Did anyone watch any of the classic made-for-TV movies that they showed on the TVLand cable channel recently?

Are there any classic made-for-TV movies that don't have super-serious subject matter?

love to see any of these classix again:

Diary of a Teenage Hitchhiker (whatever you do: don't get in the car w/Dick Van Patten!)
Gargoyles
Night Terror
Terror Trilogy (Karen Black tour de force)
The Night Stalker
Outrage (Robert Culp gets PISSED at juvenile delinquents)
Sweet Hostage
Dawn: Portrait of a Teenage Runaway

more to come!

While An Early Frost might mark TV's first attempt at making a drama about AIDS, there were other, earlier TV movies that were about gay relationships: That Certain Summer (1973, Martin Sheen and Hal Holbrook!) and A Question of Love (1978, Gena Rowlands and Jane Alexander!). I'd rather see those two.

I'm miffed, I had no idea this was on! Everytime I've flipped to tvland they have on reruns of Who's the Boss or something ridiculous like that.

this is being remade as a series for next season (by some of the people who worked on the X Files, which was heavily influenced by the Night Stalker to begin with)

Also Maybe I'll Come Home In The Spring, with Sally Field (post-Flying Nun but pre-most everything else) is one of my favorites. She plays a hippie-esque college student who comes home to her uptight middle-class family, and conflicts ensue.

Don't know if either was on TVLand. I'm not even sure I get TVLand.

After decades--too cheap to pay for the Kojack box set, and no interest in the subsequent series anyway--finally got to rewatch The Marcus-Nelson Murders, the show's pilot, but when first aired just a made-for-TV movie like any other. Someone posted it on YouTube a couple of months ago.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5A-M5HjIsRE

Almost every bit as good as I remembered. (The murders at the beginning are a bit clunky.) So many excellent performances: Gene Woodbury as Lewis, the black teenager who gets a phony confession beaten out of him; Marjoe Gortner as Teddy, a hapless junkie and the real murderer; Roger Robinson, Jose Ferrer, Alan Garfield, and others. Savalas is good too, not yet the easily caricatured detective of the TV series. (He does preview that a couple of times, most memorably in his take-charge declaration that "I think we got one too many murders on this baby.") I don't think its treatment of race has aged a bit, right down to the family celebration for Lewis's (premature) release, where one of his relatives disdainfully shakes Kojack's hand and walks away. Not a lollipop to be seen.

Amazing stuff you remember, when you often can't remember where you set down the remote: just before finally confessing, Teddy and Kojack make small talk and Teddy asks him about last night's Yankees game. "He's going to ask him how Joe Pepitone did, I know it!" Which he did

The Marcus-Nelson Murders really is great. iirc it's set in 1963, the year of the real life murder case it's based on (which is why the Joe Pepitone reference makes sense). Would've been interesting if they had sustained the tone of this pilot going into the regular series, but it would probably have been too intense over the long haul. I've seen the entire series and I think it maintains a respectable level of quality through the final season (disregarding a couple of duds per season). But it's never quite as dark as the pilot.

'63 sounds right--the Miranda decision comes in '66, and the film is about a case that was supposed to be central to that (fictionalized to some degree, a prologue states). I really don't remember anything about the series, so I shouldn't characterize it, but my sense is that it became a pop-culture thing, filled with cheesy moments like the one I quoted. I knew I knew Kojack's ex-girlfriend at the beginning, but couldn't place her till afterwards: Lorraine Gary from Jaws. Gene Woodbury didn't do much of anything after Marcus-Nelson, which is unfortunate, he's so good. As I mentioned on a different thread, Joseph Sargent, a big made-for-TV director, went on to The Taking of Pelham One Two Three.

Thing is, it doesn't look like 1963 at all; it looks like 1973. From that site that IDs movies in cars, this is a '73 Oldsmobile:

http://www.imcdb.org/i001317332.jpg

And the people dress and talk like it's 1973. I guess they just decided to keep the details the same but not bother with period details (beyond MLK's speech...and Joe Pepitone).

Gary was cast in Jaws because of this excellent movie, btw.

George Savalas does have much shorter hair in it (not playing Stavros), maybe he's the only one who took the period setting seriously.

What's the site that IDs cars in movies? Sounds interesting

This site:

https://www.imcdb.org/

In my post above, I said it "IDs movies in cars"--that'd be even more interesting.

Wow that site's amazing. I searched Alfa Romeo Montreal, one of the all-time cool cars, and they had 25 examples of it (and of course Jay Leno owns one haha).

The American Graffiti page has 100+ images:

https://www.imcdb.org/movie_69704-American-Graffiti.html

Pardon the digression but I had to also look up the Toyota 2000GT, of which only 337 were ever sold, very few ever shipped to the US. Most famous appearance as James Bond's car in You Only Live Twice. Pops up in a 1969 episode of Hawaii Five-O. The site shows those two appearances plus a number of others.