{"id":8806,"date":"2016-12-14T15:09:21","date_gmt":"2016-12-14T15:09:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/?p=8806"},"modified":"2016-12-31T15:42:27","modified_gmt":"2016-12-31T15:42:27","slug":"how-alan-thicke-turned-failure-into-success","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/?p=8806","title":{"rendered":"How Alan Thicke turned failure into success"},"content":{"rendered":"

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By Ray Bennett<\/p>\n

Canadian writer and performer Alan Thicke, who died on Tuesday aged 69, was one of the good guys. He found lasting fame on the Eighties sitcom \u201cGrowing Pains\u201d but he was multi-faceted and he had to overcome one of the most public failures in TV history.<\/p>\n

As he told me once, \u201cnothing succeeds in Hollywood like failure, as long as you fail big.\u201d<\/p>\n

A popular daytime talk-show host on Canadian TV as well as a busy writer and producer, Thicke was hired by former network wunderkind Fred Silverman to front a U.S. late-night talk-show that aimed to challenge Johnny Carson.<\/p>\n

Silverman touted \u201cThicke of the Night\u201d so enthusiastically that by the time it launched in syndication via MGM Television in September 1983, it was too hot not to cool down. Fast. With regulars such as Richard Belzer, Arsenio Hall and Gilbert Gottfried, it featured new acts including the TV debut of the Red Hot Chili Peppers and it was an entertaining program.<\/p>\n

The problem was that it was in syndication. Carson was never threatened and without a strong network lead-in ratings faltered. Stations across the county began to bale and it was cancelled after one season.<\/p>\n

\"alan-thicke-young-x325\"<\/a>I met Thicke\u00a0first in February 1984 on the set of \u201cWinter Carnival in Quebec\u201d, a TV special starring Anne Murray, for whom he was a regular writer. Even in the freezing cold of a Quebec City winter, Thicke was warm and friendly despite the turmoil of his career.<\/p>\n

Almost two years later, I interviewed him in Los Angeles for a cover story in TV Guide Canada and he was as candid as always.<\/p>\n

It ran just before Christmas and a few days into the new year, I received an unpretentious card from him that read:<\/p>\n

\u201cMany thanks for the upbeat, encouraging tone of your TV Guide piece. My grandmother was very proud. (She worries when she reads the vicious and\/or depressing stuff.) Your story was a happy ending to an otherwise difficult \u201985. All the best to both of us in the New Year! sincerely, Alan Thicke<\/p>\n

P.S. Sorry for the non-Gucci stationery but I got it in Kirkland Lake where the choices are limited!<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s my TV Guide story from Dec. 27, 1985.<\/p>\n

CHRISTMAS COMES EARLY FOR ALAN THICKE<\/p>\n

By Ray Bennett
\nThen<\/strong>: Alan Thicke stood on a barren soundstage in the ashes of the much ballyhooed but now cancelled \u201cThick of the Night\u201d talk show, the syndicated series that was hyped to knock \u201cThe Tonight Show\u201d off its heralded thronw.
\nTaping of the final show was complete and the bandstand was being dismantled. Thicke\u2019s youngest son, Robin, now 8, looked up at his father. \u201cWell, Dad, did we beat Johnny Carson?\u201d
\nThicke sighed. \u201cNo, son, I\u2019m afraid we didn\u2019t.\u201d Brennan, his older brother, now 10, said glumly, \u201cYou know, maybe we should have stayed in Vancouver.\u201d
\nNow<\/strong>: It smelled and sounded like Christmas. The door opened to the unpretentious neighborhood dwelling not far from the San Diego freeway in what Hollywood disdainfully calls \u201cthe Valley\u201d.
\nFrom the doorway, the dinner table was visible where Thicke and his sons were munching on chicken. The chatter was about homework and what TV viewing was to be allowed that night.<\/p>\n

\"growing-pains-x650\"<\/a>
\nIt was a routine family evening for the Thicke family but Christmas was in the air because \u201cGrowing Pains\u201d (ABC and Global), the comedy series that has seen Thicke\u2019s resurrection, was taping its Christmas episode. Not only that, but \u201cGrowing Pains\u201d, despite the dire predictions of many critics before the season began, has turned out to be a resounding hit.
\nThe show, positioned handily between two of ABC\u2019s few hits \u2013 \u201cWho\u2019s the Boss?\u201d and \u201cMoonlighting\u201d \u2013 is one of this year\u2019s highest-rated new shows. Christmas came early for Alan Thicke and nobody mentioned Vancouver.
\nThe Kirkland Lake, ON, boy, who became a jack-of-all-trades television writer, producer, compser, host and actor and parlayed success on CTV\u2019s Vancouver-based daytime program \u201cThe Alan Thicke Show\u201d into a shot at full-blown U.S. fame only to to meet with the ultimate pie in the face, is back on his feet.
\n\u201cI don\u2019t say I\u2019m having the last laugh at this point,\u201d Thicke says, \u201cbecause I hope I still have a lot of laughs left, but I was humiliated and embarrassed this past year. In many ways, I\u2019m starting life over.\u201d
\nNot only was Thicke\u2019s trumpeted talk show cancelled, but his 14-year marriage to singer and \u201cDays of Our Lives\u201d soap star Gloria Loring ended. The double-whammy knocked Thicke sideways. \u201cI retreated,\u201d he says. \u201cI locked myself away in my little house and wrote. I didn\u2019t know what else to do. I\u2019m too old to play professional hockey. I went right back to work.\u201d
\n\"alan-thicke-gloria-loring-x325\"<\/a>Loring (with Thicke, left) had the long hours of \u201cDays of Our Lives\u201d to concentrate on while Thicke set about finding work. While readying the small Valley house that had been his company office for himself and the boys to move into, Thicke spurned Hollywood society and retreated at night to the luxury Thicke\/Loring home before it was sold in the aftermath of divorce. His friends called him \u201cThe monk of Brentwood\u201d.
\nIn the process, Thicke made two important discoveries. One was that he found out who his true friends were. He says pals such as hockey star Wayne Gretzky, record producer David Foster and singer Anne Murray never wavered. The other was that nothing succeeds in Hollywood like failure, as long as you fail big.
\n\u201c\u2018Thicke of the Night\u2019 was an unproducible, unmanageable experiment,\u201d he says. \u201cI don\u2019t think you\u2019ll see anything like it tried for a while.\u201d
\nWhich, for him, is a shame. He loved the variety his career allowed him: \u201cI\u2019ve always referred to myself as a kind of minimalist, a master of B-talent, a sort of renaissance fast-food artist. I would have been perfectly happy to just float through life indulging in all the things that I enjoyed. That was the fun of my life and work.\u201d
\nInstead, he had to stop spreading himself thin and focus on one thing. He wrote three series pilots, each of which is now in development at different Hollywood studios, and then settled on acting. ABC offered him three different shows before \u201cGrowing Pains\u201d. The producers had seen and tested more than 100 actors the show before Thicke\u2019s name came up.
\n\u201cIt was not a vehicle created for me. Nobody handed it to me,\u201d Thicke says. \u201cI’m proud to say I studied the script and developed an approach to it. I went in and read for it and earned it.\u201d
\nWhat the show\u2019s creator and co-producer Neal Marlens liked about him was his accessibility as an actor and the fact that Thicke is an active parent. Marlens based \u201cGrowing Pains\u201d on his own childhood memories. His mother is a psychologist and his father a newspaper reporter and editor. On the show, Thicke plays psychiatrist Jason Seaver with Joanna Kerns as his reporter wife Maggie. She has returned to work and Jason has moved his practice home to take of their three children.
\nMarlens says he wasn\u2019t concerned about the failure of \u201cThicke of the Night\u201d: \u201cThe public is much more forgiving than you might think. They\u2019re willing to take each new work in its own light.\u201d
\nWhen the show\u2019s announcement brought forth derisive speculation from critics, Marlens says it merely strengthened everyone\u2019s resolve. But when the show proved a hit, he says, \u201cyou could see Alan relax\u201d.
\nCo-star Joanna Kerns, whose first regular series was \u201cThe Four Seasons\u201d, says that Thicke warned her of the possible critical reaction. \u201cHe was wonderful,\u201d she says. \u201cHe took me aside and said, \u2018I want you to be prepared. There are people out there who don\u2019t like me.\u2019 When we went on and saw the numbers, there was a big sigh of relief from all of us.\u201d
\nEveryone on the show acknowledges that it was Bill Cosby who showed that family comedies were still in demand but Thicke denies that \u201cPains\u201d is a Cosby show clone: \u201cYou could say \u2018Cosby\u2019 was a clone of \u2018Father Knows Best\u2019 or \u2018Ozzie and Harriet\u2019; these are all simple family situation comedies and we are one more family on the block.\u201d
\nHe feels close to the role because he takes fatherhood very seriously: \u201cThe one thing I was never negligent in was the raising of the children and the time I spent with them. I parent on the buddy system, which is liberal and trusting, and in another 10 years we\u2019ll know whether that worked or not, if they\u2019re still out of jail.\u201d
\nThicke says that he and Loring woke up one day and realized that with all their business interests they were communicating through secretaries: \u201cWe got so busy with our successes that we lost time with each other. You kind of shrug and say, \u2018Gee, you and I haven\u2019t been doing the same things for a while.\u2019 It\u2019s sad.\u201d
\nThicke knows what sad is. Son Brennan has juvenile diabetes, which is one reason Thicke and Loring work so hard with the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation: \u201cWhen you live through that and the changes in your life and your dreams and goals for your child are compromised by a chronic disease, things can come and go and you learn to live with them.\u201d
\nAnd so, in spite of the divorce, the Thicke family Christmas tradition carries on this year. The boys spend Christmas Eve with their dad, Christmas Day with their mother, and then it\u2019s off to Canada. \u201cNo matter where we\u2019ve lived,\u201d Thicke says, \u201cChristmas has always meant Kirkland Lake with my grandparents.\u201d
\nThere, Thicke will reflect on his own growing pains: \u201cThere have been some hard lessons learned but there are some great opportunities in prospect and friends and family in support. We\u2019ll just hope that there\u2019s no looking back now.\u201d<\/p>\n

Photo of Alan Thicke and Gloria Loring: Getty Images<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Ray Bennett Canadian writer and performer Alan Thicke, who died on Tuesday aged 69, was one of the good guys. He found lasting fame on the Eighties sitcom \u201cGrowing Pains\u201d but he was multi-faceted and he had to overcome … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,1263,15],"tags":[4482,4483,4149,4141,4484,4481],"class_list":["post-8806","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-interviews","category-memory-lane","category-television","tag-growing-pains","tag-thicke-of-the-night","tag-alan-thicke","tag-anne-murray","tag-fred-silverman","tag-gloria-loring"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8806","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8806"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8806\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8825,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8806\/revisions\/8825"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8806"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8806"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8806"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}