Today (Dec. 24) on NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross, I’ll be visiting with Terry to talk about the year in TV. That gets me in a reflective mood to think about my year, and to give thanks…
First off, there’s Fresh Air, capping off another year of my proudest professional association. Next year, it will be 40 years since I began working as Fresh Air TV critic, back when it was a local show in Philadelphia. (We went national in 1987.) Terry and the executive producer, Danny Miller, were working together long before that, and I feel very fortunate to be part of their team, and to benefit from their friendship.
Add to that my long-time TV reviews producer, Phyllis Myers, and the people who work with me so closely and patiently when I guest host – producers John Sheehan and John Myers, director Roberta Shorrock and engineer Audrey Bentham – and all the other people at Fresh Air, and there’s a lot for which to be grateful. (Including their bemused tolerance of my insistence upon rewriting any sentence ending in a preposition.)
So, thanks. Expect Terry and I to cover the best and worst of the year, the emergence of Amazon as another quality source for new TV shows, and, once again, the shifting landscape of late-night television. Listen today on the radio, or, after the fact, visit the Fresh Air website.
Another major thank you goes to the folks at apexart, the TriBeCa gallery that commissioned and hosted my Personal Theory of TV Evolution exhibit. Steven Rand, Julia Knight, Lorissa Rinehart and Ryan Soper all deserve my heartfelt thanks for encouraging, challenging, and putting up with me for the duration of the show, which ended up being a source of pride – a relative rarity for me.
And for the ridiculously generous people who loaned things as part of the exhibit, or who created specifically commissioned artwork, you made it a great exhibit, and a great year, for me. I’ve thanked you before here, and in the gallery brochure, but consider this one more blanket thanks. And anyone who took the effort, and/or the subway, down to Church Street to see the show, I really, really want to thank you, too. Hope you had fun.
I also owe an end-of-year thanks to James Ragan, Kim Akass and the people at Serial Eyes, for making it possible to teach TV in some fabulous international locales – respectively, in Prague, London and Berlin. Not bad, considering the other teaching I do is in Glassboro, NJ.
Other people belong on this list, including everyone working behind the scenes on this website, during a very difficult transitional year. But I’ll save my final thanks for anyone reading this – especially if you’ve read this far.
The loyal readers are the reason this website is still going, and why we hope that 2015, finally, will be the year for us to climb up from base camp to a higher Internet level. Thanks for sticking with us in the meantime. The intelligence of your comments, and their overall warmth, makes us all feel wonderful – especially whenever we peek at the vitriol infecting the posted comments on so many other media websites.
To paraphrase Tiny Tim – the one from A Christmas Carol, not Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In – “God bless you, every one.”
And that goes double for the atheists.