Bill’s new TV series was a product of the digital age, apropos for the man whose face had, a decade before, launched Priceline.com into the stratosphere. The Internet was opening new avenues of communication almost daily, or so it seemed, and the series was adapted from a Twitter feed called @shitmydadsays, launched in August 2009 by writer Justin Halpern. Halpern used the feed to tweet a stream of random musings from his father, Sam—grumpy, sardonic, funny, expletive-filled rants that quickly gained an online following (including actor Robb Corddry). By November 2010, @shitmydadsays had amassed nearly 2 million followers and landed Halpern a book deal (from HarperCollins) and a television development deal from Warner Brothers. The studio announced in February 2010 that Bill would star in the pilot episode for a planned CBS sitcom called $#*! My Dad Says. (The title was modified for television.) @shitmydadsays was the first Twitter account in the history of the Internet to be translated into a television show.
In May, CBS let its advertisers know that it was adding $#*! My Dad Says to its fall schedule, with Bill in the lead role of seventy-two-year-old Dr. Edison Milford “Ed” Goodson III and Ryan Devlin playing his son, Henry. Will Sasso, Nicole Sullivan, and Tim Bagley rounded out the cast. Bill’s old pal, Ben Folds, composed the show’s opening theme song, called “Your Dogs.”
(In a case of life imitating art, Bill’s personal Twitter feed, @williamshatner, would prove to be extremely popular, accruing over 2.5 million followers—not including the author, as I was blocked by Shatner on Twitter after he learned about this book.)
“CBS was basically like, ‘We’ll make the pilot IF you get one of these ten actors—they sent us a list and Shatner was on the list and it just seemed like a really interesting choice,” said Justin Halpern, who helped develop the show and was credited as one of its four co-creators. “John Lithgow was on the list, and also people who were never going to do it, like Gene Hackman.” $#*! My Dad Says began shooting that summer, with Jonathan Sadowski replacing Ryan Devlin as Henry Goodson.
“The thing that was most shocking to me was that [Shatner] has an insane work ethic,” Halpern said. “He was doing two other shows while he was doing ours, and he was having to perform in front of a live audience, and he was like eighty at the time. It sounds clichéd, but he was like the first one there and the last one to leave.
“He always knew his shit, and he is older, so there were times we would have to pre-shoot some stuff because it’s just too rigorous to go through a whole shoot in one night in front of a live audience,” he said. “But he would memorize a lot of shit in a little amount of time. He’s got an ego, like any big actor, but he is also very self-aware of what makes him funny and so we never had a problem.”1
$#*! My Dad Says premiered on September 23, 2010, to nearly 13 million viewers, a strong ratings number, but the critics were mostly harsh in their assessments of the show (and often kinder to Bill regarding his performance).
“Shatner is occasionally quite funny as a curmudgeonly retired doctor whose relationship with his son (Jonathan Sadowski) never quite developed,” wrote the Philadelphia Daily News. “The problem is that neither has the show, which at its best plays like a series of one-liners—essentially what those who followed Justin Halpern’s more graphically titled Twitter feed got, but in Shatner’s voice—and at its worst, tries, maybe a little too hard, to make us feel something for the guy delivering them.”2 Bill’s Ed Goodson was, said the Boston Globe, “Archie Bunker without the satirical spin, and without the overt prejudices that made Archie so edgy.”3 The San Francisco Chronicle: “Face it, $#*! My Dad Says was a bad idea from inception to pilot.”4 Other critics called it “dismal” (Slant magazine),5 “hopelessly old school” (San Jose Mercury News),6 and “irrelevant, a wholly generic sitcom so divorced from its source material that you have to pinch yourself to remember it had anything to do with the Internet, or with the world after 1985” (New York Times).7
Despite the criticism, the show’s viewership never drastically fell off, but CBS announced in May 2011 that it was cancelling the series after one season and eighteen episodes. “For as crappy as that show was, and it really wasn’t Bill’s fault at all, I think Bill did exactly what we were hoping he would do,” Halpern said. “The experience was amazing. I think it was the tone of [the series]. I don’t think that was the best. I don’t think a multi-camera sitcom was the best format for that character . . . because he’s a guy who’s not trying to be funny . . . and it was very much a punch line setup. It doesn’t capture what that character is. And also, you can’t go as dark as you need to go.” Halpern said that even his father, Sam, upon whom Shatner’s Ed was based, wasn’t a fan: “My dad could not have given less of a shit. He did not love that show. He didn’t really care.”8
Bill didn’t appear to be too broken up over the show’s cancellation, though he did chide CBS for dropping the axe. “It was too popular. And we were getting it right,” he said. “I don’t know what happened in CBS’s mind. I’m told that it’s in the top ten in Canada, and here it was in the top twenty most of the time. So, I don’t understand that. I went into the series with tremendous trepidation, and I would look at it the same way now, even more so. I can create the things I am creating without having that onus on me.”9
He took some solace following the show’s cancellation in being honored with an honorary degree by McGill University, regaling the assembled crowd at his alma mater’s graduation ceremonies with tales of growing up in Montreal, directing McGill’s Red and White Revue (“I made better use of the sofa than the desk”) and his long Hollywood career. “Don’t be afraid to make an ass of yourself,” he proclaimed. “I do it all the time and look what I got.”
Earlier that year, Bill was back in the recording studio working on his fourth album, called Seeking Major Tom. It was released on October 11, 2011, and featured Bill covering twenty space-themed songs—including David Bowie’s “Space Oddity,” Roger McGuinn’s “Mr. Spaceman,” and Sting’s “Walking on the Moon”—in his by-now-familiar spoken-voice shtick.
(The album’s title was a takeoff on “Major Tom,” the character in Bowie’s anthemic “Space Oddity” who would reappear in other Bowie songs. Its cover illustration featured Bill, in a spacesuit, floating in orbit above the Earth with a rocket and a satellite whizzing by on either side of him.)
Bill was backed on Seeking Major Tom by a bevy of A-list musicians, including Sheryl Crow, Steve Howe, Johnny Winter, Ritchie Blackmore, Peter Frampton, Dave Davies, pal Brad Paisley, and drummer Carmine Appice. For good measure, he threw in a spoken-word cover of Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody,” though he’d never heard the song before recording it, and shot a strange video to accompany the tune.
“A lot of people loved it and some people didn’t like it,” Bill said of the album. Reviews ranged from the enthusiastic to the snarky. “Although the variety of supporters helps, Seeking is at least eight songs too long; the concept and Shatner’s style often wear out their welcome,” sniped one critic. “Shatner’s desire to be taken seriously as an artist seems to be at odds with his penchant for self-parody.”10
“Seeking Major Tom is one of the most epic musical moments of 2011, and it works because—like the original Star Trek series or Shatner’s recent masterful acting performance on Boston Legal—it has replayability,” wrote TheTune.net. “There’s no one in the world at all like William Shatner, and I’d hazard that there never will be—therefore, there will never be a cover album at all like this one.”11 Popmatters was more succinct: “Seeking Major Tom is a sleek dog that’s fallen in the swimming pool and doesn’t deal well with the extra weight. It stumbles awkwardly around the kitchen knocking over chairs, stopping every once in a while to shake its paws miserably.”12
Bill had better luck that year with his new documentary, The Captains, a big-screen feature that eventually aired on cable’s Epix network in the United States. The film had a novel concept, as Bill travelled around the world to interview five other actors who’d played starship captains in the Star Trek franchise (both on television and in the movies): Patrick Stewart (Star Trek: The Next Generation), Avery Brooks (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine), Kate Mulgrew (Star Trek: Voyager), Scott Bakula (Star Trek: Enterprise), and Chris Pine (the alternate-universe version of Captain Kirk in 2009’s Star Trek).
“It’s just an idea that occurred, and it seemed like a good thought, it seemed like a commercial thought,” he said, admitting that he didn’t know the other actors save for “a respectful nod in their direction when I would see them,” although he did have dinner with Patrick Stewart a few times.13 The ninety-six-minute movie, which featured a bevy of co-producers—notably several Canadian production companies—also featured smaller interviews with other actors associated with Star Trek, including Rene Auberjonois (Bill’s Boston Legal costar who played Odo in Deep Space Nine), Christopher Plummer (Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country), Walter Koenig, Grace Lee Whitney (Yeoman Rand from the original series), and Garrett Wang (Harry Kim in Star Trek: Voyager).
The Captains premiered in July 2011 to mixed reviews, with the New York Times calling it “largely about William Shatner” but “pretty tolerable as vanity projects go,” while TrekMovie.com claimed: “[It’s] overly long, a big self-indulgent, and possibly over ambitious. The direction and editing are trying a bit too hard with Shatner not really letting the core content of his interviews stand out.” It did note, however, that it “is still a must-watch for any Trekkie.”14 15
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Bill donned his author hat again that fall with the release of Shatner Rules: Your Guide to Understanding the Shatnerverse and the World at Large, a tongue-in-cheek take on self-help books cowritten by Emmy-winning comedy scribe Chris Regan (Comedy Central’s The Daily Show with Jon Stewart). The 272-page book, published by Dutton, featured Bill spouting faux Zen philosophy (“There are many lives in a lifetime”; “The journey must be taken in individual moments. Enjoy the ride for the ride”) and ruminating on his life and career. He even took a few jabs at his favorite celebrity target, Star Trek costar George Takei, writing that “he’s been saying mean things about me for nearly 40 years now” and claiming that Takei’s 2008 marriage to Brad Altman was a publicity stunt. Nonetheless, the book was generally well-received. “Lurking beneath the Star Trek cracks and self-deprecating hairpiece jokes, this is a portrait of a man nearing the end of his days, taking stock of his life and wrestling with his two distinct personalities,” wrote the critic for the National Post. “But through it all, the reader gets a keen sense that William Shatner knows exactly who the character of William Shatner really is, and that he’s the one having the last laugh.”16
The cancellation of $#*! My Dad Says failed to put a dent into Bill’s television career; if anything, he now had the time and freedom to pick and choose projects that appealed to him without the onus of a weekly series and its grueling production schedule. For the next few years, his television appearances were, for the most part, guest-starring roles for one or two episodes. He played Frank O’Hara, the estranged father of Det. Juliet O’Hara (Maggie Lawson), on two episodes on the popular USA Network cable series Psych and guest-starred on the third-season premiere of ABC’s cop drama Rookie Blue (a Canadian import) as a belligerent drunk driver with a built-in antagonism toward the police. “For a guy his age he is such a badass,” said series star Missy Peregrym. “He’s really tough. He was getting his ass kicked and kicking other people’s asses. It was awesome.”17
In January 2012 Bill announced his return to the Broadway stage in a one-man show, Shatner’s World: We Just Live In It, which was slated to premiere in February at the Music Box Theater on West Forty-Fifth Street for a limited run (through March 4) to be followed by a fifteen-city national tour. It was his first appearance on The Great White Way in nearly fifty years, since ending his run as Paul Sevigne in A Shot in the Dark at the Booth Theatre.
Shatner’s World began its journey to Broadway the previous year, in February 2011, when Bill was flown to Australia by a Sydney production company, Spiritworks, to appear onstage in an interview show called Kirk, Crane and Beyond, a testament to his international popularity. He toured with the show throughout Australia and New Zealand, sitting onstage with a moderator who prompted him with questions about his life and career—and, of course, about Star Trek and Boston Legal. It was a successful venture that eventually took Bill to Canada with the show retitled to How Time Flies: An Evening with William Shatner.
“We finished the six cities, got good reviews, and people clapped and I sang some songs,” Bill said. “And I thought, ‘Well, that’s over. I’ve done that. And then Canada said, would I tour Canada? Same kind of show, and they offered me an interlocutor who was a nationally known character. I worked the show out a little bit better and got to Toronto—which is the high point in Canada—and they usually tear you apart. And they didn’t tear me apart. It was very well attended.”18 When he was asked to bring the show to Broadway, he decided to ditch the interviewer—“that’s not a oneman show”—and rewrite the show in order to let his anecdotes flow more smoothly. “The New York people came to Los Angeles and we started to put the visuals together. And I thought, ‘This isn’t good enough, I’m fucking going to be laughed at, I’m going to be laughed off the stage. This is terrible . . . But the more I did it, the faster I got, the more rhythm I got, it started to take shape.”19 How Time Flies took Bill to six Canadian cities, including Vancouver, Winnipeg, and Montreal, with a press release promising “a wild ride through his life and career” and Bill “singing songs as only he can.” The show ran for nearly three hours and the reviews were mostly positive. “The end is coming, and William Shatner knows it,” noted one critic. “He’s so preoccupied with it that he’s begun a pilgrimage across Canada to ensure his legacy is secure . . . Ranging from funny to morbid, Shatner talked a lot about his own mortality . . . Unfortunately, the show’s moniker wasn’t its mantra. Shatner might look great for 80, but like some octogenarians, he can be a windbag when he gets talking about the past.”20
No matter; when word broke that Bill was returning to Broadway following his run in Canada, he threw caution to the wind, issuing a typically blustery press release announcing his return to the boards with Shatner’s World: “I’ve been pretty busy since I last played the Music Box,” he said mistakenly. (He never starred in a Broadway production in that theater.) “I’ve been refurbished; I hope the theater has been too. My plan has always been to return to Broadway every 50 years. I can’t ask my fans to wait for me longer than Halley’s Comet, so I’m coming back.” Shatner’s World would, the press release promised, feature “this internationally known icon and raconteur, known as much for his unique persona as for his expansive body of work” reminiscing on his sixty-year career.
Scott Faris, a veteran of several Broadway productions, was hired to direct the show. Faris worked as a stage manager on Cabaret, Grease, and Chicago before he got the call for Shatner’s World. “He didn’t know me from Adam, and I called him, he’s got the stentorious voice, he said, ‘Hello, Scott, this is Bill Shatner,’” Faris recalled. “At first I thought, ‘Bill Shatner? He’s not on my radar at all.’ I watched Star Trek as a kid and I knew he had a hit with Boston Legal, and once I was hired, I started watching everything he did and read his autobiography.”
Bill sent Faris some DVDs from the Australian production of Kirk, Crane and Beyond for context and research purposes; Faris, who was in Berlin, Germany, at the time, took copious notes. “I watched them all and said to him, ‘Some of it is too much and needs to be cut, what do you think that is?’ and he said to me, ‘You tell me,’ which I loved as a challenge.” Faris was due to fly from Berlin to Los Angeles to meet Bill, where they would be followed by a documentary camera crew filming it all for posterity. “I was going to meet him for breakfast the next morning and I got to the place early and was listening to music from his album with Ben Folds with headphones on,” Faris said. “A car pulls up directly in front of me and it’s Bill Shatner. He stepped out and was looking at me, sort of with his brow down and I point at myself and I point at him. He says, ‘You’re Scott Faris. Well, this is very fortuitous that we met in the parking lot.’”21
The meeting went smoothly. “I told him, ‘This is a play, therefore no stories that don’t support the journey can be included’ and he said, ‘I completely agree with you’ and we hit it off,” Faris said. “We had some breakfast and went to a brief rehearsal which was nothing but fun. He was delightful, witty, funny, and demanding, but I was used to that, having been around stars, so that didn’t bother me at all.” They rehearsed the show for a week at a dance studio on La Brea Avenue, and Bill, who was hosting his annual Super Bowl party at his house, invited Faris, who accepted the invitation. “It was a huge party with his kids, his grandkids, his friends, and TV and film guys from various parts of his career,” he said. Faris mentioned to one of Bill’s costars from Boston Legal that he was directing him in a one-man show. “He just laughed at me and said, ‘Good luck directing Bill.’ I told him we’d been working for a week and he’d been nothing but agreeable.”
They flew back to New York and began rehearsing for Shatner’s World in a studio on East Thirty-First Street in Manhattan to prepare for the show’s opening night. “It’s me giving you some varied aspects of my life that I think are interesting and entertaining, and dramatizing who I am and what I am and why I am,” Bill told a reporter. “I don’t have the answers to those questions, but in the dramatizations of these stories, I hope that you may have an answer that will satisfy you.” He called the idea of doing a one-man show on Broadway “daunting” and said he’d been asked to return to the Broadway stage “several times” but never had the time to commit to this sort of project. So, what changed? “But this was like a dream come true, because I could come to New York, be part of the Broadway stage one more time and not have to have an extensive commitment that would take me away from my family.”22
The hard work paid off. Shatner’s World opened on February 14, 2012, to mostly positive reviews, though eyewitnesses reported that Bill was heckled by audience members every now and then. The project got off to an inauspicious start when Bill came down with food poisoning or the flu (he wasn’t sure which) the night before the show’s preview performance after dining at the Four Seasons with Elizabeth. “At this point now, what are you going to do? Laugh me off the stage? I’m not going to die . . . so I go into my Broadway opening frightened to death that I’m going to fail,” he said. “And I have the stomach flu—which means you can go from here to there, to the toilet, because you have no command of your bowels whatsoever. And I’ll tell you the life lesson I learned . . . You never know what you can accomplish until you try.”23
In the show, Bill spent over ninety minutes on stage—seated in a rolling armchair, with a large projection screen behind him—regaling theatergoers with stories from every phase of his life: his childhood in Montreal, his four years at McGill, the mid-1950s Stratford Festival years, working in live television in New York, Star Trek, Boston Legal, Priceline.com, Ben Folds . . . and on and on. He told stories about his love of horses and, naturally, got in a few zingers at George Takei, though he largely avoided mentions of Leonard Nimoy or his other Star Trek castmates.
“We kind of fluffed it up, adding a projection screen; we wanted a bit of a space-age thing,” Faris said. “The producers always wanted Bill to hit on Star Trek . . . I came up with this idea that we would play the start of the Star Trek music, like he was going to do, ‘Space: the final frontier’—he interrupts from offstage and says, ‘Oh no, I’m not gonna do Star Trek!’ and crashes that idea, yelling at the stage manager. It got a big laugh. He certainly didn’t suffer fools gladly. When the producer made the suggestion about Star Trek, he said, ‘I’m not doing that. That’s the worst idea I’ve ever heard.’ He was just like, flat-out ‘No!’ He didn’t mince words.”24
The New York Times called the show a “chatty, digressive and often amusing tour of his unusual acting career . . . Mr. Shatner shows a welcome tendency to poke fun at himself that anyone who has seen his commercials for the travel Web site Priceline.com will probably recognize,” while the Associated Press noted the preoccupation with death in Bill’s observations: “He lingers on the supposed final words of Timothy Leary (“Of course”) and Steve Jobs (“Oh, wow”), wondering what it all means. ‘What happens at the other end? I don’t know!’ he demands, almost screaming . . . It is very much like Shatner himself, a little out of date, a little bizarre, but endearing nonetheless.”25 26
“People loved it,” Faris said. “They were saying, ‘This is absolutely delightful. He’s funny. He’s fun.’ I lived uptown at that time and would walk to the theatre in the weeks of the run. He’d go, ‘Scotty, glad you’re here, I’m having trouble with this joke, let’s work on it.’ He was calling me Scotty, which just cracked me up. He brought Brad Paisley in to perform a song as a guest artist in the closing show. I staged that.”
Shatner’s World exceeded expectations and garnered Bill glowing reviews as it moved from Broadway to a touring production in major cities throughout the United States. He sat for a round of interviews to promote the show, and in September, the producer of Shatner’s World, Innovation Arts & Entertainment, announced that it was adding another twenty cities to the tour, taking its run through 2013. “His new solo stage act might be pulled together from anecdotal scraps,” Variety noted, “but it gets by with humor and good-natured charm.”27 Bill would continue to tour with a pared-down version of the show in subsequent years—“a suitcase show with less production values,” said Faris, now an associate professor of theatre practice in stage management at the USC School of Dramatic Arts.
Shatner’s World, or at least a reasonable facsimile thereof, was staged even without its star, or his cooperation. In January 2014, Phil Soltanoff and Joe Diebes launched An Evening with William Shatner Asterisk, an off-Broadway show staged at the New Ohio Theater on Christopher Street in the West Village. Directed by Soltanoff and written by Diebes, it cobbled together snippets of audio and video of Captain Kirk from the original Star Trek series and projected this onto a large screen abutted on either side by video screens with titles. “The juxtaposition of Kirk’s strenuously virile utterances with Joe Diebes’s highfalutin text may sound like a one-joke concept,” one critic wrote, “but Mr. Soltanoff continually, deliciously alters the temps, cadences and presentation.”28
It was obvious that Bill would never escape the clutches of Captain James T. Kirk, and while he grew to embrace his role in the Star Trek mythology, the franchise continued to mushroom into other areas. In April 2014, NASA honored Bill with its Distinguished Public Service medal, the highest award bestowed by NASA to nongovernment personnel. It presented the award to Bill (wearing a leather jacket and cowboy hat) in Los Angeles during his annual Hollywood Charity Horse Show. He was receiving the medal “for outstanding generosity and dedication to inspiring new generations of explorers around the world, and for unwavering support for NASA and its missions of discovery.” Bill’s association with NASA included his recent narration of a NASA documentary celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of the space shuttle missions and, in 2013, hosting a video presentation about Curiosity, the rover sent to Mars to explore that planet.
* * *
Bill released his fourth spoken-word album, Ponder the Mystery, in October 2013 on Cleopatra Records. The fifteen-track album was produced by Billy Sherwood, who played most of the instruments and who recruited keyboard-ists Rick Wakeman and Tony Kaye, both of whom played with Sherwood in the progressive rock group Yes. The album also included contributions from notable musicians, including ex-Doors guitarist Robbie Krieger, Al Di Meola, Vince Gill, and Foreigner founding member/guitarist Mick Jones.
Bill, who wrote all lyrics, described the album’s theme as “a guy in despair who is living on a beach, and it takes him through the last hour of the day at sunset through twilight, into darkness and the sounds of the night in which he regains his fervor, his love of life based on the beauty of what he’s seeing around him.”29 He shot a kaleidoscopic video to promote the album, and in late October, following its release, he performed Ponder the Mystery live at small venues in Southern California (Hermosa Beach, Agoura Hills, and San Juan Capistrano) accompanied by Kaye and Circa, Sherwood’s progressive rock band that included several former members of Yes.
“Shatner’s reflections are somewhat scatterbrained throughout Ponder the Mystery, but that’s what makes the compilation so intriguing,” wrote Music Times. “The eighty-two-year-old performer initially ponders one word or phrase, and eventually blossoms that concept into a lyrical conundrum of insightful thoughts and ideas. Some may find Shatner’s creative talent genius, others probably think it’s laughably crazy, but overall the experience is amusingly enjoyable.”30
That was the vibe that Bill hoped for when he signed a deal to host his first web series, William Shatner’s Brown Bag Wine Tasting, which premiered on Ora.TV in June 2014 and found him collaborating, once again, with Shatner’s Raw Nerve producer Scott Sternberg. (Ora.TV is also the Internet home to former CNN stalwart Larry King, whose Larry King Live morphed into Larry King Now on the streaming network in 2012.) “It was his idea,” Sternberg said of Brown Bag Wine Tasting. “He called me up and said, ‘I have an idea. I’m gonna knock on doors and take bottles of wine and share wine with people and I’m gonna ask them what they think about it.’”31
Bill said that he was inspired to do the series—parts of which were shot in his house in Studio City—by a friend of his, Mike Horn, a broadcaster who was also a sommelier, and by the success of his Bio Channel talk show, Raw Nerve. “I’d been casually drinking wine for years before that, but now came specific and distinct knowledge of this estate and that varietal,” he said, “and so it occurred to me in one of those conversations that since I liked wine, but knew nothing about it, and I’d had an interview show that had done well . . . we would combine the wine and conversation, so that the wine became an introduction to the conversation.”
William Shatner’s Brown Bag Wine Tasting ran for two seasons; over the course of the series, Bill sat down with, among others, Wil Wheaton and Le-Var Burton from Star Trek: The Next Generation, comedian Adam Carolla, television personality Nigel Lythgoe (So You Think You Can Dance), and actor Misha Collins (best known for The CW television series Supernatural). “The hook was, we’ll put [the wine] in a brown paper bag so no one knows the wine, not even Bill,” said Sternberg. “Then, at the end, after the interview, the other hook [for the series] was to describe the wine as if it was something in your business or occupation, using terms you use on a daily basis like, ‘This tastes like a bad tax return.’ That also helped with Bill’s sense of humor, which is outstanding.”
William Shatner’s Brown Bag Wine Tasting won a TasteTV Award from the Academy of Media Tastemakers, a “diverse and respected association of food & wine editors, writers and bloggers, chefs, fashion journalists, television producers and stations, online video platforms, mobile device providers, retail and technology enterprise experts.” He received his TasteTV Award in January 2015 at a red-carpet reception held at the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood.