Tuned In

Mary Hart Leaving Entertainment Tonight

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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avOBNaU0fQY]

If there’s one thing that TV, especially long-running syndicated TV, is good at doing, it’s making you feel sentimental and nostalgic for shows that you hardly actually watched. It is in that spirit that I announce, with a touch of actual sadness, that Mary Hart is leaving Entertainment Tonight after 30[!] years.

It’s the end of Hart’s tenure, not the end of the show, but the surprising span of that career—it really has been three decades—confronts us with how much entertainment-news TV has changed. ET launched as a sort of light, generalist People magazine of the air, but we’ve long since into the much more aggressive and snarky era of The Soup and TMZ. In the above clip from 1983, the ET of that era seems positively statesmanlike, mixing reports on Bob Hope, Marilu Henner and… Daniel Schorr on the U.S. invasion of Grenada?

There’s no replacement yet set for Hart, but I wonder if the producers will take this opportunity to update the show’s tone, or keep it running as a happy throwback. [Speaking of throwbacks, points to the first person to ID the classic sitcom we see a split second of at the end of this videotape clip.]