Robert Osborne reminder

A brief reminder that Robert Osborne is not going to be presenting tonight's lineup on TCM. In fact, he's no longer going to be presenting movies on Friday nights at all. Osborne wrote a letter to discuss his somewhat reduced hosting duties going forward.

As I pointed out a week and a half ago, the TCM taping schedule seems to be just right for taping one month's worth of prime time intros in five taping days, which would be a Monday-Friday week for the rest of us. Is you do the math and see that Osborne is taking off Fridays (roughly four Fridays a month) and half of Sunday (roughly equivalent to two nights' worth of movies), you'll see that Osborne is cutting out about the equivalent of six (sometimes seven) nights' worth of intros each month, which oh-so-conveniently comes out to about a fifth of the month, which ought to enable Osborne to tape his work for the month over the course of four days instead of five.

Fridays this month are devoted to a look at movies dealing with American politics, kicking off with an A Night at the Movies documentary, which I presume will be similar to the one they did for genres like horror and epics. (That would be the sort of thing that's a reasonable introduction for the uninitiated, but cursory for the sort of people who read blogs like this and are likely to have seen most of the movies in this series.) According to TCM's press release, Wolf Blitzer is going to be coming in from CNN (who once again conveniently just happen to share the same corporate overlord as TCM) to discuss the films on October 26. I was under the impression he'd be on every Friday night this month, but apparently not.