"Siskel & Ebert & the Movies" (1986) More at IMDb Pro »TV series 1986-????

Ever since I was 13 years old, and I tuned into "Sneak Previews" with Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert back in 1982, I fell in love with these two guys overnight. Besides being the kings of film critics, they also had the makings of a comedy team in the Abbott and Costello vein (well, you figure out who was Abbott and who was Costello, and the answer is painfully obvious). They were so highly successful they were asked to go onto syndicated TV and do "At the Movies", which did wonders for their forever-famous thumbs and their careers, then another TV show bearing their name, which kept fans rolling in the aisles until Siskel's tragic death in 1999. By the way, replacements for "Sneak Previews" and "At the Movies" were copycats who shouldn't have been there because Siskel and Ebert were always number one. Those annoying copycats included New York's squeaky-voiced, touchy-feely Jeffrey Lyons, the nerdy Michael Medved, the mean-streaked Rex, Reed, and the bimbette Dixie Whatley who didn't really review movies, but her glamourous presence was only to lure unsuspecting viewers. Anyway, we all miss Siskel and no other critic in his chair, not even the new guy, Richard Roeper, could ever review movies the way Siskel did. Ebert does his best with Roeper, and it seems that the corpulent Ebert is now the straight man, which he always needed because he was a better spark plug with Siskel. Still, Roeper is nowhere near as bad as the four copycats in the above paragraph, and the show is still going on, as long as there is Ebert.