I 40 Paradise

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I 40 Paradise was a 30 minute daily cable TV sitcom on the Nashville Network. It made television history by becoming the first sitcom to produce an entire episode in a single day.^{[citation needed]} Previous to this, it took an entire week to produce a 30 minute sitcom. It was set in a truckstop/restaurant/tavern on Interstate 40 between Knoxville and Nashville in a small town, Crab Orchard, Tennessee. The main characters included "LuAnn Bledsoe", the owner of the Paradise, played by Barbara George; "Sonny Rollins", the goofy, "Goober" style mechanic, played by Bruce Carnahan; "Stogie" the bartender, played by John Ribble; "Georgia", the wannabe-country-music-singer-who-sang-off-key waitress, played by Trish Dougherty; "Buck", the house band leader and resident country music singer, played by Jack Crook; "Randy", Buck's kid brother, a multi-talented singer and musician, played by Lionel Cartwright; and "Melody Dawn Rainey", the girl singer, played by Kelli Warren. Country Music stars would drop in on their way to Nashville and perform a couple of music numbers on each episode. Many Grand Ole Opry Stars performed on this show, including Reba McIntire, Little Jimmy Dickens, Porter Wagoner, Jerry Clower, and many others. The late great Roy Rogers, star of film and television, also appeared in two episodes.

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The show aired from 1982-1986, during the heyday of the Nashville Network, also known as TNN. The Nashville Network was one of the very first cable networks, along with CNN, HBO, Cinemax and the Disney Channel. It catered to country music fans, with a variety of game shows, dance shows, sports shows, talk shows, and of course, music shows. TNN began with an audience of 6 million viewers and quickly grew to over 50 million viewers. I 40 Paradise aired over 400 episodes, and was produced for TNN by Cinetel Productions in Knoxville, Tennessee.

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