Quiz Answer Key and Fun Facts
1. It's very humiliating for a show to be canceled after the first episode airs, so one person used the second episode to apologize for the first. The show, called "You're in the Picture", was hosted by an icon of American television and aired in the 1960-1961 TV season. The idea was that "celebrities" would put their heads through holes made for the purpose in a scene and ask "The Great One" questions to determine what picture they were in. The result was described by said "Great One" as ...a show last week that laid the biggest bomb! I've seen bombs in my day, but this one made the H-bomb look like a two-inch salute." And, awayyy it went, to be replaced by a talk show. Who was the host, and consequently, the guy who went on to apologize?
2. 1960-1961 was a tough time to watch TV. "Time Magazine" reviewed it by saying "As the bloodstained 1960-61 season crawled toward its grave last week, it had proved one thing to everybody's satisfaction: it was the worst in the 13-year history of U.S. network television." One of the casualties was a show called "Klondike." "Klondike" was set in the Alaskan Klondike in 1897 and aired 17 horrible episodes before someone killed it. However, the network was forced to shift the stars, Ralph Taeger and James Coburn, to another show called "Acapulco" (which was canceled after eight episodes.) Why?
3. I have two vivid memories of my early childhood. One involves feeling incredibly frustrated because all my favorite shows were preempted by a bunch of old guys talking incessantly. The adults took a keen interest in this thing and shushed me every time I asked them what was going on. According to the Museum of Broadcast Communications, 85% of all pre-school children must have shared my pain, as that was the percentage of households that watched the hearings. Given that I was born in 1969, this must have occurred during the summer of 1973. What hearings were my parents watching?
4. As any parent will tell you, toddlers love repetition. It's part of their development, and they're really just practicing things. Because of this, all shows aimed at toddlers or pre-school children employ a lot of repetition. And, as proud as I am of my kid when she can identify her colors or her letters, that doesn't mean I can watch the same episode of "Blue's Clues" for the fifteenth time today. I do count myself as fortunate that I have escaped one toddler-pitched show starring a certain purple dinosaur. Parents who have not been as lucky as I, though, voted it as number 50 on TV Guide's list of worst television shows of all time. What's the name of this plague PBS has unleashed on unsuspecting parents?
5. I have a tremendous crush on Heather Graham, which I admit to only because my wife has no interest in playing these quizzes. I will watch almost anything with her in it. I did, however, manage to miss every episode of her 2006 series. Frankly, this isn't too bad, since the show got terrible reviews and disappeared after a single episode. What was it called?
6. "Survivor" set a horrible precedent. The "one-person-gets-kicked-off-the-show" premise has now spread all over TV like a fungus, and there are approximately a zillion shows with that gimmick. Some of them, blissfully, fail. One that did was one that had the premise of getting together celebrities and having them perform something OTHER than the thing that made them famous. Marla Maples did gymnastics, Danny Bonaduce performed on a unicycle, Sheila E. juggled, Clint Black did stand-up comedy. What was the name of the program?
7. Supposedly, an aspiring author sent an unsolicited manuscript to George Bernard Shaw with two pages stuck together. Shaw returned the book, with a note saying he didn't like it. The two pages were still glued together, though. The author wrote back, "How can you say you didn't like it! You didn't finish it!" Shaw replied, "You don't have to eat a whole egg to know it's rotten." Sometimes, the same is true of TV shows. You can watch one episode and conclude the show's doomed. You can then devote your time to something less painful, like putting your hand in a bowl full of razor blades. One of these was a show aired by Fox intending to challenge the Tonight Show and Late Night with David Letterman. Hosted by a "Saturday Night Live" alumnus who's also known for his appearances in the National Lampoon "Vacation" movies, the show aired five episodes in 1993. Who was the host, for whom the show was named?
8. Speaking of "Saturday Night Live", there's a wide variety of opinion on what cast is the best, and even as to which casts are better than others. However, the cast that appeared in 1980-1981 is the consensus pick for "worst ever." It was so bad, as a matter of fact, that half-way through the season, most of the cast was fired and replaced. The show was, in fact, placed on hiatus and probably only survived because of a writer's strike that bought them time to bring in a better cast. How many members of the 1980-1981 cast survived?
9. One show managed to last two seasons despite being, well, evil. Someone at Fox appears to have decided that women had way too healthy a self-image, and thus a show where ordinary-looking people were "transformed" into beautiful people would be a hit. Each contestant was assigned a support team to transform her, which included a coach, therapist, trainer, cosmetic surgeons and a dentist. The keystone of each transformation was multiple cosmetic surgeries. And, because the producers were, well, evil, one contestant on each of the eight preliminary episodes was cut, and the top nine "competed" in a pageant in the ninth episode of the season. In a particularly obtuse literary allusion, the name of the show came from a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, "The Ugly Duckling," which concerns personal transformation. What's the name of the show?
10. Sometimes you can make a bad thing better (see the 1980-1981 season of "SNL"). Sometimes you can't (see "Klondike"). But it appears you can always make something bad worse, if you're willing to be cruel enough. One of the ways you can punish your viewers for turning your once-mighty ratings juggernaut into a faded champion circling the drain of cancellation is to add a precocious kid. It won't save the show, but it will, at least, inflict pain on people, and that's half the fun of producing a TV show. A character like this - a precocious kid added to a dying show just before cancellation - is called a "Cousin Oliver" after a character added for the last season of what beloved show?
Source: Author
Correspondguy
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kyleisalive before going online.
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