Listen to me on TV CONFIDENTIAL:
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.
May 2, 1996
Phil Donahue taped the final edition of his talk
show Donahue. On July 15, 2002, he returned to television with a
talk show under the same name.
May 3, 1991
Prime-time soap opera Dallas airs its last
episode.
The episode was watched by
33.3 million viewers (38% of all viewers in that time slot)
The show debuted in April of 1978, and broke ratings
records in 1980 when 83.6 million viewers tuned in to find out "Who Shot
J.R.?". In the final episode, titled Conundrum
(An homage to It's a Wonderful Life)
J.R. is contemplating committing suicide. The drunk J.R. walks around the pool
with a bourbon bottle and a loaded gun, when suddenly another person appears, a
spirit named Adam (portrayed by Joel Grey), whose
"boss" has been watching J.R. and likes him. Adam proceeds to take
him on a journey to show him what life would have been like for other people if
he had not been born. At the end of the
episode Adam encourages J.R. on to kill himself. J.R. will not do it, as
he does not want Adam to be sent back to heaven with his job incomplete. At this
point Adam reveals that he's not an angel, but a minion of Satan. Bobby has
returned home. The gun goes off while Bobby is in the hallway, and he rushes to
J.R.'s room. He looks at what has gone down, gasps, "Oh, my God," and
the series ends on that note with the fate of J.R. never settled (although it
eventually would be five years later, in the reunion movie, Dallas: J.R. Returns.).
In 2010, cable network TNT announced they had ordered
a pilot for the continuation of the Dallas series. After viewing the completed
pilot episode, TNT proceeded to order a full season of 10 episodes.
The new series premiered on June 13, 2012, centering primarily
around John Ross and Christopher Ewing, the now-grown sons of J.R. and Bobby.
Larry Hagman, Patrick Duffy and Linda Gray returned in full-time capacity,
reprising their original roles. The series is produced by Warner Horizon
Television, a subsidiary of Warner Bros., which holds the rights to the Dallas
franchise through its acquisition of Lorimar Television and is a sister company
to TNT, both under the ownership of TimeWarner.
The new series is a continuation of the old series,
with the story continuing after a 20-year break. It does not take the events of
the TV movies Dallas: J.R. Returns or Dallas: War of the Ewings as canon.
Instead we find the characters as they are today, 20 years after the events of
the Season 14 cliffhanger.[29] In an interview with UltimateDallas.com, Cynthia
Cidre was asked to describe the new Dallas. She responded, "I tried to be
really, really respectful of the original Dallas because it was really clear to
me that the people who love Dallas are [like] Trekkies, really committed to
that show and I really did not understand that before, so I never wanted to
violate anything that had happened in the past. On the other hand that was the
past, twenty years had gone by, so at the same time I think we're properly
balanced between the characters of Bobby Ewing, J.R. and Sue Ellen. I also have
the new cast and it's John Ross and Christopher, the children of Bobby and
J.R., and their love interests. Total respect and a balance of old and
new."
May
8, 1976
The theme song from Welcome
Back, Kotter is the #1 song in America.
In
1975, John Sebastian, former member of the beloved 60s pop group the Lovin'
Spoonful, was asked to write and record the theme song for a brand-new ABC
television show with the working title Kotter. As any songwriter would,
Sebastian first tried working that title into his song, but somehow the rhymes
he came up with for "Kotter"—otter, water, daughter, slaughter—didn't
really lend themselves to a show about a middle-aged schoolteacher returning to
his scrappy Brooklyn neighborhood to teach remedial students at his own former
high school. So Sebastian took a more thoughtful approach to the task at hand
and came up with a song about finding your true calling in a life you thought
you'd left behind. That song, "Welcome Back," not only went on to
become a #1 pop single on this day in 1976, but it also led the show's
producers to change its title to Welcome Back, Kotter.
What
Sebastian's sweet, wistful and playfully nostalgic tune did not do, however,
was influence the tone and content of the show. To listen to "Welcome
Back," you'd think that Welcome Back, Kotter was a seriocomic
slice-of-life program in the mold of, say, The Courtship of Eddie's Father—another
70s TV show with a theme song by a great 60s songwriter (Harry Nilsson).
Instead, Welcome Back, Kotter was little more than a flimsy platform for
catchphrase-spouting caricatures, albeit an insanely successful one. Arnold
Horshack's "Oooh, oooh, oooh," Freddie "Boom Boom"
Washington's "Hi therrre," Vinnie Barbarino's "What? What?"
and Gabe Kotter's "Up your nose with a rubber hose" were the pop-cultural
coin-of-the-realm in 1975-76, and though they bore little relation in tone or
spirit to the song that topped the charts on this day in 1976, the disconnect
did nothing to hinder the popularity of all things Kotter-related. Indeed, if
you weren't wearing an Uncle Sam or King Kong T-shirt in the summer of
America's bicentennial year, you were probably wearing one with a picture of
"the Sweathogs" and a colorful phrase like "Off my case, toilet
face" on it.
"Welcome
Back" was the first and only television theme song that John Sebastian
ever wrote, but it was far from the only television theme song of the mid-1970s to become a legitimate pop
hit. Only weeks earlier in 1976, the instrumental "Theme From
S.W.A.T." had topped the Billboard Hot 100, and the excellent Mike
Post-written theme The Rockford Files had made the top 10 the previous
summer.
To quote the Bicentennial Minute, "And that's the way it was".
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