"Bar Month" at OnMilwaukee.com is back for another round! The whole month of February, we're serving up intoxicatingly fun articles on bars and clubs -- including guides, the latest trends, rapid bar reviews and more. Grab a designated driver and dive in!
Yes, it's even bar month here in the media world, where bars have been a part of TV for almost as long as there's been TV.
We're in something of a golden age of TV bars.
The crew from CBS' "How I Met Your Mother" spends a chunk of nearly every episode at a place called MacLaren's based on a real NYC watering hole called McGee's. Of course, Charlie Sheen's "Two and a Half Men" spends far too much time at his local pick-up bar.
On Fox, both "The Simpsons" and "Family Guy" have friendly taverns where the guys hang out.
On FX, "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia," is set at Paddy's Irish Pub in South Philly.
But TV viewers didn't always have so many choices. In fact, there was a time when bars were seen as low-class -- at least in the world of network television.
Early on, there was "Duffy's Tavern" a long-running radio show, which made an unsuccessful transition to to TV in 1954.
Here's a clip:
"Duffy's Tavern" ran on radio through the 1940s and into the early 1950s, and spawned a big-screen movie. If you're interested in sampling the radio sitcom, here's a site that offers the audio.
Far more successful and long-lasting was Jackie Gleason's "Joe the Bartender" in his portfolio of characters. Here's a sample of his bar-side manner, alongside Frank Fontaine's "Crazy" Guggenheim.
From the 1950s until the 1980s, there was a sense that taverns were low-class. Rob Petrie never stopped in one after work, and Mayberry seemed pretty dry.
Archie Bunker hung out at Kelsey's Bar, and a spin-off of "All in the Family" made him the owner of "Archie Bunker's Place" for four seasons.
But it wasn't until the 1980s that TV bars acquired an air of coolness. "Cheers" premiered in 1982, and moved taverns beyond their blue collar roots, while maintaining the tradition idea of place where "everybody knows your name."
Then came the post-"Cheers" 1990s, when the "Friends" crew gathered in a coffee shop and the "Seinfeld" bunch met in a diner.
But even then, there was Homer Simpson and his favorite watering hole, Moe's. Here's a clip that merges "The Simpsons" with "Goodfellas."
Any other TV taverns out there that are worth remembering (other than the Regal Beagle, Jack Tripper's hangout on "Three's Company")?
Tim Cuprisin is the media columnist for OnMilwaukee.com. He's been a journalist for 30 years, starting in 1979 as a police reporter at the old City News Bureau of Chicago, a legendary wire service that's the reputed source of the journalistic maxim "if your mother says she loves you, check it out." He spent a couple years in the mean streets of his native Chicago, and then moved on to the Green Bay Press-Gazette and USA Today, before coming to the Milwaukee Journal in 1986.
A general assignment reporter, Cuprisin traveled Eastern Europe on several projects, starting with a look at Poland after five years of martial law, and a tour of six countries in the region after the Berlin Wall opened and Communism fell. He spent six weeks traversing the lands of the former Yugoslavia in 1994, linking Milwaukee Serbs, Croats and Bosnians with their war-torn homeland.
In the fall of 1994, a lifetime of serious television viewing earned him a daily column in the Milwaukee Journal (and, later the Journal Sentinel) focusing on TV and radio. For 15 years, he has chronicled the changes rocking broadcasting, both nationally and in Milwaukee, an effort he continues at OnMilwaukee.com.
When he's not watching TV, Cuprisin enjoys tending to his vegetable garden in the backyard of his home in Whitefish Bay, cooking and traveling.
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