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The Dana Carvey Show was a half-hour sketch comedy television show that aired on the U.S. television network ABC during the 1996 season. Dana Carvey was the host and principal player on the show as well as its head writer.
The show's cast included: Dana Carvey, Steve Carell, Bill Chott, Stephen Colbert, Elon Gold, Chris McKinney, Heather Morgan, Peggy Shay, Robert Smigel, and James Stephens. The writing team included many future talents, such as Charlie Kaufman, Louis C.K., Dino Stamatopoulos, Spike Feresten, Colbert, Carell, and Smigel.
Content
Some believe the program was doomed from the first sketch on the first episode. Coming after the family-friendly Home Improvement, the sketch featured Carvey as President Bill Clinton, showing what a compassionate person he was by having a human baby (which was a doll), several puppies (real ones) and a kitten (also real) suckle milk from his multiple prosthetic nipples. Needless to say, this raised a few eyebrows. Carvey recreated some of the characters that he developed on Saturday Night Live and parodied the news of the day, as well as the media, politics, commercialism, and other sketch comedy shows. The show's humor varied between crude and sophisticated, making it difficult to find a broad-based audience. One particularly memorable sketch, "Skinheads From Maine," involved a pair of white power skinheads dressed in plaid, sitting on a porch, whittling, and conversing about their racist beliefs in a thick mock northeastern accent.
Additional post-produced bumper material was often featured between sketches. One such example, Discovery Channel After Dark, featured an edited montage of wild animals mating, and performing other actions that would be considered obscene if shown being done by their human counterparts. It was a parody of adult-based, late-night cable programming.
At about the same time, The Drew Carey Show was aired on ABC with a similar comic tone, but in the guise of a conventional sitcom, and did much better in the ratings. Typically, prime time sketch shows are not well received by network audiences, as numerous other such shows have failed. But this one, which highlighted Smigel's love-it-or-hate-it brand of absurdist humor, was an even greater challenge for audiences.
An animated sketch that first appeared on the show, "The Ambiguously Gay Duo," featuring the voices of Colbert and Carell, would become well known on SNL after Carvey's show was cancelled.
History
When The Dana Carvey Show first appeared, it was greeted with above average reviews and a lukewarm response from the audience. Despite the fact that ABC only aired seven episodes of the series, it has maintained a small but loyal following.
The first six episodes that aired were officially titled based on the presenting sponsor of the show:
- "The Taco Bell Dana Carvey Show"
- "The Mug Root Beer Dana Carvey Show"
- "The Mountain Dew Dana Carvey Show"
- "The Diet Mug Root Beer Dana Carvey Show"
- "The Dana Carvey Show (Sponsored by Pepsi)"
- "The Szechuan Dynasty Dana Carvey Show"
This was an homage to the classic television shows that Dana Carvey grew up watching, wherein a variety show would have a single sponsor whose advertising and promotion were integrated with the show. Dana would begin the show surrounded by dancers wearing (for example) gigantic Mug Root Beer soda can costumes.
Each of the first five sponsors were products of PepsiCo, Inc.. The sixth sponsor was a famous Manhattan-area Chinese restaurant chain. The final episode had no presenting sponsor.
Trivia
This article contains a list of miscellaneous information. (September 2007) |
- The show was actually videotaped at the CBS Broadcast Center on West 57th Street in New York City. As an inside joke to the fact that an ABC television show was being recorded at a rival network in each show's opening sequence the announcer proclaimed "From the ABC Broadcast Center in New York It's The ________ Dana Carvey Show ( ____ is where the sponsor's name is heard) as a man stands at the top of a ladder outside of the Broadcast Center placing the ABC logo over the CBS Eye logo.
- The show has not been released on DVD and no plans have been announced for a future release.