Anyone out there been to the taping of a sitcom, game show, or talk show? How did you get tickets? Did they tell you what the episode would be about? How long did it take? And did you enjoy yourself?
When I was a wee lass, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, I got to watch *Happy Days *being filmed. It was the one where they get locked in Mr. C’s. . . storage room? Safe? I don’t remember all that well. Back then my dad was always getting tickets to different things through his employer; we were very fortunate that way. We had no idea what the episode would be about and as I recall, it was several weeks before it aired. There was a lot of run throughs and we were encouraged to react.
IIRC, getting tickets is a matter of showing up to the studios and asking what shows are available that day. Sometimes they also send agents around to various touristy areas of Hollywood (e.g. the Chinese Theater), trying to get people to come to tapings.
In 1996, I attended a taping of a Leeza Gibbons talk show and the series premiere of the Steve Harvey Show (the sitcom, not the present-day talk show). The Steve Harvey show was stupid, so we left halfway through the taping, even though the ushers were practically forcing us to stay. (I’m sure it was obvious to the TV audience that the laugh track had slightly fewer people laughing during the last half of the episode. :rolleyes:) Each scene has to be filmed twice (even if the first take seems perfect), so it takes forever to get through a taping.
The following year, we went to a taping of The Price is Right. For TPIR, you have to show up early in the morning before the tickets are all gone. Then you leave for breakfast and then return to the waiting area outside the studio at the designated time. As you file into the studio, the producers have each person talk about himself for a few seconds. The people they think are the most friendly and telegenic are the ones who get picked to come on down to be a contestant. A TPIR episode lasts an hour, and it doesn’t take much longer than that to film an episode. The crew was very quick at moving the prizes and set pieces around during commercial breaks.
I went to a taping of 2 sitcoms in 1993. Same night, same studio. A member of our group got us tickets. It took about 4 hours all together.
It was The Phenom, the The Nanny. They did **the Phenom **one take per scene. The audience laughed, but in reality is wasn’t really good. It only lasted one season.
The Nanny ran through each scene twice. It was funny, but the second time we all laughed at the jokes we had just heard. The producers gently encouraged this, but it wasn’t really nessesary. I couldn’t help feeling a little like an audience of trained seals.
The cast of** The Nanny** couldn’t have been nicer. They all came over to the seats and talked with different members between takes and scene set-ups.
I went to the taping of Late Night with Jimmy Fallon when they filmed a special episode in Chapel Hill because the President was coming. so not the typical way of getting tickets; you had to be a lucky senior and respond to an email to reserve a spot before all were taken and then wait in line early to get a good ticket. It was fun the warm-up comedian heckled the audience and the band played for us while we waited a couple hours for the show to start and the show was cool too.
Well…kinda sorta but not really. I was on the Quiz Bowl team in high school, and the game was taped at a tv studio on a weekday for broadcast the following weekend. It was sorta neat to see how a tv show was made, with the cameras, commercial breaks, etc…but that was the sort of program that pretty much only the participants and their parents ever watched.
what a great idea for a thread - consider me subscribed…
I was in the Letterman audience for a show back in 2008, but that’s pretty much the extent of my live-taping experience.
I’ve unsuccessfully searched for years and years, for some random blog by anyone who happened to be in the studio-audience for one of the monumental “last episodes” of a memorable sitcom, because I would love to hear “the story” of how it all went down.
As a “quick and dirty” off the top of my head, I would love to read someone’s story that experienced the live-taping of:
the last episode of Seinfeld
the last episode of Friends
Michael J Fox’s last episode of Spin City
the last episode of Family Ties
the last episode of Cheers
among many others, that I’ll remember tomorrow morning…
Once, years ago (in the 1970s), I went to a taping of a quiz show, called Mastermind. I don’t remember how we got the tickets. I was with my mother, so she may have got them beforehand.
I remember the producer warning us at the start that we had to stifle any urges that we might have to shout out the correct answer.
It was a half-hour show, but the screening went on for much longer. One of the contestants was told that his answer was incorrect and he challenged the ruling. Everything stopped while the adjudicator tried to find out who was right. It was pre-internet, of course, so I think someone was dispatched to the nearest library to clarify the issue.
Around 1961 people handed out tickets for game show tapings on the streets of NY - and kids could go. I saw To Tell the Truth, Beat the Clock, and Whom Do You Trust with Johnny Carson and Ed McMahon.
You can get Daily Show tickets - but you have to take what they give you and there is a long wait. Friends of ours did it. It used to be on the credits, I assume it is on their website now.
I went to a Jeopardy taping - but I was a contestant!
And I’ve been to the filming of several episodes of an old Nick comedy, but that was because my daughter was acting in it. You get a lot closer that way! (And you get fed.)
Earlier this year I attended the taping of The Voice at the BBC studios in White City. That was interesting. It was a very long day though…
A friend was trying out but she didn’t make it through.
It depends how broadly you define TV show.
I went to a taping of a Radio Show which is also broadcast on TV and over the internets.
Because it’s a grassroots effort, one can reserve tickets online or just show up at the door and hope. I think it cost a trivial amount of money.
That particular night, it was snowy enough that almost everyone stayed home. So they made the audience sit in the first twenty rows. And told us to clap really loud, so that the audience at home didn’t realize how few people showed up.
I’ve also attended tapings of other radio shows, the best known of which is Prairie Home Companion. My parents remember the days when one didn’t have to get dressed up, or reserve tickets in advance. But those days are long gone.
In all cases, the performance I saw was the same length as the usual radio show–it was just being performed in front of us.
I was in the peanut gallery of the Howdy Doody show around 1958. Though we lived in NYC, for some reason I remember it being filmed in Waythehellinthemiddlenowhere, NJ. Maybe Camden, or Cherry Hill. My parents knew someone connected with the show.
I saw The Colbert Report in the first season and I finally got The Daily Show last summer. For TCR I just went on to the site and got them (it was still a new show so it wasn’t too difficult). For TDS, once tickets become available now, they’re gone in seconds. I’m facebooked with them so when they announced that tickets were available I saw it instantly and clicked. I got in but they were gone seconds later.
Both experiences were totally awesome.
Oh, an interesting insider experience I had: for TDS last summer (Austin Goolsby was the guest), in one of the segments where Jon was referencing a news clip, someone screwed up and the clip didn’t play when it was supposed to, so they had to re-shoot it. When they did and the clip played as planned, Jon made a little gesture or comment of relief or something to the effect of “whew” which got a laugh from us but which the home audience was of course not in on. This inside jokes actually seem to happen often on TDS, and I’m guessing on other comedy talk shows as well.
About 10 years ago I went to a taping of David Letterman. Before the show, while we were in line, they sent people out to beg us to laugh. *David has a better night the more the crowd laughs. If you aren’t sure if something is funny, laugh anyway and figure it out on the way home. *
If I’m not sure if something is funny - it probably isn’t.
Unless you can count Live sporting events I’ve been to two.
David Letterman back in 1996. Main guest was Helen Hunt promoting Twister. Next was Bob Woodward plugging a book and then Blues Traveler Played. Taping was a little more than an hour, and the best thing was during one of the breaks Dave did three of four extra Top Ten lists for various things not being aired. One of them was as a wedding present to someone. I sent away for tickets for that one and you got them in the mail for a random date a few months in advance.
The other was Late Night with Conan O’Brien. Can’t remember how we got tickets for it, but six of us from College went to go to the show. The studio filled to capacity when we were the next to go in, but for some reason (not sure if it was because we were mainly the target audience) they let us in and allowed us to stand in the back. Sarah Jessica Parker was the main guest and when her interview was over, Chris Farley ran into the studio ripped her out of her chair, threw her over his shoulder and ran out of the studio with her. As they went to commercial and we all started talking to each other how funny it was and noticed pretty much the whole cast of SNL was up there with us to watch him do it. I shook Ellen Cleghorne’s hand. We raced home in time to see it air and were so estactic that when they showed the audience we could see all of our feet. I wish I could remember who else was on that show, and wish there was some way to find a copy of it.
You have to now “get dressed up” to attend a radio show? 
I’ve been to several. We actually went to some tapings in high school as a fundraiser–some shows pay a per-person price to get the seats filled in their audience. My choir went to a few tapings of America’s Funniest Home Videos in its first or second season, paying us something like $15 a seat. Pretty useful for a group like a choir. And yes, Bob Saget was paaaaaaaainfully unfunny, and no, we didn’t laugh at the really, really bad jokes (I realized they kept doing takes of one horribly lame joke because no one would so much as chuckle–Bob said, “Okay, so if it sounds like it might be a joke, laugh,” etc. inbetween takes). We did laugh at the videos, though. There’s a closeup shot of my 17yro laughing that occasionally gets rerun. For years, I’d hear, “Hey, were you ever on AFV?”
I saw another AFV taping with my family a year or so later, but don’t really remember much about it except they split up my family and we sat all over the place.
I’ve also seen tapings of Family Feud (way back with Ray Whats-His-Name), Hollywood Squares, Dr. Phil, (twice) and some horribly painful, never-made-it-to TV game show pilot called Love Thy Neighbor. The pilot was excruciating, because it was, well, a pilot. This means taping took for-EVER, was tedious, boring, and rough on the stomach and bladder. I remember they brought us hot dogs at one point because we’d been stuck in the seats for so long. We went as a fundraiser because it paid the highest to get audiences in the seats, but, yeesh.
The other shows all ran like clockwork and were very close to what you see on TV.
I want to see The Soup next, but that requires us finding the time to do it. Harder to do now as working parents. Hmm, maybe we could do Big Bang Theory too. Thing is with successful sitcoms like that, you aren’t guaranteed a seat. The lines to get in can be long. We were all set to watch a taping of That 70s Show and just missed getting in. Boo.
Years ago, my job sent me out to L.A. for a week-long workshop. One of the activities they had lined up for us after hours was a trip to a sitcom taping.
Unfortunately, the sitcom was “According to Jim.”
Anyway this would have been during the show’s first season, and I don’t think it had even aired yet. As other people have mentioned, they did several takes of each scene and had a warm-up guy encouraging the audience to laugh as hard as they could, which of course became harder with each successive take (and also because the gags weren’t really that funny to begin with).
We ended up leaving just before the end of the show, as it was getting pretty late. Don’t recall anyone complaining.
About 5 years ago, the Israeli version of “1 vs. 100”
They did a Children’s Special (i.e, the “100” were primary school kids) and our twins were two of the 100. He drew one of the biggest laughs of the show – when he disqualified (by “spacing” on an easy question,) and was asked by the MC “aren’t you bummed?” to which he answered “not terribly, I’m counting on my sister to win something!”
She won a few hundred $s 
Obviously we didn’t need to buy tickets…
When I was in junior high school, I saw a taping of the $10,000 Pyramid, hosted by Dick Clark. This was a school field trip. I’m not sure why this was considered educational, but I enjoyed it.