The It Was a Thing on TV Podcast Network

It's the early 1980s and the Brady kids have grown up and are ready to begin adulthood.  Two of the Brady daughters got married, the couples moved in together, and Alice joined them for some reason.  Typical Sherwood Schwartz hilarity ensued...briefly.

Before baseball season began in 1999, during a viewer mail segment, a viewer asked David Letterman how Letterman prepared for opening day.  The response was the first of three appearances of this segment, Ball, Get Out of My Nachos.

NBC might have made a big comeback in the mid-1980s, but there was one huge weakness for them--Friday nights at 9 PM against shows like Benson and Dallas.  Half Nelson was another Friday at 9 victim, succumbing after a month and a half.  But it had a lot of big names!

Next week, Saturday Night Live starts it's 48th season on NBC. In this special minisode we look back at a weird commercial parody making fun of monster truck shows where those boring funny cars turn out in the ad to be sentient beings able to achieve perpetual motion. Sadly those monster trucks are not amused by what these funny cars manage to accomplish.

We revisit school briefly for this episode.  Before Saved by the Bell, some of its characters were in a short-lived Disney Channel show set in a middle school in Indianapolis.  Good Morning, Miss Bliss was a precursor to the popular series from the 80s and 90s.  One thing remained the same:  Zack Morris is trash.

We wrap up our annual Back to School week by turning the tables, focusing not on a TV show about the students, but rather the educators themselves.  Teachers Only had a short first season, but underwent a major overhaul of the cast (and even a new theme) for a slightly longer second season.

It's back to school week!  We start this week talking about why some movies should not make the transition to TV shows.  Ferris Bueller had very little in common with the movie, and the title character makes that known in the first 2 minutes of the pilot.  But it did have Jennifer Aniston.

In 1997, CBS took the bold steps of putting together a 2-hour comedy block on Friday nights versus ABC's TGIF, and even took two of TGIF's stalwarts in the process.  The two former TGIF shows were on its last legs.  We're here to talk about the two original shows to the Block Party--Meego and The Gregory Hines Show.

UPN tried throwing almost anything on their schedule in the late 90s.  Shasta McNasty is no exception.  It was so bad that the title was cut in half to just Shasta during the show's run.  Even cross-promotions with WWF Smackdown couldn't lure viewers. This was basically the most 1999 TV show that ever 1999'd.

In episode 61, we talked about the season when NBC owned and operated stations had primetime starting at 7:30.  We talked about one of those 5 shows, We Got it Made, in episode 66.  Another show from that experiment is this show's focus.  Marblehead Manor follows the antics of a wealthy family and their staff at their palatial residence.