Shower of Stars

[shimp scrampi]

I hadn't realized how many of these Jack appeared on. IMDB credits him with 13 shows. It fleshes out my understanding of Jack's sometimes contradictory and perplexing 1950s TV career to me. It always seemed a little strange to me that Jack kept up the "every-other-week" schedule for so long, even after the radio show had ended.

But it seems to me between SHOWER OF STARS and lots of guest appearances elsewhere, the TV viewing audience had no shortage of Jack during those off-weeks.

I've only seen a couple, but Jack is very prominent in them as emcee, they're essentially hour-long skit-based Jack Benny Shows with a heavy variety emphasis. So far the one that still boggles my mind is seeing Jack with Vincent Price, Jayne Mansfield, Liberace and Rod McKuen!

Compare Jack's list of guest shots in the fifties to say, Lucy or George Burns, who were heavily focused on a weekly program. They're pretty sporadic, whereas Jack was everywhere!

I wonder if Jack saw himself in the fifties as deliberately diversifying from the radio format that had served him in the past, but had pretty much dissipated by the time the final move to TV was apparent. He seems to be almost shopping around for a new format as "Jack Benny the celebrity" moreso than trying to streamline or update his own show.

Then as filmed TV shows began to replace live as the production norm, he finally went back to a stronger weekly investment in his own program. Curious.

[Yhtapmys]

It always seemed a little strange to me that Jack kept up the "every-other-week" schedule for so long, even after the radio show had ended.

Did other stars (Hope, for example) still do the same thing in 1955, or had they gone to weekly by then?

Yhtapmys

[shimp scrampi]

Did Bob Hope even have a regular show? At least one that lasted very long?

It's interesting, do you compare Jack to the variety shows or the sitcoms? But, certainly Burns and Allen, Milton Berle, I Love Lucy, were all weekly by then. Other shows like Colgate Comedy Hour or, Shower of Stars, would be on weekly but have rotating hosts.

[Jhammes]

The closest Bob Hope came to doing a weekly show was "Bob Hope Presents the Chrysler Theater", from 1963-1967. This show followed the then popular anthology formula, lots of stories and lots of guest stars.

Occasionally, Bob would participate in an episode: for the most part, he limited himself to the brief open and close of each show, providing the usual commentary and bon mots.

[shimp scrampi]

Minor correction to my above post, SHOWER OF STARS was a once-per-month program, swapping out with CLIMAX MYSTERY THEATER, not weekly.

[Maxwell]

I can only think of two comedians (other than the rotating stars on the Colgate Comedy Hour) who had less than a weekly format through the '50s, Jack and Bob Hope. Other than "Bob Hope Presents the Chrysler Theater" which debuted in the late '60s, Hope restricted himself to monthly specials during his entire TV career.

Even during the Chrysler theater period (in which he may have appeared in a few episodes as an actor rather than in a variety format), he restricted his variety specials to once a month with "Chrysler Presents a Bob Hope Special" (or words to that effect). As was mentioned earlier, Hope's main role on the show was to act as host with filmed introductions and closings.

I'm pretty certain that Jack was the only major star other than Hope who waited so long before going to a weekly series. I remember thinking even as a kid in elementary school that it was odd that Jack was on alternate weeks (with Private Secretary and later with Bachelor Father).

[scottp]

For what it's worth, the Chrysler anthologies are also listed as "Universal Startime." I remember circa 1980 seeing "Startime" in the TV listings on Sundays, and I vaguely remembering watching it once and saying "look it's so-and-so back before he was famous."

[shimp scrampi]

I guess my question/topic related to SHOWER OF STARS is just this - despite Jack's irregular to every-other-week production of THE JACK BENNY PROGRAM on TV, if you rack up those guest shot credits, he was still appearing on TV almost every week, somewhere.

In an alternate universe, I wonder what it would have been like had he ditched the radio show sooner, not focused so heavily on guesting elsewhere, did a reformat of the Benny show (like Burns and Allen or Lucy did), perhaps with new characters. With 20/20 hindsight, would that have been the better career move for Jack?

[Yhtapmys]

In an alternate universe, I wonder what it would have been like had he ditched the radio show sooner, not focused so heavily on guesting elsewhere, did a reformat of the Benny show (like Burns and Allen or Lucy did), perhaps with new characters. With 20/20 hindsight, would that have been the better career move for Jack?

As his TV career worked out just fine, I don't see why anything different would be needed.

New characters could have been developed, after all Jack continued adding and subtracting minor ones during his radio career.

It's funny you mention Burns and Allen. I prefer their TV show to the radio one. But I prefer Jack on radio far more than television. Burns and Allen's shows relied on Gracie's word-manglings, which work equally well on TV or radio. Burns added a great visual gimmick when he went to TV. On the other hand, Jack's show relied a lot more on images of the Maxwell, the band, the vault, the parrot, the vending machines, and so on, and the mind can create that far better than a camera.

Yhtapmys

[shimp scrampi]

As his TV career worked out just fine, I don't see why anything different would be needed.

The rest of your post gets to what I'm after though.

B&A and Lucy both improved their radio formats on TV. Jack's TV show, while well-liked, is almost universally compared unfavorably to his radio series. It's rare that you'll hear "Oh, I loved his TV show, but the radio show, not so much", even though the TV show is a "minor classic" in its own right.

Jack didn't really reformat, update, or try to replace elements like Phil or Mary, whose absence was noticeable. I just wonder if he had overhauled his approach to the show, and focused more on that task rather than the guesting and simultaneous radio broadcasts, if we might not have ended up with something still in constant reruns today like I LOVE LUCY.

Just idle speculation ...

[Gerry O.]

From the Jack Benny-hosted "Shower of Stars" programs that I've seen on video, they very closely resemble the later NBC color specials that Jack did after his regular half-hour series ended.

As for his half-hour shows, I think that part of the problem was that there was no real format or rhythm to it. Some weeks it would be a "typical" Benny show with Don, Dennis and Rochester and other weeks it would be basically just Jack with guest stars who didn't always fit well into the Benny mold.

Yes, the radio shows alternated between variety-type episodes and sitcom episodes, but the core cast was there every week, providing a solid foundation that listeners could count on. That was sorely missing from the Benny TV series, and it was something that other TV performers like Burns & Allen and Lucy DID have.

[Roman]

Having the superb comedic talent of Phil and Dennis on a regular basis is, I agree, the main reason why the radio program was superior to his television show. To use Lucy as an example, her later shows without Desi, Vivian Vance and William Frawley were not nearly as funny as I Love Lucy. Jack, like Lucy, was funnier when he had great talent supporting him. Jack though, unlike Lucy, still had a number of strong supporting players when he went to television like Rochester, Dennis (sometimes) and Mel Blanc, not to mention Don Wilson. Lucy had the underrated Gail Gordon but not much else to work with.

[shimp scrampi]

I think Dennis worked better on radio as well. Without the visual, the "crazy kid" worked. Seeing Dennis in his mid-forties still as the same naive character doing gags about living with his mother gets a bit creepy. And Don, in contrast to his jovial radio sound, always comes off as quite stiff on camera to me.

I believe it was Gerry O who made the excellent point somewhere that Burns and Allen wisely "matured" their characters as they themselves aged. Jack's character worked fine without aging, but Dennis could've been given different material.

Both Lucy and Jack eventually succumbed to depending on "guest star of the week" syndrome; but I'll argue that Jack's show never reached the numbing lows of Lucy's repeated, and increasingly threadbare trips to the same comedic wells.

I like Jack's fifties, sitcom-style single-camera filmed shows quite a bit, it's probably my favorite format. Mary's on board for a lot of them, and they have strong production values. Again, getting back around to the original point of this thread, it would've been fun to have seen Jack pick a format and hone it to perfection rather than the shotgun approach - although I can also appreciate the "smorgasboard" quality of having so many different kinds of Jack Benny TV shows out there to choose from.

[LLeff]

Jack didn't really reformat, update, or try to replace elements like Phil or Mary, whose absence was noticeable.

Makes you wonder if Jack learned something from the Bob Crosby "replacement" of Phil Harris. If you had...I don't know...Iris Adrian come on and start "doing" a Mary character, would you have embraced her as such? Or what if someone came on doing the more 30s "dizzy dame" version of Mary? After years of getting used to the Jack and Mary chemistry, would it make sense? I think the best you could do is to bring over someone like Gladys Zybysko--which they did in episodes like the one at dinner with Mr. and Mrs. Jimmy Stewart--and try to develop it into something deeper than the relatively shallow Gladys-as-carhop-or-plumber comic relief which provides for a very narrow range of character jokes.

[shimp scrampi]

Yeah, interesting to think about. Though if you watch those early live TV shows, it is clear they are intended to be something "separate" from the radio show which had gone predominantly toward the 'sitcom' format by then. Jack notes that his radio cast will be coming in as occasional guest stars, but it doesn't seem like it was initially intended to continue the radio format, but be more of a variety program.

Then, bit, by bit, radio elements were added back into the TV series, but it was never quite the same, though I think it came close with the fifties shows on film.

My mind was wandering to the "what if" scenario of a much more radical/risky kind of rethink of the Benny show. Maybe have Jack running a hotel, or roaming the country in a van solving mysteries (kidding). Perhaps Roch or Dennis could be incorporated, but as different characters. Eh, who knows if it would've worked. I'm perfectly happy with what we have, but just spitballin'.