Westinghouse Broadcasting
Only two new shows premiered this week in two different decades. One was a very successful, long-running daytime talk show, and the other a moderately successful spin-off of a popular reality series. With holiday programming and reruns taking up space on the airways, this is as good as it gets this week. Do you remember either of these shows?
1951
- No new shows premiered this week in 1951.
1961
December 11 – The Mike Douglas Show
- Cast: Mike Douglas
- Synopsis: Daytime talk show
- Network: Syndication
- Broadcast History: Twenty-one seasons, 4,017 episodes, last broadcast on December 30, 1981
- Trivia: The show began local in Cleveland before being picked up for distribution on stations owned by Westinghouse Broadcasting. Barbra Streisand co-hosted the show in February 1963 to promote her appearance at a local Cleveland nightclub as the newspapers were on strike, but the TV station erased the tapes, as was the practice then, to use them again. Production of the show moved to Westinghouse’s Philadelphia station in August 1965 after NBC attempted to buy the show to keep it on its Cleveland station. The show was broadcast live until April 29, 1966 when Zsa Zsa Gabor called Morey Amsterdam a ‘son of a bitch’ for interrupting her joke. Future episodes were taped a day in advance to allow for the editing of objectionable material, with only a handful of live broadcasts attempted afterwards. Roger Ailes, one of the show’s producers, met Richard Nixon while working on the show in 1967 and was hired as Nixon’s media consultant on his 1968 presidential campaign, launching his political and media career. While the show was consistently one of the most popular shows on daytime, Douglas paid a surprise visit to the set of Match Game to congratulate Gene Rayburn for making the game show the #1 daytime program. Production on the show moved to CBS Television City in Hollywood in 1978. Westinghouse dropped the show in the Fall of 1980, turning over the time slot to John Davidson. The Douglas show continued under a revamped traveling roadshow format, retitled The Mike Douglas Entertainment Hour, but the change did not help the ratings and the show was cancelled in 1981. The show featured the first appearance of two-year-old Tiger Woods, who demonstrated his golf swing for Bob Hope and James Stewart. The show featured different co-hosts every week during its entire run. The show won four Daytime Emmy Awards during its run.
1971
- No new shows premiered this week in 1971.
1981
- No new shows premiered this week in 1981.
1991
- No new shows premiered this week in 1991.
2001
- No new shows premiered this week in 2001.
2011
Original Productions
December 6 – Storage Wars: Texas
- Cast: Walt Cade, Ricky Smith, Bubba Smith, Victor Rjesnjansky, Moe Prigoff, Jerry Simpson and Lesa Lewis (Season 1, recurring Seasons 2-3), Roy Williams (Season 1), Jenny Grumbles (Seasons 2-3), Mary Padian (Seasons 2-3), Kenny Stowe (Season 3), Matt Blevins (Season 3), David Kay (Season 3)
- Recurring Cast: Rudy Castro (Seasons 2-3), Francis Grumbles (Season 2), Blom Padian (Season 3)
- Synopsis: When rent is not paid on a storage locker in Texas, the contents are sold by an auctioneer as a single lot of items.
- Network: A&E
- Broadcast History: Three seasons, 78 episodes, last broadcast on January 7, 2014
- Trivia: Originally titled Storage Wars: Dallas. The original Storage Wars theme song, ‘Money Owns This Town’, plays over the opening titles in a slightly remixed Western-style format.
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