The Cognoscentus Wednesday, January 12, 2005

From the Plato's Cave Dept.: The other night, in the middle of a marathon viewing of "The Office," Wrong Turn Jr. jerked his head toward the TV when he heard a baby crying. Hooray! Reconigition! Mrs. WTJ wondered if this meant we should start playing Baby Einstein in the evenings. The next night we were back on the Buck Train.

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A Technical Note

I've added a Blogger toolbar at the top, but for some reason it doesn't work with my indexes. Patience; I'll figure it out.

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My Kind of Town

Anyhow, Joe. The wrap-up point I was trying to make was that there's really nothing wrong with Joe's stuff, except that it's not great. It's good enough, but it doesn't sing, as a beloved boss once said about a headline of mine. Still, Costello couldn't write "Stepping Out" if his life depended on it--and that might make up for all the rest.

Next! To paraphrase Noel Coward, there is something extraordinarily potent about cheap sci-fi. As I may have noted, the ever-insightful Mrs. WTJ bought me the complete "Buck Rogers" TV series for Christmas, and we've been working our way through it. The camp is fabulous enough to bring Susan Sontag back from the dead: neon roller skates, skintight purple suits, vaguely Hebraic robots. But the real selling point, as far as I'm concerned, is rediscovering a great leading man.

Gil Gerard is not brilliant, even by sci-fi TV's degraded standards; he's probably not going to be doing a one-man "Christmas Carol" anytime soon, for instance. But he has a kind of goofy, doughy charm that pop culture lost in the 1980s. He's in his thirties, he's got a bad haircut and waistline issues (the belts he wears on the show are as spacious as lines of latitude); but he gives off this amazing vibe, a mix of Midwestern friendliness, Gaelic humor and SoCal lassitude. It's the same sort of gentle spirit John Ritter had; I'd throw Peter Falk in there too, but he was operating on a whole other level. He knew how to use kindliness as a knife.

It depresses me a little that if "Buck" were remade today (anything's possible) the lead would be a Sci-Fi Network nobody, like the central-casting dorfi they dug up for "Dune" or the "FarScape" lead (and I say that as a sort-of fan of the series). Also that the show itself would be so different: i.e., "dark" and "reimagined" with subplots and conspiracies and what have you. In its way, the show is as innocent as Gil's charm. Lots of broad strokes, a brightly colored future, gentle sexiness.

Look: I'm glad sci-fi doesn't have to be goofy anymore, and even on its own terms "Buck" didn't do all it could do. The original "Star Trek," for instance, had the same goofy elements but never drowned in its campiness: It girded its elements with a once-in-a-lifetime cast and fine writers. But watching the "Buck" DVDs, I remember lines of dialogue and camera angles--whole scenes, even--that I haven't seen in a quarter-century. Now that's power.

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