Don't Try To Eat Your Bellacino's Grinder Or Advertise Your 6th Avenue Grill During AMC's Walking Dead

When I lived near a Mancino’s franchise owned and operated by Theresa Hager in Lexington, KY, Sunday night TV meant spot-welding the TV tuner to AMC and settling in with a bottle of pop and a steak and cheese grinder from Mancino’s. I was a regular customer of Ms. Hager’s Leestown Rd Mancino’s and I hung with her even after she allowed her 15-year-old employee to attack me and call Barack Obama a “socialist” on election day 2008 when I entered Mancino’s wearing my “I voted” sticker and was asked for whom I voted. When I said “Obama” all hell broke loose in the restaurant where the TV which was usually tuned to Fox News regularly tormented me.

Incidentally, I recently found a pretty good but not great grinder at Bellacino’s in Barboursville where I was tormented by country music that was too loud and, well, too country. More on Bellacino’s later.

Anyway, Sunday night TV is no longer best enjoyed with a great sandwich – or food of any kind, for that matter. At least not this season. Not until Breaking Bad comes back this spring. You see, AMC’s current Sunday night show, Walking Dead, will ruin your appetite so even if I could find a good grinder in The Kanawha Valley I couldn’t eat it while watching AMC on Sunday night because I Walking Dead is just too gross.

And it’s been done. It’s derivative of Will Smith’s gross zombie movie, I Am Legend. 

Walking Dead is the second recent AMC programming mistake; the other one was the cancellation of Rubicon after just one season.

Now, back to my search for a great grinder. When I found out that members of the same family that started Mancino’s founded the Bellacino’s franchise, I went in search of a grinder worthy of being enjoyed on Sunday night while watching Breaking Bad. I almost found it. I say “almost” because the grinders I bought at Bellacino’s in Barboursville and Kanawha City were much better than the grinders I found at Larobi’s and Husson’s but not as good as the grinders I used to get at Mancino’s in Lexington.

I have a suggestion for Todd Forney, Suzanne Stevens and Shawn Stevens, owners of the Bellacino’s franchises in Kanawha City and Barboursville: take a drive down to Lexington, KY and get a steak and cheese grinder from Mancino’s on Leestown Rd. Forney used to work in Lexington so he should have no trouble finding the place.

By the way, I had lunch at 6^th Avenue Grill in St. Albans yesterday and I offer owners Guy and Robin Turturice and John and Amy Sowards the same advice I offer Forney, Stevens and Stevens: take a drive down to Lexington, KY, and order a Mancino’s grinder. Figure out how they make it. Bring it to St. Albans. It’ll be a hit.

Oh, and if you own a food business, don’t even think about buying ad time during AMC’s Walking Dead. Believe me, unless you are in the janitorial business or some other business where your job is to clean up messes, you don’t want your brand anywhere near the Walking Dead brand. 

Mad Men Starts Firing Chekhov's Guns But Rubicon May Be This Season's Best Show

In my 11 October 2009 post I wrote “At the very least, Mad Men writers have forgotten “Chekhov’s Gun”, the principle that "a pistol on the wall in the first act must be fired by the last act." Well, in tonight’s episode Mad Men’s writers fired the pistol on the wall marked “what happens if the agency loses their biggest account?” Layoffs. Internal squabbles among the partners. A partner (Cooper) leaves the firm in a huff because he doesn’t approve of a “Hail Mary” play Draper makes to save the company.

I’m glad Mad Men is also firing the pistol on the wall marked “Don Draper’s kids and ex-wife.” For seasons now the Mad Men writers have been showing us way too much of Draper’s immature, snobby wife (Betty) and his daughter (Sally) in ways that add nothing to the show. Well, now the writers have taken those family pistols off the wall, placed them in the hands of a child psychiatrist and started firing. Finally, the writers have noticed what viewers knew all along: that Betty is a bad mother and Sally is a normal, smart little girl who is crying out for love, guidance and attention from the selfish adults in her life.

Oh, and in tonight’s episode, Don Draper didn’t commit adultery. That doesn’t happen very often so it’s worth mentioning.

Now to what’s fast becoming my favorite TV show, Rubicon. In tonight’s episode we learned the meaning of the title Rubicon but we haven’t yet learned the significance of the four leaf clovers although we have some clues about why if you find one in your morning paper you’re likely to die.

In tonight’s episode, Rubicon’s writers took a lot of pistols off the wall and started shooting. The blue-eyed, New Jersey-born convert to radical jihad finally struck by sinking an oil tanker in Galveston Bay in an effort to choke off ¼ of the US oil supply. Will Travers and his team actually figured out what the blue-eyed terrorist was going to do but not in time to stop him.

And API chief, Truxton Spangler, who is up to his eyeballs in treason, corruption and dead bodies, finds out that several members of his team including Kale Ingram (Will’s boss) are working against him and have discovered at least some of his (Spangler’s) involvement in the blue-eyed terrorist’s strike.

I think what I appreciate about AMC’s 3 great dramas : Breaking Bad (new season starts soon) , Rubicon and Mad Men – is that they all assume the viewer is intelligent. The plots are complicated and if you step out of the room to get a coke and miss something they make no apology and don’t help you catch up by spelling anything out for you. You have to pay attention. You have to pay attention to every piece of dialogue and every peek into a character’s past or state of mind or you won’t understand that character.

If you haven’t yet seen Rubicon, you’re missing this season’s best new show.

Rubicon, Breaking Bad and Mad Men

I love AMC's "Rubicon" so much that after it airs at 9PM on Sunday night I stay up and watch 2 hours of "Mad men" (the new episode and its encore) so I can see the "Rubicon" encore. I simply can't get enough "Rubicon". AMC's motto is "Story matters here" and Rubicon is proof that a TV show doesn't need any well-known actors to make raving fans out of viewers if the story is strong.

"Rubicon" started with a bang, figuratively and literally. While his family frolicks on the lawn a guy finds a four-leaf clover in his morning paper and takes out a pistol and blows out his brains. On "Rubicon", people who see four leaf clovers either commit suicide or get death threats and electronic bugs in their homes. 

"Rubicon's" main character, Will Travers, played by James Badge Dale, works for something called API - American Poiicy Institute. API is a contractor to every branch of the US military and all the US spy agencies and has access to every secret and top secret database. When they're not spying on their bosses and co-workers or being spied on by their bosses and co-workers, Will Travers' team of analysts are tracking terrorists and trying to figure out what they're up to before there's another 9/11. 

I can't stop watching. I'm hopelessly hooked.

I'm hooked on three AMC shows. The other two I've mentioned in this bog before: "Mad Men" and "Breaking Bad". "Mad Men" is nearing season's end and "Breaking Bad" will soon return to the screen with a new season. I'll watch every new episode and I'll stay up late and watch the encore presentations. And when AMC has those marathons when they re-play every episode of "Breaking Bad" or "Rubicon", I'll watch them again. I simply have to find out why it's called "Rubicon" and why when those four-leaf clovers show up people either commit suicide or get caught up in a spynet.

And if you'd told me a few years ago that on Sunday nights I'd stay up late to watch a show about a high school science teacher who becomes the biggest meth cooker in Albuquerque and then The Southwest, I'd have said you were the one with the meth habit but, like AMC says, the story matters and as long as AMC keeps giving me strong stories, I'm going to take a pizza or a bag of potato chips and a dip to bed with me and spend as many hours with AMC's shows as AMC is willing to give me. I hope the other networks are paying attention to what's going on at AMC. If AMC's shows were part of the basic cable package across the nation, AMC would have more viewers on Sunday nights than all the other networks combined.