The Caroline Rhea Show

*The Caroline Rhea Show*
The Caroline Rhea Show
Genre	Talk show
Written by	Cathy Ladman; Joe Toplyn
Directed by	Debbie Miller; Caroline Rhea
Presented by	Caroline Rhea
Country of origin	United States
Original language	English
No. of seasons	1
No. of episodes	195
Production
Production locations	NBC Studios; New York, New York
Running time	60 minutes; (with commercials)
Production companies	Travail D'Amour Productions Inc.; Telepictures Productions
Original release
Network	Syndicated
Release	September 2, 2002 –; May 21, 2003

The Caroline Rhea Show is a short-lived American syndicated variety/talk show hosted by actress and comedian Caroline Rhea. It premiered on September 2, 2002 and ran until May 21, 2003. The show was regarded as the successor to The Rosie O'Donnell Show, in that Rhea was hand-picked by Rosie O'Donnell as her replacement and had hosted the last few weeks of Rosie prior to her show launching.

Format

In many ways, The Caroline Rhea Show was similar to its predecessor The Rosie O'Donnell Show and the more successful The Ellen DeGeneres Show; all three programs were daytime talk shows that were run like nighttime talk shows, with monologues and house bands and celebrity (and sometimes non-celebrity) guests.

Unlike with O'Donnell's daytime show where an audience member opened the show, by announcing the day's guests, Chip Zien was the announcer of the show announcing "Live from New York, it's The Caroline Rhea Show! On today's show: [names of guests]...Here's Caroline!" The first five words, "Live from New York, it's," mimicked the opening tagline to Saturday Night Live, produced in the neighboring Studio 8-H. The show's intro song was Neil Diamond's "Sweet Caroline", which the audience often sang along to, particularly in vocalizing the three beats after the song's eponymous line and chanting "so good, so good" in response to "good times never seemed so good".

Production

Like its predecessor, The Caroline Rhea Show was taped in Studio 8-G at NBC's Rockefeller Center Studios in New York City. The show's house band was led by trumpeter Chris Botti. Former David Bowie guitarist and musical collaborator Carlos Alomar was the musical director for this program.

Some stations that aired Rosie also aired Caroline Rhea, but some (like WABC-TV in New York, which gave the former Rosie spot to The Wayne Brady Show) aired the show at an undesirable late-night time slot.

Most television markets which had aired the show replaced it with The Ellen DeGeneres Show, which was offered by the syndicator of both Rhea's and O'Donnell's show, Warner Bros. Television's Telepictures division. (New York station WLNY-TV, which was a secondary carrier of both series, added Ellen while WABC did not; it was instead given to WNBC.)

External links

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