TV Guidance Counselor
TV Guidance Counselor Episode 16: Adam Resnick
- Wait, you have a TV? - No, I just like to read the TV guide. Read the TV guide, don't need a TV. ♪ Tell me to let it ♪ ♪ Tell me to let it ♪ ♪ Tell me to let it ♪ ♪ Oh ♪ (upbeat rock music) - Hello and welcome to another episode of TV Guidance Counselor. It's Wednesday, which means it's time to talk about old TV. Thank you so much for coming down and checking out the podcast. If this is your first time, if you're checking it out, due to my excellent guest this week, welcome. If you're a regular listener, you are in for a treat. I have an excellent guest this week. So just turn a reminder of the general format of the show. I'm a huge TV fan growing up. I watch tons of TV and I own pretty much every issue of TV guide, at least from 1980 through the mid 90s and then some before and some after that. Someone picks a TV guide for my collection, a classic edition, and they go through and pick out what they would watch in prime time that week and the podcast is us discussing their choices. So this week we break format a little bit. We sort of stick to it with my guest who is Adam Resnick. Now Adam was a real honor to talk to. I was amazed to have him as a guest on my show. He's got a new book out called "Will Not Attend" which is called "Lively Stories of Detachment and Isolation About Growing Up in Rural Pennsylvania" that you should definitely purchase. It's very, very entertaining. But he also was one of the creators and writers for some of my favorite shows like "Get a Life" specifically which comes up on this show all the time. He was a writer for "David Letterman". In my opinion, "The Heyday" of that show, we had a great conversation. This is also our first live edition of TV guidance counselor. So you will notice it is not recorded in my home. There are some people there laughing and a bit of an audience, so don't be alarmed. It is on purpose. Please enjoy this week's episode of TV guidance counselor with my guest Adam Resnick. ♪ So what's on TV ♪ ♪ So what's on TV ♪ ♪ So what's on TV ♪ ♪ So what's on TV ♪ - So I'm very excited. I'm a huge fan of Adam's TV work over the years and I'm a huge TV nerd. I brought Adam a selection of my TV guides and you picked one from June 18th to the 24th, 1983. What drew you to this TV guide? I assume it has to be the Simon and Simon cover. - You know something? I thought, oh yeah, that seems like a good year. I'll know about that. And then I started looking through it and realized that I don't think I watch much TV at all. And I was also, but I was fascinated 'cause some shows I did watch were obvious. I didn't realize they had gone. - It was the tail end of that show. - Yeah, the tail end, but boy, what a shitty time for television. Is that what you're saying? - Yeah, I would say, so 1978 to 1983 is an era I refer to as the beige age. So this was the, for local people it would be the Kaldor brown rainbow. It would be the best way to sum up 1978 to 1983. And to me, the 1980s didn't start until 1984. - It was just like-- - Just '78 to '83? - Yeah, that's sort of the beige age where everything was sort of, it wasn't great. And I think the TV has reflected that. You had a lot of '70s holdovers. And I also think that it was the time when NBC was in the bottom of the ratings. They were a powerhouse in the '60s and they were trying to do all these stunts in the '70s, sort of '90 of a thousand stars holdovers. But the great thing about that is 1983 is when we started to see some sort of innovative stuff. And we'll get to Letterman later in the show. But that's sort of when people were like, hey, everything's so bad, let's just burn the ground and start over. And you started to get innovative stuff. You started to get cheers and you started to get these shows that really started being interesting. - Yeah. - But this was kind of-- - When I was going through this, I was like, I'd never watched this. I don't know. I couldn't believe how bad-- - There's some terrible, terrible television. - Well, what was the period then when it was at the tail end of the beige? No, it probably would have been later. Mid-80s, when it-- No, no, it was early '80s. And she was like, "Manimal" or-- - Yeah, "Manimal" was '84. So that was Brandon Tardikoff, who was the youngest network head in the history of television. And they basically said, look, NBC, we're fucked. You could do whatever you want, man, if you can get people to watch them. He's like, "Miss Fitz of Science." And they're like, no, that's not gonna work. He's like, "Manimal!" Didn't work. But he got cheers. Also stuff like Alf, "Punky Brewster," and "The infamous Miami Vice Story," where he basically had some producers. He had Michael Mann in his office, who had only made "Thee" from "The Keep" by that point. And he wrote down on a piece of paper, MTV Cops, and said, "Can you do this show?" And they were like, "Yep." And they were like, "I mean, I mean, I'm on." - I mean, I know, I saw him. - Which Cresselia was on in an episode. - Yeah, yeah, everything. - Everything, you know, at one point or another. It was a yes. - She's very strange. He was like 25 playing a Vietnam vet. - Yeah. - He was in the movie "Manhunter" playing, like a forensic son. - Michael Mann, yeah. - Yeah, what is it, right? - Michael Mann's just a huge Cresselia. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. So yeah, so that's when stuff started to get better, but they were kind of throwing anything at the wall to see what would stick. You had the show "The Wizard" that was about a dwarf, who was an electronics wizard, who had solved mysteries. - Wow. - Yes, he was a, I can't remember the actor's name, I feel better, but he was in time bandits. And so an executive at NBC saw time bandits and they're like, "That's the guy." That's the guy we're gonna have on the show. - Wow, well, that's... I can't, I can't remember which little person he was. - He was the main little person. - Oh, like the main guy that was kind of funny. - Yeah, yeah, he was in charge, he was in "The Wizard." So you were at NYU at this time, so you weren't really watching a lot of TV. You were doing college things. - You were, well, I don't know about that. I just wasn't watching you, I was probably just walking around by myself, exploring, getting to learn the city and things. - So you grew up in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, which was pretty rural, central Pennsylvania. - Well, when I was growing up it was, you know, like, and now it's just, I mean, the area that I was in, it was mostly like fields and things like that, farms and strip malls. - It's what, maybe half hour from Hershey Park? - Yeah, that's right. - So was Hershey sort of like a Willy Wonka-esque amazing thing in that area growing up? Like people would talk about it in hush tones? Or was it just kind of like, yeah, whatever? - Well, growing up in my family, I can tell you, I don't know, I think maybe I was there once when I was a kid, but I do remember that, yeah, it smells like chocolate when you drive to town, but I, you know what's interesting? I never liked Hershey's chocolate. I like prefer Nestle's. - Yeah, well Hershey's has a little, I always thought Hershey's a little waxy and it tasted a little raisinade. - It's got a sour, yeah, it tastes like raisinets without the raisins. - Exactly, yeah. - It actually has a sour milk in it, which was his patented process, was to let the milk curdle first. That's what happened. - Oh, that's right. - Yeah, but he's a huge Jew hater. - Yeah. - But if he did, he did. - He's easy to find those. - Yeah, there's a lot of Jay, sure. - Him and Walt Disney used to just hang around and just yell Jew with the sky for hours. (laughing) That's, that's fact. - But it's not like, you know, there are some points to that, but let's fuck it in. - Yeah, well, we don't have time for that. We are talking about television. - I'm joking. - But also Pennsylvania at that time to me was all about George Romero. I mean, I've made a-- - Yeah, that was easy, that's more towards Pittsburgh. Yeah, yeah, I'd never been in Pittsburgh in my life. - Still to stay. - I mean, no, no, to this day, I think I've passed through up it as a child. - I made a sabbatical to the Monroeville Mall in the red outside Pittsburgh where Dawn of the Dead was filmed. - Oh, really? - I went there. - When I was 25, I said I have to go, and it was the weirdest experience for me 'cause although it's on a television show, I've seen that movie probably a hundred times. And it was the first time I'd been somewhere where I intimately knew the layout without ever having been there once. - So that's really interesting. Dawn of the Dead, you're talking to me. - Dawn of the Dead, you're talking to me. - The kickoff of the beige age at the dawn of the day. That was always Pennsylvania to me. So you moved to New York, was it the first time you were ever there when you started going to college? - I had been there maybe a couple of times. - Okay. - What once with my father was going there for some reason, some business reason, which was really rare, and he took my brother John and I along. I was like maybe 15 or 14. - And were you just amazed at the size of it? - I think I was just amazed at, wow, God, Harrisburg, I always knew it sucked, but you have a Harrisburg in New York. - No, you know it sucks. - You become aware of things like contrast, yeah, right, yeah. So when I was growing up in Boston, I didn't go to New York that often, but my whole image of New Yorkers from movies and television into New York was all the warriors, or escape from-- - Yeah, I think it's true. The movie, I think when I was young, I had this affinity for New York more than any other place that I, where I saw their location, where they're shooting on location in some city, but New York, it was just, it looked so great to me. And I didn't feel that way about, I saw something in place that was set in San Francisco, or even Chicago, I mean, looked nice, but New York was-- - You wanted the grittiness of it? - I don't know, it just felt right to me. Even when I was, you know, so young, I could just barely remember, like hearing about Bitnite Cowboy, or seeing the scene on a thing, didn't really understand, you know, what it was. - Just walking through? - The stories, walking in the streets is all this people, and there's like a dead guy laying on the sidewalk, and everyone just keeps fighting. I gotta move to this place. - I wanna go to a place where you can step over dead people and no one chides you for it. - No, I think I related to the dead guy. I thought this is a place and going really be anonymous. - You could just die in the scene. - Yeah, no one, no one, that went, got to run into anybody, it's great. - Is there a TV show set in New York that you gravitated towards? We were talking about Barney Miller earlier, which is a show-- - I didn't really, I didn't really, I never knew Barney Miller. I just hated the look of it, and you told me I should give it a shot. - I think you'd love it. So Barney Miller is a show that seemed too old for me at the time, and it looked really shitty. It looked like a bad play, basically. But when I watch it now, especially as a writer of television, it is the most purely TV writer show I've ever seen, in that the show, in 200 episodes, only left the one room one time, and it's 25 minutes in one room with five guys and is engaging in funny, just written word, that's it. I mean, it had a great ensemble cast as well, but it didn't rely on, I think that a lot of times people now discount sort of three camera sitcoms, like we grew up with, as sort of cheap or worse quality, but to me, it's sort of harder to do a better version of that, because you don't have the thematic cheats like where you can do a cut-in, or some of the more cinematic jokes. And Barney Miller is a prime example of that. - Interesting, yeah. For me, I could say I do feel a little, I don't know, when I see like a multi-camera show, it does turn me off a little, at least when I see the older ones. But now, I mean, what like, you know, shows like "Everyone Lumber," "Everyone Lumber," and that was a multi-camera, fantastic show at the, I guess there's other stuff. - You'd get a life was multi-camera, would you have rather have done that show as a single camera? - Yeah, I think it sort of came to realize, there's a lot of single-camera stuff done on that show. It became, you know, a hybrid of sorts, which is writers like to throw that word when they're pitching a show, because they don't know what the network is like, you know, the network changes every year, like you want to bring that multi-camera. Yeah, so what sort of a hybrid, you know? - What do you like, that's what it is. - But by get a life, you know, almost immediately, we realized, you couldn't, the pilot, which I hated was in front of a live audience, but that was the one and only one. - Right, and that's the stuck hybrid rollercoaster episode. - Yeah, yeah. - But that rollercoaster wasn't on location? - No, that was a, you can't tell. The set was so, especially when we got into it, maybe it was once the series got picked up, the set was so small that, you know, you could just see the backdrop. It would, like, we weren't far from the wall at any time. - See, here's me growing up watching actually thinking that was sort of intentional. - Yeah, people say that about cabin boy too, why it was just like really crappy set design, and which, so there was supposed to be kind of a look to it, but some of the really, the stuff that looks especially bad was just usually, Chris and I bet you know how bad it looked to me, so. (laughing) - Well, 'cause I gave you more credit than, 'cause my thought was that, you know. - Yeah, okay, now, yeah, that was the idea. It's a hybrid, it's a cheesy hybrid. It's a hybrid between good and bad, it's what you're like. I always thought that, for, we'll get a new pics in a moment, but sort of for a show like Get a Life, and we were talking about this earlier, there was sort of a weird zeitgeist in the late '80s, early '90s, of this sort of dark but knowing, sort of meta type shows that sort of almost commented on the previous 50 years of television, but in a way that to do this, you weren't just being snarky, you actually had an affinity for, and a knowledge of the cliches, and the structure of the television, and it was sort of the first time I remember seeing that in multiple shows, and there was shows that I always sort of lumped in with Get a Life, like Air Indiana, that Joe Dante did, and The Adventures of Pete and Pete, and he's more sort of a real show, that also had a sort of a weird heart to them as well. - Yeah. - And I don't know if that's just me. - Well, you know, the first spark of an idea for Get a Life that was, Chris was the one that said he wanted to do like sort of a weird, dark, dentist-a-menace. - And in a way that's really what the show was. - Oh absolutely. - So it's like a dentist-a-menace that we still lived at home with his parents when he was 30, and... (laughing) - Which is weird, 'cause the kid that played dentist-a-menace was almost in real life very much like the Chris Peterson character. - Jay North went on to do some softcore porn movies. - Oh, really? - Yeah, a drug problem. - You knew those guys, that was really fat, then when he got older. - He got really fat. - Yeah, I think I've seen the pictures. - Yeah. - I also always, we were talking about STV earlier, which is maybe my favorite sketch show of all time. - Yeah, that's the best. - They did an amazing "Leave It To Beaver" sketch. - I remember that John Candy, yeah. - Yeah, John Candy's Beaver, which is very similar to Get a Life in a Lot of Ways. - Interesting, yeah, I'd have to see that again, really, that's the thing. - The first 30 in Harold Ramis, maybe Rest in Peace, has a really funny piece as Whitey, and John Candy comes out and he goes, "I hate that Eddie Haskell," and he goes, "Why don't you kill him?" It's like, it's really great. - Yeah, I'm remembering all the details of this now, yeah, it was funny. Those were, I get to watch some of those again, 'cause that was the best. - Was that a show that you watched growing up? - Yeah, definitely, it was, I recall, am I wrong with this? Was it on PBS at first, or something? - It was. - And then they were, I forget how long they were, all they had different formats, like the length, they were hours, they were hours, they were-- - They had three different formats of STV. So, STV started 1975 on the CBC, which is a Canadian broadcasting system, like the BBC, as a half hour show. It was syndicated in the US, but also run on PBS, because it was from the CBC. So, you know, it was like Money Python. But then, in 1980, Brendan Tardikoff again, at NBC, was done with SNL. They were pretty sure they were gonna cancel SNL. Lauren Michaels had quit the show. Christine Ebersall came in to be the producer, and was a disaster. So, they hired STTV, which had been off the air. They got it to come back on Friday nights in a 90 minute format, mirroring a Saturday Lives format. - Yeah, right, right. STTV Network 90, and they even had them have musical guests, which STTV did not want to do. But they did a very ingenious thing where they incorporated them into the sketch. - I remember that now, yeah, like, was Lavon Hellman, or so there was-- - The tubes, all of the notes did a sketch called Chariots of Eggs. That was a parody of Chariots of Fire with Egg Races. - That's funny. - John Candy had a sketch called The Fishin' Musician. - I remember this. - Yes, that was great, yeah. - Oh, yeah, fantastic. - He had a really nice looking guy, actually, yeah. - Roy Orbison was in an episode, so they were trying to groom STTV to replace Saturday Night Live. - And then there was a version where do they cut some of the sketches shorter when they repackage? - Yes. - I remember so many different versions of-- - Yes, so then it moved to Cinemax and Super Channel, which was the Canadian version of Cinemax, and it aired in a one hour format for the final year. After that, they mixed all that into a syndication package in half hour episodes. So, the Network 90s were cut up into three part episodes, and they re-aired some syndication but mostly on Nicket Night in 1987 and 1988, and then on Comedy Central later in the 90s, they would re-air them. - But that's a great show. - Look at it, there's not one subject on Earth that I know as well as you know this kind of shit. It's unbelievable. (audience laughs) I'm impressed, seriously. I mean, but wait, let me ask you something. - Yeah. - And you can cut this part out. This is just me, Ashley. - No, no, no. - Okay, the beige years you were talking about? - Yes, yeah. - What I'm sort of interested in, what were the viewing habits of Americans at that time? Were they watching less TV? Were they just okay with lousy TV or what was going on? - So, I think that there was a big cultural shift anyway because you started to, two major things happened in the early 80s. You had a cable become more widespread. So, before that, you had satellite dishes and some people had cable, but a lot of people didn't. So, it sort of became much more mainstream to have cable and VCRs. So, now people could get to be a little bit more discerning about what they watched. They wouldn't just take whatever was fed to them. And so, their viewing habits started to change around '82, '83 and which paved the way for Fox in '87 as the fourth network. And so, I think people were just putting up with this '70s garbage. They were just saying this is what we've watched forever and the networks got cocky. - Well, how were the ratings during the worst of this? - The ratings started to go into the tech. So, that's when NBC had almost no ratings. I mean, it was still the worst rated show in 1983 would be the number one show today. Just because stuff has become so specific and narrow casted and the audiences have become so fractured, but it was not what it had once been. - So, then, I'm guessing even I wasn't there for the early couple of years or so, whatever, but Letterman then had to be a big cultural shift. That was my sense at the time. And I think so much came out of that show, that NBC show. It was almost immediately, I think. - Absolutely, because nothing was connecting with youth. That was the thing. It was all the networks were considered old people networks. And they were shows that, like we pointed out earlier, that we'll get to a moment where there's shows that have been on since the '70s. And if you're 17 and a show's been on for eight years, you're like, that's the oldest show I've ever heard of in my life. This has been on two-thirds of my life. I don't wanna watch this. So, there wasn't a lot of stuff for them. And there were shows that attempted to be aimed at youth, like shows like Jennifer Slept here, where Angelion played a horny ghost in a house. - I missed that one. - I missed that one. - That's a terrible show. Or in the midst of science and these sorts of shows, that were sort of attempting to capture youth, but really weren't. And I think the thing with Letterman was, it didn't talk down to the audience. He was a guy with a very specific sense of humor that was very weird. And it allowed people to find it, instead of telling people. - But also, he was vocal about things that were not good. I mean, you wouldn't, you know, when he would joke about "Manimal" and it was like that. When I don't think, I don't think Carson was joking about that stuff at that time. - Oh, Carson was a company guy. You would never say anything against the network. - Yeah, and Dave did that almost immediately, which is interesting, was- - He set himself up in a great position to be like, yes, we're on this network, but isn't this stuff bullshit? - Yeah, right. - So, the kids who were like, yeah, what's this? - That's what attracted, yeah. When I first saw, I never saw "The Morning Show", but when "Late Night" came on, that was the thing. I was like, wow, this is the first guy that's not full of shit. - Oh, yeah. - Bonnie and the show is so- - It is aware of it. - Strange and different than this, you know? - You felt like you was getting away with something, which I think the same with "Get a Life" as well. I mean, I think you're out of history if you look at the shows that you've worked on over the years of having a reputation that is almost like, I can't believe they're getting to do this. And I don't know if you felt the same sort of thing. - I mean, you know, by the time I was writing on a letter or when I got there as an intern, it was already a couple of years into its run and it was, it's funny because I think I wasn't working there at the time, like the first year or whatever. And it's, but I remember, I think Dave was on the cover of Rolling Stone the first year. So I kind of remember when I was watching the way people talked about it, it was, I think it instantly worked, right? - We did. - You know, that's my memory anyway. - It was a huge- - That people were into it right away. - Plus if it weren't people, we're just like, I've never seen anything like this. - Yeah. - Which actually isn't a totally true statement because a lot of the stuff he was doing almost had a parallel with like, Ernie Kovac stuff, or some of the- - They would say that, right? - I mean, 50 stuff. - Yeah, I didn't know that much better. I don't know if that was- - I don't think it was conscious. - I'm like, I didn't know, conscious, and the Steve Allen thing, I don't know about that. I know he did the suits thing. - I never liked Steve Allen. - I don't know, yeah, I don't know much about him. - Yeah, people are always dropping Steve Allen's name and I'm like, he seemed like kind of a dickhead. - Yeah. - Yeah, yeah, I guess I get that, sure. - Yeah, but also Letterman had like youth on his side. It was sort of anarchy and it seemed kind of like a middle finger. - But here's the thing that I loved about Dave, which was different than Saturday Night Live, is he's, all those things you were saying, but in a way, not trying to be hip, and it didn't feel hip. - Yeah, I guess it was in that it was, it was different than anyone had ever seen, and they were doing different things, but that's not, Dave, we're SNL, you get the sense that, even in the 70s, that it was, they kind of liked show business, and they liked being famous, and they liked being part of a scene, where Dave was never like that, and it was- - He was just like, this is me, this is what I think- - Right, yeah, he knew he didn't hang out, he didn't hang out with celebrities, he never felt even comfortable, like he belonged with other celebrities. - So it was sort of pure in a lot of ways. - Yeah, that's the thing is, it was pure, it was honest, you know. - And when you would do these interviews, you were like, anything could happen, he might hate this person. It's not just the what's your movie? - That's what I love, I know that, and he's still still, you know, people say, oh, he's mean, it's not, he's just sort of like, look, if he's cranky, you'll see some of that on there, but also he, he doesn't tolerate guests, they come on, they're just there to push a movie, or something like that, and it'll come out, if they're just being lazy and they're coming out. - They're just using this platform, it's not. So when you were writing on Letterman, did you write the, everything with Chris most of his stuff? - No, you know, when I got there, it was, he was doing one of the guy sketches, Hanukkah guy, or one of that for me, before I can't remember. - So before he did the guy under the stairs? - Oh no, I think maybe that's what it was, maybe the guy under the seats, and then when I got there, we, and we started to write together, we got to be friends almost immediately, we really ponded, and Chris and I did the things, like the Marlon Brando sketches and all that, and that sort of stuff. - And would you guys watch these old tapes? Like I know like when Chris did the Shatner, Sci-Fi Awards, would you guys sort of find these things? - No, and that one in particular I remember, someone showed, it was, I guess maybe that the, someone early days and that tapes being passed, man. - It was from the 1978 Sci-Fi Awards, and Shatner came out and did a spoken word for the performance of Rockin' Man. (audience laughs) - It's fantastic, yeah, and Chris does basically, almost a note for no recursion. - Yeah, with his little Chris Eliot-bisms in there, which I don't know, but that was really, but yeah, I remember Chris and I watching it. - So you would be a lot of callbacks to sort of these classic television things, and maybe that's one of the things you guys bonded on? I mean, it seems like one of the things that I remember from the Letterman days was a lot of that stuff was very reflexive on the past. - Chris and I actually, personally, I think, bonded on movies 'cause it turned out that we loved the same movies, and we knew like all the weird little, even a mannerism from an actor in one scene. We'd be like, oh yeah, and does that little, for that funny thing with his hands, you know, we remember that, so. And then it turns out, even though, you know, I grew up in the sticks, and he grew up in New York City that our childhoods were very similar, we were sort of very alike. - But also the bridge was media. - Yes, absolutely. - So no matter where you are, and how your background is, sort of television and movies sort of bring us all on the same level, it's sort of a collective unconsciousness of that sort of thing into a degree. - A lot of people don't want to admit that, but for me, growing up especially, I can think in my life, I don't think there's been any bigger influence than television. - Yeah. - But mostly, when I was a kid, it meant the most to me, you know, and that's, and it was a great thing. - And it's sort of an escape, it sounds like you had a pretty chaotic household from the exception of the book-- - Yeah, it wasn't, yeah, it wasn't, no. - Yeah, I mean, every, all most kids like television, like I said, some people might think that, oh, that's, I'm not really influenced by TV, like it's beneath it, but it's like there's no, it's almost everything is back to television, you know, at least, and before there were, for me, before there were, you could get DVDs and things like that and have control over stuff, you know, so-- - You were at the mercy of it, and if you had seen this thing, and someone else had also seen it in a late night, you had this common bond now. - And also, you know, in retrospect, it's just like, everything was better in life and there were fewer choices for everything, you know, and so now I was easy, like when you had fewer things to watch, you watch them much more intensely, even the bad things-- - Yeah, absolutely. - You know, you can't, there's just too much stuff. - And you have to stand by your decision, so like when you're looking through TV Guide, if there's two things you want to watch, you got to pick one, and I'm like-- - Yeah, right, yeah, yeah, there was no, yeah. - So I also think that television for a lot of people is, it's a much more intimate format than say movies, 'cause movies is an event, you go out of your house, you go out of your comfort zone, you see it with strangers in a room, but TV, you watch in your home, you watch it alone, you watch it with your family, and it's sort of more with you at the time. - Yeah, right. - And so, let's jump into it, let's start Saturday night. So one of the things you mentioned was night flight. - Yeah, that's the way, 'cause there was nothing, it's interesting, as going through here, you had a bunch of different copies of TV Guide, and I didn't know what you were to look at, so, I know why I pulled 1983, but it turns out I wasn't really watching TV then, obviously, but I couldn't believe, you know, one of the first things I saw was different strokes, which is not a show, my younger brothers, I remember watching that, but I knew it, but I didn't realize it was still on the air in '83, and then the description here was about, you know, Willis gets in trouble for drunk driving, and I'm thinking, oh my God, it was still on the air, he was old enough to-- - It went to '86. - To '86, oh really? - It did, it actually switched networks, so it was canceled by NBC, and then ABC picked it up for the last season. It went to '86. - Oh, that's grim, yeah, it's very grim. - And that's an example of something like, so that was still pulling an audience then? - Yeah, it was still pulling an audience, they had moved it to, from Saturday nights, then they moved to Sunday nights with Silver Spoons, and Punky Brewster for a while, they kept bumping it around, they introduced a new cute kid, because he wasn't working with the old cast, they introduced Danny Cooksy, who was on a Salute Your Shorts, an Interminator, too, some people might know him from, and it was a little red-- - Oh, yeah, the kid, the main kid from there, too. - No, that's it, he's for a long time. He was his dirtbag buddy with the long red hair. He was on, so I don't know if you remember this growing up in the Northeast, but there was a definite divide between Southern nights and Northeastern-type nights of television, so you'd get a night that would be like, "He-haw, Duke's a hazard!" - Yeah, yeah. - And so Danny Cooksy would always show up on those shows, there's like a four-year-old singing country songs. He'd be like, "Hey, not new!" And his mother on different strokes was played by Dixie Carter, and she was the new love interest for Conrad Bain. - Wait, so how did this kid integrate into the show's storyline? - So they had Conrad Bain get remarried, and she was his son from this marriage. There's an episode where he's kidnapped by a childless man, and oh, a man whose child has died, and he keeps him chained to this fence, and is all like, "Pretending my son, pretending my son!" It's the weirdest show, it's like a get-a-life episode. - That show, I didn't watch it much, but I remember, you know, like my brothers watching it, maybe to walk through, but I seem to recall their different strokes was known for some dark episodes, sometimes like, "Wasn't there a child molester?" - Missed bicycle man, isn't it? - Over the end of the episode, yes, yeah. - It's a two-part episode where Gordon jumped from W.K.R.P. and Cincinnati plays a child molester who molests his friend Dudley. - Yeah, and with a laugh tracker, no, a live audience laugh. - A live audience laugh tracker. There's a game they play in this molestation where he makes him take his shirt off and he goes, "I wanna play a game called Neptune King of the Sea." Huge laugh from the audience. - What is it, but that's interesting. So what does that tell you? I don't just, the way people think, the way the difference over like 20 or 30 years, like, first of all, forget what you're saying about how, you know, the way that way, you know, this is about child molestation, it was like a... But people obviously were just not as sophisticated, this could even pass as entertainment on television that they would watch it, that's... - I always think they might've tried to justify it, like, we're bringing light to a topic and we're actually helping, but really they're just using it as fodder to get laughs, which is weird. - I mean, this is slightly off subject, but not really, but it's the same thing, I just wonder how people's, people develop over time, human beings, when they rock something, but, you know, when the exorcists came out, that was a scary movie. When I finally saw it, I thought it was a scary movie, but, you know, kids today, my daughter and her friends, they just laughed at it. - You think it's funny? - Yeah, yeah, yeah, but so what is that? It's just that there's been so much of this stuff that it doesn't mean anything anymore, or people more naive, I mean, is it just that, I think it's a thing we're like, you know, the more communication, the more technology, the less mysterious the world is, and that's, and even in the 1970s, the world was still pretty mysterious. - Oh, absolutely, and you have less control over it. I mean, I think it's a mixture of those two things. I remember that television I found very soothing to me, you know what always sued me, and people found this very disturbing, and like Stephen King books are in his movies. He's well known for incorporating real things, so he would mention Letterman, like the guys at home watching Letterman. This would terrify people because they're like, I watched that, that's a real thing, but I would always find that very comforting, so like if in a horror movie there, like drinking a real product or watching a real TV show, I would be like, okay, everything's okay, 'cause I watch that and I don't get murdered by a Sasquatch. So it would be that sort of thing, but I think that people, the more accessible things are, the more power they have over the media stuff, I can watch the Exorcist on my phone right now. It's not gonna be as scary as a freak. - Yeah, yeah, it's just not any kind of an event, but also it's just, I don't, I can't remember, there's, I mean, maybe it's when you get older, nothing's gonna scare you, but the Exorcist was, you know, frightened adults back then, so what's different now, like, it's, I was the last time you saw a movie that scared you, it really creeped you out, I mean, I'm an adult, what's gonna scare me, it's a movie. I mean, if you look at the ships of horror movies, I mean, horror movies are a great example, because horror movies always reflect the culture that they exist in more than any other genre, because horror movies are never about horror, they're about what's going on in the world. There's actually a great documentary called The American Scream that goes through the 1970s and draws the parallels between Vietnam and the horror movies they were making and all this stuff you don't know till after, but if you look at the horror movies of the last 10 years, they're all torture porn. It's Saw and all these movies that are sort of reflective, it's just body horror in pain and suffering-- - Okay, so that was the death of horror films, movies, like Halloween, was that they're actually the beginning of the end of, because-- - I think to a degree, I mean, I think when the more you show, the more that the horror is about pain and the less that the horror is about dread, I think you lose something, because pain is very fleeting and pain is a very physical fear and not a psychological fear, and stuff doesn't stick with you as long, I think. You can get used to pain. It's harder to get used to a sense of dread, I think. - And also, people, I think, just get used to things. They know when something's gonna jump out at them now and they know all the tricks. - Shock is gone. - Yeah, it's just-- - And it's also harder to build good characters and when you have a good character, you care more about what happens to them. Funny or sad or shocking or horror, but it's easy to just have a fodder character and have something shocking happen to them. - It also affects themselves. There's nothing, I think, that can amaze an audience. You know, the CGI, so. I remember thinking, like, movie like Poltergeist, not that it was scary, but it affects you, like, wow, that's really cool, like, you know. - Well, what about that chicken drumstick scene with the maggots? - I don't remember that. - This guy's eating one of the paranormal investigators is eating a drumstick of chicken and he looks and it's covered in maggots and then he looks in the mirror and his face melts. That really freaked me out. - Gotta hate ghosts. - Yeah. - When they start stirring the shit. - Frankster ghosts. (laughing) - Did you write on the spewing me episode of Get A Life? - I think that was, Jase Richdale wrote that, but that was, the spewing was based on, I had a fascination for Mac and me. And that went back to the Letterman days, actually, because I saw, I remember the New York Times, when they didn't want to come out, like '86, '87, Mac and me. - '86, yeah. - Yeah, '86, yeah. I remember going and being in the writer's room and going through the Times and the movie section, there was, I think it was a full-page ad to my man. And it's the first I had heard about it and said, you know, this Friday, a, you know, magical creature from space who loves her, she's Reese's Pieces with a trademark thing. - Yeah, yeah. - And just think, and 'cause it was so, so blatant, and also a little late to be ripping off E.T., but also like, but so blatant. And then, I don't think I saw it 'til I came on cable, and I actually find that movie kind of creepy, the McDonald's thing. - It's very creepy. The cheapness of the, of the, of the, whatever those things are, the aliens, you know? Yeah, that with their mouth always in that sort of o-position. - Yeah. - Just for gags that they can put a straw on the mouth, you know? - It's awful. And, and I bring up spewing me because I, when I talk to people, that actually, that episode is one of the things that disturbed them growing up. And they were terrified by that episode. Like, like it was the exorcist, the actual monster and spewing me. - Oh, yeah, that, yeah. I forget, yeah, that was, yeah. And I think part of the guy, and there's, yeah. - Yeah, it was a practical effect. - We tried to get the actual, Mac and me, you know, costume set then, but the people were very insulted that we were gonna use it for comedy. - No, you're missing? - Kid in a wheelchair. - Yeah. - That's where you need it. - Yeah, and the, yeah, it's-- - They were like, are all your cast members able-bodied? And you're like, "Yes, they are." And they're like, "Forget it." (laughing) "Forget it." We're not interested. - Yeah, but yeah, I, I, I had a fascination with it from the first ad, and was fascinated with it before I had even seen it finally. - Yes, you never know what sorts of things will disturb people. I think that having a tactical sort of monster, even presented in a comedy show, is somewhat scary anyway. And I think that CGI is probably one of the things that makes things not seem as real or terrifying to people, whereas that stuff's not scary anymore. - Right, yeah, and CGI, you don't think we're in like the worst age of it that years from now, people will be laughing at what the current, just, what's the yellow, it's just gonna look so cheap. It's gonna look like- - Look at the pixels on that bullshit. - Yeah, I've yet to see good CGI, I mean, when it's done, when it's done the right way, I guess, but it's just, you know, you can just tell. Even kids that don't know what CGI is can spot it, and say that they won't say CGI, but they know that's- - Something looks fake. - Something fake. - It doesn't have a weight to it. - Right, yeah. - The exorcist is a movie that I saw late at night on cable one night alone, was terrified. My mother used to drop me off at my grandfather's house, just dumped me there. He only watched three things. He watched the People's Court, Hawaii Five-O, and Price is Right. He was a big, angry man from Norway, and he would sit at this kitchen table, smoking in the dark until those shows came on. That's all he did. - Really? - He'd sit in there to press me. It was a smoke ring above where he sat. He was a giant guy from Norway. So my mother would bring like just a stack of videotapes, and I'd sit there and watch tapes all day. So one time she went to me, the exorcist. And on the, yeah, I was four years old. - So it's the crucifix scene that she's yelling fuck me, and shoving her rosemary in her hooch. My grandfather silently comes into the room. He shoves his giant hand in the VCR. Doesn't even press a check. Pulls the tape out, smashes it against the wall, saying nothing, went back to the kitchen, lit a cigarette, and then just went back to smoking for three years. That was my memory of the exorcist. - Wow, what a final image, too. - So maybe that's what you need to do to your daughter. (laughing) - I know, yeah, like I'm possessed or something. - Yeah, exactly. - I ripped the DVD out of it. - Exactly. - So different strokes you went with as just to what the hell is this? - I was just curious about the at Willis drunk driving, and then I saw Night Flight was on an A2, and I was like, well, I don't remember ever watching it early. You told me that they would show it, I only remember watching it at midnight Night Flight. - Yeah, so Night Flight was the USA network when it first started, which was an amazing network at the time before it just showed on order all day. They had a thing called Night Flight. That was on every night from 11 PM to 5 AM, but on Saturdays, it started at eight, a few times. It started in 1981, and what this was was just a crazy mismatch of old movies, like The Terror of Tiny Town, which is an all-midget Western. (laughing) Weird music videos, movies like The Documents or Another State of Mind, about social distortion, punk rock videos, John Waters, Profiles. - Yeah, and I can remember things like a short, this musician web wilder, you know what it is that I remember seeing, not knowing who that was, but it was a hodgepodge, it was great, and then it was like, you'd see that, you know what that was, and then you know, and then here's Roxy music, so you'd love as the drug. - And you're like, this is just an education. And I watched it every night, and it's responsible for sort of all the things that I like. And I think that was another thing about Letterman was the fact that it was on so late. And so it was on a 1230 originally, and you had things like Night Flight in these sort of fringe late night shows that you kind of like, did I really see that, or am I sort of half remembering it? And you don't have that now because of infomercials, that sort of killed that, that time zone. - But again, I'm telling you psychologically, there was this sense that there were fewer channels, there was less on it, made it more interesting even, you know, like how do you even find this stuff now? - Yeah, when you find something, it seemed more special. - Yeah, yeah, it's the same thing with like, you know, one of my fondest memories as a kid was watching this show, it was out of Philadelphia, we got in Harrisburg, it was one of those horror shows, Dr. Shock was the guy. - Yeah, he had some Dr. Shock. - Oh, do you have some Dr. Shock? - Yeah, yeah, he was patient. John Zacharly, who I think was big in New York, had that in Philly originally, then Dr. Shock, I get, I learned this all later, he allowed, exactly allowed Dr. Shock to use his makeup design and everything, but that was great. And he used to come on late, like 1130, when you're a kid, 1130 is like three in the morning, but then it didn't last long as parents complained, and they put it on Saturday afternoon, it was never the same, but it was so, yeah. - Yeah. - So that's when every local market had a horror host. - Yeah, right. - Every single, that's the other thing too, is that with corporations becoming more, just swallowing up all these small companies, the weird regional variations go away. And stuff becomes-- - Yeah, and including the local commercials, where that's all gone, you know. - You still have furniture commercials, but that's the last bastion of great, bad, local humor. - New York has a couple things, and you know, there's some place called the Grand Palace Hotel, I think it's in Queens, and it feels like a 1970s commercials that people own, and I don't know, it's just, you know, come, we'll make all your dreams come true. - That's fantastic. - How do you know, the Grand, you know, has the chiron of the thing for that. Do you know that? - Yeah, it's a commercial. - Yeah, it's interesting, and then the sixes and the sevens, the taxi, you know, again, it's a local commercial, there's just like, what's the song they did for, it's for a car service, you know, and it's all sevens, or the all sixes of the phone number, but that's one of the local commercials. - Oh yeah, I mean, I collect old broadcasts of television, a lot of the New York ones from the 70s, I have, you'll see an ad for Plato's Retreat, which was a swingers club. - Oh yeah. - It'll be on, like, there's, yeah, Plato's Retreat, and it's a real ad, they're like, come, come, come. - Midnight Blue, they have days to show so that Plato's Retreat, yeah. - We have a buffet in swinging, and these are like real ads. - And then these people were so ugly, like, sex would be the last thing you would think about. - Yeah, Al Goldstein and Scrumach, yeah, yeah, oh. - Yeah, you had a lot of that sort of stuff that you just couldn't get now. And you sort of cable access, but it's not quite the same thing. - Yeah, right, it's-- - And these were on networks. - Yeah, yeah. - So what else do you go with after that? Let's see, wow, we're only on Saturday, huh? - We're probably gonna do the whole week. (laughing) - I'm enjoying myself. - Okay, so yeah, oh, I wrote this down in "Love Boat," a show that I've never actually seen, I've seen bits of it, but even, do you find this out too? I find that, like, movies or things that I disliked as a child, I stole dislike, they're very few, so there's only certain things that maybe I wasn't smart enough to understand, and I said, oh, that was a great movie, like, I remember there was this movie on, I told you, this is first paid channel, it's called Channel 100, it was at Harrisburg, and a few small markets, and you paid for it, they showed two movies a week, but there was a Robert Metchem movie called "Friends of Eddie Coyle," which I think takes place in Boston, right? - That's one of the great Boston movies. - But I was too young to appreciate it, I just thought it was boring, but then when I got older, I saw it, and I was like, wow, what a great movie, one of the great-- - Alex Rocco is-- - Yeah, yeah, Alex Rocco is my favorite, Boston scumbag actress, he always plays the Boston scumbag, or Joe Polnesschek's dad on "Fax of Life." - Oh, really? - Yeah, 'cause Hollywood was like, oh, Brooklyn accent, Boston accent? Same thing, which really they're pretty similar, but "Friends of Eddie Coyle" is one of the classic Boston movies. - Great, man, his performance is so good. - Oh, it's chilling in that movie. That movie's probably the best representation of the Boston I remember growing up, that or Spencer for hire. - Yeah, right, that's much. - Well, a lot of the '70s movies is like that, like "The Friends of Eddie Coyle" just a film stock and everything, it looked grubby, like French connection, it looked just grubby, like the '70s. - Yeah, it wasn't that slick, so the '80s thing. - Anyway, I saw this thing, so nine o'clock on Saturday, which I never watched "Love Boat," but I just liked the description. Carol Cook sings "Lullaby of Broadway." So that's, you know, I'm there for that. - Yeah. - First of all, who's Carol Cook? - She's not Carol Cane, I don't even know Carol Cook. "Love Boat" was big on presenting people as guest stars without them actually being famous. - Well, are people thinking, like, were people more idiotic as you go back in time, like even in the period of "Love Boat," who would watch this shit? I mean, like, to see that, you know, I mean, to see Carol Cook sing "Lullaby of Broadway," is a program for idiots. - I think so. - But yeah, that would be how to-- - It's true, like there's someone who's like, "What's on "Love Boat" tonight?" No songs, forget it. - Yeah. - 'Cause I'm just gonna sit in the dark. - Yeah, but I think that-- - Right, yeah. - Yeah, people maybe were less sophisticated, but at the same time, these are probably the same people who are watching "Splash" now. - Yeah, but they did. - But they dive in competition. - But the fascinating thing, they didn't watch it thinking it was kitsch, and I don't think people thought of that term-- - No, they just loved it. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - Yeah, I mean, it was people were a lot less knowing and a lot less cynical. You didn't wanna have irony then? - Right, right. - As we did now, which, you know, is one of the things that, again, like Letterman sort of brought that to the forefront. - Right. - The humor shifted to every-- - Yeah, no, Dave, I really think Dave changed everything but more than, you know, 'cause he was not, hey, he had nothing to do with "Saturday Night Live." You know, it's a completely different thing, a different sensibility, a different, and I think ultimately, and then everyone so, of course, started trying to adopt this sort of, you know, cynical attitude, but he just came from a real place, but then you see-- - Yeah, it was so false, it was obvious. What's the most, what's the thing that you can't, something you've written that you can't believe actually made it to television? Is there anything that you were shocked that you actually got on the air? - On anything, anything you've written. - Gee, I don't know. Well, actually, there was this short-lived series that I did for HBO in '90, I forget what '90s, something that actually Dave produced, "The High Life." Yeah, that, I was surprised. And it wasn't, you know, it was uneven and if we would have gone to a second season, I think I'd finally gotten the bugs out of it. But that was, that seems like a dream to me. It had been as in a hazy dream. How could that be? - It was a black and white show with a cast of people that you had never heard before, yeah? So it was already, that was a different era that you could even think of getting a show like that on HBO, you know? And it's, yeah, it was-- - Oh, cool. - Yeah, and they're in like a block with Mr. Show, I think they were. Would they have that? - Yeah, they would, I think the rerun on Friday night or Saturday was on like a 12. - Yeah, that's when I-- - That's definitely when I saw it. - Actually, it was, I think it was the prime time version was right after Larry Sanders, so-- - Oh, that doesn't mix well at all. That doesn't work out, doesn't it? - It was that show. - It was good, you know? But it was, now there was, there was promise to the high life, I had a good time doing it, but I just-- - Were you, having it be black and white and weird, were it, was there a specific show from your youth thing? - I just like a lot of people, I know other people, like it's, I just like black and white. It's easier on my eyes, I like to look of it. - Okay. - I just like, you know, like a movie like Paper Moon, love that, you know, last picture show all this, when you, you know, it's sometimes-- - Well, it's a little shepherd house in that one. - Yeah, right, yeah, right, right. But it's, in the '70s, you can still occasionally get a black and white movie made, and shot in black and white. I don't think, you know, a lot of times now, what was the Coen Brothers one, the man? - Oh, the man who wasn't there. - Yeah, I think, I think-- - They shot it in color. - I think, yeah, well the high life was the same thing, was shot in color, 'cause they weren't positive. - Just in case, we weren't-- - Just in case. - Was it a hybrid of color in black and white? - Yeah, I was like, but then I was like, no way it's gonna look like shit, but it actually looked pretty good, but it still didn't quite have the different tones of black and white that maybe film, you know, black and white film would have, but all right, let me like, let me like this list. - Yeah, well, yeah. - Okay, so Sunday at eight, I just find this, you know, for you know, entertainment this week, well that was the beginning of everything falling apart. That was the beginning of the beginning of this obsession with the nuts and bolts of show business behind the scenes and box office numbers and all that. Yeah, so that to me is a, oh, how horrible, I mean. - So when you, the first time you said foot in a TV studio, was Letterman's studio? - Yeah. - And was it like you thought it would be? - It was thrilling because it was that show. - Okay. - I never had any real interest in the behind the scenes thing of entertainment. It just isn't the first time, I mean, you know, one that being at NBC in that building on that show on that stage was, there was never to me anything, I never felt more awestruck or more proud to be a part of something, but you know, as soon as you know, I got to LA for the first time, being on a studio lot just did nothing for me. It just, it just didn't do anything. LA, I didn't like LA, I didn't like the feeling of it, it just doesn't, if it looked like it didn't, in Chinatown, that would be a great place. - Some of it still does, the money and built more. - Yeah, yeah, there's some good architecture there. - So when you, knowing how this stuff was made and knowing the behind the scenes, does it ruin how you watch television? Was it harder for you to get into shows after that, knowing the sort of artifice of it? - What do you mean after like, get a life or when I did that for show or something? - Yeah, even just once you really know what goes into making a show. - It wasn't even, the thing that surprised me was, where Letterman was just so much fun, but sort of, we were away from Hollywood. It's funny, it didn't feel like showbiz yet, it felt like the most pleasingly show business thing that I had ever done. - It said, when you went up there, it's like, you know, it's not fun to work on these shows, it's awful. - It's horrible. - And then I, but then you have to remember, with God, I'm lucky that I can, you know, make a living at the only thing I can possibly do, but it's not for the work, it's drudgery, just like any other job, there's nothing fun about it. Like when people watch a show that they love, and maybe they think, boy, imagine it would be like working on it, every bit of it is awful, and you dread going in, and you dread when they shoot it, you dread me, right, you know. - How are they gonna fuck this up? - Yeah, I mean, it was, it wasn't like an Unlinerman, that was like a whole different sort of thing. - But he was keen with his own little world, though, to agree with that. - Yeah, it was just such a great feeling there, but yeah, but as soon as I was in this, I went from, you know, working and, you know, having an office in Rockefeller Center to this crappy studio, it was called Sunset Gower Studio, it was off of Sunset, way east, or whatever, it was just the most depressing cluster of beige buildings, and every now and then, you'd hear some tidbit, like, you know, there's shots, some of the three sturge is short, too. - Wow. - Part of Angels with 30 Faces was shown, but you just can't ever really feel that, but it's-- - The more I just learned about television, the more I realized that anything good being made is despite of everything, not because of it. - Yeah, I think it's sort of amazing. When you have a show that's really good, and it gets on TV, it's sort of changing now, because I think that the quality TV now is more how movies were in the 70s. - Yeah, right, right. - 'Cause movies now are just big-budget P movies. That's how we happen. - Yeah. - So television is sort of the quality part now, but especially like when you're making "Get a Life," the fact that anything interesting would get made because there's so much done by committee and goes through so many filters and gates, fact that anything good gets on is sort of unbelievable. - Yeah, well, the best television now, you can tell there's strong voices and showrunners and creators behind it, and they have, if they can deliver the goods, there's a lot of freedom and television that you won't have in the future. - Well, if you're making money, they're gonna have to do whatever you want. - Yeah, right, but look at God. I mean, I loved and lightened how, and that was, you know, look at that. That's like Mike White, his whole good everything with that, you know, wrote every episode of all the other, but it's-- - Well, let 'em in produced Bonnie Hunt's show, "The Building," around the same time as-- - Yeah, I never saw that. - She wrote "Directed" and starred in every episode. - Oh, really? - What a network, what was she doing? - 95, she did "The Building," and then she did "The Bonnie Hunt Show" in '96, and that was sort of weird. People hated it, it was a really sort of '50s throwback show, but really lovingly done. And again, you know, people just were like, "I don't understand what this is." - That's it, yeah, I never saw it. - It was a very specific voice. So, what are we on Sunday night? Would you-- - Yeah, I thought I had risk-ropic, this is-- - These poor people, 'cause they can't get up in the-- - Are we holding you? - You are, you and I, we're gonna go through this really quick. (audience applauds) - Sorry. - It's like being in church all those times. You just can't get up, you can't leave, but you're dying. It's one ounce so bad. Looking for lifesavers in your purse and things like that. - Do you have someone agreeing? - Yeah, I could fake a seizure. - Well, let me ask you this, I don't even know what this is. I was gonna ask you, but I was intrigued. Sunday night at nine, I don't know if this was a theatrical movie or whether it was made for TV. It was called, it's called "Caven" or with Allen. - That's an Erwin Allen. Erwin Allen was known as the king of the disaster movie. - And they like, you did the Poseidon event. Would I go through some TV shows, right? Like "Lost in Space." - He did "Lost in Space." He did "The Towering Inferno." He was just known for these. So "Caven" was a made for TV movie that Erwin Allen did, sort of at the end of the height of Erwin Allen's power in Hollywood. He'd also sort of run out of disasters at this point, so he was like, did the boat, did the fire? I don't know, fucking "Caven". - Well, this is literally what the description is at. Taurus Trapped in Caverns in a national park. - Yeah. - Yeah. - And this was-- - I guess if you're in that situation, it is pretty frightening, but-- - You don't want to watch it, right? - Yeah, exactly. - Like stuck in an elevator, that's not something I'd want to watch. I think that's where Erwin Allen would have gone. Had he continued to make TV movies, it would just be like between floors. And this would be an excuse to really haul out a lot of old Hollywood actors and some current TV stars. Yeah, that "Caven" is a terrible movie. So this is-- - Shh. - I would have never guessed. - All right, so let me ask you this. Now here, there's a bright spot here. I see it 9.30, although I don't think I watched it then. It's new hard. I know that-- - Yes. - That's the Vermont show, the early age-- - That's the Vermont show. - I don't remember watching that 'til like '85, but what a great show that was, yeah. - So this is the first season. This was when it was shot on videotape before they shot it on film. - They didn't even know about this, yeah. - So the first season feels very different. It was an MTM production, which is very time in Morris Production Company, which almost had no bombs. They did some pretty quality stuff. But they were cutting corners. They also did, I think it was called "Love Sydney" at this time that was shot on video. So the first season of "New Heart" is shot on video. It's funny, but it doesn't really have the sort of crazy characters that sort of came in-- - The Larry Darryl and Darryl. - Yeah, Larry Darryl and Arpius Galaria's "Michael" and sort of the insanity. And that show-- - That was, you know, obviously pre-Get a Life, but I actually had some Get a Life Sensibility in it in a way, absolutely. - So David Merkin worked on the last three seasons at "New Heart" with, what was her name? She was a writer for "Get a Life." - Oh, "Margie Gross." - "Margie Gross." She wrote on "New Heart" as well. And there are episodes of the last three seasons "Get a Life" that could have easily been, I mean of "New Heart" that could have easily been "Get a Life" that was-- - That's interesting. - There's an episode where "New Heart" and his old buddies form a gang and fight another gang of old men. And they all have jackets on and there's this scene where they're facing off and they're going, "Rumble, rumble, rumble." And it's a, it's like right on a gang. - Oh, that's it to do. - So there's a, there's a TV station they work at and the owner of the station dies and leaves the station to a baby. So the baby is in charge of the stage of all your-- - It's craziness. - Wait, what's, this is towards the end? - This is the last three seasons that got very surreal. - Yeah, that might have been a period that I wasn't watching as much of it, but I know when I was watching it, it was the best thing on at the time. - Great, and it was a consistently good show that went through a lot of different phases. I like it better than the "Bob Newhart" show, which people think is sad. - Yeah, I don't like that as much either. - Yeah, I mean, it's okay, but it's, yeah, it doesn't. - It doesn't hold up quite as well as like the "Mary Tyler Moore" show, which you can still watch and still get-- - Yeah, absolutely. - And "Bob" I think is pretty timeless. - You can watch that now and it could be set now, it could be set whenever, and I think part of it's probably the Vermont setting, but great show. - Well, I just had a thing when I was young for that Suzanne bullshit. It was especially actually in movies and stuff, not so much in the actual, I think. And she seemed, yeah, that, oh yeah, that cigarette voice. - She was like an even sexier, Joyce Dewitt. - Yeah, Joyce Dewitt, yeah, and you can't say those two. - Yeah, although I like Mary Friend who was on "New Heart" as well. - Oh, I wish she was good now. - She always used to host every parade. Like the Hollywood Christmas parade. - Yeah, I kinda remember that, yeah. - Macy's Parade, they'd roll out Mary Friend. - Yeah, well, if a name like that, that's your destiny, I guess. - That's true. - Substitute teacher or hosting parade. - I don't know why, it doesn't just sound like Mary Friend sounds like so. - Yes, it does. - Oh, so this is here, let me ask you this here. - Yeah. - I cannot believe, by the way, how would you know about this stuff? - I can't either, I don't wanna know it, it's a curse, really. - The way you're speaking about this, the most out of that, let's sort of command of knowledge over would be something like a loaf of bread. I would just say, see, the wrappers kind of crinkly and stuff on the outside. - So it's like, when there's this twisty thing to be open and you go in and the stuff inside this bread, it's really soft and you get like squeezing, almost turn it into dough again. (laughing) And I could probably go on like that for a couple of hours, you know. - You should have a podcast about bread talk. - You should have a podcast about bread talk. - It requires no real memory, but it's a, all right, so. - No, this is interesting. The 10 o'clock at Wally George, who was not, I don't think that was in Harrisburg. But I know at Wally George, George is, I've seen that he was like, do you know that it's right? - Yes, yeah. - So my question to you, sir, is this. Isn't like the Bill O'Reilly's or the Glenn Backs or Hannity's, this is what I'm going back to the sophistication thing. - Yes. - Like I can remember even in the '80s, like people watched Morton Downey and it wasn't, it was a little silly, but they took it more seriously than they ever should have the people that were interested. - Yeah, oh, fine. - So now, so this is, so someone like Bill O'Reilly, for this age, isn't he just sort of a Morton Downey junior, but the thing is, you don't make it like professional wrestling, make it seem like you're real news guy, you know what I mean? - Absolutely. - You don't be silly, you know, but these guys were silly in a way. - Yeah, they were sort of, people, it was a spectacle. - Yeah. - And they totally took the right-wing position, sort of like that was the funny, that was the angle. It was more about the love America, love it or leave it kind of thing, yeah. - Right, and I think a lot of that maybe came out of, almost like high school debate teams. It was almost like, one of us needs to take the opposing viewpoint, so I will take it to an extreme, but that's for the purposes of point, counterpoint. But now you have people who are just like, "Yeah, the Jews are holding all the gold "and you should buy MREs 'cause you're gonna have to eat your mother." And people are like, "It's true." For some reason, people don't question that. - Well, it's also one can prove to me it's not true. - That's very true. - I always like, I listen to a lot of right-wing radio now, watch a lot of, I do, watch a lot of right-wing TV because-- - I like that, I enjoy it too. - It's kind of incredible. - Yeah, it is enjoyable. - My favorite thing about it is, listening to the ads, you get an absolutely perfect picture of the average listener. - Sure, yeah. - Here are the ads on right-wing radio. Gold hoarding, boner pills, and divorced attorneys. Those are literally the three biggest advertisers on those things. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - And it's like, how can you take and diabetes, yeah. - Yeah, right, yeah. That seems like, in fact, it's all those, any kind of prescription medication where the commercial starts, you know, like, are you pissing the bed at night, you know? Are you, you know, finding a-- - She probably wore gold. - She probably wore gold. - All right, so, well, the 10th-30s on Jimmy Swaggart, I used to love that kind of, like, Jimmy Swaggart-- - Oh, it seemed. - And PTL Club, I used to be fascinated when it was the, you know, the Jim and Tammy at the height of their power. - Did you know people grew up? 'Cause in a rural area, and I apologize if this is a stereotype, I imagine there were more people who really bought into that kind of stuff and gave them money and that sort of thing. - Yeah, I didn't know anyone, I can't, but yeah, no, well, they made a lot of, in the height of the PTL Club, they had a lot of products, they had a theme park, you know, so which I always wanted to go to, and it was, but then it all ended badly. - I just, yeah, you could get crucified virtually. Honestly, yes, it was all ruined by some slut that set up Jimmy Swaggart as the way they tried to play it. - Yeah, it was right. - Yeah. - No, it wasn't true, yeah, like, he came out and someone busted another preacher, a rival, it was always a rival preacher. - Oh, yeah, salute. - These are a Christian brotherhood. - Turned the other Jimmy, yeah, so. - I'm making more money. Remember when Tammy Fay Baker hosted a talk show with Jim J. Bullock? - Oh, vaguely, yeah, yeah, that was very weird. - Let's hear some more applause for that thing. - Jim J. Bullock, yeah, yeah. When I, when I had a band, we tried to do an album called Nevermind Jim J. Bullock, but it. - Oh, really? That's great. - He was raped in an episode of the sitcom he was on. - He got too close for comfort. - Oh, well? - He was raped. He was raped by a man in drag in the episode and they played it for laughs. Monroe played for laughs. - You have to send me the DVD. - Yeah, I can't believe it, I just don't believe it. Okay, so then this is, I was marveling at things. Like, I don't remember, well, I've never seen the movie Private Benjamin. I didn't know there was also a TV series. - Yes, the TV series is awful. So Goldie Hahn was in the movie. The movie's okay, yes, but the TV series was really bad. It only lasted half a season. It was a mid-season replacement. It was, there haven't been many good based on movie TV shows. - Yeah, that's a good point. - Well, it's a good point. - Well, this brings us to-- - Two right now, look, at nine o'clock on Monday, Mash show, I know, but don't be offended by this. I never liked that. - No. - I love the movie, I love the movie. But no, you're in good company with it, that you like it because so many, that's, you know, people love it just-- - It's critically acclaimed. - Smart people love that show. I just did never get into it, it was too, I didn't like the laugh track and I didn't like all that-- - You were listening to it with the electric and the DVDs and listen to it-- - Oh really? - It's just dark, it's just really dark. - Really? See, I couldn't get past things like the transvestite guy. What's his name? - Hot lips. - Hot whatever you have. - Who likes Jamie Farr, no one likes Jamie Farr. - I mean, for me, he played it a little broad, but no, it's a little big, a little big. - Little broad pun intended? - No, yeah, I actually didn't mean that, just played it big, played it big. - And Alan Alda doing the "Groucho" thing, but I like the movie. - The show wasn't really fishing or follow, it was almost too dark to be funny and too stupid to be moving. Like it was too wacky. - And also then we could very corny at times. - Absolutely, yeah. - And it was on longer than the war it was setting. - Yep, that's right. - Yeah, it was, the other thing I thought-- - Well, I understand they applied a Vietnam sensibility to the Korean War. - Yes, they did, to the Korean War. - See, I knew that, I think the loaf of bread, I knew something outside of the loaf of bread. - Exactly. - Well, much bread as Vietnam sensibility is applied to it these days. The Vietnamese bread is very popular. - Why should it bond me? Do they have those impostor? - Yeah, it's like a quick bread, it's a fried bread. - Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. - Yeah, no, Mash. My uncle used to watch Mash all the time and it just seemed like boring and I was just like, I don't, it's just a normal movie. - Anything that reminds you of like your uncle, your grandparents' house. It's like, I can't just, yeah. - That musty smell of death. - Yeah, and also like it's a war movie, but it doesn't have any good fighting. There's no shooting. - Yeah, my, my, yeah, it's, it's, yeah. - I found a radar very off-putting, just his face. - Yeah, no, again, I thought he'd play it kind of broad, but it was a big, all right. - I enjoyed it. - The next thing, I'm sorry. - Oh, no, I was gonna say I enjoyed Mad Magazine's parody of Mash much more than the show, Mash. - I don't remember that, that's it. So this, I just saw this title, I know what the show is, I've never seen it, but just the title literally gave me a fever for about 30 seconds. - That's our cheap bunker's place. - Yes. - Isn't that basically, that's based on like, everyone around him died. - Yes. - And then they moved on with another show or something. - Correct, so this is where the last two seasons of All in the Family. So they had, they killed off his wife, which is a very upsetting episode when he finds her slipper, and he cries. - Oh God. - And so you mean all those years that he was just beating the shit out of her? - Yeah, I mean, he really loved it. - And he realized. - Really loved it. - She was okay. - All the way Glenn Miller beat his wife. - Isn't that the lyric? So yeah, so our cheap bunker's place, he buys a bar and adopts a child. (audience laughs) - Well, he's true to his character. - He was. - Who the hell was that? How was that? - It's, I guess the bar thing, or did he get the money for the bar? - Maybe from his wife's death. I don't really know. Sammy Davis Jr. paid him for that kiss. You know, and they also had a spin off of his daughter, so Gloria had a show at the house. - Oh, she was a veterinarian? - Yes, she was a veterinarian in a small country town, and that was the hour block, Archie Bunker's Place in Gloria. - I had to think of that Sally Struthers in the early days of On The Family. - Oh yeah, yeah. - Come on. - I was glad you said the early days of On The Family and not in the Save the Children Foundation, or the, do you want to make more money? - Sure, we all do. - He's the hour bear. - Oh no, it's, right, oh God. - She was hot. - Yeah, Archie Bunker's Place, not my favorite child. I met Norman Lear once. - He seems like actually a cool guy, though. - He's a pretty nice guy. I invited myself to the Aspen Comedy Festival once, and I saw him, and I said, "Mr. Lear, I'm sorry to bother you." He went, "You already have." - Oh, screw it. I'm really, I didn't see, okay, so there you go. - I got my picture with him. I met-- - You already have. - You already have. - Right. - I also met Robert Altman at that. - Oh, what was that? What was he like? - He was supposed to be a good guy. - He was a really good guy. This was literally like two months before he died. He was waiting for your own companion, so he seemed very frail. But I thanked him for the movies he made because I really enjoyed them. The Long Kids Goodnight is one of my favorite movies of all time, where-- - The Long Goodbye? - Oh, I'm sorry, the Long Goodbye, with Elliot Google. - Yeah, with the cat. - Yeah, amazing. - It's a great, fantastic movie. - Amazing, but yeah, so it was nice to thank him. - Yeah, it's all right, so I started to run out of steam. - That's all right, that's all right. - It's just so awful. - You were so disgusted when 1983, you've stopped on Thursday. - No, Tuesday, I stopped it. Yeah, I stopped on Tuesday, just gave up, and so here's what you watched on television Tuesday evening, and what, 1983? - '83. At 8.30, you would watch the A-Team. - Yeah, I mean, who doesn't like the A-Team? George Propard, who would introduce himself to people, saying, "I'm George Propard, I'm not a nice man." That's what you would say to people. - I really, that's, I never saw it. - You never saw the A-Team? - I know what it is, it seems like, yes, I've seen Mr. T through an hand grenade or something, but I really don't watch out. I wouldn't have wasted my time. - Was Mr. T ever a guest on Letterman? - Yeah, funny guest, actually. - Really, yeah, early on, he was a guest. I think when I, yeah, I don't even think I was there yet, I was a fan of the show. He was real, it's before he had worn out his welcome. - Right, right. - And he was, yeah, very, very funny guest earlier. That was David, when you first started to realize that you'd never seen anyone, you never watched a guy host or show like that, but he was so funny with Mr. T. - Who was your favorite guest that was on the show that you were like, "This is crazy," or-- - There were so many of them, but you know, I think someone like Brother Theodore, who-- - Oh, yes, yeah. (clapping) - Harvey P. Carr, with a few things-- - They would never get on two of those guys. - Yeah, right, exactly. There were so many people like that that used to come on. - Did you ever see The Berbs with Brother Theodore to Joe Dante? - No, I've heard, yeah, he has like kind of a role. - Very good, he's a major character in that movie. - I feel so bad because I had this like sort of rat hole apartment, tiny little studios, my first apartment in New York, but it was across, it was on 13th Street, and it was down the street was this little playhouse that Brother Theodore did his thing, whatever his show was, like every Friday night, and I never went to see it, I liked him, and I thought, "Oh, one of these days I have to get it, "and now I have to see him." And now I feel so, you know, I can't believe that I didn't see that guy. - Like, now you'd be like, "I'll be there every Friday night." Well, you probably just thought it would be there forever, and I think that's-- - Yeah, yeah, right, yeah. - We take those things for granted when we're younger, for sure. - Right, I'm getting sad, no. - It's all right, let's pick it up, what do you gotta-- - Here's where I started, just I gave up, and the pen had plenty of ink in it. There was still plenty of ink left to that. - I see what you've written, and I understand why you gave up. - Joanie loves Chachi, and there's a nine to five, a series based on a shitty movie I've never seen, and then, but, you go ahead, what we're gonna say. - So, first of all, Joanie loves Chachi's a show that's somehow even worse than Happy Days. It might be the worst, very martial show ever, and that's also when they got really ambiguous about the time frame, 'cause they were like, "Hey, it's set in the 50s, nah, not all the time." And so, this has been-- - Oh, really, what do you mean? - They kind of, if you watch Happy Days, the show originally was much more like "America 50," was shot on film, as it shifted, it was now shot on video, and also stopped kind of being set in the 50s, but very weirdly, so they just sort of stopped. - So, what were we gonna, like, Happy Days or something? - No, no, it was just like set contemporary in the 70s, 'cause they just sort of stopped bothering with the 50s, pretend. - That's so interesting, I didn't know that. - Very weird. - Another show, I didn't know that. - And they would have spin-offs that were now just set in contemporary times, and Joanie loves Chachi, was one of them where Scott Beow, who no one likes, was a singer with his girlfriend, Joanie, and they were trying to make it in the world, and a terrible, terrible show. Nine to Five is actually a pretty good movie, I love Dolly Parton, I'll watch her and anything, and Danny Coleman is such a wonderful prick. And that movie, he is such a good asshole, and the TV series had neither of those things. - Right, right, and he was like, "Oh, that made me think of that show I liked of his called Buffalo Bill?" - Buffalo Bill was amazing, so that was one of the first shows that had an incredibly unlikable lead character in the sitcom, and Jeanie Davis was also in that show. - Right, yeah, that's when she was Jeanie Davis. - Yes, before she was Jeanie Davis. - Nobody knows since Jeff Goldwood. - Right, she was just, yeah, she was a kid when she did that show. - Yeah, she was on a lot of shows, she was on Family Ties for a while. - She was funny, she was very funny. - She's from Massachusetts, former Olympic archery champion. - Somehow, oh, right, didn't I read some, recently she was gonna try out for the Olympics or something. - I'd watch that, if she was the Olympics, I'd watch it. - I knew some other actress. - I'd watch in all actress Olympics. We should bring back the Battle of the Network Stars, but just having the archery. - That's a celebrity archery. - Yeah, that's. - I'm surprised that hasn't been made yet either. I can't believe we haven't brought back Circus of the Stars given the current climate of entertainment. - I think that looked interesting to me on Tuesday night, and it was, I don't know if it was PBS or something else, I have no idea what it is. All it said, it was 10 o'clock, children running out of time. (all laughing) Yeah, but I, you know, that piqued my interest. I was like, I think I would've given that a shot. - I don't imagine it's just-- - I think it's probably a-- - A kid in a bed with a countdown clock. - No, I think it's like a bill, I think it's like a Bill Moyer sort of thing, which probably, wait, one of those things that would scare the shit out of me. I was a kid, like, I remember being seen some report about the disease of the kids that have that disease, the old age disease that-- - Oh, yeah, Projeria. - Oh, shit. I was like looking at my-- - Yeah, look at their nipples. - You know, like, I'm mostly afraid that one of those kids was like, showed whether hiding under my bed or something. - No, no, they primordial dwarfs, is that what they're causing, like that? - No, I fear the name of the condition. - Yeah, but they're terrifying. - Every, my dad used to bring home the National Inquirer when I was nothing but gory type of stuff. - Yeah, every week-- - Yeah, then it started again to celebrity stuff, but it was mostly like, and I remember he scared me. The picture and the headline in the front cover was nine-year-old Norma dying of old age, and they showed this little nine-year-old old lady, their natural picture, basically, but she's nine years old, but she's a, and when you're a kid, you know, that'll get to you. - Yeah, do you remember that National Inquirer used to advertise on television every week? They would have TV ads and be like, this week in the National Inquirer, nine-year-old dies a hole in it, like they'd have it on TV. It was a very different time. - So this is where I just stopped on Wednesday in the week of what was this, June, the 24th, 1980. - Yes. - If you see, I could barely even write the words, 8 p.m. real people. - Yes. - I can't do it. - Yeah, I was, I sort of remember that show, but it was, it was all, it wasn't weird people or anything. - No, it was weird people. It was, it was, it was fronted by John Davidson, one of the most unlikable people in the world, who hosted Hollywood Squares for a while and also had a singing career. - Yeah, yeah, he used to be on like, awful. - He would show up on Love Boat a lot in like Fantasy Island along with like Bert Convey. There were similar guys. So he was the host of the show and it was like, people doing stunts, so it'd be like, "This guy's gonna jump over 200 cars." And then like, "Look at this guy, he's got four faces." Like it was just like, it was a mixture of-- - So it was like a sort of Ripley's, believe it or not, thing kind of thing. - It was a mixture of freak pointing and stunts. So it'd be like, "This guy can fit in a small box." And then here's a hill that rolls backwards. - It was just one of these shows, I can't really think of one specifically now where they would cut to a small audience, but I don't even think they were there when they, it was just a cutaways to people laughing or maybe clapping, but I don't think they were watching. What we were watching. - They couldn't have been. - They couldn't have been. - Absolutely couldn't have been. - 'Cause it would be like, there's a small island in the Pacific where men have tits, but not on their bodies. Like it would be some crazy story about cannibals and people would be laughing. And then the next area would be about like a water skiing squirrel. Yeah, John Davidson. And Fred Willard was on that show for a number of years as a correspondent, weirdly, on real people. - Look, people gotta eat, you know. - I also like their intention that it was like, everything else is fake people. This is the real shit. - They're the real people, right? - So you gave up on Wednesday, that's fair enough. I think that 1983 was a pretty dire year for television. - Yeah, I didn't realize that at the time. When I picked out this copy. - That's okay, we'll do every other year. Every night, we're gonna come in real quick. And so finally, the way I end every podcast is that TV Guide is not just informative. It's got opinions. It cheers and it cheers. - Oh, I forgot about cheers. - Yeah, yeah. - So if you could come up with one gear for that week of television, and one cheer, what would they be? I think your cheer is probably gonna be either pretty easy or almost too much the cheer. - Yeah, but let me see if there's one that I could really say that. I mean, look, yeah, how do I get, there's different strokes, different strokes. There's a private Benjamin Archie Bunker's place. I can't, you know, let's just say that it almost all is. I get the cheer would be easy. It would be night flight, and it would be children running out of time. Excellent, so night flight and children running out of time. Adam Resnick, thank you so much for being on TV Guide. (audience applauds) - And then, that was my episode with Adam Resnick. Thanks so much to him for taking the time to speak with me. Also want to thank Rob Kreen for helping put that together. We recorded that at the Middlesex Lounge in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was a lot of fun, and you should get his book, as I said, at Fine Booksellers Everywhere. I don't think B Dalton Booksellers is a bookseller anymore, but if they were, that would be a great place to buy the book. So that was Adam Resnick. Be sure to check in next week, next Wednesday. We have another great guest lined up. Please subscribe on iTunes so you don't miss any episodes. Rate us, review us, help us spread the word if you like the show. And as always, you can email me at ken@icandread.com and I'd be happy to answer any of your questions or I just like hearing what you think of the show. So thanks again, and we'll see you next week on TV guidance concert. (upbeat music) [MUSIC PLAYING] [BLANK_AUDIO]