Month: June 2007

All In The Family was one of the most popular shows in TV history. While the show was a comedy at its heart, it was also known for taking an unflinching look at American society. The show regularly took on topics considered taboo for any TV show (much less a comedy) like racism, homosexuality, women’s lib, rape, breast cancer and impotence. Although just about everyone has seen the show at least once, there’s a lot you might not know about it:

– It was supposed to be filmed in black and white! Norman Lear, the show’s creator, originally wanted to film All In The Family in black and white to make it more “gritty”. CBS had only recently upgraded to 100% color broadcasts, so they vetoed the idea immediately. Lear opted instead to decorate the set in drab, washed-out colors as a substitute, so that’s why the Bunker’s house looks so “dreary”.

– The furniture cost thousands of dollars. Sort of. Archie’s famous chair (and the rest of the Bunker’s furniture) originally came from a Los Angeles area Goodwill store. Late in the show’s run – after All In The Family had become an American icon – the Smithsonian came calling, wanting Archie’s and Edith’s chairs for their American history museum. Lear donated the items, but then the show had to spend thousands of dollars creating exact duplicates to use in the show.

– The theme sequence was a compromise! The opening sequence of the show, which featured Archie and Edith singing a song together at the Bunker’s living room piano, is one of the most famous (and most parodied) in TV history. But the truth is that after filming the show’s pilot, there was simply not enough money left in the budget to put together a splashy introduction. So Lear came up with the idea of Archie and Edith simply singing at the piano. Several versions of the introduction were used over the years; one version even had an extra verse! But two continuing trends of the updated intros were Stapleton singing her famous line “and you knew who you were THHHHEENNN” in an ever louder and “screechier” voice, and both O’Connor and Stapleton carefully enunciating the last line of the song (“Gee our old LaSalle ran great”) ever more clearly, as viewers complained that they couldn’t understand that line.

– The show was the king of spin-offs. Sort of. “Spin-offs” are new TV shows based on popular characters in existing shows. For example, Kelsey Grammar’s popular doctor Frasier Crane was “spun-off” of Cheers into a new show called Frasier. All In The Family spun-off several shows, and if you include spin-offs of the spin-offs, it reigns supreme as the show with the most spin-offs in TV history. All In The Family itself spun-off Maude, The Jeffersons, 704 Hauser, Gloria and Archie Bunker’s Place. Further spin-offs include Checking In (a spin-off of The Jeffersons) and Good Times (a spin off of Maude).

– It was a show of firsts. All In The Family has a long line of “firsts” under its belt: the show was the first to be videotaped before a live audience (as opposed to filmed), it was the first sitcom to rank #1 in the ratings for five consecutive seasons (only The Cosby Show has matched that feat), it was the first show to feature the sound of a flushing toilet, the first show to use words like “spade” and “nigger” on a regular basis, and was also the first show in which all of the cast – Carroll O’Connor, Jean Stapleton, Sally Struthers and Rob Reiner – won Emmy awards for their work.

Friends was one of the most popular sitcoms in American TV history. Even people that claim to hate the show can get a chuckle or two out of it if they’re stuck on an airplane or in a Jiffy Lube waiting room. And there’s a lot of interesting trivia about the show you might not know:

• The first cast member to get a movie role after the show went big was… Marcel the Monkey! Actually, Marcel was played by two female monkeys named “Monkey” and “Katie”. Katie played a central role in 1995’s Outbreak, a film which starred Dustin Hoffman and Rene Russo. One wonders what that says about the rest of the cast’s acting ability!
• The fridges actually worked! The refrigerators in Monica\Rachel’s and Joey\Chandler’s apartments actually worked; the cast and crew kept their lunches and drinks in Monica’s fridge, which explains why it was always so full. Joey and Chandler’s fridge was usually kept empty – unless a scene required something in the fridge, in which case the crew would fill it up. Since the crew didn’t want to do that very often, a camera angle was chosen such that you almost never see the inside of their fridge.
• The episodes had similar titles! When people talk about a television show, they often refer to episodes with the phrase “The one where…”, as in “the one where Hawkeye glues Frank’s boots to the floor”. The writers of Friends noticed this phenomenon, and most of the show’s titles begin with “The One…”. Contrary to both popular belief and barroom trivia, however, not every episode was titled as such. The pilot was named “The Pilot”, the 100th episode was titled “The One Hundredth” and the finale was named “The Last One”.
• The picture frame around the peephole was an accident! One of the most distinctive features of the show’s decor was the empty picture frame that surrounded the peephole on the back of Monica’s door. In the very early days of the show, there was a mirror in the frame, but a clumsy crew member accidentally broke it! The cast and crew decided that they liked the look of the frame, so it was left where it was.
• Their apartment numbers changed! In the first episodes, the apartment numbers of Chandler\Joey’s and Monica\Rachel’s apartments were #4 and #5, respectively. The show’s producers quickly realized that those numbers didn’t match the view from Monica’s balcony, so the numbers were quietly changed to #19 and #20.
• The show wasn’t always filmed in front of a live audience! Friends was almost always filmed in front of a live audience. However, there were no audiences during the filming of “cliffhanger episodes” (which is common in the industry, so that audience members can’t sell spoilers to Entertainment Weekly magazine). What’s not so common was that Tom Selleck always received a boisterous standing ovation from the crowd any time he walked on the set, so the scenes where Selleck walks on camera for the first time almost always had to be re-shot without an audience!

Just about everyone in the English-speaking world has heard of talk show host Jerry Springer. But there’s a lot about Mr. Springer that you might not know:

He was born in a Tube station! Jerry’s parents were German Jews that fled to London to escape the Nazi regime. During WWII, many London Underground stations were used as bomb shelters for civilians. Jerry’s parents were no exception, and it therefore wasn’t all that remarkable that Jerry Springer was born in an east London Tube station on February 13, 1944.

He once paid a hooker with a check! After being an aide for Robert Kennedy and unsuccessfully running for Congress, Jerry was elected to the Cincinnati city council in 1971. He had to resign in 1974 after police raided a massage parlor in Fort Wright, Kentucky and found a check Springer had written for “services rendered”. He admitted the faux pas, and was re-elected in 1975.

He was routinely mentioned on a 1970s TV sitcom! Jerry became mayor of Cincinnati in 1977. “Mayor Springer” was mentioned in several episodes of WKRP in Cincinnati, but never actually appeared on the show.

His show mirrored Morton Downey Jr.’s show! In 1982, Springer left politics and was hired as a political reporter for Cincinnati’s WLWT-TV, an NBC affiliate. This led to his own talk show, The Jerry Springer Show, which debuted on September 20th, 1991. Much like Morton Downey’s Jr.’s show in the 1980s, Jerry’s first TV show was mostly about serious topics like gun control, homelessness and abortion; the show’s guests included Oliver North and Jessie Jackson. Also like Morton Downey Jr.’s show, as time passed the show’s ratings started to fall, and more and more “outrageous” subjects were brought on.

There’s an opera based on his show! In August of 2001, Jerry Springer: The Opera debuted at the Battersea Arts Centre in the UK. The show was an instant success and was frequently moved to larger and larger venues, eventually settling at the Cambridge Theatre in London’s West End. The libretto of the opera is a bit complex to get into here, but it suffices to say that it contains a lot of foul language and content that would offend churchgoers. It’s so offensive, in fact, that the BBC received over 47,000 complaints when it aired a version of the show in 2005 – the most complaints about any show in British history!

Match Game was one of the most popular game shows of the 1970s. It originally aired on NBC in a different format, but was resurrected for CBS in 1973 into the format we all know and love.

Ratings for the show weren’t that good initially, so CBS sent the show a “cancellation notice”. Back then, networks didn’t yank shows off the air like they do today, and Match Game had several episodes remaining before it was due to leave the air. So the writers decided to have fun with it: they took the show’s hitherto pedestrian “fill in the blank” questions and crammed them with lots of innuendo and double entendres. The new “spicy” version of the show became an instant hit and ran for several years.

Many folks noticed the distinctive microphone that host Gene Rayburn used on the show; few know that Rayburn designed and patented the microphone himself. It was built especially for him by Sony and was given model number ECM-51.

In his earlier days, Rayburn was a radio DJ on a show called Rayburn and Fitch. Rayburn once knitted a pair of socks as a publicity stunt for the show, and as a result he became interested in working with needles, especially needlepoint. He was frequently spotted in airports and restaurants and on airplanes doing needlepoint to pass the time. Match Game creator Mark Goodson even surprised Rayburn onstage during the taping of an episode to give him a needlepoint bag as a token gift for making Match Game the #1 daytime television show.

A 1974 incident where Rayburn told contestant Karen Lesko that she had “pretty nipples” has gone down in history as one of the worst bloopers in game show history (or best bloopers, depending on your point-of-view). Rayburn meant to say that she had “pretty dimples”.