By Sasha Park · Republished 2026-05-16 · Originally reported by Richard Horgan on FishbowlLA, January 2011
In late January 2011, Portland-based media strategist and progressive talk-radio host Adam Klugman — son of the late LA-based actor Jack Klugman — staged a workshop reading of his new play Treason at Portland’s Artists Repertory Theater. The original FishbowlLA framing pulled the LA-broadcasting thread of the story forward: Klugman’s KPOJ 620 AM show “Mad as Hell” took its name from the Peter Finch / Howard Beale speech in Network (1976), and the broader Klugman family arc had been one of LA’s recurring TV-and-radio entertainment threads across decades.
Then
Adam Klugman, then 47, had been hosting “Mad as Hell” on KPOJ in Portland, building a progressive-talk-radio audience around the call-in segment in which listeners shared what they were mad as hell about. The KPOJ slot was structurally a smaller market than his father’s LA-based studio decades — but it shared the broadcasting-and-performance DNA that had been the Klugman family’s recurring contribution to American media.
Treason, the play that was getting the January 2011 workshop reading, was a one-act drama about a peace activist on death row for causing the deaths of fellow protesters. The piece was structured around the final 24 hours of the lead character’s life and his decision whether to plead insanity in exchange for a lesser sentence. The Fertile Ground Playwrights Festival, the ten-day Portland new-work showcase that hosted the reading, had been one of the more active regional play-development showcases of the early 2010s.
The original FishbowlLA framing, by Richard Horgan, was warm — treating the Klugman-family thread as a continuing American-broadcasting-and-theater story worth tracking even from the LA media perspective. Jack Klugman, the Quincy, M.E. and Odd Couple star, was at the time 88 and still alive (he would die in late December 2012). The recursive Network / “Mad as Hell” framing of Adam’s radio show added a small layer of self-aware media-history reference.
Now
Jack Klugman died on December 24, 2012, at age 90. His career across decades of television and stage work — including the multiple Emmy-winning Quincy, M.E. run, his Tony-winning theater work, and his many guest appearances — is now part of the broader documented American-television-history record. The cancer-survivor-public-advocate work he did in his later years has also entered the historical record.
Adam Klugman has continued in progressive-talk-radio work and political-media strategy across the years since 2011. KPOJ itself eventually shifted format in late 2012, leaving the Portland progressive-talk market substantially smaller; Klugman moved his work to other platforms across the years that followed.
The Fertile Ground Playwrights Festival has continued as a Portland new-work showcase. Treason itself, after the 2011 workshop, had limited subsequent staging history; the play has not become one of the recurring American political-drama pieces of the post-2011 era.
The 2011 FishbowlLA piece reads now as one of the small documented moments when the Klugman-family LA-broadcasting thread was still active in the public record on both ends — father in his late LA-based years, son working a smaller progressive-radio market in the Pacific Northwest. The piece’s choice to pick up Adam’s Network-referencing radio name as the through-line was, in retrospect, an apt move for a story that was structurally about American-broadcasting-family inheritance.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.