Martin Mull and Fred Willard turned Hollywood's roster into chaos and a career crucible
Fernwood2Nite didn’t just bend the rules of television; it bent the careers of the people who dared to make it.
Fernwood2Nite, starring Martin Mull (as Garth and Barth Gimble) and Fred Willard (as Jerry Hubbard), was a blast of television history worth a look as a peculiar piece of the craft and a cultural phenomenon, as object lessons go. Fernwood2Nite and the corollary America2Nite featuring the distinctly unhappy Happy Kine and his Orchestra, the Mirth Makers, and a cast of stellar character actors making faux guest appearances, mixed with actual guest stars, such as Charlton Heston.
Here’s the rub. As underground and avant‑garde as they ran it, none of this was underground TV, and the names behind the production were not strangers to viewers. They were uptown Hollywood as they come.
And that’s where the absurdity sharpens. The plotlines, the treatment of those passerby character‑actor guests as fictional beings, became mixed with actual TV celebrities — some of whom didn’t quite know what hit them. Fernwood and America2Nite operated like a funhouse mirror aimed directly at the medium itself.
Garth Gimble (including Barth) as a stand‑in 'host' for the genre known as the talk show, brought it to its knees -- the parade of characters and their interactions were nothing if not aspirational confirmation of this premise. But what were they saying goodbye to, and with such enthusiasm?
It was infantilism masquerading as PTA civility, Neighbourhood Watch earnestness as a front for pandering to a new lowest common denominator, and carried under the guise of talk‑show uplift. Was it meant as a mockery of talk shows? It mocked their icons viscerally. It carved out space for a different message in the medium. They didn’t need swearing to blacken the tone — the delivery and the disrespect did the job, heaps upon heaps of disrespect.
If you saw this brief and bizarre television show, you know Martin Mull portrayed a character several notches below rascal (and yes, he had an even more evil twin brother). His sidekick was the schoolyard bully who somehow wandered into a television studio. Fred Willard’s Jerry Hubbard wanted to joke himself into a dustup every single minute of camera time. It was electrifying, madcap, fatalistic comedy.
It was the mainstream gone nuts. And something tells me it went off the rails behind the scenes. It altered the career trajectories of both Mull and Willard. They weren’t exalted for this off‑card achievement of slapstick. Anything but. They weren’t blacklisted — they were institutionally castrated, or damn close to it. Picture a couple of Hollywood moguls dragging the pair out to Bohemian Grove to wave a katana sword under their testicles.
Your career isn’t over. But you’re not funny anymore. You’re actors.
I’m not taking the low road. It was a journey to see Mull and Willard fight for a place in the industry. They both succeeded. No doubt about it. That’s what’s so fascinating. How Hollywood was able to forgive those two bastards is anybody’s guess. They had charged in and essentially roofied the whole party. It was that ugly.
And here’s the twist: behind all that chaos, all that gleeful sabotage, all that avant‑garde mischief, stood some of the most polished, powerful, and mainstream figures in American television.
Norman Lear — the architect of half of 1970s network culture — created the show. Alan Thicke produced it. T.A.T. Communications Company, the same outfit behind Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, bankrolled it. The writing staff was a murderer’s row of sitcom craftsmen: Tom Moore, Jeremy Stevens, Bob Illes, James Stein, Wayne Kline, and Lear himself. The directors were seasoned studio hands like Tony Csiki, Jim Drake, Louis J. Horvitz, and Howard Storm.
This wasn’t a pirate broadcast. It was a sanctioned detonation.
And when the cult success of Fernwood made the small‑town Ohio setting too small for the number of real celebrities who wanted in, the producers simply moved Barth and Jerry to Southern California, rebranded the show as America2Nite, and opened the floodgates. Suddenly Vincent Price, Carol Burnett, Burt Lancaster, Tom Waits, Mark Hamill, Rita Moreno, and a parade of others were walking into a fictional UBS network studio whose logo was an ear and whose slogan was “We put U before the BS.”
Fernwood2Nite was the prank. America2Nite was the encore.
Both were Hollywood at its most self‑aware — and its most willing to let two brilliant troublemakers burn the furniture for the sake of a laugh.
In the end, Fernwood2Nite and America2Nite weren’t accidents — they were warnings dressed as comedy, and the industry spent decades deciding whether to heed them.
Hold tight >>>>
Written by Mack McColl and Copilot, for Commerce News
