Who Shot J.R.?

Enough Already! There are some television shows I wish were never started. Sophomoric, broad, bathroom humor offering nothing to elevate the mind. In the beginning of commercial broadcast radio, there were shows that were so popular folks didn’t want to leave the house and miss something.

It reminds me that getting people out of the house today for civic and fraternal events as well as church services is difficult because they don’t want to miss their shows.

In the early days of radio, “Amos’n Andy” was a nightly comedy series of black characters but voiced by white actors.

The show was so popular that some movie theaters interrupted the movie and switched the sound system to the radio, played the radio show over the theater speakers, then resumed the movie.

For decades people could be heard repeating a catchphrase by George “Kingfish” Stephens, “Holy mackerel, Andy!”

Daytime dramas, called “soap operas” and later “soaps,” started with radio. There were scores of them supporting hundreds of actors and writers. It was cheap drama without the cost of sets.

Actors read scripts while sitting around a table with a sound effects table nearby.

The television show “M.A.S.H.” brought closure to the 4077th in 1983, drawing the largest television audience ever that was not a Super Bowl game; 105,970,000 viewers.

The M.A.S.H. record was followed by the “Who Done It” segment of the show “Dallas.” Viewers had to wait until the next season to discover who shot J.R. Ewing.

It wound up being Kristin, J.R.’s sisterin- law, the sister of his wife.

I got hooked on “Lost,” a weekly hourlong series that ran for six seasons. The show, filmed in Hawaii, spawned an industry of location tours and made stars of unknown actors.

“Lost” was full of twists and relationships that never made sense.

The show began with an airplane, Oceanic Airlines Flight 815, crash landing on an uninhabited island. The story twisted along until the final episode, which to this day I do not understand.

In this house the favorite series is on the Hallmark Channel, “When Calls The Heart.”

It is a clean show that bumps along with a young widowed “schoolma’am” who can’t make up her heart between a gentleman bandit, who may have reformed, and a “hero+nice guy” cop.

Whatever they are going to do, I wish they’d do it. The longing looks and audible sighs are getting old.

Besides there is enough fodder in the characters to keep going on, and on, and on…

joenphillips@yahoo.com