The Baxters

[RicoGregg]

Anyone else remember this tonnage from Norman Lear?

It was, for lack of a better term, a sitcom about a family of five, and all their foibles. The closest thing to a name in the cast was Anita Gillette, who played the mother.

What made it different was that the actual scripted portion of the show ran for only the first 15 minutes. The second half was audience participation, with a local host moderating a discussion among audience members on what just happened on the show.

The show ran in syndication from 1979-81. Most markets that carried it had their own local host & studio audience, though some chose the "generic" version if they didn't do their own local segment.

I guess the audience segment was supposed to bring each episode to it's conclusion. I think that all that it accomplished was to cause people to draw their own conclusion.

From my memory banks, I can say that if you somehow missed "The Baxters", you missed nothing.

 

[Markxxx]

I think there were two versions. Wasn't one produced by Lear and the other produced by some company in Canada? I know our version of "The Baxters" ran on WFLD-TV Channel 32. The problem with it, as I saw it, the discussions were boring and too short to have meaning

 

[Ultimajock]

I think there were two versions. Wasn't one produced by Lear and the other produced by some company in Canada? I know our version of "The Baxters" ran on WFLD-TV Channel 32. The problem with it, as I saw it, the discussions were boring and too short to have meaning

...are you sure you're not confusing The Baxters with All That Glitters? Both were Lear products, both featured Anita Gillette, and both were run on WFLD (there's a WFLD promo for All That Glitters at http://youtube.com/watch?v=at4B2LloM1o)...

 

[RicoGregg]

I think there were two versions. Wasn't one produced by Lear and the other produced by some company in Canada? I know our version of "The Baxters" ran on WFLD-TV Channel 32. The problem with it, as I saw it, the discussions were boring and too short to have meaning

...are you sure you're not confusing The Baxters with All That Glitters? Both were Lear products, both featured Anita Gillette, and both were run on WFLD (there's a WFLD promo for All That Glitters at http://youtube.com/watch?v=at4B2LloM1o)...

All That Glitters was a gawdawful, unfunny, and unwatchable comedy soap opera that was even worse than Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, which had jumped the shark in about the 12th minute of it's first episode. It came out about the same time as another lame, unfunny, and unwatchable comedy soap opera came out, The Life and Times of Eddie Roberts (L.A.T.E.R.)

These two shows were totally unfunny and unwatchable.

As for the Canadian question, here's a source for you:

http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_baxters

Might clear that up some, at least.

 

[bpatrick]

The second season of "The Baxters" was produced in
Canada and used Canadian actors. It was even less
successful than the first year.

Interestingly, to me at least, "The Baxters" started
as a local program on WCVB Boston and was a huge
hit there. Norman Lear somehow heard about the show
and picked it up for national syndication with the format
we've described here. Can anyone from Boston explain
why the show did so well there and failed so miserably
everywhere else?

 

[Markxxx]

Well Boston is a big liberal market with a lot of universities and this would lend itself to the kind of people that'd watch the show.

In Chicago the "talk," part of the show was boring and stupid. I remember saying "I could say so much better things." Since this was before the explosion of talk radio, I think a large part of the shows success would depend on the people that were chosen to talk about the segment.

Chicago tends to be more conservative and when you talk about things like homosexuality, extra marital affairs, drugs, etc, at the time, at least in Chicago, you're not gonna find anyone would listen to anyone saying an supportive viewpoint.

Some things are regional for interest, "The Golden Girls" as a rerun never did well in Chicago though other markets found the re-run a hit. Conversely "Barney Miller," ran for ages in Chicago quite well and was picked up by Me-TV for a while and did well.