PAST, TENSE

I once had a stressful job as the archivist/librarian at a museum in Chicago that centers on television and radio history. While I was there I created this blog to show off some of its print-based artifacts.

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On December 13, 2002, I paid $10 for admission to the Museum of Television & Radio, now known as the Paley Center for Media (the Museum of Broadcasting, originally), in New York City. It had multiple theaters and screening rooms as well as a listening room, and before YouTube's arrival in the spring of '05, the viewing library of a museum like this one was, unless you already had it on an old VHS or Betamax tape, the only place to see an HBO comedy special like David Letterman: Looking for Fun (1981).

The museum's "Seminar Series" boasted truly exclusive material, like a recording of a panel discussion with Amy Sedaris, Stephen Colbert, Paul Dinello, and other members of the team behind Comedy Central's Strangers With Candy (1999-2000), although the discussion and the series's unaired original pilot, which I also watched that December day, would soon be included as bonus features on DVD sets for the show.

Moonlighting was my favorite show growing up, so I'd already seen the first-season episode "The Next Murder You Hear" multiple times, but maybe I thought the MT&R's copy would include the commercials from its original broadcast on ABC on March 19, 1985. Or maybe I just wanted to revisit the episode in which Moonlighting began to feel like nothing else on TV at the time. (Bottom line: More than 20 years later, I can't remember why I checked this episode out. My time in the viewing library was limited to two hours and 15 minutes, so I wasn't able to watch everything in full.)

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The 1981 feature film The Four Seasons, written and directed by and starring Alan Alda, was recently adapted as a series, cocreated by and starring Tina Fey, for Netflix, but it’s not the first time Alda’s directorial debut has been serialized. In January 1984 CBS debuted The Four Seasons as a midseason replacement and centered it on Jack Weston, reprising his role from the movie, as Danny Zimmer, who moves with his wife, Claudia (Marcia Rodd, taking over from Rita Moreno in the film), from New York City to Los Angeles, where they reconnect with old friends Ted (Tony Roberts) and Boris (Allan Arbus) and their respective partners, Pat (Joanna Kerns) and Lorraine (Barbara Babcock). Alda’s daughters Beatrice and Elizabeth also reprised their film roles. Netflix has renewed its 21st-century update of The Four Seasons for a second season, but CBS canceled its adaptation after just 13 episodes.

Emmy winner Barbara Babcock (1981’s Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series, for Hill Street Blues) guest-starred on NBC’s Cheers the previous season (R.I.P., George Wendt), the sitcom’s first, when it struggled in the ratings on Thursday nights, finishing 74th out of 96 shows, but by the end of the ’83-’84 season it was sandwiched between Family Ties, also in its second season, and freshman series Night Court — like The Four Seasons, a midseason replacement (Marcia Rodd was a guest star on the season finale), but this one lasted nine — and by the end of the following season all three were top-20 shows along with newcomer The Cosby Show, which led off the peacock network’s Thursday lineup for all eight of its seasons.

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Seven months before he became the top-billed cast member of ABC's Glitter, one of many Aaron Spelling-produced shows on the network at that time, David Birney was part of the ensemble cast of Master of the Game, a CBS miniseries based on the 1982 novel by Sidney Sheldon, who created a Spelling-produced series of his own, Hart to Hart, which ended its five-season run on ABC in the spring of ’84. Sheldon also created the sitcoms I Dream of Jeannie (1965-’70) and, with William Asher, The Patty Duke Show (1963-’66).

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Glitter didn't generate ratings gold in the fall of ’84: after ABC aired the two-hour pilot episode and two regular episodes that September, it put the Aaron Spelling-produced drama on hiatus until December, when three additional installments were broadcast. The series next appeared on the network's schedule the following December, when the remaining eight episodes were burned off in late night, following Nightline, over the course of two weeks.

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Have you seen this man? The one who isn’t Hawaii Five-O’s James MacArthur, that is?

His name’s Arte McCollough, and after finding my YouTube channel last month he contacted me because, aside from appearing in eight episodes of Five-O from 1971 to ’76 while also working for the Honolulu Police Department, he had “the lead role in a United Airlines TV commercial here in Hawaii that played for over a year” in the mid-’70s. 

He added that the Sunday Manoa’s 1972 song “Honolulu, I Am Coming Back Again” was featured in the United ad, “a story about flying from San Francisco to Honolulu and the dreams I had while flying; scenes at the beach, parks, etc., with a wife and child; [and] arriving in Honolulu meeting them.” Arte would love to be able to show the ad to his extended family, including many grandchildren and great-grandchildren who never got the chance to see it on TV.

If you’ve seen this commercial, which may have been produced by Phil Arnone in cooperation with Honolulu’s KGMB Channel 9, and have a copy, please email me at [email protected].

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Charles Bierbauer (top) was ABC News’s correspondent in Moscow from 1978 to ’80. Peter Jennings (bottom) anchored ABC’s World News Tonight from the Soviet capital for a full week in February of ’86.

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David Brinkley hosted This Week from 1981 to ’96. Now in its 41st year on ABC, the Sunday-morning news program is hosted by George Stephanopoulos, Martha Raddatz, and Jonathan Karl.

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The Last Word didn’t last long: ABC canceled the news program in April of ’83, just six months after it debuted. One on One, also hosted by Gregory Jackson, replaced The Last Word in the network’s late-night lineup; it was canceled three months later.

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The limited series The Offer, currently streaming on Paramount+, recounts the making of director Francis Ford Coppola’s 1972 Academy Award winner for Best Picture, The Godfather, as seen through the eyes of producer Albert S. Ruddy. In the fall of ’77 NBC broadcast The Godfather and its 1974 sequel, The Godfather Part II, which also won Best Picture — both films were adapted from Mario Puzo’s 1969 novel — as a limited series, although in those days “miniseries” was the preferred term: The Godfather: The Complete Novel for Television spanned nine hours (including commercials, of course) over the course of four nights and included scenes that hadn’t made it into the films’ theatrical cuts.

“Francis suggested that we begin very simply, putting everything into a strict chronology, starting with the scenes in Sicily and progressing through ‘Godfather I’ footage in New York up to the scenes in Nevada. We would weave in all the unused footage wherever it fit within that chronology,” said editor Barry Malkin, who’d previously edited The Godfather Part II with Richard Marks and Peter Zinner, in TV Guide’s November 12-18, 1977, cover story. 

“The whole painstaking assembly took about three months. And when we had finished we found that the chronological format, which we had done strictly as a starting point, worked quite well in its simple form. It was a logical method for presenting four shows and maintaining impact between them.” 

Coppola oversaw Malkin’s edit while filming Apocalypse Now (1979) in the Philippines. Malkin, along with Lisa Fruchtman and Walter Murch, later edited Coppola’s The Godfather Part III (1990) and, with Murch, The Godfather Trilogy: 1901-1980, a 1992 home-video release that combined all three films and previously unseen footage into a nine-hours-and-43-minutes viewing experience.

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Oscar-winning actor Marlon Brando dodged questions on The Dick Cavett Show on June 12, 1973. If only paparazzo Ron Galella’s jaw had been as evasive with Brando’s fist after the taping, Galella might not have felt the need to wear a football helmet during future encounters.

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Nearly 40 years before the January 6 Capitol riot, Bugs Bunny concocted “his own version of American history” in Bugs Bunny: All-American Hero, while in The Bugs Bunny Thanksgiving Diet (original air date: November 15, 1979) he was ahead of the curve when it came to overprescribing quack cures for weight loss (Daffy Duck must’ve been furious). Ain’t he a stinker?

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On Tuesday, September 13, 1977, ABC opened the fifth season of Happy Days, the top-rated show of the ’76-’77 season, with two episodes of a three-parter set in Hollywood. The following week it aired the concluding episode, in which Fonzie (Henry Winkler), the sitcom’s breakout character, jumps over a tiger shark on water skis.

Twenty years later Jon Hein, a University of Michigan alumnus, created Jump the Shark, a website where TV fanatics could debate the “defining moment when you know that your favorite television program has reached its peak. That instant that you know from now on ... it's all downhill.”

Despite Fonzie literally jumping the shark and Happy Days figuratively jumping one of its own, the series remained in production for 164 additional episodes, definitively proving that ignorance is bliss. Those were the days ...

(image source: the September 10-16, 1977, Chicago edition of TV Guide)

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Here Comes Garfield, originally broadcast on October 25, 1982, was the first of 12 animated specials CBS aired over the next nine years featuring cartoonist Jim Davis’s lasagna-loving feline. Four of those specials won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Animated Program, including 1983’s Garfield on the Town, and in 1988 Garfield and Friends began a seven-year run as part of CBS’s Saturday-morning lineup. Davis’s creation has had nine lives and then some: Garfield celebrated 43 years as a nationally syndicated comic strip earlier this year (from January ’76 to August ’77, its first life was spent as Jon, published exclusively in The Pendleton Times in Pendleton, Indiana).

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Anchored by Ted Koppel from its premiere in March 1980 until his retirement from ABC News 25 years later, Nightline was originally a 20-minute newscast and an extension of 1979’s The Iran Crisis: America Held Hostage.