Interesting facts about TV shows.

Just read that when older episodes of Law & Order were prepped for HDTV, the TV channel TNT digitally added product placements such as Coke cans on desks. I find that a repulsive thing to do but a nevertheless interesting fact I wasn't aware of.

Oh, and the voice-over actor ("In the criminal justice system...") appeared in the very first episode with a single line of dialogue.

What are some other interesting facts some people might not be aware of?

 

On the classic[I Love Lucy]William Frawley and Vivian Vance[Fred and Ethel]couldn't stand each other.

 

Barney Miller, which ran for 8 seasons, stopped taping in front of a "live" studio audience after Season 3 because of the show's notorious marathon tapings, which sometimes lasted until 2 or 3 o'clock in the morning. A conventional laugh track was employed after this.

 

Perry White usually had his lines in front of him for his desk scenes in The Adventures of Superman.

 

Ricky Ricardo’s club was next to the kitchen

 

Same occurs with re-runs of How I Met Your Mother.

In the age of DVR's and ad-skipping, this is was probably the inevitable outcome. Would be interesting to see just how far back these companies would go...for example if they did this for re-runs of Seinfeld where you'd see new movie posters or Internet-related products in a time period where the Internet was pre-WWW.

And of course there's speeding up re-runs, but that's an old effect to wring out another 30 second ad or two.

 

Most notoriously on Hitchcock reruns on USA in the '80s, aka "The Helium Years"

 

Ted Turner started his programs on TBS at :5 and :35 after the hour ("Ted Turner Time") in order to get a separate listing in TV Guide

 

The first nation to have regularly scheduled television broadcasts was... Nazi Germany in 1937. They began about a year and a half before the BBC.

For more info and clips see the doc Television & The Swastika on YT.

 

Howard McNear who played Floyd Lawson the barber on the Andy Griffith Show had a stroke and in the later seasons was always shown seated in a chair.

 

Jerry Van Dyke was the first choice for Gilligan on Gilligan's Island but he turned down the role.

 

A very sad but true fact is that Ed Bishop and Michael Billington, who starred together in UFO, died 5 days apart, on 8 June and 3 June 2005, respectively.

 

• Ted Knight (Ted Baxter on The Mary Tyler Moore Show) was the voice of the narrator on Superfriends.
• Michael Bell (a prolific voice actor, was Zan on Superfriends) appeared on screen as Grappler Zorn in "Encounter At Farpoint", the debut story on Star Trek - The Next Generation

 

Lost is a terrible show.

 

That there were pothead pixies cavorting on Gilligan's Island.
And it wasn't the skipper , the professor , the movie star or the millionare and his wife.

 

Mr Green Jeans was also Dancing Bear

 

Great Ceasar's Ghost!

 

The final episode of Cheers wasn't actually the last episode filmed. The episode before that was the last one filmed.

So that final scene of Ted Danson walking saying "sorry, we're closed" and walking to the back wasn't that last scene filmed

Kinda disappointing in a way

--In fact, this finale was not the cast and crew's finale. The penultimate episode remains to be shot, out of order, as is not uncommon on television. So the finale was not, for the cast and crew, a real finale, but nonetheless a momentous event for a show that had its premiere in September 1982 when Ronald Reagan was President, Ed Koch the mayor of New York and the Dow Jones Industrial average stood at a mere 900.

 

Some of the most watched serialized television programs of all time are M*A*S*H (top viewership 105.9 millions), Cheers (80.4 million), Seinfeld (76.3 million), Friends (52.5 million) and Magnum P.I. (50.7 million).

 

Related: Due to a back injury, on Bewitched Dick York was in such pain that eventually he was always shown seated in his later episodes.

 

The Addams Family
- In addition to playing Lurch, Ted Cassidy was also Thing (except in those scenes where Lurch and Thing are on screen together).

Related
On the cooking show Good Eats a character called Thing appears (just a hand like on The Addams Family). It turned out that Thing is the son of Thing on The Addams Family.

 

An interesting thing about Cheers is that when it debuted it was literally the bottom-rated show. The only reason it remained on the air is that NBC (its network) had nothing else to put on. This shows a change over the way things are now. Many shows that became classics (All In The Family, M*A*S*H) would not have lasted on the air today because of their low ratings when they debuted. Of course, with the proliferation of television outlets there is more room for shows now.

Concerning filming episodes out of order, it isn't unusual. In Star Trek - The Next Generation, the episode "Skin Of Evil" where Tasha Yar dies was filmed before the final episode that she appeared in as Yar (Symbiosis, although she did return to the series twice as Yar). In a scene in "Symbiosis" Yar waves goodbye to the camera in one scene.

 

Interesting. I did not know that. I looked up additional trivia on the finale and here's what I found.

The finale was filmed on March 31st 1993 and the final scene with everybody talking in the bar was done on April 7th without an audience with a laugh track added afterward, on the same day as the 2nd to last episode "The Guy Can't Help It". No idea on whether the filming of that episode featured an audience or not. The reason for this was the writers had a minor time-consuming feud about whether Sam & Diane should end up back together which caused delays in the writing so Shelly Long had to go back to other commitments and come back a week later to film her scenes.

"While the gang was smoking cigars and discussing the meaning of life, Frasier Crane's voice started trembling, as he sounded somewhat emotionally distraught while trying to finish his sentence. Given the fact that the series finale did not end with Sam Malone selling the bar, or anything bittersweet of that nature, Kelsey Grammer struggling with his words was not scripted, as he was genuinely sad while filming the very last scene with his co-stars of nine years. George Wendt adlibbed the comment regarding Cliff's perception of shoes, in an effort to ease Kelsey Grammer's heart a little." - iMDB

The finale was originally written the showrunners but the creators (the Charles bros) felt it was rushed and didn't like the end result so they went to the studio to get permission for a triple-length finale. It clocked at 98 min, was trimmed to 90 for broadcast as 3 episodes. The DVD set has the unedited 98-min version. Strangely, Amazon has three 23-min blocks for the episodes, totaling 96 minutes so there could be 2 min missing. Somebody posted a link to a completely unedited finale in HD which I promptly downloaded in case there were 2 missing minutes.

Also, another fact I uncovered is there was a writers' strike which meant scrapping some ideas, one of which involving a season 6 cliffhanger where Sam learns an ex-girlfriend is HIV positive.

Phil Pearlman played "Phil" the old guy with glasses at the bar. He's Rhea Pearlman's father. Her sister, Heide, produced and wrote a good amount of episodes.

 

Same with MASH and IIRC The Dick Van Dyke Show, which is why "The Gunslinger" is the last episode shown in the rerun cycle, rather than the one where Rob sells his book

 

Arrested Development

David Cross had to fight Fox to keep Tobias’ mustache as the executive had a no-mustaches policy.