From the Couch Hole: Fast As Wheels Can Turn

Previously on FTCH, there was a murder at the gallop, and the secret agent had to wise up about the Nouvelle Vague. We is us and Pringles are smoky. This week we transitioned to one of the best sports times of the year. College-basketball conference tournaments will lead into March Madness, baseball season will start up as that ends, and NHL and NBA playoffs are on the horizon. In Texas, we tasted high 80s and high 30s all in the same week. This week R.J. Decker was driving Hamnet to get a cherry float. There was a murder most foul and there was a closed casket because of the cheezy blast. Remember, at FTCH the turning of the projector is just the start.

Pop Culture Ephemera

• Sophie Hannah – Agatha Christie’s Closed Casket (2016) (Published by Harper Collins): “Good sense appears the most underhand of tactics to a man who has no reserves of his own to draw upon.” This is Sophie Hannah’s second Hercule Poirot novel. I thought that the first one captured Poirot’s voice pretty well, but the mystery, while a good setup, was a mess as solved. This one reverses that with a better mystery, but it loses Poirot’s voice. If this was any other generic detective story, I think I would rank it highly. Writing Christie’s character comes with the weight of decades of great character building.
  
  Catchpool (his new, ineffective sidekick and narrator), Poirot, and an odd assortment of characters are invited to the Irish estate of famous writer, Lady Playford. They are witness to her revealing a new Will that leaves out her son and daughter and gives her money to her dying husband in waiting. He ends up dead later that night, and that launches a “closed door” mystery on par with Clue in many ways. The mystery is easier to follow than the first book, but it gets bogged down both with lots of long backstories and another very long exposition as Poirot solves the mystery. It is that scene that I usually enjoy Poirot’s wry humor that doesn’t come through in Hannah’s version of the character. There are another four books in the series, and I’m going to take a little break before seeing if the next entry can find the Poirot voice again.

Buy Agatha Christie’s Closed Casket

• R.J. Decker – “Pilot” (S.1 E.1) (ABC) (2026): “The truth, cellie, is you were carryin’ too much hurt around and you unloaded on the first best person who came along.” – Wish. While I’m waiting for a new season of Bad Monkey (Apple+), imagine my surprise to find that ABC is rolling out a show based upon Double Whammy by Carl Hiaasen. Except, there’s a second surprise, there’s no Skink in the adaptation of the Skink novel. I’m curious how this will work on network television. The Hiaasen characters are ripe for adaptation, and he includes so much hint of backstory around his characters that I don’t imagine they will run out of influences. The concern is that he doesn’t write characters that fit the “solve a mystery every week” formula. The cast (Scott Speedman, Kevin Rankin and Jaina Lee Ortiz) is very likable and capture the spirit of the characters in the novels. Consider this a good start, but I’m wary of a long run with this structure.

Buy Everything but the Girl – The Language of Life

• Everything but the Girl – “Driving” (from The Language of Life) (1990): “Maybe one day you’ll wake and you’ll find me gone / But, loverboy, if you call me home / I’ll come driving.” The sax solo about halfway through the song might give you the impression that this is really an ’80s song. I actually was surprised to see it was a 1990 song when I looked up the video. I was a fan from the start of Everything but the Girl, through the ’80s (formed in 1982). They got some airplay on MTV but rarely any radio love. Tracey Thorn’s voice is ’80s soul, not unlike Anita Baker on this tune. They had a unique British lane of of electronic jazz soul (other inhabitants of this lane included Prefab Sprout). This song takes me back to nights in my Dana Point apartment, listening to records, and reading my books.

• Murder Most Foul (1964) (Directed by George Pollock): “That woman has made a mockery of my one and only murder.” – Constable Wells. The third entry into the George Pollock-directed, Margaret Rutherford-starring Miss Marple mystery has fallen into a comfortable series of wink, nods, and jokes that build upon the previous films. The simple plot is that Miss Marple is the lone dissenting voice on a murder trial, causing a hung jury. To Inspector Craddock’s disapproval, Miss Marple goes undercover in a theater troupe to investigate the murder. The fun is in the little details. The title is a reference to Shakespeare. The company has previously put on a play called Murder, She Said (the first film) written by Agatha Christie and references to other of Christie’s works. It’s hardly as noticeable that this film also replaces Poirot with Miss Marple, like the last one. Some of that probably has to do with even less of the original story included here beyond the trial and the troupe. The mystery isn’t bad, and only suffers from the need of some more detailed backstories. It’s fun to see Miss Marple (Margaret Rutherford, here in her early 70s) keep frustrating Inspector Craddock (Bud Tingwell). It’s my very definition of a murder matinee.

Buy Murder Most Foul

• Hamnet (2025) (Directed by Chloe Zhao): “He loves me for what I am, not what I ought to be.” – Agnes. It’s not like the story of the loss of a son is going to be full of laughs like Shakespeare in Love (1998). The first half of the film alone should win Oscars for Cinematography and Sound Design. I love Jessie Buckley’s performance as Agnes and her connection to nature and healing. The second half is less consistent for me. I’m not saying that it isn’t emotional. That emotion of the loss of a son (which you shouldn’t have seen the film without at least knowing that was coming) took control of the film for the middle act. As Will says, “The play’s the thing,” and that is what I was missing as a bridge between the suffering parents and the catharsis of Agnes and Will at the performance. The film ends on a note that’s hard not to get chills over, easily one of the best shots of the year, and I can see why it’s nominated. The bar is high for a film that references my favorite Shakespeare play, and to be Film of the Year. There just needs to be three complete acts.

Buy Hamnet

Best of the Rest

• Beef (Netflix) was one of the best shows of 2023. The Ali Wong and Steven Yuen series was dark, anxiety inducing, and funny. They didn’t leave room for another conflict, so imagine my surprise at the headline that Beef: Season 2 was starting in April. This time around it’s two new couples, Oscar Issac-Carey Mulligan and Cailee Spaeny-Charles Melton. It looks like Beef: Season One as filtered through The White Lotus. That doesn’t sound terrible when I put it like that.

• One of the things I look forward to when I take my road trips is to find regional exclusives for the sodas I enjoy. For the past few years, I looked forward to a slice of pizza and a Mtn Dew Overdrive at Casey’s once I hit Oklahoma and again in Indiana. That was discontinued last year but this summer, Casey’s is debuting a Mtn Dew Citrus Blackberry. The problem is that Mtn Dew has had a Citrus Blackberry GameFuel in the past. I am guessing that the only difference will be less caffeine, since the GameFuel line was just regular Mtn Dew flavors with about half again as much caffeine. I’ll still seek them out if I get on the road this summer.

• The last episode of The Bear (Hulu) was “Goodbye.” It might have left some stories open-ended, but I wouldn’t have been upset that it ended after four seasons, as creator Christopher Storer had said from the beginning. Therefore I was excited but torn to read that Season Five of The Bear is filming now in Chicago. It’s one of my favorite shows of this decade, I love the cast from top to bottom and I think it has a thoughtful structure than puts it in the rare air of shows like Better Call Saul. I’ll need to reserve a few days in June to finish this one out in style.

Sunday Morning Tuneage Flashback

• Sunday Morning Tuneage from 3/28/2010, the boys both won their baseball games over the weekend and both boys had big hits to contribute. They had both celebrated birthdays in the past ten days, and we were headed to Best Thai (Christian’s choice) that day. The Amazing Race (CBS) was my Sunday night choice and Fringe (Fox) was back again on Thursday. My list of the week mirrored some of my current-year lists, and I’m going to have to think hard if I have anything else to add to them other than some reordering.
  
  My #70 Top TV Show of All-Time was Heroes (NBC) (2006-2010): The show had a tremendous debut, and it maintained wonderful ratings for a couple of seasons. In retrospect, it had a few good storylines and suffered from having to fit all of their universe into an hour a week. Only Lost (ABC) had a bigger cast. In today’s world, they would split those off like the networks do with almost every successful show, and they would let audiences choose which of the characters they wanted to follow. It’s not a Top 100 show in my mind, but in an era that was lacking superhero television shows, this attempt to create a franchise was admirable. Ultimately, it’s writing that makes or breaks a show like this, and they just couldn’t figure out how to get out of corners they painted themselves into.
  
• BEST OF THE REST OF 1967 (2010)
  • 10. Super Bowl I
  • 9. Muhammad Ali Refuses Military Service
  • 8. Vietnam War Protests
  • 7. Fashion Island
  • 6. Toronto Maple Leafs Win the Stanley Cup
  • 5. Monterey Pop Festival
  • 4. The ABA
  • 3. Thurgood Marshall
  • 2. Summer of Love
  • 1. New Channels: BBC Radio 1, 2, 3, and 4, and PBS
    
• BEST OF THE REST OF 1967 (2026)
  • 10. Summer of Love: San Francisco becomes the counter cultural Mecca. There are so many tentacles that flowed out of that with music, film, and in print, that it’s hard to find an equivalent since then. I am grouping some of the offshoots like Pop Art, Psychedelic Art posters, and Rolling Stone magazines under this umbrella.
  • 9. Thurgood Marshall: Civil Rights was still an important topic. Lots of firsts still happening, but Supreme Court Justice was pretty impressive considering the overall environment.
  • 8. Food: The Big Mac makes a debut and Doritos comes out nationally and changes the way we look at corn chips. This was also the year that they decided to finally put frosting on Pop-Tarts.
  • 7. Super Bowl I: It wasn’t a groundbreaking game, as much as the fact that it happened was important. There was little surprise that the Green Bay Packers won this one and the next. It would take until the third to start to establish it to what it has become today.
  • 6. Heart Transplant: Dr. Christiaan Barnard did what still seems impossible, he took someone else’s heart and put it in another human. They died of pneumonia 18 days later, but today it’s close to just an “every day” surgery.
  • 5. Comedy on Television: The year gave us two distinctly different kinds of humor, and the next decades would try to duplicate the magic of Laugh-In (NBC) and The Carol Burnett Show (CBS). ABC broke their own ground in the comedy game with The Newlywed Game (ABC), which debuted this year and brought a new genre to us, the comedy game show.
  • 4. Monterey Pop Festival: It’s thought of mostly for Jimi Hendrix setting his guitar on fire. Janis Joplin, Otis Redding, Simon & Garfunkel, and Jefferson Airplane among a few dozen acts also made this into one of the most important musical weekends of the decade. (Read Gordon S. Miller’s review of the concert film.)
  • 3. Baseball: I left out one of the most important years of baseball in the past list. The sport was failing in attendance and ratings with the same teams, mostly the Yankees and Dodgers, dominating the leagues. This was the year that Yaz won the Triple Crown and Bob Gibson had one of the most amazing post-season runs including three complete game wins in the World Series as the Cardinals beat the Red Sox in seven games.
  • 2. New Hollywood: The movement away from studio control of directors and artists (Old Hollywood) sped up with movies like The Graduate and Bonnie and Clyde leading with young directors and actors who came from outside the traditional studio system.
  • 1. Musical Starts: There were some amazing albums released, as I listed previously. The incredible list of bands and musical artists getting their start in 1967 is like a Rock n Roll Hall of Fame starter kit. The Doors, Pink Floyd, The Grateful Dead, David Bowie, CCR, Chicago, Genesis, The Stooges, The Jimi Hendrix Experience, and The Velvet Underground just to name the most successful. There may be years that produced great bands or artists, but it’s hard to argue that this isn’t the core of what made the next ten years some of the best music ever produced.

Buy The Doors debut album

1976 in Review

• March – The Incredible Hulk #198 (Marvel Comics): Cover by Gil Kane. Written by Len Wein. Art by Sal Buscema. “I have a display case ready and waiting for our newest acquisitions!” – The Collector. I didn’t read The Incredible Hulk in this era, although I feel like I might pick up some of the collections. Those covers are awesome. The Hulk fighting Man-Thing and Glob is pretty cool. It appeared that the Collector was dead at the end of this issue, but as you know, “dead” ain’t dead in the Marvel Universe. He would be back pretty quickly in The Avengers.
• March 15 – During morning and evening rush hour in Los Angeles, on the Santa Monica Freeway, the first “diamond lane” aka “car pool lane” opened. It would quickly spread to other highways and other cities to encourage high occupancy vehicles.
• March 6 – The Rockford Files (NBC) was ending its Second Season in March of 1976. The show still plays in repeats almost constantly. It’s well loved, but it’s hard to remember that it wasn’t a ratings success in the day. It started as a Top-15 show the first season. By March of 1976, it was consistently ranked #32 and dropping the remaining seasons.

What the Hell Did I Put in My Mouth?

“Oh, loverboy, I know you too well
And all of my lonely secrets to you I tell
The highest of highs, the lowest of lows” – Everything but the Girl