV General section for it.

I’ve been randomly dipping into Goosebumps (1995-98) on Netflix because I loved it as a kid and even now have a lot of affection for it, even if it’s usually not good at all. That said, two episodes stand out: “The House of No Return,” which is surprisingly scary by this show’s standards, and the two-parter I watched tonight, “A Night in Terror Tower.”



“Terror Tower” was my favorite episode when I was a kid, and watching it now, well, I actually really enjoyed it. Unlike “House of No Return,” I can’t imagine this one being scary even for kids. (As a kid I certainly wasn’t scared of it.) There are no monsters, ghosts, ghouls, or possessed dummies, not even any Halloweenish imagery. It’s just a fun little adventure/fantasy story, based on the Princes in the Tower.

Now, this is still Goosebumps, which means a low budget and hokey acting (forgivable from the kids but inexcusable from the adults, even if they clearly are there for the paycheck).

But—I don’t know if they got a different director or what, but this episode, unlike nearly all the others, has a sense of visual style and cleverness. Some shots actually look nice, which is more than I can say for 99% of Goosebumps. And it seems like it has a slightly higher budget than usual, what with all the medieval scenes.

The child actors aren’t anything great, but they did make me feel for the characters, especially when they have an everything-we-know-is-a-lie moment, à la The Matrix or (more fittingly) Dark City. I’m wondering if this was my first exposure to everything-I-know-is-a-lie stories, which I love. Certainly a contender. The villain is fine and fun. The wizard isn’t that good, but he’s not in the episode much.

Do I recommend it for adults? Not really, unless you have nostalgia for the series and/or this episode in particular. But I actually laughed at a few jokes (the Basil Fawlty wannabe gave me a big laugh with his sniffy “I wouldn’t dream of seating you anywhere else”), and I found the story compelling and the heroes likable. If only more Goosebumps episodes were this good.