Before I get into this week'sTuesday TV Touchbase, a belated happy birthday to Dick Van Dyke who reached quite a milestone on Saturday, December 13th, turning 100 years old.
Over the weekend, Andrea and I watched an episode of American Masters on PBS which featured a 2 hour retrospective on the life and career of Dick Van Dyke. The special featured highlights from The Dick Van Dyke Show as well as his best loved films such as Bye Bye Birdie, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and Mary Poppins.
But the special also takes an unflinching look at his career lows and failures. In his early days, people like agents, producers and network executives knew that had a very talented guy in Dick Van Dyke. He was a total package of actor, comedian, dancer, singer and he was so good at all of it. But no one knew quite what to do with him.
The 1970's were potmarked with various misguided efforts to recapture the notorierty he enjoyed in the 1960's. It was a time also married by a descent into alcoholism, a subject that Dick was more than willing to be open about. It was not until the 1980's when Dick Van Dyke regained his footing and found his groove again as Dr. Sloan in Diagnosis Murder.
Click here for Mark Evanier's always classy and superior post about Dick Van Dyke posted on his birthday.
At age 100, Dick Van Dyke still has his wits about him and is in fairly decent health for a man a century old. If you gotta live that long, at least live like Dick Van Dyke. Happy birthday!
Now on with the touchbase!
I recently started catching up on the 2nd season of Peacemaker.
Season 2 picks up after the events of this summer's Superman movie with Lex Luthor's dimensional rift fuckery and also follows up on Peacemaker killing Rick Flag Jr during the mission on Corto Maltese in The Suicide Squad movie that came out in 2021....fuck me! Really? 2021? That long ago?
Chris been miserable and depressed after the Project Butterfly mission was completed at the end of Peacemaker season 1. He tries to make Peacemaker a legit super hero (but the Justice Gang wants nothing to do with him.)
Exploring his late father's bigger on the inside secret lair does little for his mental health. Auggie Smith was a super tech genius but he was also a hateful, spiteful racist prick who persistently bullied Christopher Smith after Chris accidentally killed Auggie's favorite son, Keith.
Basically, Auggie deserved to die when he badgered Chris into shooting him in the head in season 1.
Still, it's a lot to deal with.
And he tries to blunt his depression with alcohol, coke and orgies.
Warning: in episode one of season 2, there's an orgy going on in Chris's house and I saw a lot of dicks I did not want to see. Seriously, way too many dicks in one scene.
The orgy is just not doing it for Chris so he enters the secret lair where he discovers a doorway that leads to....
Another Earth!
Oh shit! Really? A multiverse story?
Yeah, but it's really quite the emotional roller coaster for Chris.
It's world where:
- Auggie is still alive
- Is NOT a racist piece of shit
- Keith is still alive
- Auggie genuinely loves both his sons
- And the three of them are a beloved super hero trio.
Trouble starts when that world's Peacemaker assumes our Peacemaker is a threat and they get into a knock down drag out fight which ends up with that world's Peacemaker getting killed by our Peacemaker.
Since life in this world sucks and there's another world where life can be better, our Christopher Smith decides to move to that world where he will take the place of the deceased Christopher Smith.
Comedy and tragedy ensue as only writer James Gunn and Peacemaker can deliver.
Meanwhile, Stranger Things is back for it's 5th and final go 'round.
Wait! It's been since 2022 since season 4 dropped? Really?
Yeah, it took Andea and I a moment to get caught up to speed.
"Who is that person and how are they connected to that other person?"
"Do any of the 'kids' look like they should be in high school?"
So what the hell is up? Or down? Or upside down?
It's now the fall of 1987 and the group of intrepid adventurers are still looking to kill Vecna.
There are complications.
After Vecna's rifts to the Upside Down opened up at the end of season 4 and nearly swallowed Hawkins,IN, the military moved in and have Hawkins in a quarantine. The military sealed the rift with a giant metal zipper (really!) but still have open points of entry into the rift where they are engaged in fuckery inside the Upside Down.
One hopes they're trying to stop Vecna but who knows with this bunch.
The military is also still looking to recapture Eleven.
What? They're still on that? Really?
(By the way, Millie Bobby Brown is 22 years old, married and is a mom!)
Meanwhile, as the anniversary of Will Byers' original disappearance approaches, they suss out that Vecna has a renewed interest in taking more of Hawkins' children.
Including Mike and Nancy Wheeler's younger sister, Holly.
Chapter 4 ends with everything going wrong that can go wrong until Will Byers goes all Eleven and unlocks some heretofore unknown powers to kill a fuck ton of Demogorgons.
And that's where we left off.
Season 5 will continue with 3 episodes on Christmas Day and the series finale dropping a week later.
So Andrea and I do care about Stranger Things but it took us awhile to remember why and who these people are.
BONUS THING! Here is an aminated video from You Tube circa after Stranger Things season 1 with the gang done up like a Peanuts cartoon.
OK, that is that for this week's Tuesday TV Touchbase.
Next week, we touchbase on Christmas specials and holiday themed episodes we watched this year.
The week after that, a retrospective of what the hell I watched on TV in 2025.
Until next time, remember to be good to one another and try to keep it down in there, would ya? I'm trying to watch TV over here.
Oh hell! One more thing!
I saw where Anthony Geary of General Hospital died.
Well, that truly sucks and I will have a word to say about that in a later post.
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