Quality of Television today.

There is very little on television these days that catches my attention, let alone keeps it. However AMC and BBC have a series that has me tuning in every week. Hustle., is the story of a group of grifters who play the long con. The stories are original, and fun. The show moves along at a good pace, and it builds the suspense up to the very end where you see the final results. This show also does not portray the characters as supermen, one has been shot, one beaten brutally, and two have had to deal with ex-spouses. Real people with some real emotions. The Chronicle has a good story about Robert Vaughn who plays the senior member of the group Albert Stroller .

Vaughn was born in New York City in 1932 to father Walter, a top radio actor in the 1940s, and mother Marcella, a stage actress, but "after six months they dissolved their union, and she took me back to Minneapolis where she had been raised," he says. "She stayed there with me until I started school at the age of 5, left me there to be raised by my grandparents, went back (to New York) and got remarried, to my stepfather," whom Vaughn idolized, but whose alcoholism helped lead to his death in 1950 at age 39. At that point Vaughn left the University of Minneapolis, where he'd studied journalism for a year, and moved with his widowed mother to Los Angeles.
He pursued acting at Los Angeles City College, where he earned a master's degree. He debuted on screen in an episode of the TV series Medic in 1955, and broke into film as an extra in The Ten Commandments (1956). Along with the scene of the golden calf, "I played a guy in the first chariot behind Yul Brynner," Vaughn says, "which I told Brynner when we did The Magnificent Seven. And for some reason he didn't remember me. I don't know why!" he jokes. A lucrative contract with actor Burt Lancaster's production company eventually followed, and Vaughn has stayed busy ever since. He was nominated for a best-supporting actor Oscar in 1960 for The Young Philadelphians.
After U.N.C.L.E., he even returned to college, getting a Ph.D. in mass communications from the University of Southern California in 1970. G.P. Putnam's Sons published his critically lauded dissertation, Only Victims: A Study of Show Business Blacklisting, released as a paperback by Limelight in 1996

He had taken the role of master grifter Albert Stroller on Hustle (which returns to AMC tonight) when the premiere episode was already six days into production.
"So I said, 'Let's construct something as we sit here. Suppose (U.N.C.L.E.'s) Napoleon Solo retired at the end of his years in the worldwide secret-agent business, living on his government pension, deciding he can't really live this way. He'd had girls, cars, money, fine hotels, first-class travel, and now it's not happening. What could he do that was worthwhile in terms of using his knowledge? He should become a con man. And he changes his name to Albert Stroller.'
"I made this up as I went along," Vaughn, 73, says genially. "From that point on, it's been repeated over and over again. That's how it happened," he says, smiling the smile of a born raconteur.

One can't help but wonder how a guy so smart and successful — who with his wife adopted two kids and moved to Connecticut to raise them with non-Hollywood values — could have appeared in so many movies that he admits were "not so great. Of 120 (films and TV movies), I'd say maybe 10 were OK." So why ... ?
"They pay!" he says, smiling. "That's it. They pay the same thing as the big ones. I don't turn down movies. Well, I've turned down movies for reasons that have nothing to do with money — things I just thought were terrible movies. Many of the ones I've been in are terrible movies," he concedes, "but I thought they'd be good."
And Hustle, as it happens, actually is. Maybe Stroller and Solo are the same guy, maybe not. But the inveterately open Robert Vaughn, in the best sense of the phrase, isn't conning anybody.

To be perfectly honest this is simply one of my favorite non sci-fi shows on TV today.