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"
Polly Dean Holliday July 2, 1937 – September 9, 2025
In 1976, Polly Holliday was cast—in what would be her major break—as sassy, man-hungry waitress Florence Jean "Flo" Castleberry on the U.S.CBSsitcomAlice.Her character coined the popularcatchphrase"Kiss my grits!" The phrase became part of the Americanvernacular. Holliday starred inAlicefrom 1976 to 1980, and then moved to her own short-livedspin-offshow, titledFlo, in which Flo leftArizonaand moved back home toTexas.The show was successful during its abbreviated first season, but ratings declined during the following season due to a time change, and it was canceled in 1981.
In 1983, Holliday joined the cast of the CBS-TV sitcomPrivate Benjaminas a temporary replacement for series regularEileen Brennan, who was recovering from serious injuries after being struck by a car.
The first episode of "Welcome Back, Kotter"
aired on ABC.
The show starred stand-up
comic/actor Gabriel 'Gabe' W. Kaplan as the title character, Gabe Kotter, a
wisecracking teacher who returns to his alma mater high school, the
fictional James Buchanan High
in Brooklyn, New York, to teach an often unruly group of remedial
loafers self-labeled as the "Sweathogs." (The nickname reflected the
fact that the remedial classes were held on the very top floor of the high
school.) The school was based on New Utrecht High School, which was used in the opening credits, and also the
high school that Kaplan attended. The school's principal was perpetually
absent, while the uptight vice principal, Michael Woodman (John Sylvester White),
dismissed the Sweathogs as worthless hoodlums and only expected Kotter to
attempt to contain them until they inevitably dropped out.
Kotter
had attended the same remedial classes when he was a student at Buchanan, and
was a founding member of the Sweathogs. Recognizing that he was his students'
last chance to learn enough to survive beyond high school, he soon befriended
them as they grew to recognize and appreciate his faith in their potential. His
devotion to the class was such that his students often visited his Bensonhurst apartment, sometime via window, to
the chagrin of his wife, Julie (Marcia Strassman).
Many
of the characters of Welcome Back, Kotter were based on people
from Kaplan's teen years as a remedial school student in Brooklyn. As a
stand-up comic, one of Kaplan's routines was "Holes and Mellow
Rolls", in which he talked in depth about his former classmates. The names
of characters in Holes and Mellow Rolls: "Vinnie Barbarino" was
inspired by Eddie Lecarri and Ray Barbarino, from Miami, FL; "Freddie
'Boom Boom' Washington" was inspired by Freddie "Furdy" Peyton;
"Juan Epstein" was partially inspired by Epstein "The
Animal"; and "Arnold Horseshit" was changed to "Arnold
Horshack" for network television.
The first half of the hour-long
program, which is set in New York City, focuses on the police as they
investigate a crime--often inspired by real-life news stories--while the second
part of the show centers on the prosecution of those accused of that crime.
Each episode opens with a narrator stating: “In the criminal justice system,
the people are represented by two separate yet equally important groups: the
police, who investigate crime, and the district attorneys, who prosecute the
offenders. These are their stories.”
On September 20, 1999, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit,
starring Mariska Hargitay and Christopher Meloni as a pair of New York City
detectives who investigate sex-related crimes, premiered on NBC. Law &
Order: Criminal Intent followed in 2001. Law & Order: Trial by Jury
debuted in 2005 and lasted for one season. The Law & Order franchise
was created by Dick Wolf, who was born in 1946 and began his television career
as a writer for such shows as Miami Vice.
My Mother The Car premiered
on NBC TV. The series was canceled after only a few weeks after the
debut.
Critics and adult viewers
generally panned the show, often savagely. In 2002, TV Guide proclaimed
it to be the second-worst of all time, just behind The Jerry Springer
Show. In 2010 The O'Reilly
Factor recorded its viewers
as listing it as the worst show of all time. In the context of its time,
however, My Mother the Car was an original variation on
then-popular "gimmick" shows like My Favorite
Martian, The Flying Nun, I Dream of Jeannie, and especially Mister Ed,
all of which depended on a fantastic, quirky premise for their comedy. Like
these situation comedies of the 1960s, My Mother the Car is
remembered fondly by baby boomerswho
followed the series during its one broadcast season.
Allan Burns, co-creator of My Mother the Car, went on
to create some of the most critically acclaimed shows in television history,
including The Mary
Tyler Moore Show, Rhoda,
and Lou Grant. Television producer James L. Brooks,
who later collaborated with Burns on these series, created, among others, Room 222 and Taxi,
and served as executive producer of The Simpsons (which later parodied the show in the "Lovematic
Grandpa" segment of "The
Simpsons Spin-Off Showcase"),
got his start in television sitcoms when he was called upon to rewrite a script
for an episode of the series.The other co-creator, Chris Hayward,
produced and wrote for Barney Miller during its first several seasons.
September 14, 1965
F Troop debuted. F Troop is a satirical American television sitcom about
U.S. soldiers and American
Indians in the Wild West during
the 1860s that originally aired for two seasons on ABC-TV.
It debuted in the United States on September 14,
1965 and concluded its run on April 6, 1967 with a total of 65 episodes. The
first season of 34 episodes was broadcast in black-and-white,
the second season in color.
The series relied heavily on
character-based humor; verbal and visual gags, slapstick, physical comedy and burlesque comedy
make up the prime ingredients of F Troop. The series played fast
and loose with historical events and persons, and often parodied them for
comical effect (such as with calling the Winchester 73 rifle the Chestwinster 76 rifle) There were
some indirect references made to the culture of the 1960s such as a
"Playbrave Club" (a parody of a Playboy Club) and
imitations of Rock & Roll bands (including singing songs written in the
1960s).
The Golden Girls received critical acclaim throughout most of
its run and won several awards, including the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Comedy Series twice. It also won three Golden Globe Awards for Best Television Series –
Musical or Comedy. Each of the four
stars received an Emmy
Award (from multiple
nominations during the series' run), making it one of only three sitcoms in the
award's history to achieve this. The series also ranked among the top ten
highest-rated programs for six out of its seven seasons. In 2014, the Writers
Guild of America placed the
sitcom at #69 in their list of the "101 Best Written TV Series of All
Time".
The last episode of
"I Dream of Jeannie" aired on NBC-TV.
Jeannie and Tony's cousin
want to make Tony the chili king even though NASA forbids its astronauts to
make commercial endorsements.The show premiered was on September 18,
1965.
September 7, 1950
Radio game
show Truth or Consequences comes to television.
The show required erring quiz show contestants to
perform outrageous stunts as the consequence for wrong answers. As we mentioned
in an earlier episode (This week in Television History: The
Start of Something Big) the radio
version of the show ran from 1940 to 1956. The TV version of the series
launched on CBS in 1950, but the network dropped the show after only one
season. In 1954, NBC revived the game show, running it in prime time until
1958. Meanwhile, the network also created a daytime version of the show, hosted
by Bob Barker, which ran from 1956 to 1965. NBC dropped the show altogether in
1965, but it continued as a syndicated series until 1974, with Barker staying
on as host.
September 7, 1950
Julie Kavner, voice of Marge Simpson, is born.
Best known as the voice of Marge Simpson on The
Simpsons, the longest-running animated show in TV history, is born in Los
Angeles. Before taking on the role of the famously blue-haired housewife,
Kavner played Brenda Morgenstern on Rhoda, a spin-off of The Mary
Tyler MooreShow that originally aired from 1974 to 1978. In 1978,
Kavner won an Emmy Award for Best Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series for her
portrayal of Brenda, the younger sister of the show’s lead character, played by
Valerie Harper. She won another Emmy in 1992, for Outstanding Voice-over
Performance, for an episode of The Simpsons. On the big screen, Kavner
has been a frequent performer in the films of the writer-director Woody Allen,
including Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), Radio Days (1987) and Shadows
and Fog (1992). Among her other film credits are Awakenings (1990)
and Judy Berlin (1999).
The Simpsons began as a series of animated shorts created by
cartoonist Matt Groening (who reportedly based some of the main characters on
members of his family) that aired on The Tracey Ullman Show starting in
1987. On December 17, 1989, The Simpsons debuted as primetime program on
Fox with a Christmas special titled “Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire.”
Set in the fictional town of Springfield, The Simpsons skewers
American culture and society with its chronicles of a middle-class family
comprised of the buffoonish husband and father Homer Simpson, a safety
inspector at a nuclear power plant; his well-meaning, sometimes gullible wife
Marge; and their troublemaker son Bart, precocious daughter Lisa and baby
Maggie. The Simpsons is known for its sharp writing (Conan O’Brien used
to write for the show before he became a late-night TV host) and features a
large cast of supporting characters, including Homer’s boss and nemesis, Mr.
Burns; the Simpsons’ neighbor Ned Flanders, a devout Christian; and Krusty the
Clown. In addition to providing the voice of Marge Simpson, Julie Kavner also
voices the characters Patty and Selma, Marge’s chain-smoking twin sisters. A
long list of celebrities, including Kelsey Grammer, Larry King, Sting, Hugh
Hefner, Ringo Starr, J.K. Rowling, Tony Blair, Stephen Hawking, 50 Cent and Mel
Gibson have made guest appearances on the show as themselves or fictional
characters.
The Simpsons has been an enormous commercial and critical hit--in
1999, Time dubbed it the greatest TV show of the 20th century--and
images of the yellow-skinned Simpson characters have appeared on everything
from T-shirts to video games. As a pop phenomenon, the show paved the way for
other popular animated comedies, including Beavis and Butt-head and South
Park, and has been a source of popular catchphrases,
including Homer’s “D’oh!” which was added to the Oxford English
Dictionary in 2001. A big-screen version of the show, The Simpsons
Movie, debuted July 27, 2007, and was a box-office hit.
Children's show Kukla, Fran and Ollie
airs its last episode on prime-time network TV.
The show featured beloved puppets Kukla, Ollie (a
dragon), and others, with live actress Fran Allison as host. The show began as
a local Chicago program and moved to NBC in 1948. It was one of the two most
important series made in Chicago, along with Garroway at Large, during
the city's brief period as an important production center for network programs
in the late 1940s. After its network cancellation, PBS revived the series from
1969 to 1971.
On this day in
2000, Richard Hatch, a 39-year-old corporate trainer from Rhode Island, wins
the season-one finale of the reality television show Survivor and takes
home the promised $1 million prize. In a four-to-three vote by his fellow
contestants, Hatch, who was known for walking around naked on the island in
Borneo where the show was shot, was named Sole Survivor over the river raft
guide Kelly Wiglesworth. Survivor, whose slogan is “Outwit, Outplay,
Outlast,” was a huge ratings success and spawned numerous imitators in the
reality-competition genre.
Produced by Mark Burnett (The Apprentice, Are You Smarter Than a 5th
Grader?), Survivor premiered on May 31, 2000, on CBS. The
showcenters around a group of sixteen strangers who are stranded for 39
days in a remote location where they must fend for food, water and shelter and
compete in various challenges to win rewards and immunity from being voted out
of the competition by their fellow contestants. The voting takes place at the
so-called “Tribal Council” ceremony and after a contestant is voted off, the
show’s host Jeff Probst informs that person that “the tribe has spoken” and
asks the evictee to extinguish his or her torch.
As of May 2008, Survivor had been on the air for 16 seasons. The show
has been filmed in a variety of locations around the world, including the
Australian Outback (season two), the Amazon (season six) and Fiji (season 14).
Season 13, which was set in the Cook Islands, stirred up controversy when the
contestants were initially divided by race into four competing tribes:
African-American, Asian, Caucasian and Hispanic.
In 2006, season-one winner Richard Hatch was found guilty of tax evasion for
failing to report his Survivor prize money to the IRS. He was sentenced
to more than four years in prison. Other former Survivor contestants
have gone on to reap more success from their appearance on the reality show:
Season one’s Colleen Haskell landed a co-starring role in the forgettable 2001
comedy The Animal, while season two’s Elisabeth Hasselbeck (nee
Filarski) went on to become a co-host of the daytime TV talk show The View.
The offbeat show, about
a Manhattan doctor contractually forced to work in the fictional of town
Cicely, Alaska for four years to repay a student loan from the
state.Rob Morrow stared as Dr. Joel
Fleischman. Most of Northern Exposure'sstory arcs are character-driven, with the plots revolving around the
eccentricities of the Cicely citizens. The show consistently ranked in the Top
20 most-watched TV shows until it was canceled in 1995.
July 13, 1985
Live Aid, a massive concert for African famine relief, takes place
simultaneously in Philadelphia and London.
In addition to 162,000 fans that attended the all-day event were 1.5
billion viewers worldwide who watched the show on MTV or other television
stations. An estimated 75 percent of all radio stations around the world
broadcast at least part of the concert.
Irish musician Bob
Geldof, of the Boomtown Rats, organized the event. Among the participants were
Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, the Beach Boys, Carlos Santana, Madonna, Sting, and
Tina Turner. Several disbanded groups came together again for the day, including
Crosby, Stills and Nash; The Who; and surviving members of Led Zeppelin,
including Robert Plant, Jimmy Page, and John Paul Jones. All performers worked
for free, as did many other concert workers. The production, which ordinarily
would have cost $20 million to stage, cost only $4 million and raised more than
$70 million for famine relief.
Despite the number of
acts, the show ran surprisingly smoothly. Rotating stages allowed bands to set
up and dismantle their equipment while other bands were onstage. Acts from one
stadium were telecast across the Atlantic to the other. Such organization,
however, did not characterize the group's later charitable efforts: Live Aid
was later criticized for its disorganized and slow efforts to channel aid to
Africa.
Most shows featured a guest star, usually a well known singer or musician,
most commonly within popular music or sometimes rock, folk, jazz or other
musical genres. After one or two opening numbers by the Pops, the guest would
be brought onstage. Usually the guest would sing several their own hits or
songs associated with them, with accompaniment by the Pops. After concluding
their set, the guest artist would leave the stage, and the Pops would play one
or two closing numbers. The three men who served as Boston Pops Conductor
during the show's run – Arthur
Fiedler (1970-79), John
Williams (1979-95) and Keith
Lockhart (1996-2005) – appeared. Gene
Galusha provided narration and announced most of the pieces played.
Evening at Symphony, a companion series produced by WGBH and
featuring performances of the Boston Symphony Orchestra conducted
by Seiji
Ozawa, aired on PBS from 1974 to 1979.
Hugh Grant appears on Tonight Show after Hollywood
arrest.
On this day in 1995, Hugh
Grant appears on late-night television’s The Tonight Show less than two
weeks after being arrested with a Hollywood prostitute. The show’s host, Jay
Leno, famously asked the English actor, “What the hell were you thinking?”
Grant, who shot to stardom with the 1994 hit British film Four Weddings
and a Funeral, was arrested on June 27, 1995, in a parked car near Sunset
Boulevard with a prostitute named Divine Brown and charged with lewd conduct in
a public place. At the time of his arrest, Grant, then age 34, was already
scheduled to appear on The Tonight Show to promote Nine Months,
his first major Hollywood movie. The actor kept his agreement and went on the
program, speaking publicly about the incident for the first time. “What the
hell were you thinking?” Leno asked him, to which Grant simply responded “I did
a bad thing.” The show garnered huge ratings (enabling Leno to beat his
late-night talk show rival David Letterman) and Grant was praised for
apologizing for his behavior, in contrast to other scandal-plagued celebrities
who went into seclusion or blamed their mistakes on others.
Grant pled no contest to the charges against him, paid a fine and received
probation. Although the arrest surprised many fans of the actor, who was known
for his charm and wit, his career did not seem to suffer in the end and he went
on to star in a number of films, most often romantic comedies, including Notting
Hill (1999), Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001), About a Boy
(2002), Love Actually (2003) and Music and Lyrics (2007). Though
Grant’s long-term girlfriend, the English model and actress Elizabeth Hurley,
stuck by him during the scandal, the couple announced their separation in 2000
after 13 years together.
As a brunette, I had previously been this serious actress.
Then I became a blonde and got to play a completely different, comic role.
-Loni Anderson
Loni Anderson (August 5, 1945 – August 3, 2025)
Loni Anderson's acting debut came with a bit part in the filmNevada Smith(1966), starringSteve McQueen. After that, she was mostly unemployed as an actress for nearly a decade, then she received guest roles on television series in the mid-1970s.
She appeared in two episodes ofS.W.A.T., then on the sitcomPhyllis, and the detective seriesPolice WomanandHarry O. She auditioned for the role of Chrissy on the sitcom Three's Company. She did not win the role, but in 1978 guest-starred as Susan Walters on a season two episode,[4] an appearance that brought her to the attention of the ABC network.[citation needed] Anderson's most famous acting role came as the sultry receptionist Jennifer Marlowe on the sitcom WKRP in Cincinnati (1978–1982). She was offered the role when producers saw a poster of her in a red swimsuit—a pose similar to Farrah Fawcett's famous 1976 poster. Hugh Wilson, the sitcom's creator, later said Anderson got the role because her body resembled Jayne Mansfield's and because she possessed the innocent sexuality of Marilyn Monroe. For her role, she was nominated for three Golden Globe Awards and two Emmy Awards.
Although the series suffered in the Nielsen ratings throughout most of its four-year run, it had a strong following among teens, young adults, and disc jockeys. Owing to her rising popularity as the series' so-called "main attraction", Anderson walked out on the sitcom during the 1980 summer hiatus, requesting a substantial salary increase. While she was renegotiating her contract, she starred in the television film The Jayne Mansfield Story (1980). When the network agreed to her requests, she returned to the series and remained until its cancellation in 1982. Aside from her acting career, Anderson has become known for her colorful personal life, particularly her relationship with and marriage to actor Burt Reynolds. They starred in the comedy film Stroker Ace (1983), which was a critical and box-office failure. She later appeared as herself in the romantic comedy The Lonely Guy (1984), starring Steve Martin. She voiced Flo, a collie in the animated film All Dogs Go to Heaven (1989).
In the mid-to-late 1980s, Anderson was teamed with Wonder Woman actress Lynda Carter in the television series Partners in Crime (1984), and starred in short-lived comedy series Easy Street (1986–1987). She appeared in television adaptations of classic Hollywood films, such as A Letter to Three Wives (1985) with Michele Lee, and Sorry, Wrong Number (1989), both of which received little attention. After starring in Coins in the Fountain (1990), Anderson received considerable praise for her portrayal of comedian actress Thelma Todd in the television movie White Hot: The Mysterious Murder of Thelma Todd (1991). In the early 1990s, she attempted to co-star with her husband Burt Reynolds on his sitcom Evening Shade, but the network was not fond of the idea, thus replacing Anderson with Marilu Henner. After Delta Burke was fired from the sitcom Designing Women in 1991, producers offered Anderson a role as Burke's replacement, which never came to pass because the network refused to pay Anderson the salary she had requested. She agreed to return as Jennifer Marlowe on two episodes of The New WKRP in Cincinnati, a sequel to the original series. In 1993, Anderson was added to the third season of the sitcom Nurses, playing hospital administrator Casey MacAffee. Although her entering the series was an attempt to boost the series' ratings, the series was canceled shortly thereafter. In April 2018, Anderson was seen promoting WKRP in Cincinnati and other television series on the MeTV television network. Though less frequent since the start of the 21st century, Anderson continued to act in television series, and played a lead role in the 2016–2020 web seriesMy Sister is So Gay.
On October 3, 2023, it was announced that Anderson would feature in the Lifetime film Ladies of the '80s: A Divas Christmas. According to the official synopsis, the movie follows five soap opera divas readying for a reunion show who take on playing cupid during Christmas to bring together their director and producer as they all learn the meaning of the true Christmas spirit. The ensemble cast is made up of Anderson, Linda Gray, Morgan Fairchild, Donna Mills, and Nicollette Sheridan.
