Fernwood 2-Night and its successor, America 2-Night, had long been off the air by the time someone sold MCA, then the parent company of Universal, the idea that the talk show parody could work again.
What separated My Talk Show from its forebears were two things. One, the fictional setting was in Wisconsin, instead of Ohio, and you had a woman hosting the show. Derby, Wisconsin resident and talk show fan Jennifer Bass (Cynthia Stevenson) started with a public access cable show produced at her home. Not all of the neighbors were willing participants, nor as supportive as you might think. About halfway through the series' six month run, Bass inexplicably disappeared (Stevenson left the show), and frenemy Angela Davenport (Stephanie Hodge) took over as host. All that did was prolong the inevitable.
Let's take a look at a sample episode with William Shatner:
Despite the lure of name guest stars such as Shatner, and the involvement of SCTV to an extent, My Talk Show was gone by the spring of 1991.
No rating. Didn't see enough of the show to merit a rating.
Would love to see this again. I have a couple of VHS tapes with hours and hours of episodes, but, sadly, the tapes are of potato quality.
ReplyDeleteThere are some clips on YouTube, but as far as a DVD release, I don't know.
ReplyDeleteYou can find the whole series at Internet Archive.
ReplyDeletehttps://archive.org/details/my-talk-show/My+Talk+Show