Jon Gnagy was a TV star before Lucy, before Berle, before Kukla, Fran or Ollie. A self-taught artist, he decided teaching was his true calling, and television was the ideal classroom...

2012

Sep

ANDY WILLIAMS: NOT NOW, NOT EVER, NEVER! By Noel Holston

For kids and teenagers of the time, it was Andy Williams' TV show, not his Billboard charters, that mattered...

2012

Jul

WHAT IT WAS, WAS ACTING: REMEMBERING ANDY GRIFFITH By Noel Holston

Andy Griffith played kind, gentle men so well and so often over the course of his six decades in show business that his occasional visits to the dark side were all the more electrifying...

2012

Jun

'PASS THE BISCUITS' PART OF THE HATFIELD-MCCOY POP-CULTURE LEGACY By Noel Holston

All the hoo-hah about Hatfields & McCoys got me thinking about Pass the Biscuits, Mirandy. History Channel’s hit miniseries may well be the most accurate take on the notorious rivalry, but Mirandy is surely the funniest...

2012

May

GOING MENTAL By Noel Holston

About this time a year ago, I watched Patrick Jane shoot and kill a man who claimed to be his nemesis — and like millions of fans of CBS’s The Mentalist, I was left wondering how creator Bruno Heller and his writers could keep Jane out of prison...

2012

May

DOES POPULAR CULTURE PROMOTE VIGILANTISM? By Noel Holston

Should we paying more attention to America's tradition of self-defense and vigilantism, and how it's being celebrated by popular entertainment?

2012

Apr

WHAT THE (BLEEP), MIKE WALLACE? By Noel Holston

On my first of what turned out to be many summer TV critics' tours to L.A., I couldn't resist approaching the most feared and famous journalist in America...

2012

Mar

HARDEE'S HOPES MALE VIEWERS WILL FLIP OVER ITS SEXY NEW BURGER AD -- BUT SHOULD HARDEE'S PAY THE PRICE? By Noel Holston

Welcome to Burger Kink. May I take your order? You can have it your way, or one of our hot and juicy sandwiches will have its way with you. Would you like fries with that? A shake? A condom? Okay, you got me. I'm faking it...

2012

Mar

YOU'RE NOT 'THE SOPRANOS,' SO STOP WITH THE ÜBER-STORY By Noel Holston

At least once a month, my wife and I order a DVD from Netflix that contains a quartet of Law & Order episodes...We feel a need for something with which we can kill an hour here, an hour there, and not have to worry about committing ourselves to 12 hours of keeping track of yet another running storyline...

2012

Feb

WHAT THE FAULKNER? THE SOUND AND THE FURY AND 'THE SIMPSONS' By Noel Holston

What's left to be said about The Simpsons as it approaches its milestone 500th episode on Sunday, Feb. 19, at 8 p.m. ET? Well, we could talk about its literary kinship to the works of William Faulkner....Is not Homer Simpson, with his abiding fondness for beer, deep-fried everything a certain sort of Southern man?...

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Noel Holston

Noel Holston wrote about TV, radio and popular culture for the Orlando Sentinel, Minneapolis Star Tribune and Newsday before going to grow wine bottles near Athens, GA.

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