TV Archives - Hal Phillips

Ernie D Built the Big East, One Local College Basketball Broadcast at a Time

Hal Phillips — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 20:46:39 +0000

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (Jan. 5, 2024) — It’s never too late to mark and quantify the impact of Ernie DiGregorio. Not in New England. Not when the subject is college basketball. Yet here’s the immediate news peg, the reason to contemplate Ernie D and his attendant rabbit hole early in 2024: It was 50 years ago […]

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Universal NCAA Bids: Let’s Qualify every D1 Team for March Madness

Hal Phillips — Thu, 09 Feb 2023 15:37:46 +0000

Another bout of March Madness is nearly upon us. Alas, the current NCAA men’s basketball tournament format — 68 teams, with 8 playing off/in to create a field of 64 — begins with the worst sort of capricious, competitive folly. From the moment the play-in gambit was instituted, in 2001, the slope got very slippery […]

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When (Cartoon) Art Imitates Live (Action)

Hal Phillips — Wed, 14 Nov 2018 04:10:34 +0000

I don’t want to blow anybody’s mind, but the classic cartoon Go-Go Gophers is further evidence of a little acknowledged but fascinating trend in 1960s cartooning, whereby animators actively ripped off popular live-action television shows of the time, essentially mining/co-opting them for themes, plots and personalities. These cartoons were the stuff of my childhood — […]

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Larry Sanders: I Never Knew Ye

Hal Phillips — Sun, 15 Apr 2018 21:18:46 +0000

[Ed. This piece was originally written/posted in 2011. It’s reprinted here to mark Gary Shandling’s recent passing.] I’ve never subscribed to HBO. There may have been a month here and there when it was provided to us here in New Gloucester, by mistake, or as part of some promotion, but when the cable monolith inevitably […]

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Awfully Fond & Proud: Sesame Street’s Founding Generation

Hal Phillips — Thu, 22 Feb 2018 13:17:21 +0000

I have the distinct memory, among my very earliest, of my mother describing a new television show about to debut on Public Television. “It’s for kids exactly your age,” she told me, and so it was. Sesame Street first aired in late 1969, when I was 5. In a home where screen time was highly […]

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Palestra Tales, 40 Years in the Making

Hal Phillips — Sun, 18 Feb 2018 21:14:48 +0000

PHILADELPHIA — When we learned my daughter Clara would matriculate at the University of Pennsylvania, naturally her dad was thrilled: Here was my chance to make a proper pilgrimage to The Palestra, the most storied college basketball venue of the 20th Century. As I’ve written here before, while my hoops allegiance today favors the overtly […]

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Professor Nat Greene: Come on Down!

Hal Phillips — Sat, 19 Aug 2017 12:37:17 +0000

As yours probably does, my alma mater hits me all too frequently with some manner of e-newsletter cum fund-raising communiqué. One can hardly escape the memories stirred/jarred by all this WesContact, which is surely the way they want it. In any case, a recent MailChimp morsel revealed, among other things, that three Wesleyan faculty had […]

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International Olympic Committee Learning the Hard Truths of PGA Tour Attendance

Hal Phillips — Sun, 08 May 2016 16:47:35 +0000

The life of an elite professional golfer is one of great privilege, born of great skill. And now the International Olympic Committee is learning what organizers of PGA Tour events have known for several years: Getting the elite to schedule your event is like trying to lure multi-millionaires to time-share presentations. The news that Adam […]

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How MadMen Should Finale, Ultimately

Hal Phillips — Mon, 24 Jun 2013 20:24:10 +0000

It doesn’t honestly matter where Matthew Weiner & Co. picked up the seventh and final season of MadMen. Some might have insisted on 1969, to keep the 1960s ethos in tact — though the series actually started in the late ‘50s. Others 1974, thereby neatly bookending the Dick Nixon Era. But it doesn’t truly matter, […]

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McShane Deserves a Bust in Rogue’s Gallery

Hal Phillips — Sat, 17 Dec 2011 20:37:49 +0000

For reasons I’ve never quite understood, I’ve maintained an odd recollection of and attachment to the 1969 film, If it’s Tuesday, This Must be Belgium. It was on TV when I was a kid but no more frequently than any other junkie films that populated the late-night film archives of local Boston affiliates. Why would […]

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