Nobody’s mentioned The Cigarette Smoking Man from “The X-Files”?
I almost hate to admit this, but I remember the Tonight Show from the Jack Paar and Steve Allen days, and it seemed like everyone was constantly smoking.
They joked about it a lot, but I also think there was some serious on-air drinking going on as well, especially during Allen’s tenure.
Were we ever sure of what was in Johnny’s mug?
I was thinking of that as a counterexample; after all, if a character was called that, he stands out for the trait as a contrast to everyone else.
Trivia: The actor, William B. Davis, had quit smoking decades before, and so to avoid getting hooked again, he smoked herbal (no, not “herbal”) cigarettes onscreen.
Just one episode, but the episode of DS9 where Quark goes back in time and becomes part of the Roswell legend features everyone in the past as chain smoking huuumons.
VH1 just showed a clip recently of the Flintstones spot. It was surreally creepy.
I’ll be a moderate hijacker as I don’t know much in terms of TV shows with smoking, but the movie Fight Club had an assload of smoking in it. According to the commentary, director David Fincher assumed the excessive smoking in the film would turn actress Helena Bohnam Carter off of her pack a day habit, but she ended up keeping with the 3 pack a day habit required to do her scenes. Also, Edward Norton, according to IMDB, refused to be a smoker in the film Rounders as was written in the script, but even he ended up smoking in Fight Club.
Nobody else on the show smoked like a chimney, it’s true. But he was smoking (and often in a smoke-filled room) whenever you saw him- to the point where they once made a little visual gag of putting a nicotine patch on him in a flashback episode. Given the way smoking appears on TV today, you’re right about it sort of being a counterexample. Still, the show that gave us Cancer Man (“that black-lunged son of a bitch”) has to get a mention.
Far more recently, the TV show Becker had a cigarette scene on most episodes. Becker was a smoker who only smoked in his friend-girl’s coffee shop.
Patsy & Edina both chain smoked (including when they were in the hospital) on Absolutely Fabulous.
I’m a bit too young to remember many of those golden oldy TV-shows on the first run, but I remmeber catching a lot of reruns of Combat! and it had a ton of smoking, especially considering it was a ensemble show set in war time. One of teh cliches was the mortar/machine gun attack while all teh characters are having a smoke. Only some of the time did they bother to stop.
On the other side of the coin, Andy Griffith only smoked once in awhile on his show, but there was always some heavy shit going down when that happened.
I read that Andy Griffith amazed everybody on the set by quitting his 3 to 4 pack a day chain-smoking habit overnight very early during the show’s run. They said he wasn’t particularly pleasant for a couple of weeks, but he managed to do it cold turkey even though before he’d been a chimney.
Max Baer Jr. said in an interview that entering the offstage area of The Beverly Hillbillies required a gas mask (his terms) as Irene Ryan, Nancy Kulp, Raymond ‘Mr. Drysdale’ Bailey and several members of the crew were all “the smokingest people you’d ever want to meet”. Strangely though I don’t remember anybody ever smoking on the show, though they did make cigarette commercials in character that ran during the run of the show. (Ebsen had long since quit smoking by then and hated it, but he smoked in character as Jed on the commercials either due to contractual obligation or a lot of money one or the other, I’m not sure which- he even said “weeeelllllll doggy” when he smoked- I wish these were available online, but I’ve only seen them on TV.)
In the 1970s and 1980s, there was a late-night talk show called the Tomorrow Show. It was on NBC, came on after Johnny Carson, and was hosted by Tom Snyder, who was never without a cigarette.
I also recall that Maxwell Smart (Get Smart) occasionally had a cigarette. Not as frequently as some of the characters mentioned so far, but let’s face it–James Bond set the standard, so Max couldn’t be a groovy 1960s spy without smoking.
Yep, it was very uncommon. I don’t remember any of the main cast smoking, except Jethro with his cigar when he was “Big Hollywood Movie Producer.”
In one ep, voice-over actor extraordinaire *John Stevenson played an IRS agent who asks Mr. Drysdale about how Jed Clampett could go from having no income in one year to 25 million (the original amount from his oil) the next. Mr. Drysdale gives him a cigarette from a box (common back in those days) on his desk.
In another one, an actor playing General Ulysses Grant in a Civil War reenactment is smoking a cigarette (away from the set). His director tells him “General Grant smokes cigars, not cigarettes.”
However, there was a several-episode-long story arc about Jethro and Ellie trying to get some hippies to smoke crawdads.
Out of nine seasons back in that era, that’s pretty low.
*Just for starters, the non-Don-Messick Dr. Benton Quest, and the closing narration of the 1960s “Dragnet” series.
I’d have to go with The Untouchables. Sometimes you could barely see the characters through the haze of smoke.
Peter Gunn was the first one I thought of when I saw this thread.
P.S.: Here’s Henry Mancini’s Theme From Peter Gunn if anybody cares to listen. Mancini called it the most overrated eight notes in the history of music, but I damn well like it!
Yeah, best thing he ever wrote. He may have been trying to draw attention away from the first eight notes of “Moon River” which, for those of us subjected to Andy Williams every week, became utterly nauseating.
Back on topic, I’m trying to remember if the Warner Bros. detective drama’s (77 Sunset Strip, et. al) had a high smoke quotient. My guess is probably, especially in the obligatory nightclub scenes. But I don’t really remember. Anybody? Bueller?
Look up at post #11
Seek and ye shall find.