Richard Pryor Show

This past Saturday, TV One played a marathon of the Richard Pryor Show. Technically, you can't really call it a marathon because the network ran the original special and the four episodes
of the series. But at the same time, those four episodes were a great mix of comedy , variety, drama, social commentary. Now, when the show made its debut in the fall of 1977, I was too young to remember it when it was on the air (I was four years old at the time; if I could barely remember both the last seasons of Chico and the Man -1978 and Welcome Back, Kotter-1979, there is no way I could remember anything back in 1977.)

1977

During the summer of '77, Pyror hosted a special on NBC and the network noticed that the program showearned high ratings, they decided to give Pryor his own show for the 1977-78 television season. The network felt that lighting could strike again by having a comedian tone down and clean up his act and star on his own television show (in 1972, the network gave Redd Foxx his own show, Sanford and Son, and in its five year run, the program finished third overall tv ratings twice, and two times it was the No.2 ranked show in the country- only All In the Family drew higher ratings than Sanford.In May 1977, Foxx left Sanford and Son along with NBC to host his own variety show on ABC.)

NBC- Nothing But Censors

Even before the show made it debut, Pryor had problems with the NBC executives, specifically
the censors, for what he wanted to do and say. In today's television landscape, you can do and say certain things on the air, but this was 1977 after all and the suits weren't having it. To give you an indication on how the show was going to go, on the the first episode, Pryor appeared on camera wearing nothing but a nude body suit while saying" looks like they have taken everything away from me." In another episode, Pryor was holding a press conference as the
40th President of the United States (who knew 30 years later that we would see a black president in the movies (played by Chris Rock and Morgan Freeman, on television (on the hit show 24, Dennis Haysbert played the role) and in real life with Barack Obama!) Another skit
was when Pryor played a drunk at a bar (special guest star John Belushi was the bartender)
and when he when home to talk to his long suffering wife, and when he fell asleep on the couch, his wife (played by Maya Angelou) delivered an emotional dialogue-turned-monologue in
the sketch which looked like something you would see at a Broadway show.



After fighting with censors on a regular basis, Pryor had enough and decided to pull the plug on his show on October 4, 1977. In that final espisode, there was a sketch where Pryor was being roasted by the members of his comedy team. The comedians are well known now but were unknown back then, the cast included: Paul Mooney, Sandra Bernhard, Robin Williams, Marsha Warfield, Tim Reid and John Witherspoon.


The censors were not the only the thing that The Richard Pryor Show had to face. The network
placed the show at the Tuesday 8 p.m. time slot opposite two programs that I grew up watching
(as well as some of my favorite tv shows of all time) Happy Days and Laverne & Shirley. When
the 1977-78 television season started, Happy Days was the #1 rated show in the country with
Lavrene & Shirley close behind at #2. If you're the head of NBC programming and you placed
a new show against the #1 and #2 ranked shows in the nation, do you really think that you're going to stand a chance of winning the time slot? Unfortunately, NBC took the gamble and lost out.


The Legacy of the Richard Pryor Show

Even though it had a short stint on television, The Richard Pryor Show was the forerunner for
a number of comedic programs. Its influence could be seen in the following programs: In Living
Color, MadTV (even though some might argue that the show also has elements of Saturday Night Live); The Chris Rock Show and the Chappelle Show. The show is now on DVD and
some of it clips are on Youtube and I suggest that you should check it out.