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"
On September 27, 2004, the 50th anniversary ofThe Tonight Show's debut, NBC announced Leno would be succeeded by O'Brien, in 2009. Leno explained he did not want to see a repeat of the hard feelings and controversy that occurred when he was given the show over Letterman following Carson's retirement.[9][10]
It was announced on July 21, 2008, that Leno would host his final episode of The Tonight Show on Friday, May 29, 2009, with O'Brien and James Taylor as his guests.[11] O'Brien took over hosting duties commencing the following Monday, on June 1, 2009.
On December 9, 2008, it was announced Leno would be hosting a new nightly show in September 2009, which aired at 10 pm ET, during the network's prime time period. The Jay Leno Show ended after a short run on February 9, 2010.
June 1, 2009
Conan O'Brien debuted as the host of NBC's Tonight Show.
Many
members of the Late Night cast and crew made the transition
to The Tonight Show. The Max Weinberg 7, the house band from
O'Brien's Late Night, served as the house band under the new
name, Max Weinberg and The Tonight Show Band. Andy Richter returned to the show
as announcer, and also began resuming his role as sidekick, shortly before the
show's conclusion. The opening and closing theme song from Late Night was
also carried over toTonight, in a slightly altered form.
In
January 2010, after the show had been on the air for seven months, it was
announced that NBC was intending to moveJay
Leno from
primetime back to his original timeslot at 11:35 pm, with O'Brien's show
starting shortly after midnight. In response to the announcement, O'Brien
released a press statement saying that he would not continue as host of The
Tonight Show if it was moved to any time after midnight to
accommodate The Jay Leno Show. He feared it would ruin the long and rich tradition of The
Tonight Show, which had been on after the late local newscasts from the
beginning. After two weeks of negotiations, NBC announced that they had paid
$45 million to buy out[3] O'Brien's contract,
ending both his tenure as host as well as his relationship with NBC after 22
years.
Conan
O'Brien's final Tonight Show was broadcast on January 22,
2010, with Jay Leno officially resuming his role as host on March 1, 2010,
immediately following the conclusion of the 2010 Winter Olympics. To date, it is the shortest running version of The Tonight Show.
It later received four Primetime Emmy nominations, including Outstanding Variety, Music
or Comedy Series, the first time The Tonight Show has received a
nomination for this particular award since 2003.
In the fall of 1988, after
biopsies and a saline wash of her abdomen showed no signs of cancer, Radner
went on a maintenance chemotherapy treatment to prolong her remission, but
later that same year, she learned that her cancer returned after a routine blood
test showed that levels of the tumor marker CA-125 had increased. She was
admitted to Cedars-Sinai
Medical Center in Los Angeles on May
17, 1989 for a CAT scan. Despite expressing her fear that she would never
wake up, she was given a sedative and passed into a coma during the scan. She
did not regain consciousness, and died three days later from ovarian cancer at 6:20 am on May 20, 1989; Wilder was at her side.
Her funeral was held in Connecticut on May 24, 1989.
In lieu of flowers, her family requested that donations be sent to The
Wellness Community. Her gravestone
reads: "Gilda Radner Wilder - Comedienne - Ballerina 1946-1989". She
was interred at Long Ridge Union Cemetery in Stamford,
Connecticut.
By coincidence, the news of her death broke on early
Saturday afternoon (Eastern Daylight Time), while Steve Martin was rehearsing as the guest host for that night's
season finale of Saturday Night Live. Saturday Night Live
personnel—including Lorne Michaels, Phil Hartman, and Mike Myers (who had, in his own words, "fallen in
love" with Radner after playing her son in a BC Hydro commercial on Canadian television and considered her the reason he
wanted to be on SNL) had not known she was so close to death. They
scrapped Martin's planned opening monologue and instead, Martin, in tears,
introduced a video clip of a 1978 sketch in which he and Radner parodied Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse in a well-known dance routine from The Band Wagon.
May 21, 1999
Soap star Susan Lucci wins first Emmy after 19
nominations. “The streak is
over…Susan Lucci!” announces Shemar Moore of The Young and the Restless on
this night in 1999, right before presenting the Daytime Emmy Award for Best
Actress to the tearful star of ABC’s All My Children. The award was
Lucci’s first win in 19 straight years of being nominated in the Best Actress
category for her portrayal of Erica Kane.
A native of Garden City, New York, Lucci moved to New York City after
graduating from college in 1968. She played bit parts in the films Goodbye,
Columbus and Me, Natalie (both 1969) before landing the role of the
troubled teenager Erica Kane on a new soap opera, All My Children. The
show debuted on January 5, 1970, and Lucci would go on to play Erica Kane over
the next four decades, as the character married no fewer than 11 times (to
eight different men, and several of the marriages were invalid), had several
children and grandchildren, was kidnapped, survived an airplane crash and a car
accident, battled drug addiction and became the owner of her own cosmetics
company (among other notable events). By 1991, Erica Kane was, according to TV
Guide, “unequivocally the most famous soap-opera character in the history
of TV.”
As reported by the New York Times, Lucci at that time was the
highest-paid actor on daytime television, earning more than $1 million per year
for her work on All My Children. Her honors included a Best Soap Actress
win in a 1985 People magazine poll, and a 1989 Soap Opera Digest Editors
Award for an “outstanding contribution to daytime television.” One thing she
didn’t have, however, was an Emmy. She received her first nomination in 1978,
and before long had received several nominations in a row without a win. After
reportedly losing her temper after failing to take home the award in 1982 and
1983, Lucci began accepting her runner-up status with more humor. In the fall
of 1990, she appeared as a guest host on an episode of Saturday Night Live,
in which all of the show’s cast and crew members carried Emmy statuettes past
her during her opening monologue. She also filmed a commercial for a sugar
substitute called the Sweet One, in which she lampooned her own hunger for an
Emmy.
Lucci was the favorite to win that May night in 1999, and Moore’s
announcement brought the audience in the theater at Madison Square Garden to
their feet for a standing ovation that lasted several minutes. Lucci’s
emotional acceptance speech brought tears to the eyes of many in the crowd,
including the talk show host Rosie O’Donnell and Lucci’s All My Children
co-stars Kelly Ripa and Marcy Walker. After thanking her husband, Helmut Huber,
the All My Children cast and crew and her fans, Lucci closed her speech
by announcing “I’m going to go back to that studio Monday and I’m going to play
Erica Kane for all she’s worth.”
In addition to her work on All My Children, Lucci guest-starred
repeatedly on the prime-time soap opera Dallas during the 1990s and has
appeared in a number of TV movies, including Lady Mobster, Mafia
Princess and Secret Passions. In 1999, she starred on Broadway in
the revival of Annie Get Your Gun. Lucci also competed in the seventh
installment of the reality series Dancing With the Stars, which aired in
the fall of 2008.
In Los Angeles, California, police surround a home in Compton where the leaders
of the terrorist group known as the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) are hiding
out. The SLA had kidnapped Patricia Hearst, of the fabulously wealthy Hearst
family publishing empire, months earlier, earning headlines across the country.
Police found the house in Compton when a local mother reported that her kids
had seen a bunch of people playing with an arsenal of automatic weapons in the
living room of the home.
The
LAPD's 500-man siege on the Compton home was only the latest event in a short,
but exceedingly bizarre, episode. The SLA was a small group of violent radicals
who quickly made their way to national prominence, far out of proportion to
their actual influence. They began by killing Oakland's superintendent of
schools in late 1973 but really burst into society's consciousness when they
kidnapped Hearst the following February.
Months
later, the SLA released a tape on which Hearst said that she was changing her
name to Tania and joining the SLA. Shortly thereafter, a surveillance camera in
a bank caught Hearst carrying a machine gun during an SLA robbery. In another
incident, SLA member General Teko was caught trying to shoplift from a sporting
goods store, but escaped when Hearst sprayed the front of the building with
machine gun fire.
Although
law enforcement officials began talking about the SLA as if they were a
well-established paramilitary terrorist organization, the SLA had only a
handful of members, most of who were disaffected middle class youths.
On
May 17, Los Angeles police shot an estimated 1,200 rounds of ammunition into
the tiny Compton home as six SLA members shot back. Teargas containers thrown
into the hideout started a fire, but the SLA refused to surrender. Autopsy
results showed that they continued to fire back even as smoke and flames were
searing their lungs; they clearly chose suicide and martyrdom over jail.
Randolph Hearst, Patty's father, remarked that the massive attack had turned
"dingbats into martyrs." The raid left six SLA members dead,
including leader Donald DeFreeze, also known as Cinque. Patty Hearst was not
inside the home at the time. She was not found until September 1975.
Patty
Hearst was put on trial for armed robbery and convicted, despite her claim that
she had been coerced, through repeated rape, isolation, and brainwashing, into
joining the SLA. Prosecutors believed that she actually orchestrated her own
kidnapping because of her prior involvement with one of the SLA members.
Despite any real proof of this theory, she was convicted and sent to prison.
President Carter commuted Hearst's sentence after she had served almost two
years. Hearst was pardoned by President Clinton in January 2001.
May 17, 2004
Tony Randall died.
Best known for his role as Felix Unger in the television adaptation of Neil Simon‘s play, The Odd Couple.
May 19, 2009
The pilot episode of Glee aired.
"Pilot" is the pilot episode of
the American television series Glee, which premiered on the Fox network
on May 19, 2009. An extended director's cut version aired on
September 2, 2009. The show focuses on a high school show choir, also known as a glee club, set within the fictional
William McKinley High School in Lima, Ohio. The pilot episode
covers the formation of the club and introduces the main characters. The
episode was directed by series creator Ryan Murphy, and written by Murphy, Brad Falchuk and Ian Brennan. Murphy selected the music featured in the episode, with the intention
of maintaining a balance between showtunes and chart hits.
The
episode achieved 9.619 million viewers on first broadcast, and 4.2 million
when the director's cut version aired.Critical response was mixed,
with The New York Times's Alessandra Stanley
highlighting the episode's unoriginality and stereotyped characters, but
praising the showmanship and talent of the cast. The Daily News's David Hinckley opined
that the show was imperfect and implausible but "potentially
heartwarming," while USA Today's Robert Bianco noted casting and tone problems,
but commented positively on the show's humor and musical performances. Mary
McNamara for the LA Times wrote that the show
had a wide audience appeal, calling it: "the first show in a long time
that's just plain full-throttle, no-guilty-pleasure-rationalizations-necessary
fun."
Spanish
teacher Will
Schuester (Matthew Morrison) learns that Sandy Ryerson (Stephen Tobolowsky), the head of William McKinley High School's glee club has been fired for
inappropriate sexual behavior toward male student Hank Saunders (Ben Bledsoe). The school principal,Figgins (Iqbal Theba), gives Will permission to
take over the club, and he plans to revitalize it, naming the group New
Directions. The club consists of fame-hungry Rachel Berry (Lea Michele), diva Mercedes Jones (Amber Riley), flamboyant countertenor Kurt Hummel (Chris Colfer), paraplegicelectric guitar
player Artie
Abrams (Kevin McHale) and stutteringgothTina Cohen-Chang (Jenna Ushkowitz). Will's efforts are
derided by Sue
Sylvester (Jane Lynch), head of the school's
successful cheerleading team, the Cheerios
who soon plans to abolish the Glee club to restore her money funded towards the
spoilt Cheerios. His wife Terri (Jessalyn Gilsig) is also unsupportive,
suggesting that Will become an accountant to increase their income and give up
teaching. Rachel threatens to leave the club if Will cannot find a male
vocalist with talent comparable to hers. When the school's football coach Ken Tanaka (Patrick Gallagher) allows Will to try to recruit football team members, in return that
he put a good word for Emma for him (because Ken likes her), he discovers
that quarterbackFinn Hudson (Cory Monteith) is secretly a talented
singer. He plants marijuana in Finn's locker, and
blackmails him into joining New Directions. Finn, determined not to disappoint
his widowed mother, complies.
Raymond Burr wins
the Best Actor in a Dramatic Series Emmy for Perry Mason, in which he
plays a crime-solving attorney.
The popular show, which debuted in 1957,
ran for nine years. Derived from mystery novels by Earl Stanley Gardner, the
character of Perry Mason had made his radio debut in 1943 and the show
continued until 1955. The sleuthing Perry Mason character was revived in a
series of TV movies from 1985 to 1993.
May 6, 1984
Spinal Tap stages a "comeback" at CBGB's in
New York City
Almost
20 years and who knows how many drummers into their unique career in rock, the
surviving members of one of England's loudest bands had reached yet another low
point in the spring of 1984. Only two years removed from a disastrous 1982
world tour that not only failed to turn the album Smell The Glove into a
comeback hit, but also led to the group's breakup, Spinal Tap now had to suffer
the indignity of seeing the Marty DiBergi-helmed behind-the-scenes film of that
tour gain widespread theatrical release. Would the numerous embarrassments
catalogued in the hard-hitting rockumentary This Is Spinal Tap provoke
public sympathy for and renewed interest in the band that Nigel Tufnel, David
St. Hubbins and Derek Smalls began back in 1964 as The Originals? Or would the
group behind such familiar classic-rock hits as "Give Me Some Money"
and "Tonight I'm Gonna Rock You Tonight" be consigned once and for
all to obscurity? In this atmosphere of uncertainty, Spinal Tap elected to go
back to their roots, kicking off a tour of small American rock clubs with an
appearance at New York City's legendary CBGB's on May 6, 1984.
Of
course, almost none of the above is true, strictly speaking. A group calling
itself Spinal Tap did play CBGB's on this day in 1984, but that group was the
fictitious invention of director Rob Reiner and the comic actors Michael
McKean, Christopher Guest and Harry Shearer—St. Hubbins, Tufnel and Smalls,
respectively. Reiner's directorial debut was the aforementioned This Is
Spinal Tap, a film that launched the mockumentary mini-genre as well as a
thousand catchphrases, from "These go to 11" to "None
more black." It was during the film's first week of release that
McKean, Guest, Shearer and one of their many doomed drummers played their gig
at CBGB's, which one attendee recalls as drawing "every professional
musician in the city of New York."
This
live appearance by Spinal Tap was the first, but certainly not the last step in
an ongoing effort by the McKean et al. to blur the line between fiction and
reality. In the years since their live debut, numerous bootleg recordings and
early television appearances have "surfaced," and one full-length
album—1992's Break Like The Wind—has been released. At last report,
Nigel Tufnel was working on a pony farm, David St. Hubbins was producing
hip-hop records out of a former colonic clinic and Derek Smalls was in rehab
for an Internet addiction. But do not be surprised if one day you encounter a
salesman resembling Christopher Guest on a visit to a hat shop, or if next
year's lineup of Broadway openings includes the long-awaited St. Hubbins rock
opera, Saucy Jack
May 6, 2004
Final episode of Friends
airs on NBC
At 9:00 p.m. Eastern and
Pacific times on this day in 2004, that familiar theme song (“I’ll Be There For
You” by the Rembrandts) announces the beginning of the end, as an estimated
51.1 million people tune in for the final original episode of NBC’s long-running
comedy series Friends.
Created and executive-produced (with Kevin S. Bright) by Marta Kauffman and
David Crane, Friends debuted 10 years and 236 episodes earlier, on
September 22, 1994. Shot at the Warner Brothers studios in Burbank, California,
the show was set in New York City’s Greenwich Village, where six friends
struggled with the ups-and-downs of young adult life in the big city--albeit
while living in an impossibly large, cushy apartment, apparently without the
burden of having to spend much time working actual jobs. Almost from the
beginning of its decade-long run, Friends was a cultural phenomenon,
winning six Emmy Awards (including one for Outstanding Comedy Series), sparking
hairstyle trends (“the Rachel”), spawning catch phrases (“How you doin?”)
and turning its six principal cast members into household names.
Preceded by a maelstrom of hype and publicity, the hour-long Friends finale
drew approximately two-thirds of the audience garnered by the finales of two
other long-running sitcoms, Cheers (80.4 million) in 1993 and Seinfeld
(76.2 million) in 1998, according to a Fox News report. The most-watched TV
series finale ever, M*A*S*H, was viewed by some 105 million people when
it aired in 1983. According to the New York Times, NBC charged
advertisers an average of $2 million for every 30 seconds of ad time during the
finale--a record amount for a sitcom and only $300,000 less than what CBS
charged during that year’s Super Bowl.
In the finale, the long-running on-and-off relationship between Ross (David
Schwimmer) and Rachel (Jennifer Aniston), which over the years included a
drunken Las Vegas wedding and a baby, Emma, born in 2002, ended as most of the
show’s fans hoped: They got back together, presumably for good. Meanwhile,
Chandler (Matthew Perry) and Monica (Courtney Cox-Arquette) had become
suburbanites and parents of twins, Phoebe (Lisa Kudrow) was married, and Joey
(Matt LeBlanc) was headed off to L.A. to pursue his acting career. (A spin-off
sitcom, Joey, followed LeBlanc’s character to Hollywood; the show failed
to attract a significant audience, and was canceled in 2006.)
Throughout the show’s run, its six stars maintained a famously unified
front, ensuring that no one of them emerged as a dominating force onscreen and
even negotiating their salaries together. In the spring of 2000, each member of
the cast signed a two-year, $40 million contract that netted them each a
staggering $1 million per episode. Broadcast in some 100 countries, Friends continues
to earn good ratings for its syndicated rerun episodes.
May
8, 1984
Soviets announce boycott of
1984 Olympics
Claiming
that its athletes will not be safe from protests and possible physical attacks,
the Soviet Union announces that it will not compete in the 1984 Olympics in Los
Angeles. Despite the Soviet statement, it was obvious that the boycott was a
response to the decision of the United States to boycott the 1980 games
that were held in Moscow.
Just
months before the 1984 Olympic games were to begin in Los
Angeles, the Soviet government issued a statement claiming, "It is known
from the very first days of preparations for the present Olympics the American
administration has sought to set course at using the Games for its political
aims. Chauvinistic sentiments and anti-Soviet hysteria are being whipped up in
this country." Russian officials went on to claim that protests against
the Soviet athletes were likely to break out in Los Angeles and that they
doubted whether American officials would try to contain such outbursts. The
administration of President Ronald Reagan responded to these charges
by declaring that the Soviet boycott was "a blatant political decision for
which there was no real justification."
In
the days following the Soviet announcement, 13 other communist nations issued
similar statements and refused to attend the games. The Soviets, who had been
stung by the U.S. refusal to attend the 1980 games in Moscow because of the
Russian intervention in Afghanistan in 1979, were turning the tables by
boycotting the 1984 games in America. The diplomatic impact of the action was
quite small. The impact on the games themselves, however, was immense. Without
competition from the Soviet Union, East Germany, and other communist nations,
the United States swept to an Olympic record of 83 gold medals.
May 8, 1984
"Well,
what can I say? Both of our children are married now and they’re starting out
to build lives of their own. And I guess when you reach a milestone like this
you have to have to reflect back on, on what you’ve done and, and what you’ve
accomplished. Marion and I have not climbed Mount Everest or written a great
American novel. But we’ve had the joy of raising two wonderful kids, and
watching them and their friends grow up into loving adults. And now, we’re
gonna have the pleasure of watching them pass that love on to their children.
And I guess no man or woman could ask for anything more. So thank you all for
being, part of our family… ToHappy Days."
