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 comedy science fiction sitcom about a robotics engineer who builds a robot in the shape of a young girl, brings her home, and passes her off to the neighborhood as his adopted daughter. It ran in first-run syndication from September 7, 1985 to May 20, 1989, four seasons and 96 […]
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 […]
Wednesday night, ABC, and a house on Long Island where the dad worked out of a home office and the son could not stay out of trouble for eleven straight minutes. If you were a kid in 1985, you did not watch the Seavers so much as move in with them. The Growing Pains characters […]
Was There an ALF Cartoon? Yes. NBC aired an animated ALF series on Saturday mornings from September 26, 1987, to January 7, 1989: two seasons, 26 episodes, a prequel set on Melmac before the crash. It was a prequel set on ALF’s home planet of Melmac before it exploded, following Gordon Shumway’s days with his […]
Mr. T is alive, 74 years old, and still making occasional public appearances as of 2026. Born Laurence Tureaud in Chicago in 1952, the man behind Clubber Lang and B.A. Baracus has not been active in film or television in a regular capacity since the 2010s. Atlanta Black Star photographed him at Rev. Jesse Jackson’s […]
The arraignment call came at 11 p.m. The judge was doing card tricks on the bench. The prosecutor was checking his hair in a compact mirror. The defendant was explaining, for the third time, that the goat was already in the taxi when he got in. And somewhere off to the side, the biggest bailiff […]