Sitcom Moms & Dads: Liz Lemon's Dad

It's time for another installment of Sitcom Moms & Dads, where we talk about the legendary actors who play the parents of our favorite TV characters.  Today, we discuss Liz Lemon's father on 30 Rock, Dick Lemon, who is played by the legendary Buck Henry.  Never heard of him?  Well you're probably familiar with his work without even knowing it.

Buck Henry is probably most famous for two reasons.  First, he co-wrote the screenplay for the classic 1967 comedy film The Graduate starring Dustin Hoffman and Anne Bancroft.  He also had a cameo in the film as a hotel clerk.  He can be seen around the 1:25 mark.

Buck Henry's other big claim to fame was co-creating the spy comedy TV series Get Smart with Mel Brooks (who wrote and directed the classic comedy films The Producers, Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, and Spaceballs).  The show, which was recently turned into a feature film starring Steve Carell and Anne Bancroft, ran for 5 successful seasons from 1965-1970.  Here is the show's iconic opening theme:

Buck Henry was also a frequent host of the early days of Saturday Night Live.  He has hosted the show 10 times, which is the fourth most of any host (behind only Alec Baldwin's 16, Steve Martin's 15, and John Goodman's 12 hosting gigs).  Here's a sketch from Buck Henry's first hosting gig from season 1 episode 10 of SNL, Samurai Delicatessen.

More recently, Buck Henry has mainly been doing guest appearances on sitcoms.  In the 7th season of Will & Grace, he appeared as the husband of Will's boss, who was very attracted to Grace.  In this clip, he interrupts Will's dinner with his boss, so he can get a paddle for Grace to spank him with.

And lastly, here is Buck Henry as Liz Lemon's father.  He has appeared twice so far, first in the season 2 episode "Ludachristmas", and second in the season 5 episode "Gentleman's Intermission".  In this clip from "Gentleman's Intermission", he stays with Liz for a while as he takes a break from his marriage to Liz's mother, and Jack steps in to help Liz save her parents' marriage.

TV Star Spotlight: Alec Baldwin

Everyone knows that Alec Baldwin is amazing as Jack Donaghy on 30 Rock. He's won 3 Golden Globes and 2 Emmy's for the role. You may even know that Alec Baldwin has appeared in may films over the years, from older films like Beetlejuice and Glengarry Glen Ross to more recent films such as My Best Friend's Girl and It's Complicated. But, did you know that before 30 Rock he guest starred on many popular TV shows? Here's a few of our favorites:

Will & Grace

On Will & Grace, Alec Baldwin appeared as the character of Malcolm. Malcolm hires Will to work for his charity, but Will soon finds out that Malcolm is actually a secret government agent protecting the identity of Karen's dead husband Stanley, who is actually alive. Malcolm appeared in the last few episodes of Season 7 and the first few of Season 8. Here is a clip from the Season 8 live premier episode:

Friends

Alec Baldwin appears in two back-to-back episodes of Friends as Parker, Phoebe's overly positive and very enthusiastic boyfriend. In his first episode, he appears very briefly at the end of the episode, when he first meets Phoebe. But it is in the next episode, The One with Massapequa, where he truly shines. Unfortunately, it is very hard to find a clip from Friends on the internet (unless you want one that is either not in English or very bad quality) so this brief clip of the episode is the best I could find. I encourage you to go out and watch the whole episode, because he's really quite funny throughout the episode.

Saturday Night Live

Alec Baldwin has hosted SNL a total of 14 times, second only to Steve Martin who hosted 15 times (be sure to watch the Academy Awards next Sunday, March 7 when the two of them co-host together). It's hard to pick just one clip from all of Alec's SNL appearances, but I chose "The Tony Bennett Show" because Baldwin's Tony Bennett impression is just amazing. And in this particular clip, the real Tony Bennett pops in and the two Tony Bennetts sing together. Enjoy!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! Since it's Thanksgiving (or at least it was when I started writing this), I thought it was appropriate to give thanks for all the great Thanksgiving episodes of TV! Here's a sample of a few of my favorite Thanksgiving episodes (limited to 1 episode per show, and limited to whatever clips I could find posted online).

Will & Grace: "Queens for a Day"

While the earlier Thanksgiving episodes such as the one where they spend Thanksgiving for 10 minutes with each person's family, or the one where Jack's mom comes to dinner and she doesn't know Jack is gay (they sound like Friends episodes when I describe them) might be more classic, one of my favorite Thanksgiving Will & Grace episode is "Queens for a Day" from Season 7. In this episode, the gang all goes to Queens for the day (as you might have guessed) to spend Thanksgiving with Will's boyfriend Vince's family. Will spends the day trying to impress Vince's mom with the perfect Thanksgiving dinner, while Grace and Karen both hook up with Vince's teenage cousin and Jack discovers that Vince's engaged sister is secretly a lesbian. This is how the big Thanksgiving dinner goes down:

Boy Meets World: "Turkey Day"
Cory is from a middle class family, and his best friend Shawn lives in a trailer park. Shawn decides it would be fun if Cory's family came over to the trailer park for Thanksgiving. But even though their difference in social class was never much of an issue for Cory and Shawn as friends, they'll soon learn that it'll be more difficult than they thought for their parents to get along. Here's what happens:

South Park: "Helen Keller! The Musical"

While most TV shows have Thanksgiving episodes about families coming together at a Thanksgiving dinner, this episode of South Park features the boys putting on a Thanksgiving musical about Helen Keller. The boys all want the show to feature a great turkey in honor of Thanksgiving, but Timmy, the handicapped kid who plays Helen Keller in the show, insists on using Gobbles, a handicapped turkey.

After Timmy realizes that the Broadway turkey trainer tricked him and sent Gobbles away to be slaughtered, Timmy leaves the show to save Gobbles. The play's director, the guy who starred in Les Miz on Broadway, steps in to save the show. It's a Thanksgiving miracle!

Everybody Loves Raymond: "The Bird"

My favorite Thanksgiving episode of Everybody Loves Raymond is called "The Bird", and involves the Barones having Thanksgiving with Amy's family. They're all getting along fine, until a bird flies into the window, and instead of trying to help save the bird, Amy's mother kills it to put it out of its misery, much to the shock of the Barones. A classic Thanksgiving episode ensues. Unfortunately, I can't seem to find a clip of that episode anywhere on the Internet, nor can I find a clip from any of of the other classic Thanksgiving episodes (The one where Debra decides to serve fish instead of turkey, the one where Marie decides to make a tofu turkey instead of a real one, etc.). The only Thanksgiving clip I could find online is the one that follows. Still funny, but not the one I wanted to show. If anyone can find a better Everybody Loves Raymond Thanksgiving clip, please comment here and let us know!

Friends: "The One with all the Thanksgivings"

Friends has kind of been known for their Thanksgiving episodes, as it's a great opportunity to have all 6 characters in one room for one crazy meal. While there has been a great Thanksgiving episode nearly each of the 10 seasons the show was on the air, (including the ones where Underdog escapes, they play football, and Brad Pitt shows up to Thanksgiving and confesses he and Ross had an "I Hate Rachel Club" in high school), my favorite would have to be "The One with all the Thanksgivings". This episode had the friends sitting around and reminiscing about all the worst Thanksgivings that they've had, and is filled with tons of flashbacks to various Thanksgivings throughout their lives. Here are some of my favorite clips from that episode:

Hope you all had a restful Thanksgiving weekend!

TV Star Spotlight: Jim Rash

Our favorite new show of the season is a sitcom called Community. It airs at 8:00, the perfect start to the best 2 hours television (8-10 on Thursdays on NBC). While the show boasts a great ensemble cast of actors (including Joel McHale from The Soup, comedy legend Chevy Chase, and recent break-out star Ken Jeong [the naked Asian guy who jumped out of the car in The Hangover]) there's another actor who I didn't really know on the show, but looked very familiar. His name is Jim Rash, and on Community he plays the hilarious Dean Pelton, who is always trying to gain publicity for the school. Here's a clip of him from the most recent episode of Community (You can stop watching after the first minute and 15 seconds if you want, it's a really long clip. Or if you're enjoying it, keep watching!):

That guy looked very familiar to me, but I didn't know where I had seen him before. So naturally, I turned to the greatest website on the Internet (except for this one of course), www.imdb.com! I looked him up, and he has appeared in two of our favorite shows: Friends and Will & Grace! Even more interesting, in both shows, he appeared as a guy on a plane! In Friends, he was in the series finale as the guy who afraid of the plane's lack of "phalange" and in Will & Grace he played a steward who wouldn't let Grace into first class (until Will flirted with him). Don't believe me? See for yourself!

TV Mysteries: Where Did Grace Go to College?

Today we start a new blog segment called "TV Mysteries" where we will tackle some mysteries within our favorite TV shows. Today's mystery, "Where did Grace from Will & Grace go to college? As we were watching Will & Grace episode "Alive and Schticking" last night, a particular line grabbed our attention. This was the line:



GRACE: Jack, you've had affairs with married men, right?
JACK: I am insulted you would even ask. Of course I have. That's like me asking you if you rely too much on your hair.
GRACE: Guilty. It even got me out of my math requirement at N.Y.U.

Now, this, may seem like a normal exchange of dialogue, but what's interesting about it is that throughout the series, it had been stated that Will and Grace met while attending Columbia University, so therefore, why would Grace have needed a math requirement at NYU? We had a few hypotheses. 1) Grace didn't go to Columbia, Will went to Columbia and Grace went to NYU, she just hung out with Will at Columbia. This was proved false, after we saw episodes where they explicitly said they both went to Columbia, such as in the finale (they met during orientation, there rooms were across from each other) and in the episode where they visit an old college professor (they obviously went to the same school, if they had the same professor) 2) Will and Grace did go to Columbia, as we thought, but then Grace went to grad school at NYU, to get her degree in interior designing. However, we were able to find no evidence of this in any of our research. 3) Debra Messing, the actress who plays Grace, actually went to NYU to get her graduate degree in acting. Perhaps she just said the wrong line. It turns out, we think this is actually correct. That particular episode of Will & Grace, which was the 8th season premier, was a special live episode, that was actually filmed live twice, once for the east coast and once for the west coast. The version that we saw on the DVD (and the version that we saw when it aired live) was the East coast version. However, we found a transcript of the West coast version online, and that line about NYU is apparently not there! In the West coast version, the line is:

GRACE: Jack, you've had affairs with married men, right?
JACK: I am insulted you would even ask. Of course I have. That's like me asking you if you rely too much on your hair.
GRACE: I know, it's good right?

So, it seems that either Debra Messing improvised the line in the East coast and then after it aired live, they told her that Grace didn't go to NYU, so they got rid of the line for the live West coast airing, or perhaps it was actually in the script, but they realized between filmings that it is wrong. Either way, I think we solved the mystery! Grace never went to NYU, she just said the wrong line. Mystery Solved!

Sitcom Moms & Dads: Will's Mom

I actually have been doing a lot of studying since the last blog entry that I posted, but during a short study break I stumbled something so fascinating (at least to me) that I had to post this. On Will & Grace, Will's mother is played by actress Blythe Danner. Blythe Danner, to our generation is perhaps most famous for playing the mother of Ben Stiller's character in the Meet the Parents movies (wife of Robert DeNiro's character) as well as for being the mother of actress Gwyneth Paltrow. I was aware of all of this, however while I was casually perusing her IMDB profile (don't ask me why), I stumbled upon an interesting listing in her filmography. She played the character of Martha Jefferson in the classic film version of the musical 1776. 1776 is one of my favorite musicals, one of the first shows I saw on Broadway, and I always particularly enjoyed the film due to the the fact that the lead character of John Adams was played by William Daniels, who starred on Boy Meets World as Mr. Feeny (in the show, they went to John Adams High School, get it?). Anyway, so I'm very familiar with the film, and I had no idea that Martha Jefferson was played by the same actress who years later played Will's mom and Will & Grace! So now compare for yourself, Blythe Danner as Will's Mom and as Martha Jefferson.

As Will's Mom in Will & Grace.



As Martha Jefferson as she sings about Thomas Jefferson's passion for the violin in 1776.

Sitcom Moms and Dads: Grace's Mom

Debbie Reynolds may be best known to young audiences as Grace's mom "Bobbie Adler" on Will & Grace, but back in the 1950's, she was a huge star. She was most famous for her roles in musical films, such as Singing in the Rain and The Unsinkable Molly Brown, which earned her an Academy Award nomination (she lost to Julie Andrews for Mary Poppins. As Grace's mom in Will & Grace, her character was a musical actress as well, poking fun at her past. Debbie Reynolds also appeared in films such as I Love Melvin, Bundle of Joy, Tammy and the Bachelor, and The Singing Nun before starring in her own show The Debbie Reynolds Show. So here is a collection of Debbie Reynolds clips from some of her film highlights. Enjoy!