Ivan the Terrible is an American sitcom that aired on CBS for five episodes during 1976.
The short-lived series parodied American attitudes toward the Soviet Union during the height of the Cold War. Set in Moscow, the sitcom starred Lou Jacobi as a Russian hotel waiter named Ivan Petrovsky, and the day-to-day misadventures of Ivan's family and their Cuban exchange student boarder, all of whom live in a cramped, one-bedroom apartment.
Also appearing in this series were Christopher Hewett, Phil Leeds, Alan Cauldwell and, in her TV series debut, Nana Visitor (here billed under her birth name, Nana Tucker). Harvey Korman appeared as a Soviet bureaucrat in an uncredited cameo at the close of each episode.
The executive producer of this series was noted comic Alan King.
Famous quotes containing the word terrible:
“But the mark of American merit in painting, in sculpture, in poetry, in fiction, in eloquence, seems to be a certain grace without grandeur, and itself not new but derivative; a vase of fair outline, but empty,—which whoso sees, may fill with what wit and character is in him, but which does not, like the charged cloud, overflow with terrible beauty, and emit lightnings on all beholders.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)