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Back in the day, many television notables tried to parlay their small-screen popularity into a movie career. In today’s showbiz world, actors move from TV to film to theatre with no harm. However, it was once considered beneath a “movie star” to appear on “the tube” for fear it would jeopardize their film work. Cinema was prestigious, television was inferior (That has certainly changed).
What got me thinking about the movie trajectory of TV stars was Jon Hamm. Hamm has just come off the very successful first season of Apple TV’s Your Friends and Neighbors after having had wild success as Don Draper on the AMC show Mad Men nearly 20 (!) years earlier. He, too, has dabbled in films with mixed results. Hamm was in the 2008 remake of the ’50s sci-fi classic The Day the Earth Stood Still, as well as 2010’s The Town, a first-rate caper movie directed by Ben Affleck. Baby Driver, an action-filled 2017 thriller, was similarly successful. There were more films after that, but no big blockbusters.
Since then, he has had more success back in TV land. He did a very funny stint on 30 Rock, playing a handsome but clueless doctor. He played a tech billionaire on Season Three of The Morning Show with Reese Witherspoon and Jennifer Aniston, and Jon gave a knockout performance on the Fifth Season of Fargo as a corrupt sheriff. It seems TV is where he really excels. Or maybe the parts are just better there these days.
Speaking of Jennifer Aniston, she also dabbled with the silver screen with mixed results. The Friends star’s first film role was before that show, in the low-budget horror movie Leprechaun (1992). After that she did the romantic comedy/drama Dream for an Insomniac (1996), and gained some traction with writer/director Ed Burns’ She’s The One (1996), another seriocomedy, which also featured Cameron Diaz. Jennifer stayed in this genre lane with Picture Perfect (1997), ‘Til There Was You (1997), and The Object of My Affection (1998) with Paul Rudd. And she had better results with the Mike Judge cult comedy Office Space (1999) and The Good Girl (2002).
Aniston got to display more of her acting chops later in Friends with Money (2006). Horrible Bosses (2011) allowed her to be horrible to some big laughs and led to a sequel. She is now back on Apple TV in The Morning Show, set behind the scenes of a cable network’s AM info-tainment program. The show is ludicrous sometimes, but very entertaining.
Ted Danson (Cheers, Becker, The Good Place), meanwhile, has been much more successful on TV than in movies, his co-starring role in Three Men and a Baby notwithstanding. Ditto his former barmate/love interest, Shelley Long. Her most successful post-Cheers film may well be, ironically enough, a TV adaptation, 1995’s The Brady Bunch Movie.
Farrah Fawcett tried to conquer the cinema world when she left the ’70s TV mega-hit Charlie’s Angels, choosing as her first starring role the poorly received 1978 murder mystery Somebody Killed Her Husband, with Jeff Bridges. She was back in theaters the following year with Sunburn, co-starring Charles Grodin and Joan Collins, which fared a little better. The pin-up favorite did much better, though, when she returned to the small screen in a series of TV movies that showed she was more than a jiggle queen with a flashy smile. Murder in Texas (1981), The Red-Light Sting (1984), and especially The Burning Bed (1984) proved she could act. Farrah came back to film in the 1986 arthouse favorite Extremities, which she had first performed in Off-Broadway. The movie version earned her both good reviews and a Golden Globe nomination. More telefilms followed, but her movie star aspirations were never fully realized.
After making a big splash on Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, Goldie Hawn made a bigger splash in movies, winning an Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her second film, 1969’s Cactus Flower. Saturday Night Live gave Eddie Murphy a shot that blossomed into a booming screen career. George Clooney (ER), Will Smith (The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air), John Travolta (Welcome Back, Kotter), and Robin Williams (Mork & Mindy) also smoothly made the transition. Bryan Cranston, harried dad Hal on Malcolm in the Middle and drug kingpin Walter White on Breaking Bad, used his acclaimed performance to jump-start a movie career that is thriving. David Caruso (NYPD Blue), though, did not have the same result.
One performer who made the media jump look easy was James Garner, shifting from TV star (Maverick) to movie star (The Great Escape, Support Your Local Sheriff!) in the 1960s. Garner returned to America’s living rooms with the failed western Nichols in the 1971-72 TV season but rebounded playing a private detective in 1974-80’s The Rockford Files. And of course Clint Eastwood was another success story, starring in the TV western Rawhide for eight seasons and parlaying that into a long and illustrious movie career as an actor and director.
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Along with Garner and Nichols, the Fall of 1971 found a mass influx of screen talents who decided to try their luck on TV. The results were, to say the least, disappointing. Glenn Ford (Cade’s County), George Kennedy (Sarge), Shirley MacLaine (Shirley’s World), Anthony Quinn (The Man and the City), James Stewart (The Jimmy Stewart Show), and the duo of Tony Curtis and Roger Moore (The Persuaders) were all shown the door after one season, with only Henry Fonda’s The Smith Family surviving to a second year.
Doris Day was an exception to the rule at this time, finding a home on CBS for five years with her self-titled late ’60s sitcom. Three decades later, though, even the Divine Miss M herself, Bette Midler, couldn’t cut it with her 2000 CBS comedy Bette, which lasted a mere 16 episodes. Truly, going from one entertainment medium to another isn’t for the faint of heart.