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"
In 1989, he
teamed up with Jerry Seinfeld to co-create the television seriesSeinfeld, where he also acted as
head writer and executive producer. David's work won him a Primetime Emmy
Award for Outstanding Comedy Series in 1993. In 1999, he created the HBO
series Curb Your Enthusiasm, a
mostly improvised sitcom in which he stars as a fictionalized version of
himself.
Formerly a standup comedian, David went into television comedy,
writing and starring in ABC's Fridays,
as well as writing briefly for Saturday
Night Live.
July 3, 2012
TV
legend Andy Griffith dies age 86 at his North Carolina home.
The actor also was known for his starring role in the
1980s-1990s TV drama
"Matlock," in which he portrayed a shrewd Atlanta defense attorney.
Andrew Samuel Griffith was born on June 1, 1926, in Mount Airy, North Carolina.
He majored in music at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill,
graduating in 1949. Griffith went on to teach school for several years before
finding success as a stand-up comedian. In 1957, he made his feature film debut
in the critically acclaimed drama "A Face in the Crowd," starring, in
a serious role, as a drifter who becomes a manipulative, power-hungry
celebrity.
"The Andy Griffith Show" premiered in the fall of 1960 and quickly
became a hit. Griffith played the amiable Sheriff Andy Taylor, a widower
raising his young son Opie, played by Ron Howard (now a successful Hollywood
director, whose credits include "A Beautiful Mind" and "The Da
Vinci Code"). Set in the small, idyllic community of Mayberry (based
on Griffith's hometown of Mount Airy), the show included an ensemble of
eccentric characters such as bumbling Deputy Barney Fife (played by Don
Knotts), prim Aunt Bee (Frances Bavier), gas-station attendant Gomer Pyle (Jim
Nabors), Floyd the barber (Howard McNear) and Otis the town drunk (Hal Smith).
The folksy sitcom, memorable for its whistled theme song, which played over
opening credits featuring Andy and Opie on their way to go fishing, continues
to air in reruns. Additionally, the program spawned the TV shows "Gomer
Pyle, U.S.M.C." (1964-69) and "Mayberry R.F.D." (1968-71).
During the 1970s and
1980s, Griffith appeared in several short-lived TV series and various
made-for-TV movies before again finding success in the legal drama
"Matlock," which originally aired from 1986 to 1995. The actor's
final role was in the 2009 feature film "Play the Game." Also in 2009,
the Andy Griffith Museum opened in Mount Airy. The TV legend died of a heart
attack on July 3, 2012, at his home on Roanoke Island in North Carolina.
The controversial Sesame Street episode aired on Feb.10, 1976 and featured Wizard of Oz star Margaret Hamilton in character as the Wicked Witch of the West.
Actor Jackie Gleason
dies on this day in 1987. Raised by a single mother who worked at a subway
token booth in New York, Gleason dropped out of high school and began
performing on the vaudeville circuit in his teens. Signed to a movie contract
by the time he was 24 years old, Gleason played character roles in a handful of
movies in 1941 and 1942, but found much more success in television. He became
one of TV's most popular stars in a number of shows, including The Jackie
Gleason Show, which ran throughout most of the 1950s and '60s. On the show,
he created the character of Ralph Kramden, a bus driver who became the beloved
star of the spin-off television show The Honeymooners. On June 24, 1987,
Gleason died at his Florida home. After a private funeral mass at the Cathedral
of Saint Mary in Miami, Gleason was
interred in an outdoor mausoleum at
Our Lady of Mercy Catholic Cemetery in Miami. At the base is the
inscription, “And Away We Go.”
My
Little Margie premiered on CBS
as the summer replacement for I Love Lucy on
June 16, 1952, under the sponsorship of Philip Morris cigarettes (when the series moved to NBC for its
third season in the fall of 1953, Scott Paper Company became its sponsor). In an unusual move, the
series—with the same leads—aired original episodes on CBS Radio,
concurrently with the TV broadcasts, from December 1952 through August 1955.
Only 23 radio broadcasts are known to exist in recorded form.
The show was originally commissioned for UPN, but the network
later dropped the show and it was picked up instead by USA.03nmThe
series was filmed in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada for
its first five seasons. The sixth and last season was billed as "The
season that changes everything" and production was moved to Montreal.
The Dead Zone was expected to be renewed for a seventh season;
however, due to low ratings and high production costs the series was canceled
in December 2007, without a proper series finale.
Some rumors spread that Syfy would pick up the series after it was canceled by USA,
but it did not happen. Rumors of a made-for-TV movie have all but faded with
time.
June 18, 1942
Film critic Roger Ebert born.
Roger Ebert used his thumbs to pass judgment on
Hollywood’s latest offerings on his long-running TV show, is born in Urbana,
Illinois.
While a student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the
1960s, Ebert was the editor of the school newspaper, the Daily Illini.
He began his professional career in 1966, as a reporter and feature writer at
the Chicago Sun-Times, where his interest in movies led him to visit the
set of Camelot, the 1967 film starring Richard Harris as King Arthur and
Vanessa Redgrave as Queen Guinevere. In the spring of 1967, after the Sun-Times
movie critic Eleanor Keane left the paper, Ebert was given the job. Ebert’s
first review as critic was of the French New Wave film Galia (1966).
In 1975, Ebert became the first film critic to win the Pulitzer Prize. That
same year, he teamed with another critic, Gene Siskel, on a monthly show on
local television called Opening Soon at a Theater Near You. By the time
the show later moved to PBS (Public Broadcasting System), Siskel and Ebert had
established their now-famous format: two men sitting in theater seats
discussing the newest movies and giving each of them a positive--”thumbs
up”--or negative--”thumbs down”--review. In 1982, the show began a nationwide
syndicated broadcast as At the Movies; four years later, the title
changed to Siskel & Ebert, which it would keep for the next 20
years.
Siskel and Ebert’s colorful criticism--and their good-natured
disagreements--turned their show into a long-running hit, and made them
well-known personalities in their own right. Their run lasted until early 1999,
when Siskel died at the age of 53, from complications of surgery to remove a
brain tumor. Ebert co-hosted with a series of guests until mid-2000, when
Richard Roeper of the Sun-Times became his permanent co-host. Ebert
& Roeper aired through the summer of 2006, when Ebert underwent surgery
to remove cancer in his jaw. Ebert kept fans in the loop about his condition
and recovery with written updates on his Sun-Times Web site.
In July 2008, the show’s owner, Buena Vista, decided to pull the plug on Ebert
& Roeper, which Roeper had been continuing with guest critics. Ebert
had remained active behind the scenes, but had not been able to appear on air
because of his illness. In early 2002, Ebert was diagnosed with papillary thyroid cancer. In February of that year,
surgeons at Northwestern
Memorial Hospital were able to successfully remove the cancer with clean margins. He later underwent surgery
in 2003 for cancer in his salivary gland, and in December of that year,
underwent a four-week follow-up course of radiation to his salivary glands, which altered his voice
slightly. As he battled the illness, Ebert continued to be a dedicated critic
of film, not missing a single opening while undergoing treatment.
Ebert underwent further surgery on June 16, 2006, just
two days before his 64th birthday, to remove additional cancerous tissue near
his right jaw, which included removing a section of jaw bone. On July 1, Ebert
was hospitalized in serious condition after his carotid artery burst near the surgery site and he "came within
a breath of death". He later learned that the burst was likely a side
effect of his treatment, which involved neutron beam radiation. He was subsequently kept bedridden to prevent
further damage to the scarred vessels in his neck while he slowly recovered
from multiple surgeries and the rigorous treatment. At one point, his status
was so precarious that Ebert had a tracheotomy performed on his neck to reduce the effort of
breathing while he recovered.
In October 2006, Ebert confirmed his bleeding problems
had been resolved. He was undergoing rehabilitation at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago due to lost muscle mass, and later underwent further
rehabilitation at the Pritikin Center in Florida."[93] After a three-month absence, the first movie he
reviewed was The
Queen. Ebert made his first
public appearance since the summer of 2006 at Ebertfest on April 25, 2007. He
was unable to speak but communicated through his wife, Chaz, through the use of
written notes. His opening words to the crowd of devout fans at the festival
were a quote from the film he co-wrote with Russ Meyer, Beyond the Valley of
the Dolls: "It's my happening and it freaks me out."[94] Also in April 2007, in an interview with WLS-TV in
Chicago, he said, "I was told photos of me in this condition would attract
the gossip papers — so what?" On April 23, the Sun-Times
reported that, when asked about his decision to return to the limelight, Ebert
remarked, "We spend too much time hiding illness."
June
19, 1897
Moe
Howard is born Moses Harry Horwitz.
He is best known as
the de facto leader
of the Three Stooges,
the farce comedy team who starred in motion pictures and television for four
decades. That group originally started out as Ted Healy and His Stooges,
an act that toured the vaudeville circuit. Moe's distinctive hairstyle came
about when he was a boy and cut off his curls with a pair of scissors,
producing a ragged shape approximating a bowl cut.
Almost 12 million
people tune in for the series finale of HBO’s critically acclaimed,
multi-award-winning Mob-family drama The Sopranos on this day in 2007.
The mastermind behind The Sopranos was David Chase, a longtime
writer, producer and director for TV series such as The Rockford Files, I’ll
Fly Away and Northern Exposure. Chase drew inspiration for his
latest series from his Italian-American childhood growing up in New Jersey,
when he was fascinated by William Wellman’s great 1931 gangster film The Public
Enemy, starring Jimmy Cagney. The Sopranos was an immediate hit with
critics when it premiered in January 1999. At its center was the New Jersey
Mafia boss Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini), whose attacks of anxiety early in
the series send him into the office of a therapist, Dr. Jennifer Melfi
(Lorraine Bracco). It soon becomes clear that Tony has a stressful life
managing his family--including his vindictive mother (Nancy Marchand) and uncle
(Dominic Chianese), his materialistic but good-hearted wife Carmela (Edie
Falco) and his two teenage children, Meadow (Jamie-Lynn Sigler) and Anthony
Jr., or A.J. (Robert Iler)--as well as his crew of lieutenants, notably Paulie
Walnuts (Tony Sirico), Silvio Dante (Steve Van Zandt) and Christopher
Moltisanti (Michael Imperioli).
The Sopranos brought to television a complex, compassionate vision of
Mafia life similar to those previously portrayed on the big screen by directors
like Francis Ford Coppola (the three Godfather movies) and Martin
Scorsese (Mean Streets, Goodfellas). Both The Godfather and
Goodfellas were touchstones for Chase (and his characters) throughout
the series, as was The Public Enemy, which Tony memorably watches after
his mother’s death in the show’s third season.
According to Alessandra Stanley, writing in the New York Times during
the final season of The Sopranos: “The series lowered the bar on
permissible violence, sex and profanity at the same time that it elevated
viewers’ taste, cultivating an appetite for complexity, wit and cinematic
stylishness on a serial drama in which psychological themes flickered and built
and faded and reappeared. The best episodes had equal amounts of high and low
appeal, an alchemy of artistry and gutter-level blood and gore, all of it
leavened with humor.” As Stanley recounts, critics and pop-culture observers
were often hyperbolic in their praise for the show, calling it Dickensian or
Shakespearian; the author Norman Mailer, for one, called The Sopranos the
closest thing to the Great American Novel in today’s culture. Fans loved it as
well: The show’s audience reached a peak of some 18 million viewers during its
fourth season. The show’s breakout success, along with that of the comedy
series Sex and the City (which debuted six months before The Sopranos),
established HBO’s reputation as the home of some of TV’s most popular original
programming.
In the final season of The Sopranos, Tony survives a near-fatal
shooting and begins to contemplate his own aging and mortality. Meanwhile, it
appears that a full-scale war is brewing between the crime families of New York
and New Jersey, as the hated Phil Leotardo (Frank Vincent) takes control of New
York after former boss Johnny Sack (Vincent Curatola) dies in prison. When Phil
goes after Tony and his crew, they react in turn, and the bodies stack up. In
the closing scene of the open-ended finale, Tony meets Carmela, Meadow and A.J.
in a diner for dinner. As soon as the screen went black, fans immediately began
debating what actually happened, and mourning the end of a show that many had
considered the best in the history of television.
