Your Show of Shows
Your Show of Shows is a live 90-minute variety show that was broadcast weekly in the United States on NBC from February 25, 1950, through June 5, 1954, featuring Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca. Other featured performers were Carl Reiner, Howard Morris, Bill Hayes, baritone singer Jack Russell, Judy Johnson, the Hamilton Trio and the soprano Marguerite Piazza. José Ferrer made several guest appearances on the series.
For the 1929 movie, see The Show of Shows.Your Show of Shows
Nat Hiken
Max Liebman
Charles Sanford (music)
Ed Herlihy (announcer)
Mel Tolkin
Clay Warnick
Max Liebman
"Stars Over Broadway"
United States
English
4
139
Max Liebman
90 minutes
Max Liebman Productions
February 25, 1950 –
June 5, 1954
The show has been featured in several lists of the greatest television series. Most of the series has been preserved to some extent, but only some sketches have been released on home video.
Preservation[edit]
The kinescopes of the series were retained by Max Liebman; from those shows, a 1973 theatrical film titled Ten from Your Show of Shows was compiled which featured ten sketches. In 1976, this was followed by a half-hour syndicated series.
The Paley Center for Media in Manhattan and Beverly Hills, California, holds an almost complete set of the series, and a set of master tapes of the 1976 syndicated series.
In 2000, a cache of original scripts from the show were found in a closet of producer Max Liebman, in the City Center building in New York City. The find made the front page of The New York Times. A former employee of Liebman, Barry Jacobsen, told The New York Times he had left the scripts in the closet and was holding onto the key, planning to come back and retrieve them once City Center decided what to do with the papers; he was never contacted by City Center, and the scripts stayed in the closet until being found in 2000.[19]
After the program ended the Caesar-Coca team was effectively split into two successor programs the following season: Imogene Coca starred in The Imogene Coca Show (which lasted one season), and Sid Caesar starred in Caesar's Hour, which retained much of the cast and staff of Your Show of Shows.
Syndication and DVD release[edit]
Reruns of the 1976 syndicated "best of" series were aired on Comedy Central during the early 1990s. Skits from the series which are from Sid Caesar's personal collection are available on The Sid Caesar Collection DVD set.