Tuesday, January 28, 2014

Eddie Muller to TCM

I haven't been able to find anything about it on TCM's web site, nor have I been able to find particularly specific details, but apparently it's being mentioned that Eddie Muller will be joining TCM as a more regular on-air presenter.

You may recall Muller from last June's Friday night spotlight on noir writers. Muller, from what I saw, is quite the fan of noir and I have no reason to believe that the encyclopedic knowledge of the genre he displayed back in June was at all inaccurate. Far be it from a piddly little blogger like me who has a distressing tendency to get things wrong to comment much on the work of somebody like Muller, at least not in that regard. If he had come across as stiff in his presentation, the way some of the Friday night presenters have, that would be different, but I didn't even think Muller was bad in his presentation.

I don't know exactly what Muller's duties at TCM are going to be, or how much air time he's going to get. But you can already see that change is hard for some people. I came across a comment on the TCM boards that Robert Osborne and Ben Mankiewicz ought to be concerned about their futures at TCM. This is the point where I should probably include a sentence ending with a bunch of 1s and exclamation points intermixed. For heaven's sake, Robert Osborne is turning 82 years old in the spring. If he just wanted to up and retire and enjoy the rest of his life traveling, who could possibly begrudge him? Besides, it's not as if he's going to be around forever, unless the powers that be at TCM are busily sampling all of his intros and outros to build up a vocabulary of words an animatronic Robert Osborne can use. Which, of course, makes me wonder whether the animatronic Osborne knows the word "archaic".

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