Martin Short Show: Martin Short - Sitcoms Online Photo Galleries

The Martin Short Show aired from September 15-27, 1994 on NBC.

Sketch comedian Martin Short created this odd combination of character sketches, satire, and standard cute-kids sitcom. Like the old Jack Benny Program, it was a-show-within-a-show. Marty was seen as the star of his own television comedy/variety hour ( where he performed the sketches), lived in a world full of bizarre parodies of famous people , such as Elizabeth Taylor and Sally Jessy Raphael ( the satire) and had a raucious home life with wife Meg ( Jan Hooks) and youngsters Caroline and Charlie ( Noley Thornton, Zack Duhame), the cute kids. Alice ( Andrea Martin) was an old friend who appeared on his show. Viewers, critics and NBC did not know what to make of this mish-mash and it had a very short run.

An Article from USA TODAY
Published on September 15, 1994

Short's late-night prime time

Comic actor brings 'SCTV' sensibility to new series

By Jefferson Graham
USA TODAY

" This ain't Empty Nest," says Martin Short of his ambitious new comedy series, NBC's The Martin Short Show.

" This show will be more imaginative than anything you see on prime time," says Short, the former co-star of SCTV, Saturday Night Live, many HBO and Showtime specials and films such as Innerspace and Father of the Bride.

" On a normal TV show , you could do a scene on an airplane with your characters and that would be that. On our show ,we do the scene , but we also have the freedom to have our characters watch a movie on a plane, where I do Ringo ( Starr) in a Eugene O'Neill parody, A Hard Day's Journey Into Night."

The whole story: Co-Star Jan Hooks gets in a fight with an aging actress ( Short) on the plane and the woman sues. We see the Ringo film, and then after a commercial, we watch the trial unfold on Court TV.

The Martin Short Show is a show within a show. The sitcom's main character, Marty, stars in a TV comedy/variety show with his wife Meg ( Jan Hooks, Designing Women, Saturday Night Live) and old partner Alice ( Andrea Martin, SCTV).

But primarily it's a sketch show , an excuse for Short, Hooks and Martin to dress up and play as many different characters as they can within a half-hour.

In his makeup trailer, Short proudly points to the Polaroids on the wall showing some of the different personas he and the gang have taken on. There's Marty as Elizabeth Taylor, Ringo, his own creations Ed Grimley and lawyer Nathan Thurm and a guest on The Sally Jessy Raphael Show. Hooks as Faye Dunaway and Whoopi Goldberg.

On the set this day, Short, Hooks and Martin are doing a parody of this summer's action hit Speed.

Short premieres with a sneak preview tonight at 8:30 ET/PT before moving to Tuesdays at 8:30 for its regular run next week. Tapes haven't been made available for review, but not because the show's in trouble, insists Short. Cast and crew couldn't get the first show completed in time to get the tapes out, he says.

" We have the freedom to do on this show what we did on SCTV," says Short. " Dicker until the last minute. So we missed the deadline and critics won't see the first show. They'll see it when they see it."

While starring in The Goodbye Girl on Broadway in 1993, Short decided he wanted to return to TV, where he first garnered attention in 1982 for his wacky SCTV characters which included Thurm( " I know that") and Grimley ( " That would be awfully decent, I must say").

Short cut a deal with NBC, co-created the series with brother Michael and former SCTV collaborator Paul Flaherty and tried to bring a " latenight sensibility to primetime."

Short has assembled all of his old SCTV co-players ( with the obvious esception of John Candy) to work with him, as he has on his cable specials.

In adition to Martin and Flaherty, Eugene Levy is directing many of the episodes and appearing in skits, and Dave Thomas ( Grace Under Fire) and Catherine O'Hara ( Home Alone) are slated for upcoming shows. Steve Martin, Shorts co-star in The Three Amigos and Father of the Bride guest stars in Tuesday's show.

A favorite talk show guest of David Letterman and Jay Leno-even if plugging a turkey film, as with last years Clifford, he's always given the opportunity to do his Katharine Hepburn imitation-Short wondered what life might be like at home for a late-night talk-show host. Add the skits, and you've got the Short Show.

" I didn't want to do a sitcom; I've done late night," he says " If the networks weren't interested in someone unusual , I would have gone to cable, but I've done that too. I really wanted to tackle prime time."

An Article from The New York Times

AT LUNCH WITH: Martin Short; A Comic Chameleon At Play in Prime Time

By ANDY MEISLER
Published: September 28, 1994

MARTIN SHORT, in sweatshirt and jeans, flashes his brilliant U-shaped smile. The comic actor has a distinctively mobile face, heavily freckled, which, depending on whether he's playacting or talking seriously, seems to toggle back and forth from an apparent age of about 23 to his real age, 42.

During lunch recently at Canyon, a vaguely Southwestern restaurant near the Studio City sound stage where his eponymous new television series is taped, Short the Younger does much of the talking.

"It's going very well," he says with Grimley-like optimism, when asked about his show, which NBC is counting on to help recapture Tuesday night and provide a decent lead-in for "Frasier," its shining hit.

There are some who might debate that point. Although ratings for "The Martin Short Show" have been in the top 30, some critics have been disappointed, saying the program fails to recapture the magic created in the 1980's, when Mr. Short, a consummate sketch comedian, first unsheathed the stars of his personal repertory company: the nerd Ed Grimley, the never-was singing star Jackie Rogers Jr., the jittery lawyer Nathan Thurm and the surly overage child star Rusty Van Reddick.

Mr. Short shrugs, and aging only for a split second, says: "You can't do comedy like this and not face the possibility that you're going to look like a complete jerk going out there that far. And so you can't worry about risk. If you did, well, I mean, you'd never do anything."

NBC thought Mr. Short was worth the risk. The network commissioned 13 episodes on the strength of Mr. Short's star status, without ever having seen a pilot. He is its executive producer as well as its star; along with his brother Michael and some old colleagues from his "SCTV" days, he writes and stages the whole thing. In effect, he's been given a half-hour in prime time as his own personal playground.

Mr. Short is not using his on-screen alter ego to anchor a wicked parody of show business, as Gary Shandling does in "The Larry Sanders Show," or a quirky examination of the comedic psyche, like Jerry Seinfeld in "Seinfeld."

On "The Martin Short Show," Mr. Short is a sweet-tempered comic chameleon and family man, notably sane, famous and beloved, who always seems to get into mishaps when he's not busy bringing his outrageous characters to life. Many are from his films "Father of the Bride" and "The Three Amigos," and from television shows like "SCTV" and "Saturday Night Live."

And in real life?

This is not a trick question. In real life, Mr. Short is a comic chameleon, a notably sane and sweet-tempered family man, justly famous and beloved for the outrageous characters he's brought to life. On this day, he orders a grilled chicken sandwich with jalapenos and jack cheese, takes off his wire-rimmed glasses and sets them on the table.

"The truth is, we can do anything we want," he says. "The reality is that nothing that we're doing here is any more bizarre than anything Jack Benny did on his old TV show. Jack Benny! Sometimes the show would start in his house, and he'd walk downstairs into his dungeon, where Rochester was guarding his money. Or sometimes Jack Benny would walk on stage to start the show."

One of Mr. Short's shows begins with "the goodnights."

"I'm in an aviator outfit," Mr. Short says. "I'm saying: 'You've been a great audience. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. And once again, my special guest, Bruno Kirby.'

"Bruno comes out in a diaper. We don't mention it. We say goodnight. We walk backstage. Then we're sitting there drinking Evian -- he's still in the diaper, we still haven't mentioned it -- and he says, 'By the way, how do you think the Lindbergh baby sketch played?'

"I say, 'Oh, I don't know.'

"He says: 'Yeah, maybe it's too soon.' "

Such touches of comedic surrealism were not present in the first episode of "The Martin Short Show," which was not broadcast. That effort included self-contained sketches but also featured the actress Catherine Hicks as Mr. Short's wife; concentrated on his interaction with his children, also since recast, and more closely resembled a conventional sitcom.

In sum, enormous changes at the last minute. Mr. Short, who is drinking ginger ale, swallows and nods. "The problems were obvious," he says. "We said, 'Ah hah! So, the sketches are fun and the home life is dull.'

"Once you put sketches in, it's very hard to compete with them, because sketches are so much fun. My feeling was, O.K., what we have to do is heighten the story so that it all feels like one show."

Last summer, Mr. Short brought in Jan Hooks, a "Saturday Night Live" alumna, as his new wife; she also co-stars on the show-within-a-show. He also brought in Andrea Martin, a star of "SCTV," as an offstage friend and onstage sketch partner.

Left unaddressed by these revisions, however, is a question that has been circulating among comedy theoreticians since "The Martin Short Show" was announced: Behind all the characters, who is Martin Short?

Mr. Short glances at his sandwich. It is very large. "Look at this meal," he says. "It's like, you know, something Cass Elliott would order."

He was born in Hamilton, Ontario, the youngest of five children of a business executive father and a classical violinist mother. As a child he wrote, produced, starred in and was the sole audience for his own variety show, performed nightly in the attic of his family home.

Both his parents and one brother were dead by the time he was 20. "Maybe that gave me the perspective to realize what besides show business was really important," he says. "You know what it is? I think that truthfully I cannot work in angst. I've never understood that kind of comedy. I just get depressed and want to go home."

As he talks about his family, a glimmer of the man behind the characters emerges. Like the eternally delighted Ed Grimley, whose grandest ambitions are realized when he makes it onto "Wheel of Fortune," and like the terminally optimistic Jackie Rogers Jr., still reveling in his nonstardom, Mr. Short steadfastly cleaves to life's unfettered possibilities.

At McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, he majored in pre-med and sociology, but his real passion was for the theater. In 1972, he moved to Toronto and joined the local cast of the musical "Godspell," a now-legendary production that also attracted, at one time or another, the talents of Gilda Radner, Paul Shaffer, Andrea Martin, Dave Thomas and Eugene Levy.

There he met the actress Nancy Dolman, whom he married; they have been together for more than 20 years and have three young children.

In 1977 Mr. Short joined the Toronto branch of the Second City comedy troupe; it was there, among the likes of John Candy, Catherine O'Hara and Harold Ramis, that Ed Grimley and Jackie Rogers Jr. were born. In 1979, he won a regular part in the short-lived ABC series "The Associates," and in 1982, he joined his Second City cohorts on the "SCTV" television series. His entrance into that cult hit sent his comedy career into overdrive.

In 1984 -- in retrospect, a golden year -- Mr. Short appeared with Billy Crystal, Christopher Guest, Harry Shearer and Julia Louis-Dreyfus, among others, on "Saturday Night Live." It was his first and last season on the NBC show.

"The people there were great, but the schedule killed me," he says. "It was too much pressure. And I put the pressure on myself, too. But I wasn't incorrect to put the pressure on myself."

With Ed Grimley's "completely mental" cries of ecstasy -- "I couldn't be more excited!" -- echoing through the land, Mr. Short departed for a movie career, punctuated with occasional specials on cable television.

Last year, he appeared on Broadway with Bernadette Peters in the musical version of "The Goodbye Girl" by Neil Simon. His personal notices were considerably better than those for the book or music.

He is peopling his new series with old friends and colleagues, among whom he is held in high regard both professionally and personally. But in other ways, prime time for Mr. Short is a new and strange frontier.

Mr. Short's hour break is almost done, and so is his sandwich. He looks up into the eyes of a tall, familiar-looking man, dressed in shorts and a colorful sports shirt, approaching Mr. Short's table.

"I understand you have a new show coming out?" the man says.

"Yes, sir," Mr. Short answers.

"I hope it's a big success for you."

"Thank you!"

"You're terrific. Nice to meet you."

The man walks away. A baffled Mr. Short leans forward and asks whom he's been talking to.

The football player-turned-actor Fred Dryer, he is told. The star of "Hunter," an NBC crime show popular a few years ago.

"Oh, man, that's it," he says, clearly embarrassed. Mr. Short gets younger again very fast. "You know, 'Route 66' was the last show I watched."

For a Website dedicated to Martin Short go to http://www.angelfire.com/celeb/martinshort/

For a Martin Short fanlisting go to http://www.shag-a-delic.net/martinshort/

For a Page dedicated to Jan Hooks go to http://janhooks.com/