"TOON IN WITH ME"
MeTV’s “Toon In With Me” is a live action/animated anthology series which debuted on January 1, 2021 and is still on the air.
It harkens back to locally produced children's programs that aired from the 1950s through the 1990s, with a live-action host, comedy and puppet segments in between classic Warner Bros., MGM and Fleischer Studios cartoons. The difference with "Toon In
With Me" is that its target audience is the baby boomers who grew up watching these cartoons on hosted morning shows back
in the day.
I was part of the creative team which launched the show, and over a period of almost two years, I wrote and/or produced over 100 episodes.
It’s an interesting mix of sketch/situation comedy and “cartoon curation” — think of it as Turner Classic Movies for Golden Age Animation, with scripted comedy segments acting as interstitials between the cartoons.
Here’s a few of the “Toon In With Me” shows that I wrote and produced in 2021/2022:
The Decades Network's "Through the Decades" was a daily hour-long docu-series with a unique premise -- it focused on events and news which occurred on a specific date. There were news and pop culture events to cover cover each day of the the year
In each episode of the daily series "Through The Decades", host Bill Kurtis along with Elle Pai Hong and Kerry Sayers explored the events and news that shaped our history and left a mark on our collective memories.The program aired on the Decades Network, a digital broadcast network operated by the CBS Corporation and Weigel Broadcasting. And it utilized rarely seen archival footage from CBS News and Entertainment Tonight.
A total of 365 episodes were produced for the program, which aired new episodes from 2016 to 2020 on the Decades Network.
I was a writer and producer for this program during its initial run. Here are a few segments which I produced for the program:
ABC - LOCALISH
"OUR CHICAGO: NEIGHBORHOOD WALK"
JOHN OWENS
"THROUGH THE DECADES (WITH BILL KURTIS)"
Localish (formerly Live Well Network) is a digital multicast television network owned by ABC Owned Television Stations, a division of Disney. The network features segments dedicated to telling positive stories that celebrate our communities across America.
I have produced a variety of stories for this network. Here are a few below:
"Our Chicago: Neighborhood Walk" is a feature series running on ABC 7 Chicago. The series features host Val Warner walking through one of Chicago's 77 neighborhoods with a well-known resident of that community, who guides Val to some of the neighborhood landmarks.
I created this series and have produced the following episodes:
"DECADES PRESENTS: 1968"
"Decades Presents: 1968" was a 12-part docu-series which first aired on the Decades Network in 2018. This documentary series
looked back at perhaps the most seminal year of the 20th Century -- 1968.
It was a year marked by the assassinations of MLK and RFK, a contentious presidential election, escalating anti-Vietnam War sentiment and more. "Decades Presents: 1968" looked back at this year in depth, with each episode providing stories about
the key moments and people during that year.
The series initially ran during 2018 on the Decades Network, a digital broadcast network operated by the CBS Corporation and Weigel Broadcasting.
I was the writer-producer for three of the 12 episodes: "A Year of Strife", "1968: Transportation" and "1968/The DNC".
Those complete episodes are in the player below: