The Dick van Dyke Show I love. (Thanks, Netflix!) The Alan Brady Show…I’m not so sure about. A man impersonating a bowling pin? A talking car? Richie Petrie singing “Little Drummer Boy”??? Meh…I think I’ll pass.
What? Of course! Sure the bowling pin sketch fell down and the talking car sketch was a lemon, but everyone has off days. The quality would have been generally high (I think). I especially would have enjoyed Alan son’s early small screen experimentation with the mockumentary genre.
It was a different time, you understand.
The Alan Brady Show was based on Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows, which was very popular at the time. But that time passed, and YSoS went off the air.
Would I watch it now, if it were new? Probably not. Watch it in the 50s? Sure.
But do you/would you watch “The Dick van Dyke Show” now? That, too, is a product of its time, but it’s held up very well. It’s just the show within the show that strikes me as very creaky.
Has the show in any “show about a show” ever been any good?
If the show within the show was any good, it would be the show.
Right. People complained that the show in “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip” wasn’t particularly funny. Well, yeah, if Aaron Sorkin could write SNL, Lorne Michaels would have tried to hire him to do so.
Have we had a thread about shows-within-shows? The only other one that leaps to mind is Jerry! which looked like quite the snore-fest.
Maybe.
I’m just saying the part of a sketch they showed on Mad About You looked like it had potential.
Complaining about the show within the show is a bit like complaining that the WJM newscast wasn’t particularly informative.
Itchy and Scratchy!
Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!
But The Simpsons isn’t **about **Itchy and Scratchy, except on a few occasions.
One of the wonderful things about YouTube is that you can find some of the not so special editions of variety shows. So you don’t have to take our word for it that shows existed with a four-minute song and dance number to introduce the guest stars before the opening credits.
Commercials that (literally) sing the benefits of hexachlorophene.
And the inevitable discomfort of variety show hosts when trying to deal with anything even close to youth culture.
Alan Brady would have been Number 1 in his time slot with a 40 share!
If news counts… The Mary Tayler Moore Show. And Murphy Brown.
Yes, t-t-t-t-tune into Network 23! The network that’s a real mind-blower!
I just watched the “Alan Brady Song” segment. I laughed, in a 1950’s sort of way.
True. Sometimes it’s about Krusty the Clown.
I always wondered who in their right mind would watch Ted Baxter deliver the news on Channel 12 in Minneapolis, and why he wasn’t fired immediately
I always figured it was one of two things:
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The producers trusted the audience to suspend their disbelief and go with the joke.
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The producers are all east coast and west coast elitist, who assumed that all fly-over country denizens are bumpkins who wouldn’t know the difference.
I’ll be charitable and assume that #1 is probably the correct answer.