Now, it further occurs to me that almost every stage of my life can be described in terms of TV characters with whom I found some reason to identify at the time (no matter how grand my delusions). I would go so far as to say that I actually learned from these characters, and sometimes even responded to challenges based on ways they might, or at least in ways I thought they might. For example, I knew exactly what to do when I encountered the carnivorous She-Devil in the Jersey woods one night, thanks to Fox Mulder (OK, that's just a joke, but in no way is it meant to undermine the seriousness of this post, if only there were any).

Anyway, here's a very short list of characters who have played so defining a role in my life: 

The Sixties

Ilya Kuryakin (David McCallum, The Man from U.N.C.L.E.):
I toted a Secret Sam briefcase and idolized  NOT the dashing Napoleon Solo, but his enigmatic, comparatively ascetic Soviet sidekick, who sported black turtlenecks and a Beatles hairdo.

Barnabas Collins (Jonathan Frid, Dark Shadows): Another mystery man, but then you would be too if you were a 175-year-old vampire. Got all the girls, in miniskirts!
Witness here, the virtuous Victoria Winters.

Spock (Leonard Nimoy, Star Trek): How anyone could tout the pompous, preening, reckless James T. Kirk over this brilliant, loyal, dependable Vulcan was beyond me.

John Steed (Patrick Macnee, The Avengers): I have a confession to make: I just wanted to be near Emma Peel.

The Seventies

Alex Rieger (Judd Hirsch, Taxi):
A tinge of sadness, yes, but Alex was the  Kipling man, keeping his head when all about him (particularly Latka, the Reverend Jim, and Louie De Palma) were WAY past losing theirs. Just like me, right? Right?   

The Eighties

Dr. Jack Morrison (David Morse, St. Elsewhere): Sensitive, caring, committed, add "tormented" once his wife died. Damn that little prison unpleasantry!

Michael Steadman (Ken Olin, thirtysomething): Beautiful wife, healthy kids, nice house, great friends ... and endless angst. What's not to admire?

The Nineties

Fox Mulder (David Duchovny, The X-Files): Somehow I never felt quite so socially inept after watching Mulder antagonize everyone around him. And yet, Scully was smitten.

The Millennium and Beyond

Jack Shephard (Matthew Fox, Lost): Impossibly endearing Christ complex (in the words of Woody Allen, "I gotta model myself after someone").

Who's next? Returning full circle to FNL, I worry it might be Lorraine Saracen, Matt's grandmother, slowly losing touch with reality as the end of season two approaches, though I have yet to experience any cravings for tapioca pudding or Snackwells.

Which TV characters have YOU identified with?   

Put your answers in the comments below; you can reference the questions in shorthand.  Come back next week to see if you're right.

The questions below were compiled by Rookminie Behari, a Paley Center intern and Boston University undergrad. Good hunting!

Mouse over each card to see the answers!

I can honestly say that during my wonder years, I don't remember ever touching a soccer ball. Literally. Not once. For me and my circle of friends, it was strictly the big three: football (the American kind!), basketball, and, especially, baseball, in all its glorious permutations (hardball, softball, Whiffle ball, running bases, pitcher-catcher, even board games like Challenge the Yankees and Strat-O-Matic). Ditto for my television consumption: the golden voices of my youth were Phil Rizzuto (Yankees), Lindsay Nelson (Mets), and Bob Wolff (Knicks). Soccer? Was that even televised in the sixties? Did New York have a team? 

Yet, I'm as pumped as anyone about the 2010 World Cup, and am planning to catch as many of the matches as possible (most of them right here at the Paley Center, where we are screening almost a full complement of games, from kickoff Friday morning right through the July 11 finale). I can easily identify the time of this transformation: the year was 1998, and my five-year-old daughter, having just joined the Downtown Soccer League in lower Manhattan, first trotted onto the pitch, in her teal, ridiculously oversized Tottenham Hotspurs jersey. Amazingly enough, I was spectating from the sidelines not just as her father, but as her coach, despite still knowing almost nothing about the game (I remember that when one of the more soccer-savvy parents from the team approached me to ask if the offsides rule was in effect, I replied, "What's that?").

Twelve years later, I have seen my share of soccer matches, having followed my daughter's various teams from New York clear across country to San Diego, and plenty of places in between. What this experience has taught me—among many, many other things, of course - is that there's no better way to immerse yourself in a sport, both intellectually and emotionally, than by watching your child compete in it. I've rooted for the Yankees since the days of Mantle and Maris, but a Pinstripers loss—even in the seventh game of the World Series—is meaningless compared with a poor showing by the Albertson Fury 91, whose 2008 State Cup final loss in penalty kicks to the dreaded Stonybrook Arsenal still galls me! Come August, when my daughter departs for Georgetown to don the Hoya blue and gray, I will be living and dying with a new team, with the same passion that soccer fans from across the globe pull for their national teams during the World Cup.  

I'm still no soccer expert, but I love the game, and if you ever need an explanation of the offsides rule, I'm your man.

In Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, privateer Ragnar Danneskjold excoriates Robin Hood as “the most immoral and the most contemptible” of all human symbols, which is all the incentive I’ve ever needed to revere the Prince of Thieves as a truly saintly character. Rand, author also of The Fountainhead and founder of the philosophy known as objectivism, was offended by what she perceived as Robin’s belief in the primacy of need over achievement. A rabid anti-Commie, she testified as a friendly witness before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947, implicating the 1944 film Song of Russia as Communist propaganda and, perhaps more importantly, lending her stamp of approval to HUAC’s mission.

Robin Hood—the title character of the new Ridley Scott film (opening Friday, May 14, with Russell Crowe and Cate Blanchett)—has been around for centuries, and there is ample evidence that he is based on a real person. According to Earl Hunsinger’s “The History and Legend of Robin Hood,” English justices were using the names Robinhood, Robehod, Rabunhod, or Hobbehod as early as 1228 to reference fugitives or outlaws, and by the fourteenth century the exploits of an outlaw named Robin Hood began to be celebrated in stories and songs. Sir Walter Scott is credited with introducing the modern Robin Hood, as a supporting character in the 1819 novel Ivanhoe. In film, Errol Flynn’s swashbuckling Robin led the Saxon uprising against Norman oppressors in the 1938 film The Adventures of Robin Hood; Disney imagined him as an anthropomorphic fox in a 1973 animated film; Sean Connery limned a more mature Robin alongside Audrey Hepburn in 1976’s Robin and Marian; and Kevin Costner starred in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves in 1991, the follow-up to his Oscar-winning opus, Dances with Wolves. In 1993, Mel Brooks parodied Robin in Robin Hood: Men in Tights, which spawned the short-lived TV show When Things Were Rotten, in which Robin (played by Get Smart’s Hymie the Robot, Dick Gautier) and his band of Merry Men were portrayed as Maxwell Smart–like, well, idiots.

My personal favorite—particularly in light of Rand’s disdain for the character—is the fifties British TV series The Adventures of Robin Hood, starring British actor Richard Greene as the man in green. The delicious irony here is that the series, which aired in the United Kingdom from 1955 to 1959 and on CBS from 1956 to 1957, was frequently scripted by blacklisted writers, including Ring Lardner, Jr., one of the Hollywood Ten, who likewise appeared before HUAC in 1947 but refused to answer any questions, and was slapped with a twelve-month prison sentence for his defiance. Robin is the perfect metaphor for the blacklisted left-wing artist—refusing to surrender his principles, he chooses to live outside the law rather than endorse a pernicious regime, and devotes his life to championing the oppressed. Producer Hannah Weinstein—a little-known name in the annals of TV history—deserves props not just for this series, but also for such companion costumed adventure shows as The Adventures of Sir Lancelot, The Buccaneers, Ivanhoe, and Sword of Freedom, all of which allowed blacklisted scribes to ply their trade. 

The Paley Center’s library includes over a dozen episodes of Weinstein’s Robin Hood, including “The Infidel,” coscripted by the blacklisted writer Robert Lees (whose theatrical films included the dangerously subversive Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein), using the front John Dyson. The episode features Robin protecting a Muslim prisoner of war from a British nobleman seeking to frame the “infidel dog” for murder. Now that’s what I call being ahead of your time. Here's a full episode of Weinstein’s Robin Hood:

Thanks to my interns Danielle Fichera and Corinne Hitchins for their research. For more on Weinstein, check out Steve Neale’s “Swashbuckling, Sapphire, and Salt: Un-American Contributions to TV Costume Adventure Series in the 1950s,” from Un-American Hollywood: Politics and Film in the Blacklist Era, edited by Frank Krutnik, Neale, Brian Neve, and Peter Stanfield (Rutgers University Press, 2007). 

For broadcast networks, pilot season is the equivalent of Major League Baseball's opening day—Everyone's in first (even the Mets)! Hope springs eternal! Yada yada yada.

Optimism we applaud, yet you have to wonder how anyone could have thought Eastwick was a good idea.

Which brings us to this year's batch of pilots, vying for slots on the fall 2010 schedule. Journalists typically peruse these lists in an attempt to extrapolate trends in TV programming  (with the departures of Lost and 24 and the disappointing performance of FlashForward, is this the end of densely plotted serial dramas, particularly of the sci-fi variety? ) or about society at large (remember all those post–9/11 spy shows?) Me, I'm just trying to have fun.

Below I've listed a smattering of pilots that I find interesting for a smattering of reasons, as explained below. There's one twist, though: in each of the three categories, one of the pilots is a complete figment of my imagination, meaning it doesn't really exist. Your job—should you decide to accept—is to identify the poser.

Good luck.

Remakes

Familiarity breeds what now? Despite uninspired showings by recent remakes of Melrose Place, Knight Rider, and Bionic Woman, the networks are mulling revamped versions of:

1) Hawaii Five-O: Starring Alex O'Loughlin as Steve McGarrett and Lost's Daniel Dae Kim as Chin Ho Kelly. (See the original Five-O opening below.)

2) Columbo, Jr: Starring Mark Ruffalo as an LAPD homicide detective, just like his iconic dad, the chronically rumpled Lt. Columbo (Peter Falk, who also produces).  

3) Rockford Files: House Producer David Shore resurrects the reluctant seventies detective, with Dermot Mulroney in the role made famous by James Garner.

4) Nikita: Starring Maggie Q, because thrice (the French film Nikita, the American film Point of No Return, and the U.S. cable series La Femme Nikita) is apparently not enough.

Pedigree

Welcome back these distinguished showrunners:

1) Untitled Wyoming Project: From Gilmore Girls creator Amy Sherman-Palladino: family shenanigans on a horse farm. Nifty rapport between the mare and foal.

2) Kindreds, From David E. Kelley, fondly remembered for Ally McBeal and L.A. Law, though neither compares to Picket Fences. Legal drama, natch.

3) Undercovers: For Lost fans: J.J. Abrams is back, with this drama about a husband-and-wife spy team (shades of Alias).

4) The Jennifer Lopez Show: Forty years after creating The Mary Tyler Moore Show, James L. Brooks and Allan Burns reunite for this sitcom about an ex-L.A. Laker hoofer now running a dance studio for kids.

Strange But True (Maybe)

1) Game On: Producer Shawn Ryan and actor Michael Chiklis, who last teamed on the intense FX cop drama The Shield, switch gears for this comedy about a baseball manager who moonlights as a superhero.

2) Mike and Molly: Chuck Lorre (Two and a Half Men, The Big Bang Theory) exec produces this comedy about a couple who struggle with overeating.

3) Sh*t My Dad Says: Only celebrated thespian William Shatner could pull off a comedy with this title; based on a popular Twitter feed.

4) Tax Men: Workplace comedy about IRS employees who band together to overcome hatred; from Ron Howard, Brian Grazer, and onetime Wonder Years wunderkind Fred Savage.

Clearly we are witnessing a serious rupture of the time-space continuum!

Typically I am averse to sharing my prognostications with the rest of the world—if for no other reason than that they are unfailingly wrong and even I don't believe them—but in this case the temptation is overwhelming:

Fox, mulling a return to the late-night talk-show wars for years, finally takes the plunge. In a cost-conscious move, the network hires as host not Conan O'Brien, but the avatars of Steve Allen, Jack Paar, and Johnny Carson. However, Fox then blows the entire savings by bringing in James Cameron as exec producer, even though Caprica's Ronald B. Moore would have done it for half the price (and better).

Thirty-second commercials go the way of the dinosaur, displaced by sixty-second spots, television's original unit of choice. In a brilliant PR move, Toyota adds a "Y" to its name, excavates the famous Dinah Shore commercial for Chevy (now rewritten as "See the USA in Your Toyatay"), and signs John Mayer to perform it.

NBC brings back the prime-time comedy-variety show by resurrecting the great Your Show of Shows, only this time titled This Is Your Grandfather's Show of Shows, though still starring Sid Caesar, Carl Reiner, and Mel Brooks. Billy Crystal is recruited to fill the zany-neophyte writers' room role so brilliantly defined by Brooks, and Whoopi Goldberg replaces Lucille Kallen as the lone distaff writer. Brooks reprises his 2,000-year-old-man gag, only this time he's not acting.

CBS revives the live anthology drama, now called Apple Playhouse, with wraparounds by Steve Jobs, who opens and closes each episode not live but via iChat. The premiere installment is a remake of John Frankeheimer's 1957 program "The Comedian," directed by Michael Bay, with Howie Mandel starring as the megalomaniacal Sammy Hogarth, a role made famous by Mickey Rooney.

MTV axes every single last bit of reality programming and replaces it with—get this—music videos. Dick Clark and Larry King land the coveted jobs of lead VJs. To kick off this reformatting of the channel (renamed Music Television), the Buggles record a new version of their 1979 hit song, retitled "Internet Killed the TV Star—Not!"

As a full-fledged Baby Boomer, I'm the first to admit we've screwed up just about everything we've touched—but not television. We grew up watching sixties prime-time entertainment from some hermetically sealed parallel world, in which mostly superficial characters refused to evolve from one week to the next or to acknowledge any of the real-word chaos that was spreading anxiety all around us. Race riots on the streets? Not in our TV world. A war in Southeast Asia? Whom are you kidding?

When finally in a position to create our own programming, we did a pretty good job. The "Age of Relevancy" actually launched in the late sixties with programs like Room 222 and The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour (we all know how that went), but most TV historians point to the early-seventies sitcoms All in the Family and The Mary Tyler Moore Show as the true beginning of a sustained movement. While both of these shows were created by pre-Boomers (MTM cocreator James L. Brooks, born in 1940, was the youngest), writers and producers who worked on them were card-carrying members of the Baby Boom party, and more importantly the shows ushered in a new era of sophisticated sitcoms (episodic drama was reinvigorated a few years later with Lou Grant, but that's another story) grounded in real life. In the 1970–71, the top-rated sitcoms were Here's Lucy, Mayberry R.F.D., and My Three Sons; two seasons later they were All in the Family, Sanford and Son, and Maude.

When I teach college students, the program I use to illustrate this shift is The Wonder Years, a half-hour dramedy that aired on ABC from 1988 to 1993. The title alone is pertinent, taken from an iconic series of Wonder Bread commercials from the sixties. Even more intriguing is the construct of the show: created by Boomers (Carol Black and Neal Marlens), The Wonder Years is about a Boomer looking back on his adolescence in the late sixties and early seventies. So—bear with me here—what you have is Black and Marlens creating TV that is set in the same era as the programming they grew up watching, yet subverting it with their mischievous Boomer sensibility.

The episode I use is "Christmas," from the first season, in which Kevin Arnold (the epicenter of the show) and his astoundingly obnoxious brother Wayne attempt to persuade their chronically cranky father, who is anxious about finances, to purchase a color TV. Just the recognition that television can be an important part of family life is noteworthy, as few sitcoms from the sixties even acknowledged the existence of the medium (The Dick Van Dyke Show being one obvious exception). But the program (a holiday episode!) also addresses Viet Nam, as Kevin's crush, Winnie Cooper, and her family go away for Christmas because they can't stand the thought of being home without Winnie's brother, a casualty of the war.

At the end of the episode, as a particularly miserable Christmas Eve draws to a close, the Arnolds reluctantly join a caroling party, and as the group warbles "Silent Night," the adult Kevin tells us via voiceover: "Nothing short of a miracle was gonna make this right." In a sixties sitcom, that miracle would have happened: it would have snowed, and a white Christmas would have magically made everything copacetic. In The Wonder Years, the skies open up all right—but it pours. Following the lead of the father, the Arnolds just stand there in the rain, getting soaked, until finally they all start laughing at the absurdity of the situation. On Boomer television, that's what passes for a miracle.

And they didn't get the TV.

If that won’t motivate you to sprint the final leg, nothing will (that and the fact that your daughters are at Tavern on the Green, waiting and watching).
 
It had been eight years since my last marathon, and I was struck by how similar the experience was, despite the proliferation of media and the democratization of information distribution. I thought I’d see more people texting, phoning, or filming. We back-of-the-packers never even see a TV camera. We are one-half to one-third of the way through by the time TV viewers at home are watching the men’s champ break through the ribbon. While connected to the world electronically through my cell phone (carried really to alert my wife to my initial ascent into Manhattan), I am either too high to disturb my euphoria or too low to even bother with it. While I am in a pack with 40,000 runners, and spectators scream at me from all sides, I am ultimately alone, disconnected from everyone but my own mind and body, because in the end all that really matters is what they are capable of doing and believing. At times, it is excruciating, at other times, joyous.
 
That said, thank God for the spectators, who restore my faith in humanity. On a day when they can be sitting in their living rooms watching the marathon on TV or connecting with the world virtually via their computers, they make the effort to come out and cheer on thousands of strangers the old-fashioned, Ed Murrow way: person to person. These people are not just generous—passing out oranges, candy, paper towels, and hugely important shouts of encouragement, they’re also hilarious (best line yesterday, from a tall, grandfatherly man on Fifth Avenue who spotted my name on the front of my shirt, circa mile twenty-three: “David, hurry up already, they’re waiting for you.” Best line ever, from a complete stranger in Brooklyn: “David, I want to have your baby”).
 
I’ll take the rest of the week off. If I start training soon, I’ll be back next year better than ever.

Hence, as the fall season dawned, I was on the prowl for a new addiction, the darker the better. I had high hopes for ABC’s FlashForward, and while the driving mystery intrigues me (love the whole Suspect Zero thing and the abandoned doll factory), I’m having an awful time surmounting certain unfortunate aspects of the program, like the Stanford Wedeck (Courtney B. Vance) storyline (the guy was in the bathroom, for Pete’s sake, leave him alone!); the deadly Mark-Olivia Benford (Joseph Fiennes-Sonya Walger) melodrama; and Fiennes’s uncanny resemblance to Nicolas Cage as he portrays FBI Special Agent Mark Benford in a perpetual state of deep and painfully obvious emotional agitation.      

Surprisingly, my favorite new show of the season isn’t a drama at all, but a comedy, albeit a dark, twisted one, especially if you stop to ponder the dismal lives of the main characters. I speak of Community, the Thursday-night NBC single-camera comedy about a diverse group of—how to put this kindly?—losers enrolled at Greendale Community College in Colorado, an institution of higher learning that reluctant student Jeff Winger (Joel McHale, of E! Entertainment’s The Soup)—a smug, silver-tongued lawyer forced back to school when his bachelor’s degree is declared invalid—refers to as a “school-shaped toilet.”

Jeff has little (make that no) interest in education—“If I wanted to learn something I wouldn’t have come to community college,” he tells a professor/former client, from whom he is trying to coax every answer to every test he will have to take over the next four years—but is obsessed with Britta (Gillian Jacobs), a comely blonde coed/smart cookie who dropped out of high school to impress Radiohead (sorry, that’s as logical as it gets) and then joined the Peace Corps, later dabbling in foot modeling and getting tear-gassed at a world-trade rally. In pursuit of Britta, whom he knows to need help in Spanish, Jeff forms a faux-study group, claiming to be a “board-certified” tutor, and invites her in, hoping to work side by side at a library table for two. However, through a confluence of events, five other people wind up joining the group, forming the nucleus of the comedy.

Admittedly, a lot gets lost in the translation, but this might help: a list of five things I love about Community:

A Little Chase Goes a Long Way...
When it comes to comedy, I’ve always preferred neurotic self-loathing to smug irony, so I’ve never been a huge Chevy Chase fan, but I give Chase tremendous credit for taking on the utterly unflattering role of Pierce Hawthorne, a daffy, seven-times divorced moist-towelette magnate who enrolls at Greendale out of sheer loneliness, and is particularly desperate for Jeff’s approval. White-haired, spectacled, and far stockier than in his SNL days, Chase is hilarious in his supporting role, whether struggling to guide a slice of pizza into his mouth, tossing off sexually/ethnically inappropriate comments, or assuring Jeff that his inability to father children is due not to sterility, but to “hypervirility” (“My sperm shoot through the eggs like bullets”).

Those Who Can’t Do...
Greendale’s rogues gallery of daft educators may rival Hogwarts’s: so far we’ve met Chinese-American Spanish teacher Señor Chang (“I am a Spanish genius! In Español my nickname is El Tigre Chino! Because my knowledge will bite her face off. So don’t question Señor Chang, or you’ll get bit.”); accounting Professor Whitman (whose motto is “Carpe Diem” and who instructs students to throw away their textbooks and shoes and stand on their desks, adding that “Only when we stop stopping our lives can we begin to start starting them.”); and—my personal favorite—Dr. Ian Duncan (John Oliver, from The Daily Show), Jeff’s onetime client, cleared of DUI charges—he made a U-turn on a freeway and tried to order chalupas from an emergency call box—when Jeff persuaded a jury that the case was connected to the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Ladies and Gentlemen of the Jury...
Jeff’s speeches sound great, but watch out for the message—if in fact there is one. In one episode, he tries to douse an argument between Britta and the father of Abed (Danny Pudi, another study-group member), with this gem: “The only reason why this whole mess got started is because both of you wanted the best for Abed, and I think the lesson we can all take away from this is that everyone should always do whatever they want and leave each other out of it.” But Jeff saves his best for first, delivering a real head-scratcher in the pilot episode: after the study group nearly self-immolates and Britta instructs him to fix the mess he created, Jeff somehow assuages the group with a speech about human capacity for forgiveness (as evidenced by Shark Week, broken pencils, and Ben Affleck’s Academy Award for screenwriting), telling them that “It’s clear to all of you that I am awesome, but I can never admit that because that would make me an ass,” and, finally, concluding with this: “Abed’s a shaman. You ask him to pass the salt, he gives you a bowl of soup, because you know what? Soup is better. Abed is better. You are all better than you think you are. You are just designed not to believe it when you hear it from yourself.”

Sexual Tension
In the grand tradition of Sam and Diane come Jeff and Britta (they should last so long):

Britta: “You’re cute, but selfish and narcissistic to the point of near delusion.”
Jeff (to Pierce): “She said I was cute.”

Britta (after Jeff and Pierce’s disastrous Spanish presentation, which somehow managed to involve the waving of an Israeli flag, sparklers, and the capture of a Native-American princess, and earned both students failing grades): “That was one of the worst things I’ve ever seen, which I guess makes being a part of it a pretty selfless act.”
Jeff: “How do you know I didn’t just do it to get another shot at you?”
Britta: “Because a smart guy like you would know that no woman in that class would be able to look at you as a sexually viable candidate ever again.”

Britta: “So this is a game to you? You put human beings in a state of emotional shambles for a shot at getting in my pants?”
Jeff: “Why can’t you see that for the compliment that it is?”

Heart and Soul
The best comedies aren’t just funny, but soulful. This is why All in the Family wasn’t really about politics, but about relationships, particularly between Archie and Mike. Or, why The Office, as funny as it is to laugh at anything that comes out of Andy’s mouth or at Kelly’s utter lack of self-regard in her pursuit of Ryan, is—to my mind at least—more memorable for scenes like the one in which Michael is the only Dunder-Mifflin-ite to show up at Pam’s art show, even after a disastrous evening guest-lecturing before Ryan’s class. Not that Community is in a league with those shows yet, but balancing humor and heart is tricky business, and so far Community has done a nice job, like when Jeff relents to work with Pierce on the Spanish project, or the whole group trudges back to the library so Jeff won’t fail the next day’s test.

Hat’s off to Community creator Dan Harmon, whose previous credits include the revered Heat Vision & Jack, one of the great busted pilots of all time, and the prominent video website Channel 101, which he co-founded with Rob Schrab, and which you can check out yourself right here.