Circle Takes the Square, Florence Henderson Takes a Hit, and The Paul Lynde Halloween Special Takes Your Soul

Every October for nearly a decade straight, until I lost access to cable, I would unwrap a new VHS tape and park it in my VCR (lol OLD!! wtf) and leave it there for the duration of the month or until I'd manage to fill it up with 6-to-8 hours of holiday programming. Months later when my craving returned, I would revisit my growing collection and soak up as much creepy cathode nonsense as I could to carry me through the spring and summer months.

In the early years of this practice I was largely indiscriminate, setting the VCR timer to grab anything even remotely Hallowesque. The resulting surplus of Big Wolf on Campus episodes eventually convinced me to be a little more selective with my archiving, which made the whole process a little more challenging, but also equally rewarding. There's a goldmine of endearing, thematically rich Halloween TV specials waiting to be discovered if you're willing to wade through all of the Travel Channel's Most Haunted Outhouses and Phone Booths specials and Emeril's Gourmet Gourds on the Food Network.

The Paul Lynde Halloween Special is not one of them.



You'll find no perennial viewing material here; just a cantankerous game show host in a bat bow-tie and a musical performance by a Florence Henderson so visibly doped she doesn't notice that she's about to inhale the camera.

Along the way, Carol Burnett Show alumni like Betty White and Tim Conway show up to remind people that it's only 1976 and they're not dead yet, even though their careers might as well be. Oh yeah, and KISS make their television debut lip-synching to "Detroit Rock City," displaying chest hair so substantial the likes of which would not be seen again on network TV until Knight Rider.

Pop cultists have for years pointed to the Star Wars Holiday Special as the single worst piece of programming ever aired, but that's only because the Paul Lynde Halloween Special has been missing since its original broadcast date. Rescued from Lynde's derelict Winnebago in Fullerton, the only surviving master tape has now been "restored" and digitized so that all future generations can enjoy 51 incessant minutes of Lynde's snide quips backed up by disco numbers.

Hype O-Negative

The news that Six Feet Under creator Alan Ball plans to make some additional dips into the horror genre is probably very, very exciting to all horror and Alan Ball fans, if by "all horror and Alan Ball fans" you mean horror or Alan Ball fans who haven't actually seen his first fright effort, True Blood; purportedly a dramedic series about vampires living among humans, but really just a means of upping the number of crappy southern accents on cable television.

Like a lot of HBO series, this is probably one of those shows that's intentionally inaccessible and unrewarding to viewers at its outset in order to generate cult cred and a second-season stride, which might be a good strategy if it didn't require people to even consider that Anna Paquin might one day be tolerable. In daring such an assumption, HBO makes an ass of you and umption.

Admittedly, the three minutes of the show I was able to stand before severing the power cord from my television and shoving it into all of the orifices I use for breathing probably wasn't enough to accurately convey how the series will ultimately shape up, but if an Emmy nominee and Oscar-winner can't make vampires interesting in three minutes, maybe he dug up the wrong idea.