Zeitgeisters, It’s harsh to judge an artist, an act or any on-going entertainment by the latter part of her/his/its career. Madonna isn’t really Hung Up , just as Sting isn’t only Sting he’s also The Police and HAPPY DAYS isn’t the final years when Richie got posted to Greenland. You will have your own examples, I am sure. This brings me slowly and contrived-ly to Fred MacMurray, of television’s MY THREE SONS (1960-72). MacMurray played widower Steve Douglas. Steve Freakin’ Douglas with the cardigans, pipe and widow’s-peak coiff; he had a “laid-back” but firm way of raising his Three Sons. His supposedly likeable persona, kind of a cut-rate Jimmy Stewart, was phoney as. I’m not referring to the man himself (of whom I know little) but his actual performance as the Douglas patriarch, that, to modern eyes, seems at best phoned in. At worst he comes across like the most distant and uninvolved of the television fathers of that era. Check Steve Douglas’s eyes, people, he doesn’t giv...