His back to us and to the camera, the hero walks silently away. His work in this particular community is done. He has restored the community to its better self. This is the closing image of the classic 1947 film The Bishop’s Wife, which I watched recently. Cary Grant as the angel Dudley—sent to guide…

Better Call Saul, a prequel to AMC’s milestone series, Breaking Bad, further establishes co-creators Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould to be among the most intricate moral thinkers working in the dramatic arts. Whereas the first series rendered the ethical decline of a dying man who makes something of a noble bargain with his conscience—attempting to…

Calamity Jane lumbered around Deadwood in fringed buckskins, spitting, cursing, and waving her whiskey flask in the shadows of the Black Hills. And I want to be more like her. Guns scare me, of course. Animal skins give me the willies, and more than a sip of hard liquor gets me coughing. Deadwood’s very existence…

Other bloggers here at Good Letters seem to be establishing various narrative arcs—about music, fiction, etc. Well, it seems that I’m specializing in obituaries, this being my third in a row. Perhaps it’s my age, but in recent weeks I’ve felt the loss of several greats. Today I celebrate the great British actor, Paul Scofield,…

When NBC announces their prime-time schedule for the fall next month, the lineup may or may not include a show called “The Philanthropist,” on which I will be a writer if it airs. The character in question is a fortysomething Wall Street billionaire who, dissatisfied with checkbook charity, initiates his own one-man humanitarian missions from…

You were probably a better citizen than I was and watched the final Clinton/Obama debate before last Tuesday’s primaries in Ohio and Texas. I meant to, at least, and then got stuck in a Mega Disasters segment on the History Channel, entitled “Super Swarm.” Its subject? Locusts. Its object? Me. Viewers or victims, sometimes it’s…

“They’re dead where it doesn’t count,” says Fletcher, a newspaperman, in an episode of the current and last season of HBO’s The Wire, which I saw recently. I don’t subscribe to HBO, so I was watching at a friend’s. And I was jumping ahead; since discovering the series on Netflix six months ago, I’ve spent…

>Kudos to ABC for standing by its pilot episode of Eli Stone, in which a young defense attorney, suddenly prone to visions of George Michael singing “Faith” in his home and workplace, ends up representing the plaintiff, a mother who claims the mercury-based preservative in a vaccine caused autism in her son. The American Academy…

I have to admit: I would love to see the Oscars cancelled. Not for the power trip that we, the lowly scribes of the Writers Guild, brought Hollywood to its knees; I would be just as happy, if not more so, to see a union of caterers or make-up artists do the same. Nor for…