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, January 02, 2017
This Week in Television History: January 2017 PART I
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.
January 2, 1962
Folk group The Weavers are
banned by NBC after refusing to sign a loyalty oath. The Weavers, one of the most significant popular-music
groups of the postwar era, saw their career nearly destroyed during the Red Scare of the early 1950s. Even with
anti-communist fervor in decline by the early 1960s, the Weavers'
leftist politics were used against them as late as January 2, 1962, when the
group's appearance on The Jack Paar Show was cancelled over their
refusal to sign an oath of political loyalty.
The importance of the Weavers to the folk revival of
the late 1950s cannot be overstated. Without the group that Pete Seeger founded
with Lee Hays in Greenwich Village in 1948, there would likely be no Bob Dylan,
not to mention no Kingston Trio or Peter, Paul and Mary. The Weavers helped
spark a tremendous resurgence in interest in American folk traditions and folk
songs when they burst onto the popular scene with "Goodnight Irene,"
a #1 record for 13 weeks in the summer and fall of 1950. The Weavers sold
millions of copies of innocent, beautiful and utterly apolitical records like
"Midnight Special" and "On Top of Old Smoky" that year.
And then it came to light that members of the group
had openly embraced the pacifism, internationalism and pro-labor sympathies of
the Communist Party during the 1930s. When word of their
political past spread, the backlash was swift. The Weavers' planned television
show was canceled, the group was placed under FBI surveillance and Seeger and
Hays were called to testify before Joseph McCarthy's House Un-American
Activities Committee. The Weavers lost their recording contract with Decca in
1951, and by 1953, unable to book most concert venues and banned from appearing
on television and radio, they disbanded.
The Weavers enjoyed a significant comeback in the late
1950s, but the group never shook its right-wing antagonists. On the afternoon
of January 2, 1962, in advance of a scheduled appearance on The Jack Paar
Show, the Weavers were told by NBC officials that their appearance would be
canceled if they would not sign a statement disavowing the Communist party.
Every member of the Weavers refused to sign.
January 3, 1932
Dabney Wharton Coleman is born. He
is best known for his abrasive characters and his usually present mustache.
Coleman was so in demand as a TV guest star that he did multiple episodes of
popular series: The Fugitive
(four), That Girl (nine), The
Outer Limits (three), Barnaby Jones (five), Twilve
O'Clock High (two) and The F.B.I.
(nine), by way of example. Having played a detective in a 1973 episode of Columbo,
Coleman 18 years later returned to that series in a leading role as a murderer. He appeared as Mayor Merle Jeeter in the original Mary
Hartman, Mary Hartman (1976) and its spinoff of the following
year, Fernwood 2 Night.
Many remember the actor for his starring roles in two TV cult classics, Buffalo Bill
and The Slap
Maxwell Story. Each of these series asked audiences to embrace
Coleman's own charisma and comic timing as compensation for his character's
lack of character, whether he be a conceited television host or a self-obsessed
sportswriter. In 1991, Coleman played public interest attorney William John Cox in the Turner Network
Television dramatization of the "Holocaust Denial Case, Never Forget. More recent television characters have a well-timed, dry wit, which seem to
come to Coleman naturally. He played a more sympathetic one than usual in The Guardian
and guest-starred on a 2009 episode of Law
& Order: Special Victims Unit, more than 40 years since the
actor's earliest work on TV.
In 1999, Coleman voice-acted
in a number of episodes of the Disney Channel series Recess, playing a character named Principal Prickly.
January 3, 1952
Dragnetdebuts,
launching a long legacy of realistic police drama on TV.Dragnet, which began as a popular radio
program in 1949, boosted the popularity of the series format on TV.
Until Dragnet's
TV debut, variety shows and comedy hours had dominated prime time programming.
Most television drama appeared on hour-long anthology shows like Kraft
Television Theater, featuring unrelated stories and different casts every
week. In fact, Dragnet itself first appeared on TV as a drama on an
anthology show called Chesterfield Sound-Off Time in December 1951.
The brainchild of
actor-director Jack Webb--who starred as Sgt. Joe Friday--Dragnet was
one of the first series to be filmed in Hollywood, not New York. Webb narrated
the shows in a deadpan, documentary style, turning "just the facts,
ma'am" into a national catchphrase. Barton Yarborough, a cast member in
the radio series, played Friday's sidekick Sgt. Ben Romero on TV but died of a
heart attack shortly after the first telecast. Over the years, Friday had three
different sidekick characters, played by Barney Phillips, Herb Ellis, Ben
Alexander, and Harry Morgan.
Episodes were based on
real cases from the Los Angeles Police Department, and each half-hour segment
concluded with the capture of the perpetrator, followed by a short update on
what happened at the suspect's trial. The show inspired two hit records in
1953, one based on the show's familar "dum-de-dum-dum" theme music.
The other was a novelty song called "St. George and the Dragonet,"
which spoofed the show's opening monologue.
During Dragnet's first year, the show ran every
other Thursday, then ran weekly until it ended in the fall of 1959. The show
was resurrected in 1967 under the name Dragnet '67 a nd ran for another
two years, dropping its emphasis on high-intensity crime to focus on citizens
in distress and community service. In 1987, Dragnet was revived again,
as a spoof, in a feature film starring Dan Aykroyd and Tom Hanks. The TV show
reappeared two years later as a syndicated series, airing in the 1989-90 season
in New York and Los Angeles only, then nationally syndicated the following
season.
January 3, 1997
Bryant Gumbel co-hosted his final Today show on NBC-TV
January 4, 1982
Bryant
Gumbel moved from NBC Sports to the anchor desk where he joined Jane Pauley as
co-host of the "Today" show on NBC.
The popularity of the series, particularly in the UK,
led to several hit records and live concert tours by the cast. Despite its
success, very few of the actors maintained high-profile careers after the
series was cancelled. A number of the cast members were seen again briefly in Bring
Back...Fame, a reunion special made for UK television in 2008.
January 8, 1912
José Ferrer is born José
Vicente Ferrer de Otero y Cintrón.
Puerto Rican actor, as well as a theater and film
director. He was the first Hispanic actor to win an Academy Award. Ferrer was
born in the Santurce district of San Juan, Puerto Rico, the son of Maria
Providencia Cintron and Rafael Ferrer, an attorney and writer. He studied in
the Swiss boarding school Institut Le Rosey.
In 1933, he graduated from
Princeton University, where he wrote a senior thesis "French Naturalism
and Pardo Bazán"; he was also a member of the Princeton Triangle Club.
No comments:
Post a Comment