Looking ahead to the weekend, and back to what may be the season's most obscure in-joke TV Extra: Between Jay Leno leaving The Tonight Show, Pushing Daisies returning to ABC and Alan Alda making a M*A*S*H joke on 30 Rock, there's a lot to cover.
So let's get right to it...
Tomorrow night's best bet, in terms of TV history, is Jay Leno's farewell performance on The Tonight Show. Even if you haven't watched the show in years, it's a part of a TV continuum that deserves to be witnessed, and saluted. Leno has been at the Tonight Show helm for 17 years --nine years longer than original hosts Steve Allen and Jack Paar combined. (Johnny Carson logged an astounding 30.)
Conan O'Brien, who will take over the show Monday, will be on hand Friday as Leno's special guest. So this is just an advance-planning notice: Tune in NBC tomorrow night at 11:35 p.m. ET. A Tonight Show host is abdicating his crown -- a TV even occurring for only the fourth time in 55 years.
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The writers' strike crippled Pushing Daisies by slowing its momentum, and ABC killed it from there. The program, the best new series on TV two seasons ago, will not be back in the fall.
But the final three episodes produced -- programs ABC never bothered to televised -- finally will be shown, beginning this Saturday night at 10 ET. If you've forgotten just how delightful Pushing Daisies is (was?), tuning in for these last three shows will remind you anew.
Could ABC bury these last few gems any deeper than by showing them on Saturday night, in the summer? Yes. In fact, ABC could, and is. It's preceding Daisies with same-week reruns of Wipeout and Here Come the Newlyweds, two competition reality shows with the combined IQ of a dead mole.
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Finally, because I promised to write about this if no readers spotted it, here's my favorite Extra of the 2008-09 TV season.
It happened during the finale of NBC's 30 Rock, when Alan Alda, playing Jack's long-lost biological father Milton Green, wanders into the TV studio and overhears a heated conversation between Kenneth the page (Jack McBrayer) and loose-cannon show-within-a-show TV star Tracy Jordan (Tracy Morgan).
The conversation is a convoluted one -- something about Kenneth getting to the bottom of Tracy's childhood trauma, and his excuse for dropping out of high school. Tracy's story is that a school drug dealer ordered him to carve up a baby, which he refused to do. The real story, with which Kenneth confronted Tracy, was that the man was a science teacher, not a drug dealer. That it was a frog he was asked to dissect, not a baby to slice. And that Tracy couldn't do it, and fled in embarrassment.
"It's true," Tracy tells Kenneth, sobbing loudly, as Alda's Milton Green walks in. "There WAS no baby! I was CHICKEN!"
Milton, witnessing this emotional outburst, says to them both, "A guy crying about a chicken and a baby? I thought this was a COMEDY show."
And that was it.
Except -- except -- the highest-rated TV entertainment program of all time, the "Goodbye, Farewell and Amen" finale of M*A*S*H, had a similar plot.
Alda's Hawkeye was traumatized by a blocked memory of sharing a bus with some Korean refugees when they passed through some very hostile North Korean territory. As Hawkeye remembered it, one woman refugee strangled a chicken she was cradling in order to keep its noisy clucks from attracting the enemy. When Hawkeye's memory was challenged, he finally remembered the woman was holding her baby, not a chicken -- and the sight of her killing it had traumatized him into a sort of selective amnesia.
A guy crying about a chicken and a baby? Yes indeed -- and that night in 1983, 77 percent of all TV viewers that night tuned in to watch.
In my book, that's a great Extra -- my term for TV's hidden in-jokes. For others, found by me and by you, check the TV WORTH WATCHING Extras + Feedback page HERE. If you've never checked it out before, enjoy -- and add under Feedback, if you like, your own first TV favorites and sex symbols.