You might say William Shatner’s entire career could be summed up in three words: “Weird or What?”
That’s also the title of the show he hosts on History Television, returning for a second season Sept. 12 at 10 p.m. ET. The series examines the unexplainable.
Why do large rocks appear to “skate” across a desert, or skinny young teens suddenly have the ability to lift cars in an emergency? Is there a psychic connection between dolphins and humans? And why did CBS cancel Shatner’s sitcom “S#*! My Dad Says”?
Scratch that last one, it’s not explained on the show and hasn’t been explained to Shatner’s satisfaction by CBS. The comedy was among the highest-rated shows in Canada last season and was, as they say in the trade, “on the bubble” in the U.S. when the plug was pulled last spring after one season.
“We were staggered by it,” Shatner, 80, says of the cancellation. “There was close to 10 million people watching the show. I loved it and was very sorry it is not going on.”
After a career that has boldly gone in as many directions as his, Shatner was able to roll with it and move on. Besides the return of “Weird,” he’s also been busy with a new book and CD, receiving honours and, as always, feeding his horses and dogs.
Besides, compared with doing a network sitcom, the “Weird or What?” schedule is a pretty gentle gig. Cameras roll into his house and garden and capture the TV icon setting up one of three stories per episode and then asking viewers, “Was that weird, or what?”
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It’s the kind of show the endlessly curious Shatner would watch even if he wasn’t hosting it. “There are so many mysterious things out there that stagger us and beggar our imaginations,” he says.
“Quantum physics is showing up just how strange and unpredictable the universe really is.”
Both mentally and physically, says Shatner.
A recent “weird or what” moment involved his wife and fellow horse enthusiast Elizabeth, who woke from a disturbing dream about mice frothing at the mouth. The couple were out of town and when Shatner returned home the next day he found his dogs were frothing and had been poisoned.
“My wife’s dream 48 hours earlier had presaged what had happened,” he says.
The two-time Emmy winner was caught up in another “weird or what” moment in June when he attended the seventh and final game of the Stanley Cup finals in Vancouver. Bad enough the Canucks lost the game, but Shatner found himself caught up in the middle of the Vancouver riots right afterwards.
“I walked out of the auditorium and there was this loud explosion,” he says. “All around us – I was right there.”
Shatner was able to beam himself out of that jam. A more positive “weird or what” occurred later that same month when Shatner received an honorary doctor of letters from McGill University in Montreal, his alma mater.
“I barely went to school there,” he says. “I was so locked up in the drama department and the musicals and the radio shows I barely went to class. It was amazing to walk down that campus with the chancellor and receive a doctorate – that was really something.”
So was getting the Governor General’s Performing Arts Award for a lifetime of artistic achievement, an accolade that came in May.
So do all these lifetime awards mean Shatner is finally ready to wind down his career? Bite your weird or what tongue.
Besides his recent documentary “The Captains,” in which he interviews the other actors who have played starship captains throughout the long run of the “Star Trek” franchise, he is busy with several new projects.
He’ll be guest starring on “Rookie Blue” when the Global/ABC police drama returns in 2012 for a third season. He has a new book coming out next month called “Shatner Rules: Your Guide to Understanding the Shatnerverse and the World at Large.”
And then there’s his recording career. Shatner’s 1968 album “The Transformed Man” was a camp classic but critics were kinder to his revelatory 2004 collaboration with producer Ben Folds, “Has Been.” The new album, “Searching for Major Tom,” boasts contributions from Alan Parsons and Peter Frampton, among others.
The sci-fi themed CD has Shatner doing his unique spoken word “singing” to such classics as “Space Cowboy,” “Rocket Man” and David Bowie’s “Space Oddity.” “I even do ‘Bohemian Rhapsody,'” he says with the confidence of a man who knows how to sell anything. As Freddie Mercury might have said, “weird or what?”
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Bill Brioux is a freelance TV columnist based in Brampton, Ont.
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