Nick at Nite
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| Nick at Nite | |
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| Launched | July 1, 1985 |
| Slogan | It's not just Nite, it's Nick at Nite! |
| Replaced | ARTS |
| Sister channel(s) | Nickelodeon, TV Land, Noggin, The N, Nicktoons Network, Nick Too |
| Timeshift service | Nick Too |
Contents |
[edit] History
Nick at Nite debuted at 8 p.m. on July 1, 1985, replacing what was originally the ARTS channel (now A&E), which had leased the time from Nickelodeon. MTV Networks Bob Pittman president had asked Nickelodeon General Manager Gerry Laybourne to develop programming to fill the now vacant, and expensive (satellite time was then a premium priced commodity), time slot. After futile attempts at original program development, she asked programming and branding consultants Alan Goodman and Fred Seibert of Fred/Alan Inc. (successful as the original MTV branders, and Nickelodeon's explosive rebranding). After being presented with the given of over 200 episodes of "The Donna Reed Show" (which Laybourne despised) Goodman and Seibert dusted off an idea of theirs and conceived the idea of the "first oldies TV network." Modeled on the successful oldies radio format, "The Greatest Hits of All Time," and branded with the next evolution of the innovative brand packaging they had developed at MTV and Nickelodeon. Head programmer Debby Beece led the team to the name "Nick-at-Nite", and Fred/Alan developed the original logo with Tom Corey and Scott Nash of Corey McPherson Nash, Boston, creators of the famous Nickelodeon orange logo.
Its initial programming (running from 8 p.m. - 6 a.m., seven days a week) was a block of classic sitcoms such as The Donna Reed Show and Dennis the Menace, and the classic drama Route 66. As Nick at Nite grew, it would add to its library of shows branching out to rerun sketch comedy, such as original Saturday Night Live episodes as well as the Canadian series SCTV. It also briefly reran the 1970s mock local talk show Fernwood 2Night. As the years went by, the channel's sitcom library swelled to over a hundred shows. For the station's 20th birthday celebration, an episode from almost every series that had appeared on Nick at Nite was shown.
[edit] 10th Anniversary
In 1995, Nick at Nite celebrated its 10th Anniversary with a week long event. Throughout the week, the channel aired "hand picked episodes" of almost every series aired on the network. Each episode was introduced with its history, episode number, and how long it ran on Nick at Nite. The 10th Anniversary on-screen bug was shown at the bottom left corner of the screen for 10 seconds once per half hour show, it was used for the entire year of 1995 as was the 20th Anniversary logo in 2005.
[edit] Today
The channel's current lineup mostly consists of 1990s and 2000s hits, including The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, The George Lopez Show and Home Improvement. Roseanne, The Cosby Show, and Full House air in the marathon rotator every night. Other shows that are scheduled to air on Nick at Nite but are rarely seen include, Mad About You, Designing Women, America's Funniest Home Videos, Murphy Brown, and News Radio.
In 2004, Fatherhood, an animated series based on the book by Bill Cosby, was also added to the line up, but then pulled from the line up upon its cancellation. In April 2005, Nick at Nite premiered a reality series, The Search For The Funniest Mom In America, in which mothers from across the country competed to win $50,000 and a chance to develop a show for Nick at Nite. The winner of the competition was Darlene Westgor. In August 2005, another original series, Hi-Jinks premiered, where parents pull pranks on their children. A recent second installment of "Funniest Mom in America", hosted by Katey Sagal aired, beginning April 12, 2006. Nick at Nite also began broadcasting a new mini-sitcom entitled At The Poocharelli's, in mid 2006. In June 2007, Nick at Nite began airing a game show called Bet the House.
Nick at Nite has also spun off a niche network, TV Land, which features a variety of rerun programming. The networks were operated together until December 17, 2006, when Nickelodeon began overseeing Nick at Nite, and "Nick at Nite's TV Land" became "TV Land". On February 13, 2006, the Latin American version of Nickelodeon started broadcasting Nick at Nite for the first time. Since January 2007, the network has aired shows like ALF, Mork & Mindy, The Addams Family, The Munsters, Bewitched, I Dream of Jeannie, Growing Pains, The Facts of Life, Diff'rent Strokes and Perfect Strangers, which have been broadcast in Latin American local networks and other cable channels. Although the Latin American Nickelodeon was born in the mid-1990s, it had never carried the Nick at Nite block before.[1]
In 2007, the Nick at Nite logo changed the color from blue to orange thus creating a match with Nickelodeon's colors. On September 1st, 2007, a new logo similar to the current Nickelodeon logo but in the shape of a crescent moon, was introduced.
[edit] Programming
[edit] Original Programming
Nick at Nite has also occasionally experimented with creating its own shows, sometimes with bizarre and surrealistic results. In 1988, the channel had a contest called the Do It Yourself Sitcom Special, where viewers could create their own sitcoms and send them in and the winner would supposedly get their own show.
In 1988, the channel aired a 30-minute animated Christmas special, the pilot for what was to be an animated series entitled Tattertown, created by Ralph Bakshi. The series never emerged, but the special, later renamed Christmas in Tattertown, was aired every Christmas on Nick at Nite for several years.
In 1990, the channel briefly aired a show called On the Television,[2] a mock TV critic show hosted by Siskel and Ebert-type characters and featured bizarre, sometimes disturbing clips from parodied TV shows supposedly beginning that week.
In the early 1990s, a special made up of old TV commercials was aired only once, but the idea of showing old commercials would be rehashed by the network on several other shows and eventually become a staple of offshoot channel, TV Land. There was one special that was promoted as a TV dad quiz. The host walked through a "typical TV Home", and quizzed the viewers at home with trivia about classic TV dad clichés. At one point, the host told the viewers to connect pictures of TV dads with their appropriate TV moms displayed on the screen with a magic marker. At the end of this segment he mentions that he forgot to tell the viewers to place a piece of plastic over their screen while doing this and made jokes about the viewers futilely trying to clean the magic marker off their screens for the rest of the show.
In 1991, Nick at Nite created its own sitcom based around the rerun genre it had pioneered. The sitcom, named Hi Honey, I'm Home! after the cliché phrase used by TV dads addressing their TV wives when returning home in the evenings from work, was about a 1950s sitcom family, the Nielsens. The family's show has been removed from syndication and they are forced to leave TV Land and move into a real 1990s suburban neighborhood. Once there, the family is repeatedly confronted with culture shock. The show aired on ABC on Fridays during the network's TGIF lineup, and then would "rerun" on Nick at Nite the following Sunday nights.
In 2008, the channel announced that it was making a remake of the 1990's game show Nickelodeon GUTS for families, as well as hosting a dog competition show: [1]
[edit] Marathons
Programming marathons were an innovation that began with Nick at Nite in 1985. Working together in college radio at WKCR-FM (Columbia University, New York) Fred/Alan's Alan Goodman & Fred Seibert saw the ratings success of radio marathons featuring Ludwig van Beethoven, John Coltrane, and Charles Mingus. As the Nick at Nite "oldies" format was adapted from radio, they suggested the multi-hour (sometimes multi-day) marathon might also work with television programming. The marathon format proved successful and marathons became a ratings boosting staple of cable television networks for over two decades.
During the week of Halloween 1990, the network held a special contest, hosted by game show host Wink Martindale, in which a marathon of the show Alfred Hitchcock Presents was shown. The at home viewers were supposed to keep a running total of the total number of deaths on the show. At the end of the marathon the persons who had gotten the total number right were entered into a drawing to win a prize. As Martindale said "It's kind of like guessing the number of jellybeans in a jellybean jar, but instead of jellybeans, you're using cadavers!"[citation needed]
When new shows are added to the line-up, they are usually accompanied by some kind of marathon complete with logo and sometimes hosted by a star from the show. For instance, when Newhart was added, the channel also acquired Bob Newhart's short-lived third sitcom Bob, and showed a programming block entitled "Bob's Bob, Bob Newhart, Newhart Marathon" and showed the two shows and The Bob Newhart Show which it already had the rights to, in a programing block hosted by Bob Newhart. When I Love Lucy joined Nick-at-Nite in 1994, "Nick-at-Nite Loves Lucy" marathon aired all week which showed every Lucille Ball series (I Love Lucy, The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour, The Lucy Show, Here's Lucy, and Life With Lucy). When some older shows were retired they would also frequently have a marathon send-off. For instance, when a long rerunning show on the channel Mister Ed (from the channel's inception in 1985 to 1993) was finally retired, there was an all-weekend marathon of the show called "Au Revoir Mister Ed!" as well as a similar send-off for The Donna Reed Show, which ran on the channel even longer (1985-1994).
During the summer months of the late 1990s the station for a while created a programing block called "Vertivision" (later, "Block Party Summer") during which a different series was shown in a three-hour block each night of the week. In the first year, commercials referred to the nights as "Mary Mondays, Lucy Tuesdays, Bewitched Be-Wednesdays, Jeannie Thursdays, and Sgt. Joe Fridays" (for The Mary Tyler Moore Show, I Love Lucy, Bewitched, I Dream of Jeannie, and Dragnet, respectively). With the passing years, the summer blocks shifted to include series newly in the Nick at Nite repertoire.
Other seasonal scheduling blocks were also not uncommon such as Christmas-themed blocks during late December, Thanksgiving-themed blocks in November, and Valentine's themed episodes in February. From 1989 until 1998 on New Year's Eve, the channel would host "Nick at Nite's (year) Rerun/Classic TV/TV Hits Countdown" hosted by longtime countdown radio DJ, Casey Kasem. Kasem would spend noon until 12:30 a.m. on New Year's Eve Day counting down the 25 "most classic" episodes of the TV shows currently airing on Nick at Nite determined by viewers at home, revealing the #1 episode at midnight.
Another famous scheduling block was the "Lucy: Queen of Comedy" block which ran on Saturday nights from June 4th, 1994 to May 3rd, 1996. The line-up consisted of I Love Lucy , The Lucy Show, and The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour, which were all airing on the network at that time.
In the mid-1990's, another programming block entitled "Very, Very Nick at Nite" which centered around a theme each Friday night.
[edit] Commercials
Nick at Nite has used a myriad of unusual and unorthodox commercials, logos and, promotions. Alan Goodman & Fred Seibert assembled a team of highly imaginative writer/producers, modeled on their original 1981 creative team that had launched sister channel MTV: Music Television. Including Scott Webb, Jim Levi, Dave Potorti, Jay Newell, Will McRobb, and Tom Hill, the group was guided towards created a series of internal campaigns to emphasize the seeming paradox of a contemporary network setting that programmed reruns from the 1960s. A series of five "promises" were organized into four 30 second spots each hour, each emphasizing an attribute of the innovative programming format.
In the late 1980s, the channel began running a few different animated 10 minute channel identifications with a similar premise that all had vastly different endings, produced by Eli Noyes & Kit Laybourne, and the Fred/Alan agency. One of them was of a couple who would bring objects for a living room onto the screen including a couch and a television then sit down in front of the TV. The male would click the remote and something bizarre would happen, such as a gorilla appearing. Before the commercial was over the Nick at Nite logo would appear somehow tied to the premise of the commercial.
During the early 1990s, Nick at Nite started running a wide variety of commercials. These were made with almost every imaginable technique from limited animation, to claymation and stop motion, to original live action and stock footage. Almost every commercial had a different jingle professing Nick at Nite as being "A TV Viewers Dream" for "the TV generation" and as coming from a place called TV Land ("Hello Out there, from TV Land!"), and promoting "Better Living Through Television" and proclaimed itself curator of "Our Television Heritage", although these claims were always somewhat tongue in cheek. They would also create sarcastic commercials for shows on their network: an announcer's voice would discuss the series, accompanied by clips and music, sometimes the show's theme song. The commercials would use an actor's line or expression and take it out of context to create a new subversive meaning. The channel still uses this technique today, although often in a more hybrid way. A popular take-off of the Michelob Light commercial; "The Night belongs to Nick" ran for a short period of time before being taken off because of copyright woes.
The early '90s also saw the addition of Nick at Nite's mascot, Trixie the TV Land Pixie. For a time, the network would also play a short bumper called "Milkman", about a milkman who would distribute wholesome advice to customers on his milk delivery route. In 1995, on the occasion of the network's 10th anniversary, a tribute to the commercials throughout the network's existence was aired and hosted by former network President Rich Cronin.
The channel also had a unique way of telling viewers what shows were about to play next. Beginning as only an announcer reading off that evening's block of shows and the times they would be on while the list was displayed and music was played, this simple concept would be revised and re-revised many times over. At one point a television with objects and people from the show scrolling by (for instance, for Get Smart a shoe phone, gun, and Max and 99) would appear on the screen while the announcer read off the show and time. The time that the show was on would be displayed in another box. This continues to be changed and updated.
The station also had a wide variety of "bugs" or logos displayed in the corner of the screen during a show.
[edit] International
[edit] Australia
In Australia, Nick at Nite aired from October 1995 until early 2001. It shared the same channel as Nickelodeon broadcasting from 8 p.m. until 6 a.m. on weeknights and 10 p.m. until 6 a.m. Shows included Gilligan's Island, Get Smart, Sanford and Son, The Courtship of Eddie's Father, The Fugitive, Bonanza, The Prisoner, The Saint, Thunderbirds, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Flying Nun, and The Bob Newhart Show.[3]
[edit] UK
Nick at Nite was one of the planned, and advertised, stations as part of Sky's new Multichannels package, but was never launched.[4][5][6]
[edit] Germany
In Germany, Nick Nach Acht (Nick After Eight) airs on Nickelodeon Germany after 8:15 p.m. CET. It airs documentaries, drama series, movies and sitcoms. It uses an adapted logo of its American counterpart. [7]
[edit] Mexico
In Mexico, Nick At Nite airs at 10:00,closing with a Nickelodeon robot commercial,Then going to the official Nick-At-Nite Intro.The first program on Nick At Nite is Kenan & Kel.Other shows being shown on the network are The Addams Family,Fresh Prince Of Bel-Air, ...
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- ^ Mundonick.com
- ^ "On the Television" (1990)
- ^ Nick AU
- ^ [www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-44481183.html Nick at Nite For UK Now in Doubt]
- ^ Sat trio in U.K. debut - Entertainment News, International News, Media - Variety
- ^ ftp.funet.fi/pub/dx/text/sfnet.harrastus.dx-kuuntelu/1700-1799/1724
- ^ NICK Programm
[edit] External links
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