Television
Doing comedy on early television, he appeared on The Saturday Night Revue (1953–54), Tonight (1955) and NBC Comedy Hour (1956). He was a series regular as Mr. Romero on the Eve Arden sitcom Our Miss Brooks and also appeared in CBS's I Love Lucy and other 1950s comedies, having moving into directing at the end of that decade. He directed The Real McCoys, the Walter Brennan sitcom which was created and produced by Irving Pincus and aired on ABC and CBS from 1957 to 1963. Later, Averback shared directing duties with Richard Crenna on The Real McCoys. Crenna had also been a cast member with Averback on Our Miss Brooks.
Averback also directed for The Dick Powell Show (1961–63), The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (1964–68), The Flying Nun (1967–70), Columbo (1971), McCloud (1971), M*A*S*H (1972), Quark (1978), Matt Houston (1982–83), The Four Seasons (1984) and the miniseries Pearl (1978). For CBS, he produced Mrs. G. Goes to College (aka The Gertrude Berg Show) in the 1961-1962 season.
He co-produced the popular 1960s sitcom F Troop and supplied the voice over the loudspeaker heard on the television series M*A*S*H.
An often quoted live radio blooper in the early days was that a tongue-tied announcer tried to introduce him on a show sponsored by Eversharp razor blades. What came out was, "And here's Hy Aversharp for Everback! -- er, I mean, here's Hy Averback for Eversharp!"
Read more about this topic: Hy Averback
Famous quotes containing the word television:
“Laughter on American television has taken the place of the chorus in Greek tragedy.... In other countries, the business of laughing is left to the viewers. Here, their laughter is put on the screen, integrated into the show. It is the screen that is laughing and having a good time. You are simply left alone with your consternation.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)
“The television screen, so unlike the movie screen, sharply reduced human beings, revealed them as small, trivial, flat, in two banal dimensions, drained of color. Wasn’t there something reassuring about it!—that human beings were in fact merely images of a kind registered in one another’s eyes and brains, phenomena composed of microscopic flickering dots like atoms. They were atoms—nothing more. A quick switch of the dial and they disappeared and who could lament the loss?”
—Joyce Carol Oates (b. 1938)
“Television ... helps blur the distinction between framed and unframed reality. Whereas going to the movies necessarily entails leaving one’s ordinary surroundings, soap operas are in fact spatially inseparable from the rest of one’s life. In homes where television is on most of the time, they are also temporally integrated into one’s “real” life and, unlike the experience of going out in the evening to see a show, may not even interrupt its regular flow.”
—Eviatar Zerubavel, U.S. sociologist, educator. The Fine Line: Making Distinctions in Everyday Life, ch. 5, University of Chicago Press (1991)