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"
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.
