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Sit back and enjoy tales of television long ago -
this blog covers current and classic TV shows
and reviews of upcoming television programs
along with the latest TV on DVD releases!
THE NEW ANDY
Yesterday Kevin S. Butler told us about Fess Parker's last attempt at a TV series. Today we'll look at another TV stallwart who tried to re-capture success on the boob tube - none other than Andy Griffith.
Sure, Andy had a massive hit with Matlock in the 1980s & 1990s but in the 1970s he just couldn't recapture the magic - or number one ratings - that he enjoyed throughout the 1960s. Just two years after he left The Andy Griffith Show, he decided to return to CBS in a 'relevant' sitcom called Headmaster. Audiences tuned in in droves to watch the opening episode - then tuned away in droves in the following weeks. His mid-season solution - dump Headmaster and simply remake The Andy Griffith Show. Makes sense, right? After all Mayberry RFD was enjoying life at the top of the Nielsens.
Debuting
Jan. 8, 1971, The New Andy Griffith
Show was long on Southern hokum but woefully short on laughs.
Intentionally, there were few surprises - and that was the show's undoing. If Headmaster strained to be relevant, the new Andy show was belligerently irrelevant.
The pilot was written, created and produced by Aaron Ruben who guided the first five seasons of The Andy Griffith Show and Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C. and directed by Lee Phillips, who directed almost all of the last two seasons of TAGS. Earl Hagen crafted the theme song and incidental music to be nearly identical to his efforts for TAGS and Mayberry RFD.
This time the setting was a mid-sized North Carolina town called Greenwood (pop. 12,785, ten times the number of people that lived in Mayberry), with Griffith portraying Andy Sawyer, a returning hometown boy who instantly becomes the town's new Mayor Pro-tem.
Andy Sawyer was the model family man, always agreeable and understanding, spending lots of quality time with his young 'uns - the kind of dad who takes his eight-year old daughter on a three hour bus ride so he'll have someone to talk to. In other words, the exact opposite of any father I ever encountered growing up in the South.
For
safe measure, The New Andy Griffith
Show brought Don Knotts together with George Lindsay as Goober
Pyle and Paul Hartman as fix-it man Emmett Clark in a memorable (but confusing)
first episode that reunited the former costars of the original Andy
Griffith Show for the first time in two years.
In that episode, Emmett and Goober travel from Mayberry to Greenwood to ask their old pal Andy to use his influence with the city to rezone a plot of land each of them wants to start a new business. Strangely, the Mayberry residents don't recognize Don Knotts' unamed character, even though he's wearing the same salt and pepper suit that Barney Fife favored on The Andy Griffith Show; heck, he even wore that suit to Andy and Helen's wedding on Mayberry RFD 2 years earlier!
You can read much more about The New Andy Griffith Show here.
Monday,
March 22, 2010 - 11:53am
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FESS PARKER'S LAST STAND
The king of obscure knowledge Kevin S. Butler points out something I (and most everyone else who wrote about Fess Parker when he died last week) missed - that he tried one more time to launch a television series after Daniel Boone was cancelled by CBS in 1970:
In 1974 Mr. Parker was hired by producer Don Federson, the man who created and produced My Three Sons ,Family Affair and To Rome With Love to star in his own family oriented dramedy The Fess Parker Show.
In this pilot, Fess Parker played a construction company foreman who is also a widower trying to raise three daughters and deal with a meddlesome next door neighbor (played by character actor Norman Alden); the three daughters were all played by former kid actors - Dawn Lyn (who had recently finished her run on My Three Sons), Michelle Stacy (who had already appeared in the short-lived kid's fantasy sitcom McDuff The Talking Dog with Gordon Jump) and Cindy Eilbacher (who was seen a decade before in the ill-fated fantasy sitcom My Mother The Car with Jerry Van Dyke, Avery Schreiber and Ann Sothern). Linda Dano (pictured) and Florence Lake (Edgar Kennedy's wife in his "Average Man" film comedies) also appeared.
The Fess Parker Show aired on CBS on March 28, 1974 - unfortunately the show was not a hit, it was too much like My Three Sons and audiences at that point gravitated towards the more controversial satire of Norman Lear and Mary Tyler Moore.
After appearing in this failed TV pilot, Mr. Parker left TV acting and Hollywood for good. With the exception of appearing on tributes to Walt Disney, Fess Parker's appearances on the tube were few and far between though he remained a successful realtor and winemaker.
Sunday,
March 21, 2010 - 11:33am
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SHOCKING 1950's COMMERCIAL!
This oldie but goodie from the TVparty vault deserves a crack
at the title of worst TV commercial ever. If you haven't seen this 1950's
cold cream ad, you simply won't believe what they do to this model's face!
Thursday,
March 18, 2010 - 10:57am
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YOU TUBING
The very first TV show I remember watching was reruns of Sky King on Saturday mornings at noon. I recently watched a few episodes on DVD and enjoyed them very much - simple but effective early TV dramas with a western feel mostly shot on location in Southern California.
This is a weird clip - Jerry Vale's World had the legendary Italian crooner sitting around a living room in Las Vegas talking impromptu with Pat Cooper, Don Rickles, Jimmy Dean and Norm Crosby. Remember, this was back in the day when people knew Jimmy Dean as a singer and not a sausage salesman. It looks to me like a public access show, circa 1972, what a great idea, I hope there are other episodes out there. Las Vegas had quite a few local chat shows that hosted the legends in the 1970s & '80s.
Friday,
March 12, 2010 - 10:06am
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FAWLTY
There are / were so many American TV classics that were spawned in England, as I'm sure you're aware - shows like All In The Family, Sanford & Son, Three's Company, Hell's Kitchen, Life on Mars, The Office - the list is very long. It seems like every hit British show gets an American makeover.
Did you know Fawlty Towers, surely one of the funniest shows ever on either side of the pond - was remade here as a vehicle for Bea Arthur (Maude) in 1983? It was called Amanda's and it may have been a reasonable idea in theory - if you had to remake the show I suppose Bea Arthur at her peak could probably pull off a Basil Fawlty type - the result was horrible. S
ome of the best moments in Fawlty Towers were the hilarious battles between Basil and his shrewish wife; Amanda had no henpecked husband but instead a son and daughter-in-law. Not the same, even John Cleese noted that a female Basil defeated the entire purpose of the series. Here's what John Cleese had to say in an interview with Digital Spy: "I remember at a party I met these chaps from Viacom, who said they were working on a new Fawlty Towers. My ears pricked up at the sound of cash registers and said, 'That's wonderful, are you going to change anything?'. They said, 'Well we have changed one thing, we've written Basil out'. And that's absolutely true, they took Basil and Sybil's lines and gave them all to Bea Arthur. I always thought Peter Boyle could have played Basil well, but sadly he is no longer with us."
Nothing on the Tube from Amanda's but this brief glimpse of 2 mid-season ABC flops.
Here Bea Arthur talks about that series.
Amanda's wasn't the first time ABC tried remaking Fawlty Towers. There was a even worse attempt in 1978 - a pilot called Snavely starring Harvey Korman with Betty White as his wife. I remember seeing it and it was as awful as it sounds, the stars just didn't get it. ABC lured Korman away from The Carol Burnett Show in 1977 with the promise of a hit sitcom but audiences weren't interested in seeing the comic playing the same character week after week when The Harvey Korman Show debuted in 1978 and Snavely cemented his sitcom doom despite a few more attempts.
There were even a few American shows that inspired UK knockoffs. For instance, our Match Game became the long-running popular game show Blankety Blanks, right down to the host's weird wand like microphone.
Thursday,
March 11, 2010 - 9:52am
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This Television Blog is hosted by Billy Ingram, one of the nation's top Pop Culture Gurus and expert on classic TV. Seen on VH1, These TV Blog entries are from the TVparty! website. (I'm not normally this smug - this photo was shot for a film where I played a villain.) |
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