Remember Fridays? The ABC weekly late-night live comedy show, which aired on… wait for it… Fridays!

From 1980 to 1982, it was a welcome relief to the stale ‘Saturday Night Live’. The show was originally 70 minutes in its first season, but was expanded to 90 minutes in season two.

Like SNL, each week Fridays featured music acts and, in the second season, celebrity guest hosts. (You may have heard about the Andy Kaufman debacle!) Also fake newscasts and spoofs of television shows and commercials.

Fridays veered into dangerous territories, with skits about drugs (again, the the Andy Kaufman debacle!) sex, and physical violence. The production values for musical segments were higher, using coloured concert style lighting, as opposed to SNL’s flat white illumination, thus appealing to the MTV crowd.

Fridays had a host of memorable sketches, like SNL:

“Drugs ‘R’ Us” aka “The Crazed Pharmacist”
“Nat E. Dred” – Catchphrase: (Is it turmeric? No no NO no, gimme ganja! Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah!)
“Battle Boy” (My favorite!)
“Dick”
“Pitkinville, Montana”
“Latin DJ”
“The Three Stooges”
“Live and Be Well”
“Howdy Doody”
“Pastor James Babbit”
“Dancing Chickens”
“The Golden Boys”
“The Monster”

The series ended in 1982. First, ABC decided to expand Nightline to five nights a week, which moved Fridays to air at midnight instead of 11:30. Now, by the end of its first season in 1981, Fridays was outperforming Saturday Night Live in the ratings. The later time slot hurt the show, and Saturday Night Live had performed a major cast and crew overhaul to combat it’s new nemesis.

ABC tried to save the show by putting it on in prime time. The episode was scheduled against CBS powerhouse Dallas, which did nothing to help the show’s moribund ratings. The series was promptly canceled.

Now, 28 years later, DVDs abound from SNL, including some of those early 80′s tragic years. Yet, Fridays remains seemingly unearthed. Why is this?

The answer is really surprising. Apparently Micheal Richards is the only cast member who has the right to approve any home video release. He had that written into his contract. So far, he has not signed off on a DVD release, though some clips of him and Larry David on Fridays appear on the ‘Seinfeld’ Season 3 and 5 DVD’s.

After learning this, I headed for Facebook, and started the ‘Tell Micheal Richards to approve the release of ‘Fridays’ on DVD!’ group!

If, like me, you would love to relive those awesome Fridays moments again, join the group, and lets get our Fridays!