Hello, Larry
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Hello, Larry was a sitcom which aired on NBC from January 26, 1978 to April 30, 1980.
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[edit] First season
Larry Alder (played by McLean Stevenson), was a radio talk show host who left Los Angeles after being divorced and moved to Portland, Oregon with his two teenaged daughters, Diane, played in the first season by Donna Wilkes and in the second season by Krista Errickson; and Ruthie, played by Kim Richards. In the first season, episodes centered on Larry at the radio station and his smart remarks to callers. The supporting cast consisted of producer Morgan (Joanna Gleason) and morbidly obese engineer Earl (George Memmoli).
[edit] Second season
In an effort to make the character (and series) more likeable, in the second season, the episodes were based almost entirely around the home life of Larry and the girls, with Morgan and Earl being seen less frequently. In the second season, various supporting characters were added in the apartment building where Larry and the girls lived, in an effort to save the series. These included a black neighbor, Leona, played by Ruth Brown, who usually did not approve of Larry's parenting; Tommy, a purportedly world-wise teenage boy played by John Femia, who became a love interest of Ruthie; former Harlem Globetrotters player Meadowlark Lemon as himself; and Larry's father, played by Fred Stuthman, who moved in with the younger Alders. None of these people, nor a two-part episode in which Larry's ex-wife Marian (played by Shelley Fabares) tried to reconcile with him, were enough to save the show and it was cancelled in the spring of 1980.
[edit] Diff'rent Strokes connection
Hello, Larry is sometimes referred to as a spin-off of Diff'rent Strokes. In actuality, it was conceived as a show in its own right. After struggling to gather ratings, NBC rescheduled it to appear immediately following Diff'rent Strokes, and wrote in that Larry and Phillip Drummond were old army friends (with Drummond's company becoming the new owners of Larry's radio station), thereby allowing a number of crossover episodes on both programs, in the hope of raising Hello, Larry's popularity.
[edit] Failure and legacy
Hello, Larry had the misfortune of appearing on NBC at a time when that network was at its nadir in the ratings. The show was greeted by viewers who had high expectations based on Stevenson's M*A*S*H association, but quickly gained an extremely bad reputation as a weakly written, unfunny sitcom. It was thereafter used as a frequent punchline whenever a reference to a bad decision by an actor to leave a successful TV show was needed, though some viewers of the show argue it wasn't as bad as its lasting reputation suggests.[citation needed] Johnny Carson frequently ridiculed the show in his The Tonight Show monologues. The Larry Sanders Show pilot makes reference that people who work in television don't like to hear the words "hello, Larry."
[edit] Reference in Popular Culture
The theme song for Hello, Larry is currently used as the intro to a weekly interview segment with USA Today sports writer Larry Weisman during the NFL season on The First Team on Fox on Fox Sports Radio.
In Mystery Science Theater 3000, Crow remarks as a man whistles a tuneless song, "He's whistling the Hello, Larry theme song!"
In the episode of Murphy Brown entitled "It's How You Play the Game," Candice Bergen makes reference to "Stick[ing] it in the file with Hello, Larry and Pam Ewing's Dream."
[edit] Production
The series, created by Dick Bensfield and Perry Grant (veteran writers with a resumé going back to The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet and The Andy Griffith Show), consisted of 35 episodes. Bensfield and Grant had also worked on One Day at a Time, a CBS sitcom about a single woman raising two teenaged daughters alone, and many critics noted the similarity of the two series. The show was produced by Woody Kling and directed by Doug Rogers.
