Chuck Norris Merges With The Infinite

Chuck Norris - sometime Texan, internet meme, ace martial artist, actor, star of B-movies and the long running Walker: Texas Ranger - has passed.

Chabert Watch Bonus: She Said/He Said - a 2006 Unaired TV Pilot

Well, every once in a while I'll hit the internet to see if I can turn up one of the remaining items on the 'ol Chabert-a-Tron 3000, and this time we came up yahtzee, finding the unaired TV Pilot for a little show called She Said/ He Said - a title sure to plague any SEO and likely made IT folks very sad if this got aired.

Fortunately, they were never in any danger of that.  This pilot is so bad, it's absolutely stunning anyone wanted to make it based on the script alone.  

But here it is (until it gets pulled down):

TV Watch: Heated Rivalry

Well.  I've now seen all of the 2026 hockey/ romance sensation folks are watching over on HBO, Heated Rivalry.

The six-episode series charts years and years of a pair of hockey players who enter the pros at the same time, one a nice boy from Canada, and one a Russian who is such a bad boy, he smokes.  The two have an immediate attraction, and embark on what is initially a sexual relationship, but eventually becomes romantic.  Both are tortured by the expectations put upon them by their macho sport and all that surrounds that as closeted men.

I'm oversimplifying because, gang, this was 6 episodes, each running 45 minutes.  

I don't know that the show really held a ton of surprises, but it's not that kind of show.  It's more about taking you on the journey as best they can as the two move from casual and sexy secretive hook-ups to developing real feelings.  

The Muppet Show is back. Sort of. Maybe.

Mind blowing.  

We've all seen so many reboots or relaunches as they try to recapture the magic - including with The Muppet Show which has had Muppets Tonight, that weird ABC thing, and other specials and attempts - and if anything out there gets even partially close, we all cheer.

But, holy cats, is the new episode of The Muppet Show on Disney+ like a very real continuation of the original series.  Was happy to see all my old Muppet friends in their natural environs.  

Anyway, my social media is ablaze with people celebrating the mighty return of the show, which means you've likely seen it, or will.  And maybe Disney will let them keep doing this?  

Kudos to Sabrina Carpenter for being the ideal Muppet Show guest.  And Maya Rudolph for being Maya Rudolph.  

Loved it.  Will watch if Disney greenlights more episodes.  

Catherine O'Hara Merges With The Infinite

I don't know what it says about me that of the famous people whose passing I regularly note, this is maybe the third that genuinely upset me.  Like, tears, and whatnot.  

Doesn't everyone love Catherine O'Hara?

Part of that SCTV crew who went on to do some of the most meaningful work in media of the last fifty years, O'Hara has been everywhere, from Home Alone to Beetlejuice to, most recently, The Studio, to her masterful, beautiful turn as Moira Rose in eighty episodes of Schitt's Creek.  And, of course, all of her roles in the ensemble of Christopher Guest's movies, like A Mighty Wind and Waiting for Guffman.  

Absolutely one of my favorite performers, I am shocked and saddened that she's gone.

Anyway, the other two were David Bowie and Stan Lee.  

"Up All Night" with Rhonda Shear is Back!

,

Back during some crucial years of my late high school and college years, I basically couldn't sleep.  Long after my folks had gone to bed on the weekend, I'd be up... all night.  And in those days, even cable channels went off the air or rolled over to infomercials. 

But the USA network, a sort of junk drawer of basic cable, knew some of us insomniacs were up for nonsense before we finally gave up and went to bed.  And every weekend, they gave us two or three movies on Fridays and Saturdays, with interstitials featuring pals to take us into the wee hours.  

a true symbol of America's golden age

Netflix Watch: Stranger Things - Season 5 Part 2

I don't know how many of you read comic books, especially superhero comics, but from time-to-time Marvel and DC have these absolutely massive, line-wide crossover events.  It's the sort of thing referenced in Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame.  But I'd argue that those movies represent a best-case scenario for an epic crossover.  The comics are rarely as coherent as those movies.

Most of the time, those mini or maxi-comics-series become a logistical mess as the plot takes over, and to raise the stakes, they keep throwing new angles on top of what we knew to the point of absurdity.  In an effort to deal with the scale, they have too many characters in the mix, and so it's like reading plot by bullet-point, often with those crazy ideas comics often do so well now not offered up just one comic issue or so at a time - the ideas are just tossed at you, one after another, until nothing means anything.  And character beats?  They only happen if they're (a) advancing the overall plot somehow or (b) setting us up for some moment in a book that will debut after the cross-over.  Mostly - the characters just go through the motions until the end.  And that's a function of "wow, there's way too many characters in this".

It's pretty bad writing and never feels particularly fulfilling to read.  

It may not be a mystery why comic book event crossovers are what I was pondering as I watched the back half of the fifth season of Stranger Things.  

Spoiler:  If you love Stranger Things, and don't feel like fighting about how I don't get it, etc... - now is a good time to find another part of the internet to enjoy.

A Christmas Regret Watch: A Little Piece of Heaven (1991)

everything on this DVD cover is a lie

Watched:  12/23/2025

Format:  Amazon

Viewing:  Second (and last)

Director:  Mimi Leder

While watching A Little Piece of Heaven (1991) for ChabertQuest2025, I knew instantly that this would be a movie to share with Dug and K.  

As longtime readers will know, sharing terrible Christmas movies with Jamie's brother, Dug and his wife K, is a yearly tradition here at The Signal Watch.  And, for reasons I cannot guess, Christmas seems to really bring out some absolute nonsense, from failed comedy concepts like Santa with Muscles to the utterly sincere failures, like this one.

There are many flavors of "this movie is a bad idea" out there, and we've covered a lot of them.  But this TV movie commits the sin of, as Dug put it, insisting that the ends justifies the means.  Even if the ends are highly, highly questionable.  And the means are absolutely mortifying.  

This movie contains:

• a very 90's take on an actor playing someone "special"
• drugging a child
• kidnapping a drugged child
• light casual racism
• 90's screenplay ingrained racism
• child slave labor
• child emotional labor
• gaslighting within gaslighting, like an inception where we're passing through layers of bullshit that's knee-deep
• nonsense rationalization
• child abuse-ploitation
• more kidnapping
• transporting minors
• abandoning pigs
• basically casting all those horror stories you see about people kidnapping people off the street and keeping them in their basement, or imprisoning children, and turning the abductor into a hero
• the greatest bullshit ending to a movie ever committed to screen
• Kirk Cameron

But, fun fact, a very young Lacey Chabert received an Emmy Nomination for her role as "Princess".  

Anyway, somehow this movie was written, produced, filmed, edited and given a plum primetime slot on network TV.  And everyone thought this was fine.  Even the scene where it's clear someone is tossing chickens out of a window.  And all of young Jussie Smollet's dialog.  

Rob Reiner Merges With The Infinite

I hate this.  I hate writing this.  

No one deserves to die the way Rob Reiner and his wife Michele passed.  

Most of the time, I'm able to write a simple "they were beloved, and will be missed, here's why this site is memorializing them", but today, on this one, the cruelty of what happened is a bit overwhelming.

We all know Rob Reiner, and kind of wish we had met him.  He seemed absolutely aces, and he made so damn many good movies.  Hell, he'd be a legend just for his few scenes as an actor just in The Wolf of Wall Street, but as a director and producer, he put out some of our favorite movies.  

May the Reiner's family know what the work Rob Reiner did meant a lot to so very many people, and that Rob and Michele will be mourned.

Dick Van Dyke at 100

 

Dick Van Dyke is now 100.  What a delight to do a "at 100" post and have the person still with us and in terrific shape.

He's easily one of the earliest actors whose names I knew who wasn't a Star War.  As a kid, I remember being taken to a re-release of Mary Poppins, and it was part of how I fell in love with movies.  And, of course, reruns of The Dick Van Dyke Show played well through when I was a young adult - when I feel like I finally got the appeal (no, not just Mary Tyler Moore - it's really funny and now I kind of want to watch it again).  Not bad for a show that ended 9 years before I was born.

Later, I'd see him in Bye Bye Birdie and other films.  The man is an entertainer.  

Here's to lasting a century and somehow remaining universally beloved.  You have a lot of choices of how you want people to think of you at 100, if you're remembered at all.  This may be the absolute best case of all.

Netflix Watch: Stranger Things - Season 5 Part 1

I am sure my observations are in no way unique, but here we go.

I don't think Stranger Things is for me.

SPOILERS

Three years between seasons is way too long for serial television.  The problem is not unique to this show, and Stranger Things has already taken it on the chops a bit for trying to suggest that the first season to this season took place within 4-5 years when our kid actors are now old enough to run for Congress.

The bigger problem with the delay between seasons is that, at best, I'm a casual viewer.  I'm not a person who often rewatches serialized TV, and with multiple years between seasons I have a very hard time remembering what previously happened unless prompted very specifically.  And even then, it only kind of comes back.  

But, really, the show became something I was less interested in altogether after Season 2.

Netflix Watch: Death By Lightning

One of my favorite writers is Candice Millard.  With a relatively modest output compared to other popular historical writers, I would gladly put every one of her books in your hand.

A bit like Eddie Muller over at Noir Alley, Millard manages to humanize and make her subjects deeply understandable despite the gulf of time and geography.  A while back, Jennifer R rec'd, Destiny of the Republic to me, which made me a true Millard fanboy and, these days, I'll happily pre-order any new Millard book when I hear it's available. 

Shockingly, her first book, River of Doubt, is not the book which has received an adaptation.  No post-Presidency Theodore Roosevelt mapping the Amazon for us.  Instead, it's Destiny of the Republic, an account of the extraordinary circumstances that led to the election of James Garfield to the US presidency, and his subsequent assassination by Charles Guiteau (spoilers on basic high school US History).  

Most Americans are vaguely aware we had a president named Garfield, and some know he was killed early on in his presidency.  What gets lost is the fascinating inflection point US politics were in that saw the Ohioan elected after years of prime 19th-Century corruption.  And while some may know Guiteau was, as they say, crazy - until I'd read Millard's book, I sure didn't know how Guiteau scrambled along the edges of society, his story reflecting so much of what they don't teach in school about America in the 19th century and what would come to echo through the 20th and 21st centuries.

Now, Netflix has rolled out a star-studded series roughly based on the book and entitled Death By Lighting.  

Wonder Woman First Aired 50 Years Ago Today

Back in the day, network TV would air pilots for TV shows if they felt they might be a costly gamble, and then the show would or wouldn't get picked up based on the success of that pilot, often released as a TV movie.  

On November 7th, 1975, ABC aired The New Original Wonder Woman aired and got solid ratings.  

If you've never seen the show or it's been a while, this version of Wonder Woman was set during World War II, using the original origins from the comics, which was adapted to World War I for the film.  Steve Trevor crashes his plane onto the mysterious island, populated entirely by ageless, brilliant, warrior women.  Diana, Queen Hippolyta's daughter and the only child of Paradise Island, wins a contest to return Steve to Man's World, which the Amazons abandoned millenia ago.

The pilot includes the entire bullets and bracelets bit, which assumes that somehow Amazons have guns and bullets in the comic.  I don't recall if they use Steve's gun in the pilot.  But the basic idea sets up that Diana can use her fancy metal cuffs to deflect bullets.

Hippolyta is Cloris Leachman here, and the tone is camp.  Folks like Ken Mars appear.  We're less than a decade since Adam West's Batman, and superheroes have become synonymous with comedy in the public's mind, and will remain there until Michael Keaton swoops in.  For many-a-kid, opening a comic book in the 1980's felt like entering a secret land where these stories were actually taken seriously, and superheroes were, of all things, cool.

I have vague memories of Lynda Carter and Wonder Woman from when I was a kid.  Part of that was that the kid I played with when the show was still in first-run episodes always wanted to play superheroes, and always wanted to be Wonder Woman.  And, yeah, he was a little boy in 1970's suburban Michigan.  But can you blame him?  

Boots?  Check.  Flashy suit?  Check.  Wisdom of Athena?  Check.  Invisible plane?  Check.  Tossing bad guys around like a minor inconvenience?  Double check.  Plus: twirling and a magic lasso.

Later, I caught episodes in syndication, but not often.  Then, in college, The SciFi Channel (eventually SyFy) ran the show during the day, and if I was home, I'd watch. 

I got into Wonder Woman comics around 2000, and still read and collect them.  A huge part of that was that Phil Jimenez, who wrote and drew the run that got me on board, understood what was appealing about the character beyond cheesecake and warrior-woman stuff.  And I know that came via the show.  Wonder Woman was not just to be ogled, she was smart, she was determined, she was literally fighting for truth and justice. And those were things that Lynda Carter brought to the screen.

Which I know, because eventually I picked up the three seasons of the show on DVD, and watched episodes, but all out of order.  But it wasn't until maybe 2010 that I finally sat down and just blitzed through the whole series.  And I had a blast doing it.  

Yes, the show starts on ABC and for a season takes place during WWII.  But then the show moved to CBS for its next two seasons and was set in contemporary times - and this is probably the version you remember.  

Full stop, I think that Wonder Woman is a straight up good show.  It made me really miss when you could watch one-off episodes of something, and while there's a bit of mythology/ lore/ what-have-you, you're resetting every week and it's just about that week's adventure.  

Lynda Carter is so solid in this show, it's unreal.  I've not seen her in too many other movies or shows, but she's effortlessly charismatic, beautiful and buyable as the lead.  And she's like in her mid-20's carrying this show.  Clearly born to play the role, so much so that despite Gal Gadot appearing several times as Wonder Woman, I still default to Carter in red boots for my mental image of Diana.

The only other real supporting cast is Lyle Waggoner who plays Steve Trevor, and had the show gone on to a fourth season it seems he was being written off.  Behind the scenes it seems he and Lynda Carter weren't getting along, and by the end of the third season he would appear in whole episodes where he spoke to her on the phone.

In general, I do prefer the 1970's-set episodes when they took the show more seriously, but YMMV.  It's still pretty silly and self-aware, but isn't leaning into wisecracks and forcing the comedy and works better for an hour-long program.  And they had a wider variety of things to take on in the 1970s.

Anyhoo... here's to Wonder Woman, in her satin tight fighting for our rights and the old red, white and blue.

June Lockhart Merges With The Infinite

June Lockhart, born during the silent era of film and when Calvin Coolidge was president of the US, and who had her first credit in 1938 (the same year Superman debuted and Orson Welles freaked people out with a radio show) has passed at 100.

What's crazy is that Lockhart was in a *ton* of big movies in smaller roles right out of the gate.  I'll be watching, say, Meet Me in St. Louis, and there goes Lockhart, who has such a particular look (twinkly eyes and a huge smile never hurt anyone in Hollywood), you know it's her.

So, she was working with Judy Garland, Gary Cooper, Joan Leslie, Red Skelton, Lana Turner...  I mean...  She saw some stuff.  

Lockhart is most famous to folks of my generation and the prior generation as Ruth Martin, the matriarch of the second family featured in the popular Lassie program (the first kid was Jeff Miller, the second was Timmy Martin).  Or, they know her as Maureen Robinson, the matriarch of that space-faring family in Lost in Space.  

Lockhart's last appearance was in the 2016 film The Remake, but she had done voicework for the Netflix Lost In Space reboot.  The last thing I saw her in was a recent viewing of Holiday in Handcuffs from 2007, but which I watched in 2022.  

Here's to Ms. Lockhart, and a heck of a career and life.

TL;DR: MTV Ends (channels in the UK)

 

MTV, Music Television, is shutting down music operations.  Specifically in England.  Likely soon to be the rest of Europe.  I assume the US will happen without so much as a whimper.

But it's been dead for a while now, hasn't it?

Complaining about MTV had been old since the mid-00's.  Even Gen-X, who lived off of MTV for a decade and a half, had drifted away from the music network before YouTube arrived and made MTV's music programming redundant.  

Launched in 1981, MTV immediately became the default channel the latchkey kids of Gen X came home and put on instead of clicking on their radios (I am often reminded that Jamie did not have MTV, as she was raised in a town that might as well have had John Lithgow forbidding her to dance).  Whether we're discussing elder Gen X or us on the trailing side of the generation, it was a true culture shift our parents would not enjoy until VH1 ushered Whitney Houston and Phil Collins safely into our homes.  

But for a while, the cable channel became like a singular radio station shared by a huge swath of America, contributing to the 1980's monoculture, and ending the ability of musicians to be non-telegenic and still make it.  

For the telegenic, it could mean a young The League would find himself watching the video for Lucky Star intently in 1984, and in the 1990's maybe watch En Vogue videos with piqued interest when he was more likely to listen to Jane's Addiction on his tape deck driving around North Houston.

Upon its debut, MTV was mostly rock and pop.  My memory of the pre-1985 MTV is of a lot of Human League, John Cougar Mellencamp, Styx, Billy Idol, and whatever else was going on.  Very early MTV included Joan Jett and J. Geils Band videos.  My understanding is that MTV just didn't have many videos at launch unless it was from a European act who needed videos for Top of the Pops.  

Between videos, VJ's (Video Jockeys), would drop fun tidbits and make it feel like a cool hang, I guess.  Ask anyone into girls between 50 and 65 about Martha Quinn sometime and see them light up like a Christmas tree.  I liked the VJ's until I didn't.  Or when the VJ bit became the bit with things like Total Request Live (utterly unwatchable unless you were a 13 year old).  

Seeing the immediate ability to get national exposure, bands rushed out to make videos, grabbing whatever they could in way of equipment and lighting.  And the crazier or wilder your look, the better.  Which became it's own thing as hair got bigger, pants got tighter, and pretty soon we had Van Halen's Hot for Teacher, after which we might as well have hung it up, because that was the zenith of early music videos.  

DC Studios Universe Watch: Peacemaker Season 2

I'm pretty sure we didn't talk much about Peacemaker Season 1 around here.  Which is too bad, I quite liked it.  

Peacemaker Season 2 just finished on HBOmax.  And, man, are the reactions online weird.  

And, look, I want to be a kind person, but sometimes it's really clear that

• once a show moves beyond a certain number of episodes/ duration, and therefore snowballs in complexity, some viewers don't know how to watch a movie or TV show without being spoonfed what is happening
• in 2025, people are still actively worrying about their fan theories and judging a show based on whether or not the show matches the story they told themselves.  Why would you watch a show so predictable you know exactly where it's going?
• a lot of folks think that if something is character driven, nothing has happened, which just blows my gourd
• a lot of people who consider themselves experts on "the comics" don't seem to actually know anything about the comics.  And I say this as someone who knows nothing about Peacemaker other than that he's a Charlton character with a very oddball helmet.

Television Watch: Alien - Earth (Season 1, 2025)

I'm the first person to say Alien and Aliens are two great films, each for different reasons.  And while I understand people love Alien3, I just wasn't onboard.  And it's safe to say, I've wrestled with the subsequent sequels, including Prometheus and Alien: Covenant.  The desire to combine the Alien storyline with the Predator franchise, with the wink-wink connections to Blade Runner strikes me as a curious obsession in sci-fi fandom - even if I shared the excitement of everyone else when Predator 2 came out.  

And then I saw Aliens vs. Predator, and I thought "never mind".

I'd skipped the last Alien movie.  If Ridley Scott couldn't make me care, I'm not sure who could.  

But part of that was, even as Romulus was in post-production, I heard Noah Hawley got his hands on the franchise and had a TV show coming.  

For those unfamiliar, Hawley is the person responsible for Legion, maybe the most interesting superhero adaptation (loosely based on the Marvel X-character Legion) to hit a screen, big or small, and which ran on FX for three seasons.  But, more important, Hawley has helmed Fargo for five seasons and across ten years.  And, in this blog's opinion, it's one of the best shows to have graced screens, full stop.

Fargo is an oddball spin-off of the Coen Bros. film of the same name.  And I won't get into it here, but if Legion showed Hawley knew how to take a nut of an idea from source material and grow something fascinating with it, Fargo took the well-defined themes and characters of a Coen Bros. movie as inspiration and exploded their stories into multi-faceted noir epics, borrowing elements and ideas from across the Coen Bros. filmography.

So... yeah, I was jazzed when I heard Hawley was getting his hands on Alien.  And eight episodes later, I feel like my trust was warranted.

Hallmark Christmas Movie Schedule 2025 Drops

Ms. Chabert, set to grace Christmas screens this Holiday season, seen here having pulled this man's finger

Well, Hallmark has released their schedule for the Christmas movies coming in 2025.  Despite the fact it's September and in the 90's where I live, over in Hallmark HQ, it might as well be time to rock around the Christmas tree.

Hallmark isn't completely ignoring the rest of the year.  They're currently showing movies with a fall theme on the channels (although it's not officially autumn until September 22nd).  And they're even getting spooky this year as Ms. Chabert and Hallmark stalwart Wes Brown will appear in the Halloween themed third chapter in the "Haul Out the Holly" saga.  

Meanwhile, Hallmark ornaments are coming in waves for 2025, with an official Lacey Chabert ornament coming in October.  (I am well aware of the Superman ornament, thanks).  

Here's the Hallmark checklist of new content:

TL;DR - Pop Culture Fade-Out: What Happens When No One Remembers Lassie?

Liz is also easily distracted by squirrels

A while back I read the book Rin Tin Tin: The Life and The Legend by Susan Orlean (recommended).  The book is a biography/ history of how one American soldier on the front lines of World War I found a stray dog, and how that dog became, literally, the biggest movie star in the world.  

There's a possibly apocryphal story that at the first Academy Awards they had to re-do nominations and/ or voting because Rin Tin Tin, a skinny German Shepherd, came up as "Best Actor" (everyone kinda thought the awards were a bit absurd at the time).  But what is true is that dog was also one of the biggest box office draws in Hollywood for a few years there before the movies learned how to talk.

While the original Rin Tin Tin passed and was buried in France, various other dogs took on the name and role, and through the 1950's, Rin Tin Tin was still a major pop culture fixture - a sort of family-friendly action star, now re-imagined for television as living on the frontier and starring in his own cavalry-themed Western.

Now...  I'm not sure even my peers could tell you what breed Rin Tin Tin was with any certainty.

Doc Watch: The Yogurt Shop Murders (2025)

In addition to being very TL;DR, this post was difficult to write as this documentary covers horrific, very real deaths, and the aftermath, which - decades on - has no closure.  There is a lot of human pain involved, a lack of justice and no easy answers.  

In 1991, four girls were killed in the back of a yogurt shop in North Austin. Amy Ayers, Eliza Thomas, Jennifer Harbison and Sarah Harbison.  The store was then burned.

I don't have any particular insight into the events other than knowing North Austin in the 80's and 90's.  And my own opinions regarding several elements is probably bubbling over in the post.  

Like all cities, Austin is home to some notable crimes.  

In the 1880's, we were home to a serial killer known as The Servant Girl Annihilator.  I grew up and attended college in the shadow of the University of Texas Tower, from which Charles Whitman killed 15 people and injured 30 more.  

My sophomore year of high school I was living in North Houston/ Spring.  However, as a kid I spent six years living in Austin, from 1984 to 1990.  Formative years - 4th through 9th grade.

I retained friendships despite the move, and one evening - more than a year after I'd moved away - a friend called.  Without much prior chit-chat, she dove in and started telling me about four girls murdered in the Northcross area, a street of strip malls and a one-story shopping mall.  I had never been in that yogurt store, but I knew the area, certainly. 

Not to be too callous - but the murder rate of Austin was and is a fraction of what Houston sees any year., so at first I wasn't paying much attention.  But she began describing what occurred, and she wasn't sensationalizing anything.   The facts were enough, and required no dramatic flair.  I didn't know if she was scared or sad or both.  Or something else.  But she was affected.  And, of course, she was a teenage girl who worked in a shop, sometimes by herself.

And that's how I found out that four girls around my age had been murdered in the back of a yogurt shop in Austin.