Show No. 414 with guests Adrienne Barbeau, Will Ryan and Michael Schlesinger
Original Airdates: Aug. 10-13, 2018
First hour: Ed and Greg Ehrbar welcome Will Ryan and Michael Schlesinger. Will is the star, along with Nick Santa Maria, and Mike is the writer, producer and director, of The Misadventures of Biffle and Shooster—a collection of 1930s-style comedies that pay homage to The Three Stooges, Abbott and Costello, Laurel and Hardy and other vintage comedy teams from the Golden Era of Hollywood. Though filmed within the last five years, the sets, camera shots, attention to detail, and, above all, the performances of everyone involved in in the Biffle and Shooster films are all so convincing, they look and sound as if they really were unearthed from the 1930s. The DVD release The Misadventures of Biffle and Shooster includes five comedy shorts—“The Biffle Murder Case,” “Imitation of Wife,” “Schmo Boat,” “Bride of Finklestein,” and “It’s a Frame Up,” all but one of which was filmed in black and white—plus a ton of bonus features, including an additional short (“First Things Last”), more than an hour of bloopers and outtakes, and a 1962-style “reunion” interview that Will and Nick perform in character as Biffle and Shooster. (In addition, “The Biffle Murder Case,” “Imitation of Wife,” “Schmo Boat,” and “Bride of Finklestein” are available for viewing on demand on Amazon, Vudu and other streaming platforms, under the umbrella title The Adventures of Biffle and Shooster.) Also in this hour: Tony Figueroa devotes This Week in TV History to the twenty-fifth anniversary of the final episode of Cheers, which NBC 
rebroadcast in August 1993. Second hour: Singer, actress and author Adrienne Barbeau (Maude, The Fog, Escape From New York, Creepshow, Swamp Thing, Carnivale) talks to Ed about working with Beatrice Arthur; adapting her novel Love Bites as a screenplay; the interesting path that led to Adrienne’s writing career; and the secret to performing the song “No Time at All” while hanging upside down on a trapeze, which Adrienne did when she played Pippin’s grandmother, Berthe, in the national tour of Pippin. Adrienne’s memoir, There Are Worse Things I Could Do, and her novels Vampyres of Hollywood, Love Bites and Make Me Dead are now all available as eBooks through BooksBNimble.com.
This week’s program also marks the tenth anniversary of the premiere of TV Confidential. On behalf of Tony, Donna, Phil, Greg, Chris and everyone else who has helped us behind the scenes over the past ten years, our heartfelt thanks to you, our audience—not only for listening to us, but making us part of your life. We will be introducing new elements to our program in the weeks and months ahead. We look forward to sharing them with you and spending more time together.
