Summer Nose-talgia #25: The Incredible Mr. Don Knotts -- July 21, 1924 - Feb. 24, 2006

Don Knotts had the perfect face and body for comedy -- skinny, wide-eyed, expressive hands and voice just made for playing the high-strung characters he became famous for.  From his days honing his comic persona on The Steve Allen Show to his long-time reign as one of TV's funniest characters on The Andy Griffith Show and later on Three's Company, West Virginia-born Don Knotts never missed a comedy beat or failed to infuse his portrayals with humanity.

Especially Barney Fife.  Without Knotts' tremendous skill as an actor, Barney would have been just a nervous wanna-be with delusions of grandeur, a pipsqueak bully with a badge.  It was Knotts who allowed us to see Barney's vulnerabilities, and Andy Griffith who understood that playing straight man to Knotts would be the key to success for his new sitcom.  Sheriff Andy Taylor was Barney Fife's rock, and Fife knew it.  And America's TV viewers knew it, too.

So here's a little Don Knotts for you.  A brilliant comedian, a talented actor, a funny guy.


































As is written on Don Knotts' headstone, "He saw the poignancy in people's pride and pain and turned it into something hilarious and endearing" -- so true.

We fondly salute Don Knotts, born this day in 1924.

Summer Nose-talgia #23: Harriet Nelson, America's Favorite Real-Life TV Mom!

She wasn't a knockabout clown like Lucille Ball or Joan Davis, nor an actress playing a mom in a sitcom (like Barbara Billingsley on Leave it to Beaver), she was the actual mother of her TV children!  We're talking about the talented Harriet Nelson, born on this date in 1909, wife of the equally talented and business savvy Ozzie Nelson and mother of David and Ricky Nelson, her two kids who grew up to be equally talented, all of whom starred on The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet.

Basic facts about the show:  it began on radio, airing from 1944 - 1954; the kids joined in 1949 playing themselves.  The series migrated to TV in 1952 after they made the successful motion picture Here Come the Nelsons, showing the format could work visually.  The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet was on network TV from 1952 - 1966 for a total of 425 episodes and still retains the title of longest-running live action American sitcom.

Though it's still fashionable to mock the so-called "perfect family" construct on sitcoms like this from early TV, honestly, nobody believed that all families were like this or should have been like this.  Life was indeed a little kinder and gentler back then for a few people; maybe some kids' biggest worry was whether or not they'd get a date for the prom or if they'd be jilted at the malt shop, but certainly not everybody's.

So what if Ozzie Nelson in real life was more of a hard-nosed businessman than jaunty hilarious father with no visible means of supporting his family?  Or if Harriet was actually a snazzy jazz band lead singer who had enjoyed an exciting career in show biz and mostly gave it up to become the radio and TV version of herself?  These two talented individuals and their creative partners put their heads together to fashion an amusing version of the idealized family zeitgeist of mid-century America.  Mission accomplished.

As a child of the 1950s and as a fan of TV comedy, I enjoy watching these shows.  Not because they're a refuge from life or because there are no dirty words and everyone's perfect, but because there is something ineffably sweet about their impossible version of the world.  It wasn't my world and it probably wasn't yours, but it was a real place, at least on the TV set.

Here's another fun aspect to those times.  Though companies still use celebrities -- those sometimes-talented motley, addled, selfish, ridiculously rewarded trivial personalities -- to try to sell their wares, back in the day when most celebrities' real personalities were well under cover thanks to round-the-clock publicist oversight, lots of companies wanted that actor endorsement.  So it was with the popular Nelson family from The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet.  Who better to gently suggest to audiences that there were a few things for sale out there that might really make their family's life a little better?

First let's look at a few Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet clips, then a slew of the commercials which were embedded in those shows.  Hotpoint and Kodak certainly got their money's worth out of the Nelsons.































Ozzie Nelson passed away in 1975 at the age of 69, Rick Nelson died in a plane crash at the age of 45 in 1985, Harriet Nelson passed away at the age of 85 in 1994, and David Nelson in 2011 at 75.

Summer Nose-talgia #8: Happy Birthday to Polly Holliday of "Alice" & "Flo"!

One of the brighest lights of mid-1970s TV sitcoms was actress Polly Holliday who is celebrating her 77th birthday today.  The acting veteran from Alabama cut her teeth in regional-- Sarasota, Florida -- and New York theater and movies (All the President's Men) and knew how to take a role and make it hers.   Holliday did just that with her co-starring role on the CBS comedy Alice starring actress/singer Linda Lavin in the title role.

Alice (which debuted Fall of 1976) was adapted from director Martin Scorcese's 1974 feature film Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore; the lone cast holdover was Vic Tayback who played the eponymous owner of Mel's Diner.  Lavin was cast as the widow looking for a new life out West, Beth Howland played the ditzy Vera, and Polly Holliday was Flo, a wise-cracking waitress who knew how to handle any situation.  (In the movie version, Ellen Burstyn won an Academy Awards for her Alice, and Diane Ladd was nominated for her work as Flo).

In fact, Polly Holliday's charisma and Texas-style joie de vivre in the role of Flo was allegedly almost too good, as her catchphrase "Kiss My Grits!" soon became as quotable as Fonzie's "Aaaay!" for TV viewers of the time. Great moment for pop culture, maybe not such a great moment for a woman co-starring on a TV show with another actress who nominally the "star" of the show.

With Flo's character growing in popularity and reported increasing friction between Linda Lavin and Holliday over Flo's ascendance, Flo was spun-off -- or maybe run off -- into a series of her own.  Flo premiered in February of 1980, mid-way through the fourth season of Alice which continued to hold on until its eventual decline and cancellation in 1985 -- an impressive nine-season, 202 episode run.

Flo, on the other hand, only lasted that half-season and one more; it was cancelled in June 1981 after only 29 episodes.  After that though, unfortunately the character of Flo never returned to the original series except for flashbacks in the farewell episode. Aficionados of Alice admit that a lot of the zing went out of the series after Polly Holliday's departure, and that's no doubt the truth.

Flo Castleberry was a character brought to life by a very talented actress, as Polly Holliday frequently had to remind viewers and reporters.  For her work as Flo she won Golden Globes twice out of four nominations, and was nominated four times for Emmy Awards.  Holliday went on to solid supporting roles in movies such as Gremlins, Stir Crazy, and Mrs. Doubtfire and series TV work on Home Improvement, The Golden Girls, and Private Benjamin, among many others.



She also returned to her stage roots to much acclaim including a Tony Award nomination for her role as Big Mama opposite Charles Durning as Big Daddy with Kathleen Turner as Maggie the Cat in the 1990 revival of Tennessee Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.  Well-liked and well-respected among her peers, Polly Holliday also sponsors a yearly award at the Southeastern Theatre Conference which is open to high school students in the region who will be pursuing a Theatre Arts Major.  The tremendously talented and versatile Holliday also continues to pursue her own acting career in stage, screen and TV.

With both of her series recently available on DVD, the masterwork of Polly Holliday in creating a beloved TV character can be appreciated again and again.  Television is the mythology of our culture, and Polly Holliday as Flo is among the pantheon of characters populating its vivid history.



Happy Birthday, Polly Holliday!

P.S.:  An interesting fact is that in the years since Alice and Flo, Holliday demurred to utter her trademark "Kiss My Grits!" when requested by fans, instead asking them to say it to her.

Summer Nose-talgia #5: Happy Birthday to Richard Lewis of "Anything but Love"!

Maybe you don't remember his ABC sitcom Anything but Love but how can you have anything BUT love for the charming and hilarious comedian/actor Richard Lewis who made neurosis sexy as well as funny?  Lewis turns 68 today and he's still utterly relevant and delightful.  Most recently he appeared in many episodes of his childhood pal Larry David's Curb Your Enthusiasm, but there was a time at the end of the 1980s when the only slightly unconventionally handsome Lewis was the hottest of stuff.

He had made his mark with his breathless, non-stop, jam-packed comedy sets, such as this one from 1981:



Or this from maybe about ten years later:
















Anything but Love had a simple rom-com premise:  a pair of colleagues working at a Chicago magazine begin a tentative romance and hope it doesn't ruin their terrific platonic friendship. Lewis' co-star was the talented and personable Jamie Lee Curtis; her Halloween, Prom Night and Terror Train days of starring as the Scream Queen of Teen Slasher Films were a decade or so behind her but she had branched out with well-regarded movies like My Girl and A Fish Called Wanda.  Pairing the hyperkinetic Lewis with the strong and self-confident Curtis was a study in contrasts.  Working from the timeworn assumption that opposites attract, the pairing in Anything but Love was both realistic and great fodder for a sitcom.


Here's a promo for the debut of the show on March 7, 1989:



One of the show's opening credit sequences:



And here's a different one:



Here's another promo for an episode of the show:



An episode with John Ritter!



Anything but Love aired on ABC beginning in March of 1989 and found some measure of success over the next three years, making it to 56 episodes in four different "seasons" but lacked the solid audience support that studio 20th Century Fox was looking for. Evidently they were the ones who pulled the plug on the series, citing the slim odds that the show would last long enough to garner the industry-standard number of episodes for a successful syndication run which was the Holy Grail for episodic TV producers. Anything but Love ended its network run on June 3, 1992.

In several ways Anything but Love was a bit of a thematic precursor to the very successful NBC sitcom Mad About You which came along in the Fall 1992 season.  Slightly neurotic male lead -- played by former stand-up comedian Paul Reiser -- plays a creative guy who marries his best friend -- played by actress Helen Hunt -- and they try to find a way to keep their modern marriage fresh and relevant.  In contract to Anything but Love, Mad About You was able to hang in for seven strong seasons and amass 164 episodes, more than enough for a good second life.

While Anything but Love may not have been everything it promised, it did showcase two talented performers and allowed us to see a slightly tamed-down Richard Lewis, one of America's funniest stand-up comedians ever.

There are lots of photos related to Anything but Love at the Sitcoms Online Photo Galleries, here.

And a very Happy Birthday to the eternally amusing Richard Lewis!