Fridays (TV series)
Fridays is the name of ABC's weekly late-night live comedy show, which aired on Friday nights from April 11, 1980 to April 23, 1982 with repeats airing until October 22, 1982. The show was originally 60 minutes in its first season, but was expanded to 90 minutes in season two.
The program was ABC's attempt to duplicate the success of NBC's Saturday Night Live (especially since SNL was facing a decline in quality in the early 1980s following the departure of show creator Lorne Michaels and the remnants of his original cast). 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.
Fridays writers
The people who wrote for Fridays are:
Friday Edition
In an attempt to make the show a direct competitor to Saturday Night Live, they put together Friday Edition, as their version of SNL's Weekend Update. It starred Melanie Chartoff as the news anchor and the rest of the cast presenting different news segments, like Update, to get SNL viewers to watch Fridays as an alternative.
Recurring sketches and characters
- "Drugs 'R' Us" (a.k.a The Drugged-Out 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, such as a post-op transsexual (played by Michael Richards) and twin midgets, are hallucinations caused by the drugs he takes. Catchphrases: "I can handle it!" and "Take a pill!" In one episode he was convinced he was stoned on the ingestion of cotton balls.
- "Nat E. Dred, The Rasta Gourmet" - Igus plays a shirtless 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", where Nat E. Dredd plays Santa Claus.
- "Battle Boy" - Richards as a hyperkinetic young boy who stages elaborate war scenarios in his backyard with toy soldiers (usually setting them on fire), mutilates his sister's (Melanie Chartoff) dolls, tortures his best friend (played by Mark Blankfield), and gets yelled at by his lazy mother (Maryedith Burrell).
- "Dick" - Richards as an overzealous ladies' man who makes a fool of himself while trying to impress women.
- "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...", or other band; what followed was invariably Mariachi music.
- "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. This was first seen on a sketch where a man (Bruce Mahler) visits a plastic surgeon (Larry David) and tells him he wants to look like a celebrity. When Mahler's character is turned into Howdy Doody, he is given the best seats at restaurants, is let into clubs ahead of other people, and gets away with being obnoxious at parties.
- "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 his own personal humiliations and admissions to committing whatever sin he preached against.
- "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!" (Coincidentally, SNL would come up with a similar recurring sketch in its twelfth season with Dana Carvey and Kevin Nealon as musclemen Hans and Franz).
- "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 Mark Blankfield 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."
Sketches
- "Diner of the Living Dead"[1] - In this parody of zombie films, particularly the "Living Dead" movies by George A. Romero, a married couple (played by John Roarke and Maryedith Burrell) visits a diner run by and catering to zombies. There is an assortment of macabre dishes based on human body parts advertised on the walls (such as "Fried Ear," "Buttered Fingers," "Belly Burger," and "Toe Stew") and zombie restaurantgoers are seen eating human flesh while zombie diner employees use a chainsaw to slaughter a living human (played by Mark Blankfield) who screams for help in the diner's kitchen. Because of the skit's depiction of extreme violence, and gore, an apology was made on the following week's show by Brandis Kemp (who played a zombie waitress in the skit). The skit 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" skit removed.
- "Women Who Spit": Touted as the grossest sketch done on the show, the female cast members (Chartoff, Kemp, and Burrell) play proper ladies who can't stop spitting. This sketch, much like "Diner of the Dead," led a handful of ABC affiliates to ban the show from airing.
- "The Ronny Horror Show" - 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 gay black militant (played by Darrow Igus) who kills Reagan and leads the people in a revolution. Much like the "Diner of the Living Dead" sketch, the "Ronny Horror Picture Show" sketch was cut in reruns, only the reason behind the removal was copyright issues, not objectionable content.
- A rather dramatic sketch where Michael Richards plays a son who comes home to an old man in a wheelchair and the man denies that he's the father of the son. Thinking the old man hates him due to a generation gap (and the fact that the son has been away for a long time and had become a punk rocker), the son yells at his dad to accept him and love him, but when he compares his hair color to the old man's, he realizes that the old man really is not his father and leaves.
- 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 was rebroadcast, the shot of Brandis Kemp on the ground with her thong exposed was edited out.
- "Zilla, Horrible Monster Of The Depths", 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.
- "Orgasmic Muffins", a clan of cave people bake muffins that are so tasty, they give everyone orgasms.
- On the episode featuring guest star Susan Sarandon, there was a sketch featuring bordello workers who are college-educated and the johns who come to them for "stimulatin' dialogue." Sarandon flubbed one of her lines when she said her last customer "blew his monologue all over her after two minutes," by saying that her last customer "blew his wad all over her after two minutes." In reruns, "wad" was muted out.
Musical guests
Acts which appeared on Fridays include:
Guest stars
The guest stars (some of whom hosted Saturday Night Live either before or after their Fridays appearance) include:
^ – also hosted Saturday Night Live
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 (saying "I can't play stoned"). Michael 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 Kaufman and meant as a prank. Kaufman concocted the event with Bob Zmuda. The only staff members aware of the plan were Richards, Melanie Chartoff, producer John Moffitt and producer/announcer Jack Burns.[2] This incident was reenacted in the 1999 film Man on the Moon, starring Jim Carrey as Andy Kaufman, Bob Zmuda as Jack Burns, Norm Macdonald as Michael Richards and Caroline Rhea as Melanie Chartoff.
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. Although by the end of its first season in 1981, Fridays was outperforming Saturday Night Live in the ratings, the later time slot hurt the show during its second season (which was also made worse by the fact that Saturday Night Live had rebounded—albeit slightly—thanks to a cast and crew overhaul). 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 did nothing to help the show's moribund ratings. The series was promptly canceled.
Differences between Fridays and SNL
The humor of the show differed from Saturday Night Live in several ways:
- Fridays was more well-known for its drug humor (often depicting simulated drug usage/abuse as its basis for laughs, as seen in Mark Blankfield's "The Crazy Pharmacist" sketches, in the "Nat E. Dred, the Rasta Gourmet" sketches, and in a one-shot sketch in the first episode where a puppet snorts a line of cocaine while performing) than its sex humor (which Fridays also had, but its sex humor was not as strong as Saturday Night Live's);
- Friday's political humor made fun of Republicans and conservatives at the time rather than make fun of both Democrats and Republicans. The political humor also focused more on American politicians rather than American politicians and world leaders.
- Some of Fridays' sketches featured more real-life (and sometimes unscripted) violence; in one sketch, Melanie Chartoff chipped a tooth after a fake punch to the face connected with her mouth. In another sketch, Brandis Kemp was thrown to the floor while wearing a skirt and had her thong underwear exposed (the episode that featured this blooper was later edited to remove the shot of Kemp on the ground with her thong exposed).
- Sometimes, Fridays would throw in a sketch that was played for drama rather than laughs.
Though it was critically panned when it premiered (around the time that SNL was finishing its fifth season), the show soon became more popular than SNL after the NBC show launched its disastrous sixth season in November 1980. Fridays actually began to lure away even SNL's most die-hard fans, as it improved comedically week after week as compared to the struggling Saturday Night Live '80.
Fridays did not have a guest host during its entire first season, though it did feature musical acts (very much like the FOX sketch show MADtv in its first three seasons) and celebrity cameos. During the second season the show began featuring guest hosts (the first was George Carlin, who had also hosted the first episode of SNL in 1975), but instead of guest hosts (as SNL style), they were credited as "guest stars" (much like MADtv [which, like Fridays, was a West Coast-based sketch show that aired as a rival to Saturday Night Live] would do years later). Brooke Shields (a celebrity SNL has tried to book as a host, but failed) was the youngest person to host Fridays in 1981, at the age of 16.
The selections of musical guests were more experimental and daring, as the show featured many punk rock 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.
DVD release and revival possibilities
No DVDs have been released yet from the series, reportedly because Richards is the only cast member who has 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 and Larry David on Fridays appear on the Seinfeld Season 3 and 5 DVD's.
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.
A reunion of the cast and crew took place in October, 2011.
References
External links