The Chuck Woolery Show

Each episode of The Chuck Woolery Show opened with a sequence involving Woolery meandering his way through Hollywood on a skateboard while dodging people and performing tricks. The sequence would end at the studio, where he would roll inside just as the studio door was closing. (In reality, all the physical skating was done by a stunt double.)

The Chuck Woolery Show, like some other shows of the day, was a celebrity-driven show. Each episode featured four celebrities, and Woolery would spend several minutes talking with each one individually. The set did not feature a desk like most talk shows featuring celebrities did. Instead the show employed a setup that was similar to one used on The Arsenio Hall Show, which saw Woolery conduct the interviews while sitting on a couch while the celebrities sat across from him on a second couch.

The show would sometimes feature a studio audience member ask questions to each of the four guests for a particular day.[1]

An in-studio band was also employed to play the show's theme as well as lead into and out of commercial breaks.

The Chuck Woolery Show was one of several talk shows to premiere as part of the 1991–92 television season, joining The Jenny Jones Show, The Maury Povich Show, The Montel Williams Show, and The Jerry Springer Show. It was also the only one of those programs that did not make it past that season, as all of the others managed runs of over ten years and Povich's program still airs as of 2020.

The show was originally going to be distributed by Orion Television, with Group W handling advertising sales. Many NBC affiliates, where audiences were already familiar with Woolery due to his hosting of the game show Scrabble on the network, signed on as did the stations that were owned by Westinghouse and Viacom. WCBS-TV and WMAQ-TV were among the network owned-and-operated stations that chose to pick it up as well.[2]

Despite the clearances, trouble plagued the production from the start. Original producer Orion Television was in financial difficulty when The Chuck Woolery Show was being developed and in early 1991 ceased all production activity. Group W stepped in to serve as distributor and producer, but several stations dropped the series. It also never aired in some markets due to lack of interest.

The initial ratings were also low and continued to stay as such. It was also claimed that executive producer Eric Lieber was particularly hostile to station managers who were carrying the show, and it was said that in at least one case (in fact, its biggest case in WCBS) an argument between Lieber and a station executive resulted in Woolery being removed from the station's morning lineup and placed in a post-midnight timeslot. Whatever the reasons were, The Chuck Woolery Show never caught on with audiences and the show was not renewed beyond the initial thirteen weeks of episodes.

Woolery would continue to host Love Connection during and after production of his talk show.