Fernwood 2 Night (or Fernwood Tonight) is a satirical comedy talk show that was broadcast weeknights from July to September 1977. The program was created by Norman Lear and produced by Alan Thicke as a spin-off and summer replacement for Lear's satirical soap opera Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. The show was hosted by Barth Gimble (Martin Mull) and sidekick–announcer Jerry Hubbard (Fred Willard). Dour bandleader Happy Kyne (Frank De Vol) and the Mirth Makers were the show's stage band and featured Tommy Tedesco as a guitarist.

Overview and production

Fernwood 2 Night was ironic in tone and set in the fictional small town of Fernwood, Ohio, like Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, in which Mull portrayed Barth's twin brother Garth Gimble, who was impaled on an aluminum christmas tree. Fernwood 2 Night parodied actual late-night talk shows and the sort of fare one might expect from locally produced small-town midwestern American television programming. Fernwood 2 Night was the first television talk show satire, foreshadowing the likes of The Larry Sanders Show, Space Ghost Coast to Coast, and Comedy Bang! Bang!. After one summer season of Fernwood 2 Night, the program was revamped in the spring of 1978 as America 2 Night. In this second version, Barth, Jerry and Happy relocated to Southern California (specifically, the fictional city of Alta Coma, "the unfinished furniture capital of the world!") and broadcast the show nationally over the fictional UBS Network. The change to a Southern California setting made it more plausible for real-life celebrities to appear on the program as themselves. In 2001, Mull and Willard reprised their roles in a stage appearance and retrospective at the US Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen, Colorado. The pair also worked together in other projects, appearing together as a gay couple in the final seasons of Roseanne. Reruns of Fernwood and America 2 Night were broadcast on Nick at Nite from 1990 to 1993 and TV Land in 2002 as part of their "TV Land Kitschen" block, also hosted by Mull and Willard. Neither Fernwood 2 Night nor America 2 Night have ever been officially released on home video in any format.

Recurring characters

Trivia

While the town of Fernwood is fictional, in episode 39 Barth introduces a guest who runs a "nude dude ranch" near Farrington, Ohio in Miami County. That places Fernwood somewhere near Dayton.