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.
Donna Allen-Figueroa
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September 10, 1993
The science fiction series The X-Files premiered.
David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson stared. Duchovny
played FBI agent Fox Mulder and Anderson played Dana Scully, a skeptical
doctor. A cult hit, the show attracted an enormous following of loyal viewers.
An X-Files movie was released in 1998. David Duchovny left the show in
the 2001 season and was replaced by Robert Patrick, who played agent John
Doggett.
September 12, 1963
Leave It to Beaver aired its last episode.
The typical 1950s "wholesome family" comedy presented the lives of the Cleaver family from the perspective of young Theodore "Beaver" Cleaver (Jerry Mathers). The clan included parents June (Barbara Billingsley) and Ward (Hugh Beaumont), and older brother Wally (Tony Dow). The show enjoyed much popularity in reruns and a revival in the 1980s as The New Leave It to Beaver .
September 12, 1978
Taxi first aired.
The show focuses on the
employees of the fictional Sunshine Cab Company, and its principal setting is
the company's fleet garage in Manhattan.
Among the drivers, only Alex Reiger, who is disillusioned with life, considers
cab driving his profession. The others view it as a temporary job. Elaine Nardo
is a single mother working as a receptionist at an art gallery. Tony Banta is a
boxer with a losing record. Bobby Wheeler is a struggling actor. John Burns
(written out of the show after the first season) is working his way through
college. All take pity on "Reverend Jim" Ignatowski, an aging hippie
minister, who is burnt out from drugs, so they help him become a cabbie. The
characters also include Latka Gravas, their innocent, wide-eyed mechanic from
an unnamed foreign country, and Louie De Palma, the despotic dispatcher.
A number of episodes involve
a character having an opportunity to realize his or her dream to move up in the
world, only to see it yanked away. Otherwise, the cabbies deal on a daily basis
with their unsatisfying lives and with Louie De Palma's abusive behavior and
contempt (despite being a former cab driver himself). Louie's assistant, Jeff
Bennett, is rarely heard from at first, but his role increases in later
seasons.
Despite the humor of the
show, Taxi often tackled such dramatic issues as racism, drug addiction, single
parenthood, blindness, obesity, animal
abuse, bisexuality, teenage runaways, divorce, nuclear war, sexual
harassment, premenstrual
mood disorders, gambling
addiction, and the loss of a loved one.
September 13, 1993 Animaniacs Premiered
September 14, 1958
The Invisible Man (1958 TV series) first
aired
The
Invisible Man (later known as H.G. Wells'
Invisible Man) is a British black-and-white science
fiction/adventure/espionage television
series that aired on ITV from
September 1958 to July 1959. It was aired on CBS in the United
States, running two seasons and totalling 26 half-hour episodes. The series was
nominally based on the
novel by H. G. Wells, one of four such television series. In this
version, the deviation from the novel went as far as changing the main
character's name from Dr. Griffin to Dr. Peter Brady who remained a sane man,
not a power-hungry lunatic as in the book or the 1933 film adaptation. None of the
other characters from the novel appeared in the series.
The series follows the adventures of Dr. Peter
Brady, a scientist who is attempting to achieve invisibility with light
refraction. However, the experiment goes wrong and turns him permanently invisible.
He is initially declared a state secret and locked up, but eventually convinces
the UK government, represented by Sir Charles Anderson, to allow him to return
to his laboratory and search for an antidote ("Secret Experiment").
Almost immediately, British Intelligence recruits him for an assignment
("Crisis in the Desert"), but soon security is breached ("Behind
the Mask") and he becomes a celebrity ("Picnic with Death"),
consequently also using his invisibility to help people in trouble, as
well as solve crimes and defeat spies for
his country.
The Archies premiered
on CBS. The cartoon was based on the comic book series.
The
Archie Show (Also known as The
Archies) is an American animated musical comedy series
produced by Filmation for CBS. Based on the Archie comic books,
created by Bob Montana in 1941, The Archie Show aired Saturday mornings on CBS from September
1968 to August 1969, when it was replaced by an hour-long version, The
Archie Comedy Hour. Filmation continued to produce further Archie television
series until 1978.
The show revolves around
17-year-old Archie Andrews and his teen-age pals
from Riverdale High Schoolincluding: his
best friend and food fiend Jughead
Jones, wise-cracking Reggie
Mantle, beautiful, spoiled-rich girl Veronica
Lodge, and attractive, blonde, girl-next-door tomboy Betty
Cooper. On
the show, the friends appeared as a bubblegum
pop band featuring Archie on lead guitar. The
Archies had a real-life #1 hit single in 1969 with their song,
"Sugar,
Sugar", written by Jeff Barry and Andy Kim.
The Archie Show utilized a laugh
track, the first such example of the colloquially-titled Saturday morning cartoons. Owing
to the success of The Archie Show, most animated series would begin
using laugh tracks until the early 1980s. Previous animated series that used
laugh tracks, such as The
Flintstones and The
Jetsons, were broadcast during prime time with
the target audience being adults.
A typical episode started with the first Archie story,
introduced by Archie and occasionally a different character. Next was a
"dance of the week" segment starting with a teaser, then after the
commercial break Archie introduced the dance, followed by the song of the week
performed by The Archies. After that was a short joke followed by
the second Archie story. All 17 episodes were presented in this format.
September 14, 1978
Mork and Mindy is an
American sitcom that
aired on ABC from September 14, 1978 to
May 27, 1982.
A spin-offafter a highly successful episode of Happy Days, it starred Robin Williams as Mork, an extraterrestrial who comes to Earth from the planet Ork in a small, one-Orkan egg-shaped spaceship. Pam Dawber co-starred as Mindy McConnell, his human friend and roommate, and later his wife and the mother of his child. The first episode of Mork and Mindy aired on ABC.
The character of Mork was
played by a then-unknown Robin
Williams, who impressed producer Garry
Marshall with his quirky comedic ability as soon as they met. Marshall was
looking for an actor for an episode of Happy Days.
When Williams was asked to take a seat at the audition, Williams immediately
sat on his head on the chair and Marshall cast him on the spot, and later wryly
commented that Williams was the only alien who auditioned for the role.
Mork appears in the Happy
Days season five episode "My
Favorite Orkan", which first aired in February 1978 and is a take on
the 1960s sitcom My Favorite Martian. The show wanted to
feature a spaceman in order to capitalize on the popularity of the then
recently released Star Wars film. Williams' character, Mork,
attempts to take Richie Cunningham back to his planet of Ork
as a human specimen, but his plan is foiled by Fonzie. In the
initial broadcast of this episode, it all turned out to be a dream that Richie
had, but when Mork proved so popular, the ending in the syndicated version was
re-edited to show Mork erasing the experience from everyone's minds, thus
meaning the event had actually happened and was not a dream.
Mork & Mindy is set in Boulder, Colorado, in
the then present-day late 1970s and early 1980s (as opposed to the Happy
Days setting of Milwaukee in the late-1950s). Mork explains to Richie
that he is from the "future": the 1970s.
Mork arrives on Earth in an egg-shaped spacecraft. He
has been assigned to observe human behavior by Orson, his mostly unseen and
long-suffering superior (voiced by Ralph
James). Orson has sent Mork to get him off Ork, where humor is not
permitted. Attempting to fit in, Mork dresses in an Earth suit, but wears it
backward. Landing in Boulder, Colorado, he encounters 21-year-old Mindy (Pam Dawber),
who is upset after an argument with her boyfriend, and offers assistance.
Because of his odd garb, she mistakes him for a priest and is taken in by his
willingness to listen (in fact, simply observing her behavior). When Mindy
notices his backward suit and unconventional behavior, she asks who he really
is, and he innocently tells her the truth. She promises to keep his identity a
secret and allows him to move into her attic. Mindy's father Fred (Conrad
Janis) objects to his daughter living with a man (particularly one as
bizarre as Mork), but Fred's mother-in-law Cora (Elizabeth Kerr) approves of
Mork and the living arrangement. Mindy and Cora work at Fred's music store,
where Cora gives violin lessons to Eugene (Jeffrey
Jacquet), a 10-year-old boy who becomes Mork's friend. Also seen
occasionally are Mindy's snooty old high school friend Susan (Morgan
Fairchild) and the possibly insane Exidor (Robert
Donner).
September
16, 1963
The
Outer Limits premiered on ABC-TV.
The Outer Limits is
an American television series that was broadcast
on ABC from 1963 to 1965 at
7:30 PM Eastern Time on Mondays. The series is often compared to The Twilight Zone, but with
a greater emphasis on science
fiction stories (rather than stories of fantasy or
the supernatural matters). The Outer Limits is
an anthologyof self-contained episodes, sometimes
with a plot twist at the end.
The
series was revived in 1995, airing on Showtime from 1995 to 2000, then
on Sci-Fi Channel from
2001 until its cancellation in 2002. In 1997, the episode "The
Zanti Misfits" was ranked #98 on TV Guide's 100 Greatest Episodes of
All Time.
Each
show would begin with either a cold open or
a preview clip, followed by a "Control Voice" narration that was
mainly run over visuals of an oscilloscope.
Using an Orwellian theme of taking over your television, the earliest version
of the narration ran as follows:
A
similar but shorter monolog caps each episode: We now return control of
your television set to you. Until next week at the same time, when the control
voice will take you to – The Outer Limits.
Later episodes used one of two shortened versions of
the introduction. The first few episodes began simply with the title
screen followed by the narration and no cold open or preview clip. The
Control Voice was performed by actor Vic Perrin.
September
16, 1968
The Andy
Griffith Show was seen for the final time on CBS.
September 16, 1968
U.S.
Presidential candidate Richard Nixon appeared on episode 15 of Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In.
He spoke the show signature line "Sock it to me."
September, 16, 1993
Frasier makes its debut on NBC.
Kelsey Grammer, who was born on February 21, 1955, studied drama at New York
City’s Juilliard School and began his professional acting career in theater. In
1984, he made his first appearance on Cheers as the fiance of one of the
main characters, Diane (Shelley Long). Although Frasier Crane was originally
only supposed to appear on Cheers for a few episodes, the popular
character became a permanent member of the show. Set in a Boston-based bar
called Cheers, the show debuted on September 30, 1982. Dr. Frasier Crane
was one of the regulars who, along with Norm Peterson (George Wendt) and Cliff
Clavin (John Ratzenberger) drank at Cheers, which was run by Sam Malone (Ted
Danson). When the final episode of Cheers aired on May 20, 1993, more
than 80 million viewers tuned in, making it one of the most-watched last
episodes in TV history.Frasier starred Kelsey Grammer as the erudite, snobbish Dr. Frasier Crane, a radio psychiatrist who relocates from Boston to his hometown of Seattle following the breakup of his marriage. The main characters in Frasier’s life are his father Martin (John Mahoney), a down-to-earth retired cop; his younger brother, Niles (David Hyde Pierce), a psychiatrist who shares Frasier’s taste for the finer things in life; his father’s kooky caretaker, Daphne Moon (Jane Leeves); his radio show producer, Roz Doyle (Peri Gilpin) and his father’s dog, Eddie. Grammer went on to star in Frasier from September 1993 to May 13, 2004. After making an Emmy Award-nominated guest appearance as Crane on the 1990s sitcom Wings, Grammer became the only actor in TV history to earn Emmy nominations for playing the same character on three separate shows.
To quote the Bicentennial Minute, "And that's the way it was".
 Stay Tuned Tony Figueroa |
I represent the first generation who, when we were born, the television was now a permanent fixture in our homes. When I was born people had breakfast with Barbara Walters, dinner with Walter Cronkite, and slept with Johnny Carson. Read the full "Pre-ramble"
Monday, September 10, 2018
This Week in Television History: September 2018 PART II
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