The annual 20-hour Labor Day Jerry Lewis telethon to raise money for the Muscular Dystrophy, a fixture of American life for forty five years, is dead.
After the second year in a row in which Jerry and his surviving pals failed to top last year's total, the monumental annual television event is being downsized, slashed and shortened to a six hour prime time show.
MDA spokesman Jim Brown announced the end of the era, saying that the MDA hopes that giving the telethon a more focused broadcast window, will get bigger and better stars to appear.
The 2011 event is scheduled for Sunday, Sept. 4, and will reportedly air from 6 p.m. to midnight in each time zone, with only stations in the Eastern time zone carrying it live.
The MDA collected $58.9 million to fund research through last month's 2010 telethon.
Jerry Lewis is 84.
This is truly the end of an era. I've been sensing strongly since last August that the 2010 Telethon would be Jerry Lewis' last as host. After all, Lewis is 84 years old and isn't in the best of health.
ReplyDeleteAll of Lewis' big-name contemporaries in show business have passed on. When Ed McMahon died in 2009, his absence was so keenly felt on the 2010 telethon that it was as if the air had been let out of the balloon.
Although no one dared to say it out loud, it had to have been on the minds of everyone who watched the 2010 MDA Telethon that after 45 years, an era in American television was coming to an end and that the time is inexorably approaching when the Muscular Dystrophy Association will have to carry on without Lewis, who, at 84, doesn't have much time left before he, too, passes away.
The big question is who will step in to fill Jerry Lewis' shoes when he eventually departs from the scene? the answer to that question will go a long way to determining the MDA's future.
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