The annals of French television reveal a tangle of shifting schedules, overlooked chances, postponements, and dashed hopes. Yet an expanding catalog stands as proof of the vision and persistence of bassist and composer Mike Sary. Amid the network’s perpetual personnel carousel, he anchors the enterprise. His ensemble fuses prog, fusion, cartoon music, and Rock-in-Opposition into a sound that is at once comic and rigorously demanding, establishing French TV as one of the most distinctive American progressive-rock acts.
The project first took shape in 1983 when Sary and keyboardist Steve Roberts assembled musicians eager to pursue the eccentric rock directions their earlier basement endeavors had excluded. They enlisted Fenner Castner on drums and Artie Bratton on guitar, then committed their initial recordings to disc. Issued in a run of only 500 copies during 1984, the self-titled French TV album represented an uneven debut yet marked a concrete beginning. Departures soon followed, starting with co-founder Roberts, who departed to operate his own progressive-rock shop, ZNR Records.
Thereafter Sary alone sustained the band, affixing a numeral to its name with each subsequent release—“French TV 3,” “French TV 4,” and so on—to emphasize its ongoing instability. Following a four-year pause he issued After a Lengthy Silence. By late 1990 a third album, Virtue in Futility, stood ready, though it waited another four years for release; weary of searching for a label, Sary founded his own imprint, the ironically named Pretentious Dinosaur. Track titles and liner notes throughout the catalog regularly incorporate humor alongside left-wing political commentary.
Virtue in Futility (FTV3) proved the final album to feature both Castner and Bratton. For Intestinal Fortitude (FTV4; 1995) the group had already cycled through another short-lived configuration: Tony Hall on guitar, Bob Douglas on drums, and John Robinson on keyboards. That record introduced compositions by members other than Sary, added lyrics to several pieces, and adopted a somewhat less manic sonic palette. By the live set Yoo-Hoo!!! (FTV5; 1997), Dean Zigoris had taken Hall’s place. The band began attracting notice within progressive circles and ventured beyond its home region for performances across the United States. Joint shows with Volare, including an appearance at ProgDay ’97 in Raleigh, North Carolina, brought drummer Brian Donohue into temporary service; those sessions yielded The Violence of Amateurs (FTV6), which also includes a guest spot by avant-garde maverick Eugene Chadbourne. Released in 1999, the album is widely regarded as the group’s finest, a wildly inventive “cartoon roller coaster” that drew widespread praise from specialist publications.
The 2001 release The Case Against Art found French TV centered on Sary, keyboardist Warren Dale of TRAP, and drummer Chris Vincent, augmented by returning and newly recruited collaborators.
