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The Secret Life of Gomer Pyle

Gomer Pyle’ Star Marries Male Partner. I caught this Internet headline at 3 a.m. this morning in my typically sleepless state. 82 year-old Jim Nabors decides to ‘officially’ come out of the closet and tie the knot with his partner of almost four Hawaiian decades. To steal a line from Dennis Miller in reference to similar revelations from i-less center square and Ted Knight co-star Jm J Bullock: “Consider those tea leaves read, Jimbo.”

The blurb did lead me to a good and overwhelmingly appropriate Pyle episode on YouTube: The Secret Life of Gomer Pyle. Our favorite Marine finds himself on a break from rug-hooking classes one Sunday down by the Santa Monica pier and runs in to two unscrupulous photographers who dupe him in to posing for shots that they later insert bikini clad babes in to for a girly magazine.”Sunday Is Fun-Day” is the the article, and who should be perusing said periodical the very next weekend (the publishing industry had a faster turnaround time back then) than Pyle’s tightly-wound drillmaster, Sgt Carter. “Look at this guy,” he remarks enviously to the innocuous Corporal Boyle, “..and a Marine, too. Some guys get all the luck.” And then .. wait for it .. “Heyyyyy…. WAIT A MINUTE …”

The episode got me considering a lot of things, including whether Vince Sutton, who portrayed Sgt Carter and died of a sudden heart attack at fifty, was a Lee Strasberg graduate. That brand of elevated blood pressure is difficult to pull from thin air. Also relevant was the simple fact that they don’t make them like this anymore. While one could argue that we’re living in the golden age of episodic television, you can’t find the 2013 equivalent of “Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.” All of which leads me to something I’ve been wanting to get off my chest for some time but, due to lack of blogging and general expressive apathy, have not: What’s up with the popularity of this “Homeland” show? A recent grievance with the reprehensible Time Warner Cable led to my receiving six free months of Showtime and I figured “at least I can watch that Mandy Patinkin series that Obama digs.” And … What a colossal piece of shit.

I don’t know what’s so discouraging, the overwhelming popularity of this program (although, as spoofed in a recent SNL skit, it is largely among white people – our President not withstanding) or that several ‘insiders’ have proclaimed it the most accurate portrayal yet of inner-CIA workings. This certainly won’t relieve my habit of late-night waking. Apparently the agency assigned to protecting this country from foreign threat is lined with ginger-haired, bawling chicks who are in insult to bi-polar disorder and get re-hired at the drop of a hat after weekly incidents of compromising national security. The show flat-out sucks.

Though it may seem counter-intuitive to some I’m certain that the cultural drain circles have become faster and smaller in the decades since Gomer Pyle aired on CBS in 1964. And while there’s some consolation in a long-closeted television actor being able to marry in the twilight of his years, it’s really just a token of progressiveness in what is the final drain approach. Or maybe that Homeland show just got under my skin ..

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