Night Stand with Dick Dietrick is an American television comedy show that satirized American tabloid talk shows. The series was originally broadcast in first-run syndication from 1995 to 1997, as well as on the E! Entertainment Television network. Night Stand was co-created by Paul Abeyta, Peter Kaikko and actor/writer Timothy Stack, who also starred as the show's host Dick Dietrick. The show benefited from contributions by writer/friends of the creators, namely co-exec producer Larry Strawther (the first season show-runner) and the long-time comedy writing team of Bob Iles and Jim Stein.
History
Night Stand premiered September 16, 1995 in syndication, running in over 87% of the US markets, mainly as a Saturday evening program airing against, or if carried by an NBC station, after Saturday Night Live. It also aired on E! Monday-Thursday at 10:30 p.m. (between Talk Soup and the Howard Stern) and was distributed internationally. The partnership with E! led to a follow-up second season.
Unlike other shows, each hour-long syndicated episode was actually divided into two separate half-hour programs which yielded 96 episodes for E! reruns. (E! kept the show for several years but only in reruns.)
Much of the Night Stand production team went on to work with Howard Stern on Son of the Beach, with some of their "guests" also making appearances.
Night Stand was the first production from Big Ticket Productions, the company formed by former Warner Bros. development executive Larry Lyttle. Strawther had worked with Abeyta and Kaikko at Merv Griffin Productions and later worked with Lyttle on the shows My Sister Sam and Night Court. Strawther brought on Night Court director Jim Drake and they developed the tape-four-shows-a-week format that made the show financially practical. Strawther did not return as showrunner for the second season after he and Stack differed on when silliness went "over the top."
The show's original slogan "If you don't have Night Stand, you don't have Dick" and The Comedy That Makes Up Talk was later changed to The Comedy That Makes Fun of Talk.
Night Stand helped Big Ticket Productions get started. They did even better on its next project, Judge Judy. The show's original publicist was Howard Bragman, who is now considered one of Hollywood's top publicists.
Produced: 1995âÂÂ1997 (96 episodes, 2 shows per syndicated episode)
The show's writers and executive producers watched episodes of tabloid talk shows, such as The Jenny Jones Show, for inspiration.
Cast
Main
- Timothy Stack as Dick Dietrick, the show's host and namesake
- Peter Siragusa as Miller, Dick's long-suffering assistant on the show. Beginning midway through the first season, the role was taken over by Robert Alan Beuth and the character renamed "Mueller".
- Lynne Marie Stewart as a character variously referred to as "Audience Member", "Lady in Audience", and so forth along those lines. As her name indicates, she was part of the studio audience in almost all episodes and often asked inane questions of the show's main guests. However, in one second-season episode she was invited onto the panel, where she identified herself as the president of Dietrick's fan club and proceeded to discuss her pen-pal romance with an incarcerated murderer.
- Judy Toll was the female announcer who introduced Dietrick at the beginning of each episode and narrated most of the interstitial bumpers (including the ubiquitous "you can get Dick on the World Wide Web" promos advertising the show's website), and was also on the writing staff.
Recurring panelists
- Dwayne Barnes as gangsta rapper MC Carjak
- Jordana Capra as Dr. Susan Sonspeen, feminist lecturer, author, and "Professor of Lesbian Studies at Lily Tomlin Women's College". Blunt, husky-voiced, and with a deadpan way about her, Dr. Sonspeen â even more than most of Dick's female guests â makes no secret of the fact that she finds him (and men in general) repulsive.
- Steven Cragg as Peter Mithelmet, a snooty, pretentious, and sexually ambiguous European fashion designer
- Christopher Darga as Bob, a strip club owner, sexaholic, serial womanizer, pathological liar, and all-around creep whose sleazy schemes frequently serve as fodder for panel discussions. Whenever said schemes go awry, he invariably shrugs everything off with his all-purpose excuse: a nonchalantly delivered "Hey, I'm sick, I need help."
- Vinny Montello as Vinny, a belligerent man with a Brooklyn accent who frequently appeared in the studio audience, often making crass comments or threatening to beat up panelists he doesn't like. However, in one episode he was invited on the panel, where he discussed his plight as a struggling drag queen who hoped to get breast augmentation surgery from Dr. Hamilton George.
- John Paragon played two recurring roles. The first of these was "Bachelor #3", an asbestos miner and laryngectomy patient who speaks (and sings karaoke) through an electronic voice prosthesis. This character debuted in one of the show's earliest episodes as the unlikely winner of a Dating Game-style contest, hence his name, and subsequently revisited the panel twice more along with his newfound beau, though his real name was never revealed. Paragon also played the unrelated role of sex education expert Dr. Edward Burns in two second-season episodes.
- Shirley Prestia as Mattie Gelman, an unlicensed therapist and prolific self-help author. A frequent panelist especially earlier in the show's run, Mattie's personality comes off rather like a less abrasive version of Joan Rivers: she's a vivacious older Jewish lady with a throaty New York accent, a saucy wit, and an unrequited crush on Dick.
- Andrew Prine as Dr. Hamilton George, a world-renowned plastic surgeon who's considered the "Father of Nipple Replacement". Dr. George's skin is deeply tanned (like his name, this is a reference to actor George Hamilton) and he moves his body slowly and stiffly like a robot, presumably from having performed numerous cosmetic procedures on himself.
- Tim Silva as Dr. Lonnie Lanier, psychologist, self-help book author, and founder of the eponymous Lanier Institute. Like Stack himself, Silva was one of the many Groundlings graduates who appeared on the show.
- Steve Valentine as The Astounding Andy, a British-accented hypnotist, magician, and paranormal expert who frequently appears on the panel when the discussion turns toward things supernatural. His name is a parody of The Amazing Randi, a prominent illusionist-cum-skeptic who was a frequent fixture on The Tonight Show and other talk shows of the era, but the theatrical razzle-dazzle of his stage presence and personal mannerisms ultimately give the character much more in common with the likes of David Copperfield and Siegfried & Roy.
- Steve White as Tupac Zemeckis, acclaimed African-American director of films about gritty urban street life, along the lines of Spike Lee or John Singleton. (Appropriately enough, White's best-known roles as an actor were in Spike Lee's films Do the Right Thing, Mo' Better Blues, and Malcolm X.)
Episodes
Except where otherwise noted, information about episode titles, cast and crew is sourced from iMDB, and plot descriptions are summarized from their respective episodes as uploaded to the Internet Archive.
Season 1 (1995âÂÂ96)
References
- "Glued to the tube. Stacking up against reality of TV talk shows" Newsday 11/21/1995
External links