Archive for January 30th, 2022

Obit watch: January 30, 2022.

Sunday, January 30th, 2022

Booger.

Howard Hesseman.

In other eccentric turns, Hesseman played hippies in Richard Lester’s Petulia (1968) and on NBC’s Dragnet (he was billed as Don Sturdy back then); a patient suffering from writer’s block on The Bob Newhart Show; a psychiatrist on Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman; a pimp opposite Dan Aykroyd in Doctor Detroit (1983); and a shock rocker in This Is Spinal Tap (1984).

I didn’t watch “Head of the Class”, and, while I may have watched the original “One Day at a Time”, I’m pretty sure I had checked out by season 9. (We were actually discussing that show last night at dinner: I believe we all watched it, but with the mitigating excuse that there were only three channels at the time.)

I can’t find my favorite Dr. Johnny Fever moment online. (Johnny takes a sobriety test, and the drunker he gets, the better his reaction time gets. This is the kind of humor you could get away with in the late 1970s/early 1980s, before joyless fun suckers sucked all the fun out of everything.) And I don’t want to use the turkey drop stuff, because overused and it isn’t Thanksgiving.

So here’s a nice golden moment for you.

Edited to add 2/7: Lawrence pointed out something over the weekend that was quite a surprise to me (I should have checked his credits more closely): Howard Hessman did a “Mannix”. (“A Ransom for Yesterday“, season 8, episode 17. We watched it Saturday night: given that it was so close to the end of the series, it is actually a pretty good episode, and Hessman’s role is substantial. It also isn’t an old Army buddy episode, thank Ghu.)