Career
McGinley began his career in modeling. After a casting director spotted a picture of him in GQ, he was cast in comedy series Happy Days as Roger Phillips (nephew of the Cunninghams), a role he played from 1980-1984. During the run of Happy Days, he landed a role in the 1982 comedy Young Doctors in Love. After Happy Days ended in 1984, McGinley appeared in Revenge of the Nerds where he played Stanley Gable, the head of the jock-run Alpha Beta fraternity and the primary antagonist of the Lambda Lambda Lambda nerd fraternity; he reprised the role in the third and fourth movies in the "Nerds" franchise, both produced for television. He went on to appear in regular roles in television series including The Love Boat and Dynasty. He then went into the role of Jefferson D'Arcy on Married... with Children from 1991-1997. He had recurring roles on Aaron Sorkin's TV shows Sports Night, as Dana's boyfriend Gordon, and The West Wing as a TV news anchor. From 2003-2006, he played Charley Shanowski on Hope & Faith.
McGinley has been called "the patron saint of shark-jumping" by jumptheshark.com founder Jon Hein. This is a reference to the popular and enduring shows which have featured him in their declining years often to replace a departing regular castmember. Such shows include Happy Days, The Love Boat and Dynasty. Hein writes that this is not a comment "on Ted's fine acting skills" and that "he has a great sense of humor about it, too". In one episode of Married... with Children (a show that stayed on the air for six seasons after McGinley's addition to the cast) McGinley himself spoofed this fact by asking Al "Another picture, captain? I mean, Fonzie? ....Al?". A 2003 issue of People that focused on McGinley's casting on Hope and Faith was titled "Ted McGinley Is Not a Killer", referencing his reputation for causing shows to jump the shark, though his long involvement with Married... with Children suggests otherwise; his contributions may have enabled the series to have a longer and more successful run with many fans preferring him to his predecessor.
More recently, in 2011, McGinley again made fun of his "shark-jumping" abilities in "Mitefall", the final episode of the Batman: The Brave and the Bold animated series on Cartoon Network. In the episode, Bat-Mite (voiced by Paul Reubens) wants the show cancelled to usher in a new, darker Batman TV show. To that end, he starts replacing aspects of the show, including switching out Aquaman's regular voice actor (John DiMaggio) with McGinley. Ambush Bug (voiced by McGinley's Happy Days co-star Henry Winkler) helps to reverse the situation, in part by getting McGinley to break character (and mention his 6-year stint on Married... with Children) and leave, forcing DiMaggio's voice back into Aquaman.
In 2008, McGinley became a contestant on the seventh season of Dancing with the Stars, and was paired with pro dancer Inna Brayer. Ted was the second to be eliminated in the competition.
Read more about this topic: Ted McGinley
Famous quotes containing the word career:
“It is a great many years since at the outset of my career I had to think seriously what life had to offer that was worth having. I came to the conclusion that the chief good for me was freedom to learn, think, and say what I pleased, when I pleased. I have acted on that conviction... and though strongly, and perhaps wisely, warned that I should probably come to grief, I am entirely satisfied with the results of the line of action I have adopted.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“Whether lawyer, politician or executive, the American who knows what’s good for his career seeks an institutional rather than an individual identity. He becomes the man from NBC or IBM. The institutional imprint furnishes him with pension, meaning, proofs of existence. A man without a company name is a man without a country.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
““Never hug and kiss your children! Mother love may make your children’s infancy unhappy and prevent them from pursuing a career or getting married!” That’s total hogwash, of course. But it shows on extreme example of what state-of-the-art “scientific” parenting was supposed to be in early twentieth-century America. After all, that was the heyday of efficiency experts, time-and-motion studies, and the like.”
—Lawrence Kutner (20th century)