I swear I’m interested in things other than text and numerals that appear onscreen during television shows, but this is so interesting I have to share.

Fringe, the new Fox show co-created by Lost visionary J.J. Abrams, debuts tomorrow night at 8 p.m. I found a leaked version of the pilot a couple of months ago, but I didn’t get around to watching it until last night. Judging from the pilot, it’s basically a mediocre X-Files retread: federal agents + paranormal investigations + sinister bureaucracy + rampant paranoia. The cast includes Lance Reddick, late of The Wire and recently of Lost, and I love him. But otherwise the whole operation seems a bit contrived.

I was, however, struck by the very unusual way that the show identifies locations onscreen. The X-Files, for instance, handled these in the typical, longstanding way. If Mulder and Scully were in, say, Virginia, a location-and-time stamp would be displayed at the bottom of the opening shot of the sequence:

Arlington, Virginia
4:32 a.m.

Fringe handles location IDs in a way I’ve never seen before, at least on television: Each one is placed into the actual scene as a physical element that the characters pass by or the camera swoops through. I find this approach to be really jarring and show-offy. Have you ever seen anything like this before? (This series of clips includes one ID of a foreign location, but that information doesn’t really spoil anything.)

It’s possible that these will have been changed in the version that will be broadcast tomorrow night, but this is how things looked in the pilot I acquired in late June.

As The New York Times reported in May, Sesame Workshop is preparing a new version of the classic ’70s children’s show The Electric Company, which I wrote about lovingly in 2006. The producers just put a short teaser for the new incarnation on YouTube. Not sure I like this, but hey, I have enormous nostalgia for the original version, and I’m not eight years old right now:

Here is the Times’s description of the reboot:

Refitted for the age of hip-hop and informed by decades of further educational research on reading, the 2009 version of “The Electric Company” is a weekly, more danceable version of its former daily self. The series, which is expected to make its debut in January, faces challenges the original never did (trying to stand out amid so much children’s programming and to shake the stigma of educational television) as well as familiar ones (trying to make reading a positive experience for youngsters).

Also in May, TV Week reported that “the show’s new format will encompass interactive online elements and community-based activities across the country, in addition to adapting a more contemporary style. … Writers for the new incarnation include Willie Reale (‘A Year With Frog and Toad’), Jeff and Craig Cox (‘Blades of Glory’) and Jerome Hairston (‘Law & Order: Criminal Intent’). The show’s musical directors are Chris Jackson, Thomas Kail and Bill Sherman, all from Broadway musical ‘In the Heights.’”

Mad Men is a terrific show for lots of reasons, and it’s rightly been praised for its obsessive re-creation of the fashions, values, and emotional landscape of the early 1960s, a transitional period between the dull, ordered Eisenhower years and the cultural chaos that would soon follow. Part of the fun of watching Mad Men is knowing that we’re watching the tail end of an era—and knowing that few of the characters have any idea what’s about to happen. The show occasionally hints at the deepening cracks in the American order of things, and I’m convinced this will be a bigger and bigger aspect of Mad Men in the episodes and seasons to come.

The show’s fixation on the seemingly superficial details of a bygone era could have overwhelmed a series with second-rate writing or a weak cast. In the hands of less talented people, it might have been nothing more than That Show With the Amazing Production Design. Instead, everything is of a piece: The art direction is so immersive that there are no clangy wrong notes to distract you from the rich psychological world the characters inhabit.

Until the show ends, that is. When the last frame flickers off the screen and the credits start to roll, careful observers—okay, just the font freaks—will notice a curious thing: The end credits are set not in the iconic sans serif used in the opening-credits sequence, and not in, say, Helvetica, which was designed in 1957 and became popular soon thereafter, but in Arial, the controversial Helvetica knockoff that Monotype cobbled together in the late 1980s to avoid paying license fees on Helvetica. The main giveaways are the “R”s and the “G”s:

Thanks mainly to Microsoft, which has bundled Arial with every version of Windows since version 3.1, this “shameless impostor” has become one of the most widely used fonts in the world, if not the most widely used. No respectable designer would ever choose to use Arial, except in small sizes on the web, where its ubiquity must be catered to. The use of Arial indicates that Mad Men’s designers, so fussy about everything else, don’t consider the closing credits to be worthy of their oversight. (You’ll also notice that the single and double quotes in the screenshot above are straight, not curly—another indication that the design staff is not involved. And jeez, I just noticed that the “r” in “Dr. Oliver” is inadvertently non-italic.)

Of course this raises a conceptual issue: Do a show’s closing credits take place outside the world of the show? If so—and it ain’t hard to make that argument—then who cares if the credits are set in a shitty font? Well, then, why are opening credits usually so carefully art directed? They usually don’t exist within the world of the show either. It’s partly because an effective opening credits sequence helps set a tone and a style. So why not sustain the tone and the style all the way to the end of the closing credits?

No one would argue that Mad Men’s producers should spend as much time or money on the closing credits as they did on the opening credits. And it’s not like they necessarily had to choose a font that existed by 1962. (The font in the opening credits looks like Trade Gothic Condensed or a similar classic gothic, but it may well be a modern cut.) My point is, it wouldn’t be hard to choose Helvetica or Futura or even EF Windsor Light Condensed from the drop-down font list in whatever program is used to create the closing credits.

This is obviously a small detail. But Mad Men is a show that matches small details as well as any series that’s ever been on the air. Why does such a pitch-perfect show end with such a jarring anachronism?

Related articles: “The Scourge of Arial” and “How to Spot Arial.”

In March 2006 I posted a stellar clip from the first episode of Chevy Chase’s defective 1993 talk show. In that clip, Chase pals around with his first guest, Goldie Hawn, and then the two of them engage in some ill-conceived slapstick shenanigans. It was truly unfortunate for all involved.

This morning I discovered another clip from that debut episode, and it’s even better than the one I originally shared here on Panopticist. The Chevy Chase Show’s misguidedness was evident in every frame of the clip I posted last year, but at least Chase had his good friend Hawn on stage with him to act as a buffer. This new clip is the first 10 minutes of the show, and Chase is entirely, existentially alone. The phrase “deer caught in the headlights” is a cliche, but it really applies here. He rubs his hands together; he repeats himself; his eyes dart around. After he’s introduced, he doesn’t have the slightest idea how to silence the crowd’s applause so he can begin his monologue; he’s almost angry that they won’t shut up. He seems acutely aware that the next hour is going to go very very badly.

This is fantastic. Pay attention to his hands.

[via YouTube member MrSitcom2.]

In 1980, the same year Airplane! was released, Robert Hays starred in a made-for-TV movie called The Girl, the Gold Watch, and Everything, a sci-fi comedy about a man who inherits a magic pocket watch that can stop time. I thought this was the coolest thing ever; what kid hasn’t dreamed of having the power to stop time, especially when that power is used to make a girl’s bikini top fall off, as happens in the movie? I’ve always remembered The Girl, the Gold Watch, and Everything, and in recent years I’ve poked around the web a few times trying to find a copy. Finally, a few weeks ago, I stumbled onto a pirated file on one of those secret BitTorrent sites. I am somewhat amazed that other people remember this silly thing and would go to the trouble of uploading it to the world.

The movie is far, far worse than I remembered, a low-budget extravaganza with an aesthetic that’s distinctly A-Team. Hays plays Kirby Winter, a lazy guy who inherits an heirloom watch—and, much to his initial chagrin, nothing else—from an uncle who was a wildly successful businessman. Kirby eventually discovers the watch’s incredible powers, which allow him to freeze a scene and physically alter it in big and small ways. (This same ability was the driving gimmick in Nicholson Baker’s erotic novel The Fermata.) With the help of a ditzy Southern damsel played by Pam Dawber, of Mork and Mindy, Kirby fights off several bad guys who want to steal the watch; he uses its powers to escape parking tickets, evade the police and the villains, and halt bullets in midair. Just like Neo in The Matrix!

In the scene below, Kirby discovers what the watch can do.

(The movie was based on a novel by John D. McDonald. A sequel, The Girl, the Gold Watch, and Dynamite, was aired the following year, but Hays and Dawber were not in the cast.)