* Brady Bunch father Mike Brady’s late wife and Carol Brady’s late husband killed each other in a bar fight.
* Happy Days older brother Chuck Cunningham never made it back from Vietnam.
* JR and JFK were shot by the same assassin.
* “Skipper” Jonas Grumby and Willy Gilligan had a suspicious relationship on Gilligan’s Island: their complete lack of interest in Mary Ann, and their poorly concealed S&M relationship (“Little Buddy,” spankings with the Skipper’s hat, sleeping in hammocks 18-inches apart despite a huge island, etc.)
* Hawaii Five-O was a last minute replacement for the ill-fated Alaska Four-9.
* The donkey at the beginning of Hee Haw was drunk, and the show’s producers faced several lawsuits as a result.
* H. R. Pufnstuf is often mistaken for Watergate conspirator H. R. Haldeman. They are second cousins.
* Ricky Ricardo was a total bastard to his wife.
* Scott Baio is the AntiChrist.
* Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer was originally planned as a heartwarming Christmas tale about Donder’s alcoholic cousin Rudolph entering the Betty Ford Center.
* Despite the popularity of other shows in the series, NBC executives passed on the spinoff Law and Order: Foot Fetish Unit.
* The “dirtiest” line ever uttered on broadcast television occurred in 1960, when Barbara Billingsley explained to Hugh Beaumont, “Ward, I think you were a little hard on the Beaver last night.”
* Julie London’s character Dixie McCall on the inexplicably popular drama Emergency! was originally named Dixie Wrecht, but producers caught the mistake before production began.
* 50 migrant workers were killed assembling the set for Match Game ’73.
* All of The Waltons family was either dead or in prison by 1950.
* Like NASA’s Apollo program in the 1960s, it would be much, much more expensive to produce Star Trek (the original series) now than it was at the time. For instance, scientists and economists estimate it would cost approximately $2,000,000,000,000 to manufacture a time machine to bring the dead actors back to life.
* Happy Days was originally set in the Warsaw ghetto in 1942, until it dawned on producers that those weren’t very happy days.
* Lavern and Shirley was initially Mork and Shirley, but studio execs felt that viewers would see Mork as a drunk idiot who worked at the Shotz brewery instead of a lovable alien, so two different shows were produced.