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.
Donna Allen-Figueroa
 |
August 22, 1958
TV series Life
of Riley airs its last episode on this day in 1958.
Launched as a radio series in the 1940s, the show
moved to TV in 1949, starring young comedian Jackie Gleason in his first TV
role, as bullheaded family man Chester Riley. The radio version ran until 1951,
starring actor William Bendix as Riley. In 1953, Bendix replaced Gleason in the
Riley role on TV and stayed with the show until it was cancelled in 1958.
August
25, 1958
Concentration first aired
The American television game show based
on the children's memory game of the same name.
Matching cards represented prizes that contestants could win. As matching pairs
of cards were gradually removed from the board, it would slowly reveal elements
of a rebus puzzle
that contestants had to solve to win a match.
The show was broadcast on and off from 1958 to
1991, presented by various hosts, and has been made in several different
versions. The original network daytime series, Concentration, appeared
on NBC for
14 years, 7 months, and 3,770 telecasts (August 25, 1958 – March 23, 1973), the
longest run of any game show on that network (Wheel of Fortune was a
month shy of tying that record when the initial NBC run ended on June 30,
1989). This series was hosted by Hugh Downs and later
by Bob
Clayton, but for a six-month period in 1969, Ed McMahon hosted
the series. The series began at 11:30 AM Eastern, then moved to 11:00 and
finally to 10:30. Nearly all episodes of the NBC daytime version were produced
at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, New
York City.
A weekly nighttime version appeared in two separate
broadcast runs: the first aired from October 30 to November 20, 1958,
with Jack Barry as host, while the second
ran from April 24 to September 18, 1961, with Downs as host.
The second version of Concentration,
the first to be made in Southern California, ran in syndication from September 10, 1973
to September 8, 1978, with Jack Narz as
host.
A pilot for a third version was attempted in 1985,
hosted by Orson Bean, but did not sell. After some reformatting, a
remake called Classic Concentration, hosted by Alex
Trebek, ran on NBC from
May 4, 1987 to September 20, 1991 (with reruns broadcast to January 14, 1994).
Despite numerous attempts to develop a new version
in recent years, NBCUniversal, owners of the Concentration copyright,
have not yet authorized a new version of the program.
To quote the Bicentennial Minute, "And that's the way it was".
 Stay Tuned Tony Figueroa |
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, August 20, 2018
This Week in Television History: August 2018 PART II
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