Eliana Willis

Jack Burns, who found fame as the hilariously pompous half of Burns and Schreiber, one of the best-known comedy teams of the 1960s and ’70s, then made another mark as a television writer, died on Monday in Toluca Lake, Calif. He was 86.Patti Lawhon, the executor of Mr. Burns’s estate, announced the death. He learned he had pancreatic cancer in 2017.Mr. Burns was a popular comic presence for nearly 40 years, beginning with a brief but successful stint as a partner of George Carlin (and at one point showing up for a brief but less successful run on “The Andy Griffith Show”). After his long and fruitful partnership with Avery Schreiber ended, he went on to produce “The Muppet Show,” writing about two dozen episodes.He also wrote for variety shows like “Hee Haw” and comedy specials starring Flip Wilson and Paul Lynde. And he lent his brash, booming voice to animated series like “Animaniacs” and “Wait Till Your Father Gets Home” as well as to an ad campaign promoting the use of safety belts. He was the voice of a crash-test dummy.But it was Burns and Schreiber that cemented his fame. The two comics became known for routines that were flecked with social satire, exquisite timing and rapid-fire repartee, exemplified by their signature “yeah/huh?/yeah/huh?” bantering.Mr. Burns’s loud know-it-all persona played well off Mr. Schreiber’s warm, low-key one, particularly when Mr. Schreiber, as he so often did, punctured Mr. Burn’s pomposity. That was never more vividly on display than in their best-known sketch, in which a blithely bigoted passenger (Mr. Burns) blathers to a world-weary taxicab driver (Mr. Schreiber).In one version of the sketch, Mr. Burns recognizes Mr. Schreiber from a previous ride and tells him that he sells tinsel for a living.Burns: Tinsel, like you put on your Christmas tree.Schreiber: Like you put on your Christmas tree.Burns: Oh, I remember now, you told me. You’re not of the Christian persuasion.Schreiber: I’m not persuaded.Burns: You’re what we call your Judaic.Schreiber: If it makes you uncomfortable, you know you can get another cab.Burns: Are you kidding? I don’t care what a man is. Besides, I couldn’t get another cab this time of night anyway.When they performed the sketch as part of a Second City revue in Manhattan in 1964, Brian O’Doherty, a critic for The New York Times, praised Mr. Burns as a “connoisseur of vulgarity who apparently can sweat at will” and Mr. Schreiber as “an underplaying comic master attached to a Stalinesque mustache.”They spent parts of a dozen years together, had their own series on ABC-TV in the summer of 1973, and broke up about 18 months after that.Mr. Burns explained their comic chemistry to The Los Angeles Times after Mr. Schreiber died in 2002: “He was Jewish. I was Irish. He was mellow and sweet and optimistic, and I was angry and cynical and pessimistic.”John Francis Burns was born on Nov. 15, 1933, in Boston. His father, Garrette, was a military officer; his mother was Mary (Hogan) Burns. After serving in the Marines in Korea in the early 1950s, he studied at the Leland Powers School of Television, Radio and Theater in Brookline, Mass.By the late 1950s he was a newsman at a Boston radio station, WEZE. When Mr. Carlin went to work there as an announcer in 1959, they struck up a friendship and soon realized that they had each developed a comedic Irish character.“Jack’s guy had more of an edge,” Mr. Carlin said in his autobiography, “Last Words” (2009, with Tony Hendra). “These two guys would talk together for hours. They were great characters for saying things you weren’t quite willing to say yourself.”They became a team only after they left separately for another station, KXOL, in Fort Worth; Mr. Burns remained a newsman, and Mr. Carlin was a disc jockey. They performed locally, then left for Hollywood. Success came quickly.Burns and Carlin, as the act was known, were booked at top nightclubs around the country, appeared on Jack Paar’s “Tonight” show and recorded an album at the Hollywood nightclub Cosmo Alley — although it was released (in 1963, a year after they broke up) as “Burns and Carlin at the Playboy Club Tonight.”After the split, Mr. Burns joined the Compass Players, an improvisational troupe, then moved to its successor, The Second City, where he met Mr. Schreiber and developed the taxicab sketch.During their run as a comedy team, they pursued other jobs. In 1965, Mr. Burns was cast on “The Andy Griffith Show” as Deputy Sheriff Warren Ferguson, replacing Don Knotts, who had played Deputy Sheriff Barney Fife since the series began in 1960. Mr. Burns had hoped that he would be able to adapt his onstage style to the character and not remind viewers of the beloved Mr. Knotts.But it did not work out, and Mr. Burns lost the role after 11 episodes. Mr. Griffith blamed himself, telling The New York Times, “We tried to force Jack to do those wild, peculiar things that Knotts did — and he was willing to try — but we made a mistake.”Mr. Burns was a guest star on various TV shows from the late 1960s until the late ’90s. He also found a successful second career off camera.For a decade he was integral to the Muppet empire. In addition to his association with “The Muppet Show,” which began in 1976 and earned him two Emmy nominations, he collaborated with Jerry Juhl to write “The Muppet Movie” (1979) and was a writer on two straight-to-video Muppet productions, both released in 1985.He was also as a producer, writer and script supervisor for the ABC comedy series “Fridays.” In 1981, when the guest host, Andy Kaufman, famously started a fight during a sketch with Michael Richards, a cast member, Mr. Burns, who had been off camera, rushed to the stage and traded punches with Mr. Kaufman.One of the show’s producers was later quoted as saying that Mr. Kaufman had planned the brawl as an improvisation and that Mr. Richards had been prepared for it.Mr. Burns, who retired nearly 20 years ago, leaves no immediate survivors.His role as the voice of a crash-test dummy, Vince, was one of his most enduring, running from 1985 to 1999. In the ads — promoting safety belts for the federal Department of Transportation — Lorenzo Music portrayed Larry, another dummy.In one ad, Vince says: “For years, I’ve been eating steering wheels. For what?”Larry: “To prove how safety belts save lives.”Vince: “But thousands die every year in car accidents because they don’t buckle up.”Larry (gesturing to Vince not to put on his belt): “Vince, we’re dummies. We don’t wear safety belts.” More

After several years of family drama and monarchal mayhem, the Netflix series “The Crown” will come to a close after five seasons, the series’s Twitter account said on Friday.The announcement said that Imelda Staunton will play Queen Elizabeth II in the show’s final installment.Imelda Staunton will play Queen Elizabeth II in the fifth and final season of The Crown. pic.twitter.com/hUOob58A9p— The Crown (@TheCrownNetflix) January 31, 2020
“I have loved watching ‘The Crown’ from the very start,” Ms. Staunton said in a statement that praised both actresses who previously played the queen, Claire Foy and Olivia Colman. “I am genuinely honored to be joining such an exceptional creative team and to be taking the crown to its conclusion.”“The Crown,” which debuted in 2016 and focuses on Queen Elizabeth’s II’s reign and family, was created by the writer and producer Peter Morgan. In a statement on Friday, he said that the time had come to end the series.“At the outset I had imagined ‘The Crown’ running for six seasons but now that we have begun work on the stories for season five it has become clear to me that this is the perfect time and place to stop,” said Mr. Morgan, who also wrote the script for “The Queen,” the 2006 movie that earned Helen Mirren a best actress Oscar. “I’m grateful to Netflix and Sony for supporting me in this decision.”Cindy Holland, vice president of original content for Netflix, said in a statement that she fully supported Mr. Morgan’s creative decision and that she was “excited to see how he, Imelda Staunton and the cast and crew of Season 5, bring this landmark series to a fitting and spectacular end.”The show has cost Netflix nearly $150 million, which is about twice as much as the royal family costs British tax payers each year, and putting together the story line is no easy task. It involves a team of researchers who once a week come to Mr. Morgan’s London home for script meetings, based in part on documents they have attained.There is an expectation to “deliver TV on an annual basis, but what we’re making now is feature-film-quality stuff, and no one ever expected you to make 10 feature films a year — because you’d die,” he told The New York Times last November.Regularly recasting the roles of Elizabeth, Philip and other royals in efforts to reflect their advancing ages, was always part of the plan. “I think that the longest you can believe an actor in an aging part is about 20 years,” Mr. Morgan said in November. “Right from the start, we decided that if it all worked and kept going, we would recast every two seasons.”Ms. Foy famously kicked off the first two seasons, playing a young Elizabeth before she inherited the crown and in the early years of her transformation into a powerful global figure. Her star turn won a Golden Globe in 2017 and an Emmy in 2018.In November, Netflix released the third season starring Ms. Colman as the queen in the 1960s and 1970s, navigating political and economic issues as well as handling complicated family dynamics with her eldest children, Prince Charles and Princess Anne, and the death of her uncle and former king, Prince Edward. Ms. Colman, who won a Golden Globe this year for her performance, will continue in the role again in the fourth season.Since the show began, it has been widely recognized, winning multiple awards at the Emmys, Screen Actors Guild Awards and the Golden Globes, where it won in 2017 for best television drama.A release date has not yet been announced for the fourth season, but it will cover Margaret Thatcher’s premiership and most likely will also include Prince Charles’s relationship with Princess Diana, as evidenced by paparazzi photos.It was not immediately clear how far season five will go into the modern era of the royal family, especially the most recent news-grabbing headlines.Last year, Prince Andrew was banished from public life by the queen after he gave a disastrous interview to the BBC about his ties to the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, who hanged himself in a Manhattan jail in August while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.Earlier this month, Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan, unexpectedly announced their plans to “step back” from royal duties. They will lose most of the privileges and perks of royalty once they give up their full-time status and forsake Britain for an uncertain future in Canada and the United States. More

What’s StreamingBOJACK HORSEMAN Stream on Netflix. After six seasons swilling whiskey and deadpanning, the sweater-wearing title character of this animated Hollywood satire is putting down the reins. The series has followed Bojack, an anthropomorphic horse voiced by Will Arnett, as he navigates a fictional version of Hollywood, where he lives as a has-been 1990s sitcom star. Toward the end of the most recent batch of episodes, he accepted a job at Wesleyan University. How he adjusts to collegiate life will be one of the questions that the final installments — which hit Netflix on Friday — will answer.TED BUNDY: FALLING FOR A KILLER Stream on Amazon. Those interested in learning just how wicked the serial killer Ted Bundy was have no shortage of Bundy-related programming to choose from — Netflix released both a feature film and a documentary series about him last year — but this Amazon documentary series promises a fresh perspective, looking at his behavior against the backdrop of 1970s feminism. It focuses on the misogyny of Bundy’s crimes, and includes the voices of some of the women affected by them. Those women include Elizabeth Kendall, who in the early 1980s published a book about her relationship with Bundy.THE PRODIGY (2019) Stream on Amazon and Hulu. Early intelligence comes with a heavy helping of crazy in “The Prodigy,” a horror movie about a gifted youngster who is possessed by the spirit of a serial killer. As he grows up, Miles (Jackson Robert Scott) exhibits increasingly disturbed behavior (one example involves a classmate and a wrench). The plot involves his parents (Taylor Schilling and Peter Mooney) racing to determine what’s wrong with him before things become too dire. It all adds up to “a ho-hum horror movie given a mild boost by its credible performances,” Jeannette Catsoulis wrote in her review for The New York Times.What’s on TVSPIDER-MAN: FAR FROM HOME (2019) 8 p.m. on Starz. Peter Parker takes a break from New York to web-sling around Venice and London in this most recent “Spider-Man” movie. Parker is, of course, the alter-ego of the nimble Spider-Man, who for the past several years has been played by the British actor Tom Holland. Holland’s version of the hero is a high schooler, and in this movie, he goes on a school vacation to Europe, where his pursuit of love with MJ (Zendaya) is rudely interrupted by a bearded villain played by Jake Gyllenhaal, among other loud things. “As is often the case with these movies, a smaller, livelier entertainment is nested inside the roaring, clanking digital machinery,” A.O Scott wrote in his review for The Times. “The filmmakers try to enliven the big fights and action sequences by injecting a bit of self-consciousness about the illusion-driven craft they pursue, and a few sequences take place in an austere, dreamlike virtual realm where visually interesting things are allowed to happen. For a little while, anyway.” More

Fred Silverman, who as a top executive at CBS, ABC and finally NBC was one of the most powerful people in the three-network era — a force behind the success of beloved series like “All in the Family,” “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” “M*A*S*H,” “Laverne & Shirley” and “Hill Street Blues” — died on Thursday at his home in the Pacific Palisades section of Los Angeles. He was 82.Julia Rossen, of the public relations concern 42West, announced his death in a news release. She said the cause was cancer.At 25, Mr. Silverman was made head of daytime programming for CBS, and in 1970, in his early 30s, he landed the network’s top programming job, putting him in charge of the prime-time schedule.CBS, known in the 1960s for relatively conventional comedies like “The Andy Griffith Show” and “The Beverly Hillbillies,” was looking to freshen its image, and Norman Lear and Bud Yorkin’s groundbreaking “All in the Family,” which tackled contemporary issues like bigotry with scalding humor, became a key component of that strategy.The show was originally made for ABC, but when that network rejected it, Mr. Lear took it to CBS, where Mr. Silverman and other executives watched a pilot.“I couldn’t believe I was seeing what I was seeing,” Mr. Silverman recalled in an oral history recorded in 2001 for the Television Academy Foundation. “Compared to the crap that we were canceling, this was really setting new boundaries.”He credited Robert Wood, president of CBS at the time, with putting the show on the air in January 1971. But it was Mr. Silverman who rescued it from its original, deadly Tuesday night time slot, stacking it on Saturday nights with another savvy series, “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.”“These were the first building blocks,” Mr. Silverman said, leading to other successes like the spinoffs “Maude,” from “All in the Family,” and “Rhoda,” from “Mary Tyler Moore.”In a message on Twitter on Thursday, Norman Lear wrote, “There would be no ALL IN THE FAMILY or MAUDE without Fred Silverman.”Mr. Silverman was lured to ABC, which had long trailed the other two networks in the ratings race, in mid-1975. He was named president of ABC Entertainment, the division that developed programming and talent. By the time he left in 1978 to become NBC’s president and chief executive, ABC was No. 1 in the Nielsen rankings, on the strength of shows like “Laverne & Shirley” (a spinoff of “Happy Days”), not to mention the landmark mini-series “Roots” (1977).Mr. Silverman failed to work his magic at NBC, which had fallen to third place in the ratings, despite some successes, like the police drama “Hill Street Blues,” which premiered in January 1981. He resigned in mid-1981 and turned to producing his own shows.His hits as a producer included “Matlock,” which made its debut in 1986 and ran for 181 episodes; “Jake and the Fatman,” which ran from 1987 to 1992; “In the Heat of the Night” (1988-95); “Diagnosis Murder” (1993-2001); and a series of made-for-TV Perry Mason movies.Mr. Silverman was famed for his programming instincts, but he admitted that he had backed some clunkers. There was, for instance, a short-lived 1972 comedy called “Me and the Chimp,” about a family that has a chimpanzee. The show, he acknowledged in a 1976 interview with The New York Times, “represented a new depth in television programming.”Fred Silverman was born on Sept. 13, 1937, in New York City to William and Mildred Silverman and grew up in Rego Park, Queens. His father was a television and radio service man, his mother a homemaker. Fred graduated from Forest Hills High School in Queens.As a child he was drawn to the radio, especially dramas, and he collected radio scripts.“When I was 10, 11, 12 years old, I used to go down to the studios and made friends with all the porters,” he said in the oral history. “They would collect scripts for me. I think at one point I had about four or five thousand scripts.”Mr. Silverman earned a bachelor’s degree at Syracuse University and a master’s in television and theater arts in 1959 from Ohio State University. (He later donated his boyhood collection of scripts to Ohio State.)His master’s thesis was a 406-page analysis of ABC’s programming from 1953 to 1959, and it helped get him a job at WGN-TV in Chicago in what was called the continuity department, “basically screening commercials and approving copy for live TV,” as he related in the oral history.“So I was a censor, basically,” he said.From there he went to WPIX in New York before landing at CBS.Mr. Silverman was pivotal not only to important shows, but also to careers. He told of once being impressed by a comedian who was performing at a dinner at which Mr. Silverman was receiving an award. It was David Letterman, and in 1980, while at NBC, Mr. Silverman gave him his first talk show. It was a morning show, and it didn’t last long, but it helped elevate Mr. Letterman’s profile.Mr. Silverman is survived by his wife, Cathy, and two children, Melissa and Billy.Though Mr. Silverman was associated with countless prime-time shows, he also had a hand in a number of daytime series in his initial job as head of daytime programming for CBS.In the oral history, he told of once wanting to make a scary animated show about kids in a haunted house, with a dog as a background character. His superiors resisted, thinking the idea was too frightening. After the rejection, he recalled, he was on a plane listening to music when Frank Sinatra’s “Strangers in the Night” came on.“I hear him say, ‘Scooby-dooby-doo,’” Mr. Silverman said, slightly misrendering Sinatra’s “doo-bee-doo-bee-doo,” “and it’s at that point I said: ‘That’s it. We’ll take the dog, we’ll call it ‘Scooby-Doo’ and move him up front, and it’ll be the dog’s show.’”“Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!” premiered in September 1969 and became an enduring franchise. More

No matter how much free time you have this weekend, we have TV recommendations for you. Come back every week for new suggestions on what to watch.This Weekend I Have … an Hour, and I’ve Seen Every Episode of ‘Antiques Roadshow’‘Fake or Fortune?’When to watch: Now, on Amazon (three seasons) or Netflix (one season).If you like your shows British and enriching, try this series about art and investigations. On each episode, Fiona Bruce and Philip Mould attempt to authenticate paintings attributed to famous artists. A collector wants to know if he really owns a Renoir. An auction house thinks it has a Rembrandt, but isn’t sure. How did a Chagall wind up there? Some Old Master from the 16th century painted this part of a church, but who in particular? Episodes are thorough and surprisingly zippy, with the pacing of a detective show and the same “send it to the lab” analyses, but with added doses of European and art history.… an Hour, and Communication Skills Are Everything‘The Crystal Maze’When to watch: Friday at 7 p.m., on Nickelodeon.This family game show, hosted by Adam Conover, requires everyone to work together, sometimes with happy and exciting results and sometimes with “hm, have you considered family therapy?” vibes. Puzzles can be hard! Contestants move through different escape room-style challenges, earning more or less time inside a sphere that showers them with prizes at the end. Think the Nickelodeon game shows of the ’80s and ’90s, like “Legends of the Hidden Temple” or “Finders Keepers,” or especially “Nick Arcade.”… 6 Hours, and I Enjoy Both History and Netherworlds‘The Ghost Bride’When to watch: Now, on Netflix.Based on the book by Yangsze Choo, this six-part series (in Mandarin, with English subtitles, or dubbed) is a frothy historical romance with a supernatural streak and a murder mystery. Pan Li Lan (Huang Peijia) lives in Malacca, Malaysia, in the 1890s, and now that she is 20, she’s practically an old maid. When a wealthy family suggests that she marry its recently deceased son as a “ghost bride,” she thinks it could solve several problems at once — until she gets sucked in to the tumultuous world of afterlife drama. This show is definitely not for everyone, but if you watched “Cable Girls” and thought “I wish this also had a minotaur-like monster, handsome ghosts and an entire shadow realm,” it will be for you. More