As always, the further we go back in Hollywood history, the more that fact and legend become intertwined. It's hard to say where the truth really lies.
March 16, 2005
Robert Blake acquitted of
wife’s murder.
After a three-month-long criminal trial in Los Angeles Superior Court, a
jury acquits Robert Blake, star of the 1970s television detective show Baretta,
of the murder of his 44-year-old wife, Bonny Lee Bakley.
March 21, 1980
J.R. Ewing (Larry Hagman), the character millions loved to hate on TV’s popular nighttime drama Dallas, was shot.
The shooting made the season finale, titled A House Divided, one of television’s most famous cliffhangers and left America wondering “Who shot J.R.?” Dallas fans waited for the next eight months to have that question answered because the season premiere of Dallas was delayed due to a Screen Actors Guild strike. That summer, the question “Who Shot J.R.?” entered the national lexicon. Fan’s wore T-shirts printed with "Who Shot J.R.?" and "I Shot J.R.". A session of the Turkish parliament was suspended to allow legislators a chance to get home in time to view the Dallas episode. Betting parlors worldwide took bets as to which one of the 10 or so principal characters had actually pulled the trigger. J.R. had many enemies and audiences were hard-pressed to guess who was responsible for the shooting.
The person who pulled the
trigger was revealed to be J.R.’s sister in law/mistress Kristin Shepard (Mary
Crosby) in the "Who
Done It?"
episode which aired on November 21, 1980. It was, at the time, the highest rated television episode in US history. It had a Nielsen
rating of 53.3 and a 76% share, and
it was estimated that 83,000,000 people watched the episode. The previous
record for a TV episode, not counting the final installment of the miniseries Roots, had been the 1967 finale for The Fugitive. "Who Shot J.R.?" now sits second on the
list, being beaten in 1983 by the final episode of M*A*S*H but still remains the highest rated non-finale
episode of a TV series.
March 21, 1995
The first episode of NewsRadio aired on NBC.
Focusing on the work lives of
the staff of an AM news station. The series was created by executive
producer Paul Simms, and was filmed in front of a studio audience
at CBS Studio Center and Sunset Gower Studios. The show's theme tune
was composed by Mike Post, who also scored the pilot (Ian Dye and Danny
Lux did subsequent episodes).
The show placed #72 on Entertainment Weekly 's "New TV
Classics" list. The series is set at WNYX, a fictional AM news
radio station in New
York City, populated by an eccentric station owner and staff. The show
begins with the arrival of a new news director, level-headed Dave Nelson (Dave Foley).
While Dave turns out to be less naive than his youthful appearance suggests, he
never fully gains control of his co-workers.
The fast-paced scripts and
ensemble cast combined physical humor and sight gags with
smart dialogue and absurd storylines. Plots often involved satirical takes on
historical events, news stories, and pop culturereferences.
The third- and fourth-season finales took the absurdity to
the extreme, setting the characters in outer space and aboard the Titanic.
There are a total of 97 episodes. Reruns continued in
syndication for several years before disappearing in most markets, but the show
has aired on A&E Network, Nick at
Nite and TBS network in the United States, andTVtropolis and
the Comedy Network in Canada. In the United States, the show occasionally airs
as a filler onWGN America and runs regularly on Reelz
Channel. The program became available in syndication to local stations
again starting in July 2007 through The Program Exchange. NBC briefly
canceled NewsRadio in May 1998, after its fourth season, but the decision was reversed two
weeks later, with an order of 22 episodes placed for afifth season. Ten days after its renewal, Phil
Hartman was killed by his wife, and his absence cast a pall over the
fifth season. NBC left the series "on the bubble" until the day the
final episode of the fifth season aired, months after production had wrapped.
The fifth season ending storyline where Jimmy James buys a radio station in a
small New Hampshire town was intended to provide a new setting for a potential
sixth season, but NBC later decided to officially cancel the series after poor
ratings and reviews.
To quote the Bicentennial Minute, "And that's the way it was".
Stay Tuned
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