Fridays
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Fridays was the name of ABC's weekly late-night live comedy show, which aired on Friday nights from April 11, 1980 to April 23, 1982. The show was originally 70 minutes long before being expanded to 90 minutes.
The program was ABC's attempt to cash in on the success of NBC's Saturday Night Live. Like SNL, each week, Fridays featured music acts and, in the second season, celebrity guest hosts, as well as fake newscasts and spoofs of television shows and commercials.
The cast included Mark Blankfield, Maryedith Burrell, Melanie Chartoff, Larry David, Darrow Igus, Brandis Kemp, Bruce Mahler, Michael Richards and John Roarke. Writer Rich Hall appeared in some segments on the series, and head writer/producer Jack Burns also served as the show's announcer.
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[edit] Differences between Fridays and SNL
The humor of the show differed from Saturday Night Live as much as it included stronger drug humor, stronger sex humor, stronger political satire and sketches that were more dramatic than comedic.
Fridays did not have a guest host during its entire first season, though it did feature musical acts. During the second season the show began featuring guest hosts (the first was George Carlin)
The selections of musical guests were more adventurous, as the show featured many punk and new wave artists. The production values for musical segments were higher, using colored concert style lighting, as opposed to SNL's flat white illumination.
[edit] Recurring sketches and characters
- "Drugs 'R' Us" - "The Crazed Pharmacist"--Blankfield as a strung-out pharmacist who (sometimes accidentally) uses the products in his pharmacy to get high (drinking the liquid contents of a pregnancy test, taking strange pills that he thinks are aspirin, and sniffing glue that he mistakes for nasal decongestant) and thinks his weird customers are hallucinations caused by the drugs he takes. Catchphrases: "I can handle it!" and "Take a pill!"
- "Nat E. Dred" - Igus plays a Rastafarian chef who prepares—and smokes—food items heavily dosed with ganja. Catchphrase: "Is it turmeric? No no NO no, gimme ganja! Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah!". Similar skits included "Rasta-Claus".
- "Battle Boy" - Richards as a hyperkinetic young boy who stages elaborate war scenarios in his backyard with toy soldiers, mutilates his sister's dolls and gets yelled at by his lazy mother.
- "Dick" - Richards as an overzealous would-be ladies' man.
- "Pitkinville, Montana" - Hall narrates footage of a fictional small town of tiny model people, usually at the mercy of household implements such as an electric hair dryer simulating a hurricane.
- "Latin DJ" - Mahler fills time between records by reading radio commercials entirely in mock Spanish. Catchphrase: "La musica, la musica de los Talking Heads..."
- "The Three Stooges" - Mahler, David and Roarke portray Moe, Larry and Curly as drug-addicted troublemakers. Reportedly these sketches were halted when Moe Howard's family threatened to sue.
- "Live and Be Well (also known as Matzoi)" - Bruce Mahler and Larry David as two particularly earnest rabbis co-hosting a TV show. Mahler's "Rabbi Glickman" character on Seinfeld was a reprise of his character.
- "Howdy Doody" - A running gag on Fridays was that Howdy Doody was such a huge star that he could always jump the line ahead of anyone at restaurants and nightclubs.
- "Pastor James Babbit" - Blankfield portrays a pulpit-bound preacher intending a meaningful sermon, but whose twisted perceptions and obvious repressed insecurities would lead to paranoid ranting and the divulgence of personal references of humiliation.
- "Dancing Chickens" - Mahler would play piano accompaniment to a raw chicken stuck on his hand and wearing little black plastic shoes. The sketch always ended with the chicken in a pot of boiling water next to the piano.
- "The Golden Boys" - David and Blankfield would play two egotistical, posturing wrestlers. Their catch phrase was "We're young, we're good looking and we'll be there!"
- "The Brotherhood of Men Who Hum Between Words" - A monastic order with the odd habit of humming between every word. Later skits had brothers who only hummed between every third or fourth word, and at least one who refused to hum at all (he was considered to be Reformed).
- "The Monster" - Sketch typically begins with two young women in a bar or night club talking to a staff member about the establishment's similarity to a setting of a popular film. The staffer tells the two women that the movie's main character was modeled after a regular customer of the bar. When this person arrives, it is Richards as a Quasimodo type character, performing a parody of the dance or actions of the film character. The two disappointed young women say to the staffer "You didn't tell us he was a monster."
[edit] Memorable one-shot sketches
- "Diner of the Living Dead"[1] - A couple (played by John Roarke and Maryedith Burrell) visits a diner run by and catering to zombies. The zombies are seen eating human body parts and killing a living human (played by Mark Blankfield) who screams for help in the diner's kitchen, as it's implied he is being cut up with a chainsaw (all the viewer sees of him is his terrified face and a greenish-black hand pull him away from the door window as chainsaw noises are heard). Because of the sketch's depiction of extreme violence, gore and cannibalism, an apology was made on the following week's show by Melanie Chartoff (who played a zombie waitress in the sketch). The sketch was so offensive that six ABC affiliates stopped airing Fridays. ABC affiliates that didn't pull the show from their schedule (and episodes that aired on the cable channel USA in reruns) merely re-aired the episode with the "Diner of the Living Dead" sketch removed.
- "The Ronny Horror Show"[2] - A sprawling 17-minute send-up of the incoming Reagan Administration based on The Rocky Horror Picture Show. In the sketch, Ronald Reagan (played by John Roarke in Dr. Frank N. Furter drag) plans on creating the ultimate Republican, but inadvertently creates an angry black militant (played by Darrow Igus) instead. To this day many consider this sketch to have been the series' tour de force. Like "Diner of the Living Dead", this sketch was shown when it first came on and subsequently edited out in all reruns. Unlike "Diner of the Living Dead", "The Ronny Horror Show" was edited, not because of content, but because the producer of The Rocky Horror Picture Show protested against the film being parodied without his permission.
- An sketch in which a son (Richards) visits his father (Roarke) who protests that he "doesn't know him" and "has no son". The son, thinking this is alienation and the consequences of the generation gap, begs him to let him in and accept him for who he is until he realizes that he's in the wrong apartment. Richards claimed later that this sketch was edgy enough that it was placed last in the show.
- William Shatner appeared in a sketch where he plays a man who reacts violently to minor pain. The man takes his date (played by Brandis Kemp) out to a dance club and while there, Kemp steps on Shatner's foot and Shatner reacts so violently that he tosses Kemp onto the ground, causing her skirt to fly up and her thong underwear to be shown. When this sketch reran, the brief shot of Brandis Kemp on the ground with her thong exposed was edited out.
- "Zilla, Horrible Monster Of The Deep", in which a reptilian monster stalks out of the ocean, but being only the size of an ordinary man can do little besides trampling over children's sand castles and spilling the contents of women's purses onto the sand.
[edit] Musical guests
Although Saturday Night Live had featured a number of punk rock and New Wave acts in its first few seasons, Fridays took that ball and ran with it. Acts which appeared on Fridays include:
- The Beach Boys
- Pat Benatar
- Gary U.S. Bonds
- The Boomtown Rats
- Jimmy Buffett and the Coral Reefer Band, the cast members danced Stars Fell on Alabama
- The Busboys
- The Cars
- The Clash in their debut American TV performance
- Devo
- The Jam
- Jefferson Starship
- King Crimson
- Kiss
- Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers
- The Plasmatics
- The Pretenders
- Rockpile
- Sir Douglas Quintet - appeared on the show that featured Andy Kaufman
- The Stray Cats in their debut American TV performance
- FEAR
[edit] The Andy Kaufman incident
On the February 20, 1981 episode, Andy Kaufman was the host. During a sketch about couples at dinner sneaking away to the bathroom to smoke marijuana, Kaufman, who was known for causing trouble on live TV, broke character and refused to read his lines. Richards got up from the table, grabbed the cue cards and threw them down on the table in front of Kaufman, who responded by throwing a glass of water on Richards. Some of the show's cast and crew members became angry and a small brawl broke out on stage. Since the show was broadcast live, home viewers were able to see most of these events transpire until the network cut the cameras off. Kaufman returned the following week in a taped apology to home viewers. This incident was planned by Andy and meant as a prank. Kaufman concocted the event with Bob Zmuda. The only staff members aware of the plan were Richards, Melanie Chartoff and producer/announcer Jack Burns.[3] This incident was reenacted in the 1999 film Man On The Moon.
[edit] The end of Fridays
The series ended in 1982 following ABC's decision to expand Nightline to five nights a week, which moved Fridays to air at midnight instead of 11:30. By the end of its first season, Fridays was outperforming Saturday Night Live in the ratings, the later time slot hurt the show during its second season. One final attempt was made by ABC to save the show by putting it on in prime time. The episode (broadcast on April 23, 1982) was scheduled against Dallas, which brought dismal ratings, and it was the last of the series.
[edit] DVD release and revival possibilities
No DVDs have been released yet from the series, reportedly because Richards was the only cast member who had the right to approve any home video releases from the series written into his contract. To date, he has not signed off on a DVD release, though some clips of Richards on Fridays appear on the Seinfeld Season Three DVD.
Episodes of Fridays edited to a sixty minute length appeared in syndication and on the USA Network later in the 1980s, but the series has not been aired since then.
No reunion of the Fridays cast has ever occurred. The closest thing to a reunion to date was the 1998 series finale of Seinfeld in which Richards, Chartoff, Mahler and Burrell all appeared, and which David directed.
[edit] References
- ^ http://www.tvparty.com/vault5/diner.ram
- ^ http://ca.geocities.com/fridaysalways/ronnyhorror.htm
- ^ http://www.tvparty.com/80fridays4.html
