oh my stars!

i absolutely forgot how much i loved fernwood 2night. (and of course mary hartman mary hartman). i'm sure many of you never even heard of these shows much less watched them, but dang, THEY WERE WAY AHEAD OF THEIR TIME AND FUNNY

Fernwood 2Night: The Great Lost American Comedy








.......Fernwood 2Night was a fake talk show starring Martin Mull and Fred Willard. Preceding Alan Partridge and Larry Sanders by quite some years, Fernwood 2Night came on the air in 1977 when I was eleven years old and I thought it was the funniest thing I had ever seen. Where I lived, it was on a station called Channel 53, a low rent UHF channel in Pittsburgh that was like a junkyard of cheaply licensed television. Like a real life version of the fictional cheapo cable channel in SCTV, Channel 53 showed an insane low-budget mix of Marx Brothers, WC Fields, Aussie women in prison soaps, Monty Python, Flash Gordon serials, The Avengers, Hammer horror, Sgt. Bilko, My Favorite Martian, Jack Benny, Tom Baker-era Doctor Who shows, freakazoid televangelist, Dr. Gene Scott, Dave Allen at Large, and Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman five days a week. It was TV Heaven for some, telly Hell for others. Me, I loved it.........