Oh yeah? Joe Mantegna. Who is a great actor, but still looks like Joe Mantegna.
And Margaret Hamilton was never even plain. But when she started acting, there were such things as character actors. Interestingly, she was a kindergarten teacher, but then she got divorced, and so she wasn’t allowed to teach anymore, and had a child to support, so she became an actress, because it was one of the few professions where no one gave a damn about your marital status. Agnes Moorehead was never beautiful, but she was aristocratic-looking in her youth, when she needed to be. Nearly every role she took was very dignified (she’s the warden in Caged, which it took me two viewings to realize), unless it was plain (like the woman in the Twilight Zone episode), so she rarely wore flashy costumes or much make-up. It’s ironic that she is best-remembered for her role on Bewitched.
Also just remembered Steve Buscemi. I suppose you could discount premium channel shows, though those are some of the most high profile shows in pop culture so excluding them may be tough to justify.
EDIT: Plus much of the cast of American Horror Story. And Margo Martindale has been on a career hot streak the past few years. (Justified, The Americans, The Millers.)
Joe E. Ross comes to mind. He was a supporting cast member on “Bilko”, then co-starred in “Car 54, Where Are You?” with the equally homely Fred Gwynne. Not to mention Al Lewis, who played Schnauser on “Car 54” then played Grandpa on “The Munsters” alongside Gwynne.
In her youth, Margaret Hamilton had a beautiful, slender figure. You can see this pretty clearly in her witch costume for The Wizard of Oz. She did have sharp features and a larger nose than what the movies have taught us is attractive, but the majority of pictures of her from her younger days are pictures of her in character as The Homely Spinster or a similar role. I will tell you, as a fact, that even in character she was more attractive than half the women I see lumbering around WalMart on any given day.
Rose Marie was another actress from old school TV who, objectively, was not an unattractive woman. Even so, we were supposed to accept the idea that she was a spinster and had trouble finding dates as Sally Rogers and in similar roles.
Part of my point with the story about her accidental entrance into acting was the fact that she didn’t start acting until she was well past what would have been her ingenue days. But you can find pictures of her online when she was young, and she wasnever a great beauty. She did have a very pleasant smile, though. I’m sure her kindergarteners loved her.
I miss the innocence of shows. Where you didnt need to be crude, nearly naked or make absolute no sense for people to watch your show. TV’s literally are “boob tubes” nowadays. Bring it back!
And on all channels, too - not just the major networks and cable.
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Growing up in western Pennsylvania, we always tuned in to channel 11 from Pittsburgh, WIIC as the station was known then on Saturday nights. They had live studio wrestling with old WWWF stars such as Bruno Sammartino, Gorilla Monsoon, and George “The Animal Steele” and hosted by Bill Cardille.
Replace WWWF with NWA and I had the same thing (with different announcers, of course) in San Francisco. It was especially good once a year when the eastern wrestlers would make their “west coast swing” (one night in LA, one in SF); each city had an 18-man battle royal.
“Creature Features” was the title in my area.
Most did, but I once owned one that “clicked”.
One reason they don’t; network affiliates grew tired of shows being pre-empted for local baseball. This played a considerable part in NBC switching its San Francisco affiliate, as well as SF’s Fox station giving up on the Giants, which it had broadcast since they first moved there from New York.
This Week’s predecessor, Issues and Answers, started in the late Eisenhower administration.
Some ofher things I remember:
Dialing For Dollars - something they can’t do today unless they spread 1 1/2 hours worth of programming over 2 hours.
Roller Derby! I was lucky; one station aired the Bay Bombers and another aired the LA T-Birds. I never could figure out how Bombers games never had either team score 100 points, while T-Birds games did this on a regular basis, especially as Bombers games had eight 12- minute periods while T-Birds played 8 10-minute periods.
Being able to watch multiple stations of the same network from different cities. The only problem was, the one where I wanted multiples - CBS - was the one I never got, as the local one would show a local talk show in place of The Price Is Right pretty much from 1978 through 1991.
I remember, but I don’t miss, the snow screen when the cable went out.
Another thing I don’t miss; having to watch pretty much everything in black and white. The main TV in the house was color, but portable color TVs would not become affordable until around 1984.
Here’s one with an asterisk; being able to listen to cellphone calls on the higher UHF stations when the FCC moved them (61-83, I think) to the cellphone band.
I don’t know about the US but in the UK I miss children’s tv presenters that are actual adults. They are now invariably teens. Im sure there is a reason for this, probably to do with the show’s makers wanting less a parent/child relationship and more them wanting an older brother/sister look in a presenter.
In addition to the quality anthology shows which featured a new cast and setting every week such as Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Thriller and Conflict, there were shows which used a recurrent cast of characters yet placed them in various kinds of stories and in new settings each week: Route 66, The Fugitive, The Millionaire, etc. There were also the anthology shows built around a single star or an ensemble cast such as The Loretta Young Show.
An interesting variation on the anthology series was Bus Stop, a show that lasted only one year. Based very loosely on the William Inge play, it used the bus stop setting in various ways, and had supporting characters, such as the town sheriff, who appeared recurrently, while the principal characters in each episode were a new cast. The last episode of the series, I Kiss Your Shadow, had a supernatural theme. It starred George Grizzard as a widower who was convinced his late wife kept appearing before him, and Richard Anderson as the woman’s brother. Stephen King once wrote that it was the scariest television episode he ever saw. Other episodes in the series were not in a supernatural vein at all but were romances, comedies, crime dramas, etc. It would be nice to see programs with that kind of variety again.
It was interesting to read their was a Captain 11 in Sioux Falls. In St. Louis Captain 11 was played by Harry Fender, a kind of local institution who had been in the Ziegfeld Follies, and had then retired from show business to have an outstanding career as a police detective, and later still been a nightclub host and a local radio personality. I guess Captain 11 was a sort of semi-retirement job. He dressed up as a riverboat captain and played old Three Stooges shorts.
Children’s show hosts went into decline after the FCC put limits on having such hosts pitch products to kids.
By the way, there really did used to be fewer commercials, at least in prime time on the major networks. The FCC relaxed the limits in the late 1960s This is one reason why shows such as the old Alfred Hitchcock programs can seem to have more content. Provided they are shown unedited, they really do have more content.
The all-time champion, at least in terms of longevity, for horror show hosts would, I guess, be the current Svenghouli. There’s been two of them, and the current one has been at it for most of the past 44 years. He is currently on MeTV. He often runs excellent films, which makes his constant interruptions fairly irritating. For instance, this past Saturday I saw The Wolfman with Lon Chaney Jr. and Claude Rains, and there were even brief segments with The Three Stooges edited in.
I suspect there are more shows that fit that bill being produced today than there ever were in the past. You just need to find them.
Off the top of my head, and just from shows that are good enough that I regularly watch them:
-Parks and Rec
-Sleepy Hollow
-Elementary
-The Americans
-Orphan Black
-Fargo
(Some of those shows do have some level of violence or darkness, but none are crude, or particularly sexualized, or nonsensical.)
TV is WAY better now than it ever has been. There are amazing shows being produced in an incredible variety of genres. There are a very few things that I agree are missing (although I don’t honestly know how much audience demand there is for variety shows or old-school Christmas specials), but the amount of quality writing and directing and acting in TV right now dwarfs what it has ever been in the past.
I agree, I LOVE anthologies. Speaking of “Bus Stop”, one of the programs on that show starred the pop star known as Fabian, playing a serial killer. It was titled “A Lion Walks Among Us” and was so shockingly violent it led to a Congressional investigation of violence on TV. I would love to watch this, and “I Kiss Your Shadow”. I wonder what the audience would have made of “The Walking Dead” way back then, LOL.
About the only thing I haven’t seen mentioned yet are summer replacement shows. Or like when I was a kid, and they showed reruns of the season that just ended. That came in handy before there were a gazillion rerun channels on cable. And the reruns were old shows that actually qualified as “classic television”.
Something I miss was the network specials. Things like Battle of the Network Stars or Circus of the Stars. They were incredibly cheesy, but it was so fun to watch Chad Everette get pissed off when he was losing, or see Erin Moran try to do a high-wire somersault.
BotNS is being rerun on ESPN Classic. It’s as cheesy as you remember. However, it is refreshing to see stars willing to look bad, either sweaty with no makeup, or inept at a particular sport. No one is perfect.
On the other hand, there is the dunk tank. SNL didn’t have to stretch the facts much to make a parody called “Battle of the Network T’s and A’s”.
ESPNC does seem to edit the heck out of them. I remember them being longer, with more detail. I think they may have ran more than one night, yet ESPNC makes them fit in 2 or 3 hour timeslots.
Not to mention “network” star was practically a slap in the face. There was a much bigger gap between TV and movie actors in the 70s and 80s, which there hadn’t been in early television, and which has been closing since the 90s. Being a TV star is a much bigger deal now than it used to be, and going back and forth between media is possible now, and not seen as a career killer. In the 80s, when Tom Hanks made it in movies, he never looked back-- he couldn’t. Now, Elliot Gould can appear on Friends as Ross and Monica’s father, and people look on it with affection. Marlee Matlin can take her Academy Award and become a regular on a show that also stars Lea Thompson, and no one thinks either of them is spiraling downward.
But in the 70s, appending “Network,” or “TV” to the word “star,” was making sure that it was clear the person was not first rate. That’s why you could expect them to do stunts, and take pratfalls-- they were “just” TV stars.
IIRC, they usually had TV star week on a lot of game shows, and the actors acted like idiots. Celebrity Jeopardy skits on SNL made fun of this. I don’t think I ever actually watched one of these until after I had seen SNL Celebrity Jeopardy, and was shocked at how spot-on it was. The actors really did behave like either preschoolers, or total douches.