This Week in Television History: September 2020 PART I

September 1, 1970

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 5, 2005

Katie Couric makes network anchor debut on the CBS Evening News. 

Couric, who served as co-anchor of The Today Show from 1991 to 2006, replaced Dan Rather, who anchored CBS Evening News from 1981 until his retirement on March 9, 2005, in the aftermath of a controversial story about the military record of President George W. Bush. (Bob Schieffer served as interim anchor between Rather’s departure and Couric’s debut.) Barbara Walters was the first woman to co-anchor the network evening news, when she was paired up with Harry Reasoner on the ABC Evening News from 1976 to 1978.

Couric was born on January 7, 1957, in Arlington, Virginia, and graduated from the University of Virginia in 1979. That same year, she began her career in journalism as a desk assistant at ABC News in Washington, D.C. During the 1980s, she was a TV reporter in Miami and Washington, eventually becoming a Pentagon correspondent for NBC. On April 5, 1991, Couric became the permanent co-host, alongside Bryant Gumbel, of The Today Show, where she was known for her perky on-air personality as well as her hard-hitting interview style with politicians and other newsmakers. On April 5, 2006, after months of speculation in the media, Couric announced she would leave Today. That same day, CBS officially confirmed that Couric would become the anchor and managing editor of CBS Evening News. Her salary of $15 million per year--which made her TV’s highest-paid news anchor--reportedly remained the same. Couric said farewell to Today Show viewers on May 31, 2006. Meredith Vieira, a former co-host of Walters’ daytime chat fest The View, replaced Couric on Today starting in September 2006. 

Couric’s heavily hyped September 5, 2005, debut on the CBS Evening News attracted large numbers of viewers, but the show’s ratings later dropped below those of competitors NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams and ABC’s World News with Charles Gibson. Some critics charged that Couric didn’t have the hard-news experience and gravitas of her CBS predecessors Rather and Walter Cronkite.

To quote the Bicentennial Minute, "And that's the way it was".

Stay Tuned

Tony Figueroa

Chadwick Boseman - Live from New York

When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that I would not have a single bit of talent left, and could say, 'I used everything You gave me.

Chadwick Boseman

Chadwick Aaron Boseman
November 29, 1976 – August 28, 2020

Here is another

"Mental Sorbet" 

A little spark of madness

that we could use to momentarily forget about those

things that leave a bad taste in our mouths

Stay Tuned and Wash Your Hands 

Tony Figueroa

Your Mental Sorbet: School House Rock - Sufferin Till Suffrage

Here is another

"Mental Sorbet" 

A little spark of madness

that we could use to momentarily forget about those

things that leave a bad taste in our mouths

The Nineteenth Amendment (Amendment XIX) to the United States Constitution prohibits the states and the federal government from denying the right to vote to citizens of the United States on the basis of sex. Initially introduced to Congress in 1878, several attempts to pass a women's suffrage amendment failed until passing the House of Representatives on May 21, 1919, followed by the Senate on June 4, 1919. It was then submitted to the states for ratification. On August 18, 1920, Tennessee was the last of the necessary 36 ratifying states to secure adoption. The Nineteenth Amendment's adoption was certified on August 26, 1920: the culmination of a decades-long movement for women's suffrage at both state and national levels.

Stay Tuned and Wash Your Hands 

Tony Figueroa

This Week in Television History: August 2020 PART IV

August 29, 1967

The final episode of The Fugitive aired. 

To quote the Bicentennial Minute, "And that's the way it was".

Stay Tuned

Tony Figueroa

This Week in Television History: August 2020 PART III

August 23, 2000

First Survivor finale airs.

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 show centers 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.

To quote the Bicentennial Minute, "And that's the way it was".

Stay Tuned

Tony Figueroa

Your Mental Sorbet: The One on the Left is on the Right - Noel Harrison Smothers Brothers

Here is another

"Mental Sorbet" 

A little spark of madness

that we could use to momentarily forget about those

things that leave a bad taste in our mouths

Stay Tuned and Wash Your Hands 

Tony Figueroa

This Week in Television History: August 2020 PART II

August 14, 1945

Steve Martin, comedian, actor, and writer Steve Martin is born in Waco, Texas.

The son of a real estate executive, Martin moved to Garden Grove, California, as a child, where he worked at Disneyland during his teens. At Disneyland, he entertained crowds with magic tricks and later with banjo music and comedy. He eventually studied theater arts at UCLA and broke into show business as a comedy writer. In 1969, he won an Emmy for his writing on the hit comedy show The Smothers Brothers and later wrote and appeared on other comedy-variety shows, including The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour.

Meanwhile, Martin began performing his own comedy at nightclubs and on records. He was soon guest-hosting The Tonight Show and appearing on Saturday Night Live, notably in the role of the "wild and crazy guy."

Martin made his film debut in 1977 in The Absent-Minded Waiter, which he wrote. After playing small but entertaining roles in Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1978) and The Muppet Movie (1979), he starred in his first big hit, The Jerk (1979). He appeared in numerous comedies in the 1980s, including All of Me (1984), Three Amigos (1986), and Roxanne (1987), a modern adaptation of Cyrano de Bergerac, for which he won the Writer's Guild Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.

Martin is also a leading art collector, a playwright, and an author. His play Picasso at the Lapin Agile ran in Los Angeles and New York in the 1990s. His novella Shopgirl, published in 2000, became a bestseller, and he frequently contributes to The New Yorker.

To quote the Bicentennial Minute, "And that's the way it was".

Stay Tuned

Tony Figueroa

This Week in Television History: August 2020 PART I

August 3, 1940

Actor Martin Sheen is born Ramon Estevez in Dayton, Ohio. 

The son of a Spanish immigrant, Sheen was the seventh of 10 children. He moved to New York after high school and began pursuing an acting career while working as a janitor, car washer, and messenger. After several successful Broadway roles, he appeared in his first film, The Incident, in 1967. His film and TV career has included numerous political roles, most recently as fictional U.S. president Josiah Bartlett on the popular TV show The West Wing. Previously, he played Robert Kennedy in the TV movie The Missiles of October (1974), John F. Kennedy in the miniseries Kennedy (1983), and the White House chief of staff in The American President (1995). Sheen is the father of film stars Emilio Estevez and Charlie Sheen.

August 9, 1945

The first network television broadcast occurred in Washington, DC. The program announced the bombing of Nagasaki, Japan. 

Alan E. Ruiter, biographer of Allen B. DuMont, and Dr. Thomas T. Goldsmith, one of Dr. DuMont's early colleagues, have both reported that the first DuMont network telecast occurred on August 9, 1945, when DuMont's New York and Washington TV stations were linked via coaxial cable for an announcement concerning the dropping of the second atomic bomb on Nagasaki. Ruiter writes, however, that DuMont was first to be officially "licensed" as a television network.

To quote the Bicentennial Minute, "And that's the way it was".

Stay Tuned

Tony Figueroa