The Classic TV History Blog

The interracial crime-fighting duo is a trope so archetypal that it’s barely even a trope any more.

Jeri Taylor, who died on October 23 at 86, was best known as a key talent behind the creative revival of Star Trek in the nineties.

“If I had to pick the three people who had the most to do with getting Star Trek into reality, they would be Gene Roddenberry, myself, and an agent at Ashley named Alden Schwimmer,” Oscar Katz, a Desilu vice president, once said.

It’s time to fix something that’s been bothering me for (exactly!)

The best new teevee-related book that I read last year was Patrick Stewart’s Making It So: A Memoir.

When I was researching this piece on Shane in 2018, I reached out to the director of the first episode, Robert Butler, via my friends at the UCLA Film & Television Archive, where Butler was a familiar presence at screenings.

Like the following season’s Hondo, Shane (1966) is probably remembered, if at all, as one of those ill-conceived attempts to turn a movie classic into a television hit – a sheepish bit of intellectual property-mining that quite properly slunk off the airw…

When Christopher Knopf, who died on February 13 at the age of 91, turns up in the history books, it is usually a source rather than as a subject.

Harlan Ellison wrote some of my favorite television episodes, and hopefully some of yours.

Andy Lewis, one of the second generation of dramatists who emerged at the end of the live television cycle, died on February 28 at the age of 92.