Night Stand with Dick Dietrick is an American television comedy show that satirized American tabloid talk shows. The series was originally broadcast in first-run syndication from 1995 to 1997, as well as on the E! Entertainment Television network. Night Stand was co-created by Paul Abeyta, Peter Kaikko and actor/writer Timothy Stack, who also starred as the show's host Dick Dietrick. The show benefited from contributions by writer/friends of the creators, namely co-exec producer Larry Strawther (the first season show-runner) and the long-time comedy writing team of Bob Iles and Jim Stein.
History
At the time of its premiere on September 16, 1995, Night Stand ran in over 87% of the U.S. markets, mainly as a Saturday evening program airing against, or if carried by an NBC station, after Saturday Night Live. It also aired on E! Monday-Thursday at 10:30 p.m. (between Talk Soup and the Howard Stern) and was distributed internationally. The partnership with E! led to a follow-up second season.
Unlike other shows, each hour-long syndicated episode was actually divided into two separate half-hour programs which yielded 96 episodes for E! reruns. (E! kept the show for several years but only in reruns.)
Much of the Night Stand production team went on to work with Howard Stern on Son of the Beach, with some of their "guests" also making appearances.
Night Stand was the first production from Big Ticket Productions, the company formed by former Warner Bros. development executive Larry Lyttle. Strawther had worked with Abeyta and Kaikko at Merv Griffin Productions and later worked with Lyttle on the shows My Sister Sam and Night Court. Strawther brought on Night Court director Jim Drake and they developed the tape-four-shows-a-week format that made the show financially practical. Strawther did not return as showrunner for the second season after he and Stack differed on when silliness went "over the top."
The show's original slogan "If you don't have Night Stand, you don't have Dick" and The Comedy That Makes Up Talk was later changed to The Comedy That Makes Fun of Talk.
Night Stand helped Big Ticket Productions get started. They did even better on its next project, Judge Judy. The show's original publicist was Howard Bragman, who is now considered one of Hollywood's top publicists.
Produced: 1995–1997 (96 episodes, 2 shows per syndicated episode)
The show's writers and executive producers watched episodes of tabloid talk shows, such as The Jenny Jones Show, for inspiration.
Cast
Main
- Timothy Stack as Dick Dietrick, the show's host and namesake
- Peter Siragusa as Miller, Dick's long-suffering assistant on the show. Beginning midway through the first season, the role was taken over by Robert Alan Beuth and the character renamed "Mueller".
- Lynne Marie Stewart as a character variously referred to as "Audience Member", "Lady in Audience", and so forth along those lines. As her name indicates, she was part of the studio audience in almost all episodes and often asked inane questions of the show's main guests. However, in one second-season episode she was invited onto the panel, where she identified herself as the president of Dietrick's fan club and proceeded to discuss her pen-pal romance with an incarcerated murderer.
- Judy Toll was the female announcer who introduced Dietrick at the beginning of each episode and narrated most of the interstitial bumpers (including the ubiquitous "you can get Dick on the World Wide Web" promos advertising the show's website), and was also on the writing staff.
By default, episodes are listed here in the original order of their production. However — as was the case with many series in first-run syndication — the order in which Night Stand<nowiki>'</nowiki>s distributors actually released them to stations for broadcast could vary due to factors such as ratings maximization, issues of post-production readiness, and so forth. For this reason, the episodes' original airdates given in the right-hand column of the following tables are not in chronological order.