Solid Gold was a weekly syndicated music show of the 1980s that counted down the hits, put a troupe of dancers on the stage and went through a long run of hosts. The sources print two readings of the premiere. GRAMMY.com says Dionne Warwick spoke during a debut episode on September 15, 1980. A collector’s […]
Puttin’ on the Hits was a syndicated television series in which contestants lip-synced to the song of their choice, produced by Chris Bearde’s company and Dick Clark’s company. A Ninth Circuit court memorandum says Clark and Bearde produced it “From September 1984 through October 1988,” and a 1987 Los Angeles Times chronology of Dick Clark […]
Emmanuel Lewis stopped acting regularly, finished college, and built a quieter life in Atlanta, where he works behind the scenes in the entertainment business instead of in front of a camera. He played Webster Long on ABC from 1983 to 1987 and in first-run syndication until March 1989, took a theater arts degree from Clark […]
Here is the thing that trips people up when they try to remember this show. They picture the house, the stairs, the kid brother, the college guy in the kitchen. Then they try to name the family, and two different sets of faces come up, and they decide their memory is going. It is not. […]
Two kids from Harlem, one penthouse at 697 Park Avenue, and a rich white widower who had promised their dying mother he would raise them. On paper it reads like a premise nobody would greenlight. It opened on Friday nights, sat in NBC’s top 30 for its first three seasons, and the smallest kid in […]
Forty years ago today, NBC bet an entire time slot on a wisecracking puppet with a taste for house cats, and somehow it worked. ALF premiered on NBC on September 22, 1986, which makes today its 40th anniversary. You know the setup: a furry alien named Gordon Shumway crash-lands his spaceship into a suburban garage, […]
Small Wonder was an American syndicated sitcom about Ted Lawson, an engineer who builds a robot in the form of a young girl, brings her home, and passes her off to the neighbors as an adopted daughter. It ran in first-run syndication for four seasons and 96 episodes and finished in 1989. The robot was […]
Moonlighting ended because the show could not physically keep up with itself, and by the time it collapsed, neither of its stars wanted to be there. ABC cancelled it after five seasons, and the last episode aired on May 14, 1989. The show was famously slow to produce, running so far behind that it aired […]
Mr. Belvedere was an ABC sitcom about a proper English butler who takes a job with an ordinary American family in the suburbs of Pittsburgh. It premiered on March 15, 1985 as a midseason replacement and ran six seasons, closing with a two-part finale on July 1 and July 8, 1990. Christopher Hewett played Lynn […]
You take the good, you take the bad. Almost fifty years later that is still the first thing that happens in your head when somebody says the words, and you probably could not name the show’s headmaster if your life depended on it. That is fine. Almost nobody can. The Facts of Life characters are […]