Hollywood on Television is a five-and-a-half-hour, six-day-a-week live television talk show that starred newcomer Betty White and radio disc jockey Al Jarvis that ran from 1949-1953. When Jarvis left the show in 1951, film star Eddie Albert took his place and co-hosted with White for six months until thirty-three and a half hours of live ad-lib television per week, featuring just the two of them, took its toll and he also resigned. White was then hosting the show alone and is believed to have been the first female television talk show host as a result. After a period of White talking directly into the camera lens for hours at a stretch, the show began accepting guests to interact with her as well as gradually incorporating scripts and sketches.
Similar to Jackie Gleason's Honeymooners sketches on the Dumont Network during the same era, recurring sketches involving White as a housewife named Elizabeth caught on with the viewers to the point that expanding the sketches into a half-hour sitcom appeared to be the obvious next step. Series pianist George Tibbles began writing the sketches. Studio producer Don Fedderson, Tibbles and White formed a production company called "Bandy Productions," named after Betty White's dog Bandit, and White changed over to a half hour sitcom format based on the Elizabeth sketches entitled Life With Elizabeth, which ran in syndication for two years and sixty-five episodes.
In 1952, White began a parallel program called The Betty White Show. This show used a similar format and had much of the same cast members. The Betty White Show saw a national audience with NBC in 1954 before being cancelled that same year.
Stephen Valentine Patrick William Allen was an American television and radio personality, comedian, musician, composer, writer and actor. In 1954, he achieved national fame as the co-creator and first host of The Tonight Show, which was the first late-night television talk show.
Caroline Gilchrist Rhea is a Canadian actress and stand-up comedian, who is best known for her role as Linda Flynn-Fletcher, Betty Jo Flynn and additional voices from the Disney animated series Phineas and Ferb and Hilda Spellman on the ABC series Sabrina the Teenage Witch.
Variety show, also known as variety arts or variety entertainment, is entertainment made up of a variety of acts including musical performances, sketch comedy, magic, acrobatics, juggling, and ventriloquism. It is normally introduced by a compère or host. The variety format made its way from the Victorian era stage in Britain and America to radio and then television. Variety shows were a staple of English language television from the late 1940s into the 1980s.
Broadcast syndication is the practice of content owners leasing the right to broadcast television shows and radio programs to multiple television stations and radio stations, without going through a broadcast network. It is common in the United States where broadcast programming is scheduled by television networks with local independent affiliates. Syndication is less widespread in the rest of the world, as most countries have centralized networks or television stations without local affiliates. Shows can be syndicated internationally, although this is less common.
Betty Marion Ludden was an American actress, comedian and producer. A pioneer of early television with a career spanning almost seven decades, she was noted for her vast television appearances acting in sitcoms, sketch comedy, and game shows. She produced and starred in the series Life with Elizabeth (1953–1955), thus becoming the first woman to produce a sitcom.
The Carol Burnett Show is an American variety/sketch comedy television show that originally ran on CBS from September 11, 1967, to March 29, 1978, for 279 episodes, and again with nine episodes in fall 1991. It starred Carol Burnett, Harvey Korman, Vicki Lawrence, and Lyle Waggoner. In 1975, frequent guest star Tim Conway became a regular cast member after Waggoner left the series. In 1977, Dick Van Dyke replaced Korman but it was agreed that he was not a match and he left after 10 episodes.
The Tom Green Show is a television show, created by and starring Canadian comedian Tom Green, that first aired in September 1994. The series aired on Rogers Television 22, a community channel in Ottawa, Ontario until 1996, when a single pilot episode was made for CBC Television. The Comedy Network greenlit the show in 1997 and aired it for 2 seasons from 1998 to 1999.
Mama's Family is an American sitcom television series starring Vicki Lawrence as Mama. The series is a spin-off of a recurring series of comedy sketches called "The Family" featured on The Carol Burnett Show (1967–78) and Carol Burnett & Company (1979). The sketches led to the television film Eunice, and finally the television series.
Valerie Anne Bertinelli is an American actress and television personality. She first achieved recognition as an adolescent, portraying Barbara Cooper Royer on the sitcom One Day at a Time (1975–1984), for which she won two Golden Globe Awards for Best Supporting Actress in a Series, Miniseries or Television Film. She subsequently earned adult stardom as Gloria on the religious drama series Touched by an Angel (2001–2003), and Melanie Moretti on the sitcom Hot in Cleveland (2010–2015), which brought her a Screen Actors Guild Award nomination. In 2012, she received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Nick at Nite is a nighttime programming block on the American basic cable channel Nickelodeon. Broadcasting from prime time to late night, the block intitally consisted of syndicated sitcoms and films from the 1950s to the 1970s. Nick at Nite gradually shifted its programming to primarily airing sitcoms as recent as the mid-1990s to the 2010s.
The Jackie Gleason Show is the name of a series of American network television shows that starred Jackie Gleason, which ran from 1952 to 1970, in various forms.
The first Golden Age of Television is an era of television in the United States marked by its large number of live productions. The period is generally recognized as beginning in 1947 with the first episode of the drama anthology Kraft Television Theater and ending in 1960 with the final episode of Playhouse 90. The Golden Age was followed by the network era, wherein television audiences and programming had shifted to less critically acclaimed fare, almost all of it taped or filmed.
Lux Radio Theatre, sometimes spelled Lux Radio Theater, a classic radio anthology series, was broadcast on the NBC Blue Network (1934–35) ; CBS Radio network (1935–54), and NBC Radio (1954–55). Initially, the series adapted Broadway plays during its first two seasons before it began adapting films. These hour-long radio programs were performed live before studio audiences. The series became the most popular dramatic anthology series on radio, broadcast for more than 20 years and continued on television as the Lux Video Theatre through most of the 1950s. The primary sponsor of the show was Unilever through its Lux Soap brand.
In the United States, late night television is the block of television programming intended for broadcast after 11:00 p.m. and usually through 2:00 a.m. Eastern and Pacific Time (ET/PT), leading out of prime time; informally, the daypart can include the designated overnight graveyard slot. Most notably, the type of programming that has been traditionally showcased in the daypart—most commonly shown after, if not in competition with, local late-evening newscasts—encompasses a particular genre of programming that falls somewhere between a variety show and a talk show.
The Colgate Comedy Hour is an American comedy-musical variety series that aired live on the NBC network from 1950 to 1955. The show featured many notable comedians and entertainers of the era as guest stars. Many of the scripts of the series are archived at the UCLA Library in their Special Collections.
David Wayne Spade is an American actor, comedian, writer and producer. After several years as a stand-up comedian, Spade rose to prominence as a writer and cast member on the NBC sketch comedy series Saturday Night Live from 1990 to 1996. Following his departure from SNL, he began an acting career in both film and television, starring or co-starring in the films Tommy Boy (1995), Black Sheep (1996), Senseless (1998), Joe Dirt (2001), Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star (2003), The Benchwarmers (2006), Grown Ups (2010) and its 2013 sequel, The Ridiculous 6 (2015), The Do-Over (2016), and The Wrong Missy (2020).
Life with Elizabeth is an American television sitcom starring Betty White as Elizabeth and Del Moore as her husband Alvin; Jack Narz is the on-camera announcer and narrator. The series aired in syndication from October 7, 1953, to September 1, 1955. The show was the first of many sitcoms for Betty White across the decades and was based on sketches involving the Elizabeth character that she had performed on her earlier talk show Hollywood on Television.
The Betty White Show is a television series that aired on KLAC-TV in 1952 and 1953, and on NBC in 1954. The show was a daytime talk show that also featured entertainment segments that are typical of variety shows. Betty White served as both host and producer.
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