Mondays 9pm ET, 6pm PT with replays three times a day, seven days a week at 11am ET, 8am PT 9pm ET, 6pm PT and 1am ET, 10pm PT
Tuesdays 11:05pm ET, 8:05pm PT
Fridays 7pm ET and PT
Saturdays 11pm ET, 8pm PT Sundays 5pm ET, 2pm PT
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 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.).
May 4, 1975
Moe Howard of the Three Stooges, died. Howard was born in Brooklyn in 1897. The brother of fellow Stooges Shemp and Curly. The Stooges appeared in 190 short subjects for Columbia and more than 20 feature-length films.
Curly suffered a series of strokes which led to his death on January 18, 1952.
On November 22, 1955, Shemp died of a heart attack.
Joe Besser was hired in 1956. Joe, Larry, and Moe filmed 16 shorts through December 1957. With the death of Columbia head Harry Cohn, the making of short subjects came to an end, and Howard was forced to take a job as a gofer at Columbia.
Throughout their career, Moe acted as both their main creative force and business manager. C3 Entertainment, Inc. was formed by Moe, Larry and Curly-Joe DeRita in 1959 to manage all business and merchandise transactions for the team.
Eventhough the Stooges never made any money when thier Columbia shorts were syndicated on local TV stations, the did do very well fiancially making personal aparances in the cities where thier shorts were airing. The movie The Outlaws Is Coming (1965) has a nod to television's key role in the resurgence of the Stooges' popularity, the outlaws were played by local TV hosts from across the U.S. whose shows featured the trio's old Columbia shorts.
Normandy Productions, and amassed control over the team's finances and existed until 1994 when the heirs of Larry and Curly-Joe filed a lawsuit against Moe's family, particularly his grandsons. The result gave the other heirs more profits, and placed Curly-Joe's stepsons (Robert and Earl Benjamin) in charge of the Stooge images/sales. The moniker C3 Entertainment, Inc. was reinstated and is currently the owner of all Three Stooges trademarks and merchandising. Larry's grandson Eric Lamond is a majority owner in the company as well.
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.
To quote the Bicentennial Minute, "And that's the way it was". Stay Tuned
Tony Figueroa
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