Memories in a Cathode Ray

Last weekend wasn't a good time to be an older TV star. Don Knotts, Dennis Weaver, and Darren McGavin all died within a day of each other. It looks like bad things not only come in threes, they also start with D.

Don Knotts is probably best remembered as Barney Fife on The Andy Griffith Show, but he also did groundbreaking television on The Steve Allen Show. He may also have been one of the first examples of a star leaving a hit TV show for a sure-fire movie career that never quite seemed to take off--The Ghost and Mr. Chicken, The Incredible Mr. Limpet, The Reluctant Astronaut, and The Shakiest Gun in the West don't exactly add up to a memorable body or work. He may still have done the right thing, though, because it's possible that he'd gone as far as he could with Barney Fife. He won five Emmys for the role in seven years, so to keep going may have just left him repeating himself.

Dennis Weaver broke through as another deputy, Chester, who worked for Marshal Matt Dillon on Gunsmoke. That was an idiosyncratic part (though it won him an Emmy), but he came into his own during the '70s in McCloud, playing the fish-out-of-water New Mexico lawman in New York. He also got to ride the cool airboat through the Everglades on Gentle Ben. My favorite Dennis Weaver role, though, was the night manager of the motel where Janet Leigh was being held in Orson Welles's A Touch of Evil. He was both creepy and hilarious in one of the most tense sequences in a tense film. Setting up that tightrope for an actor--too far in either potentially contradictory direction would've ruined the performance and undermined the sequence--was audacious (but hardly out of character) for Welles, but I'm not sure many performers would be capable of pulling it off, let alone of stealing the sequence out from under the other performers.

During the '60s and '70s, Darren McGavin seemed ubiquitous on TV. He may now mostly be remembered as the father in A Christmas Story (a movie I've always found overrated--I'm happy to have seen it once, but I don't need to see it over and over ad nauseam every Christmas), but to a handful of us, he'll always be Kolchak, The Night Stalker. That was a truly spooky show. And in my mind, at least, Carl Kolchak was as significant an icon for journalists digging out the truth at all costs as Woodward and Bernstein in All the President's Men (if only modern-day journalists, Bob Woodward included, would take another look at either of those works to figure out what they should be doing). But I had an odd theory about Darren McGavin. Although he appeared to be fairly well respected as an actor, his style always seemed very similar to William Shatner's. (Oh, no! It's another Shatner post in just a week. Is this becoming a niche blog?) They had the same odd sense of stop-and-start timing in their delivery, the same bombast that would sometimes slip through their line readings. I'd always hoped that we'd see them appear together in something, so we could compare them side by side, but as far as I know, that never happened. And now it never will.

R.I.P. to the three D's.