The Full Story of Remote Control

A music channel that refused to do anything but music videos locked a group of people with zero game-show experience inside a Manhattan hotel and told them to invent one. They built the set to look like the basement none of them could throw away, sourced the recliners from used-furniture shops on the Lower East Side, and ejected losing contestants by yanking their chairs backward through the wall. Two of the guys they hired to ask silly questions were an unknown NYU student named Adam Sandler and a stage actor named Denis Leary.

Remote Control was MTV's first original non-music show and first game show, a pop-culture trivia parody created by Joe Davola and Michael Dugan. It premiered December 7, 1987, ran five seasons through December 13, 1990, and was hosted by Ken Ober with Colin Quinn as announcer. Made cheaply, set in a fake suburban basement, and modeled on the efficiency of Nickelodeon's Double Dare, it launched the careers of Adam Sandler and Denis Leary and turned its production team into future leaders of MTV, Comedy Central, and Freeform.

MTV had a problem: people kept changing the channel

By the mid-1980s MTV was a hit with a structural flaw. Music videos ran three or four minutes, and if a viewer did not like the song, they flipped away. "We needed to build longer engagement to keep people around longer so that they didn't switch the channel," executive producer Doug Herzog told the A.V. Club for its 2021 oral history. The fix came straight from the top. Herzog recalls CEO Bob Pittman gathering the team and announcing a slate: "We're going to do three shows. We're going to do a news show, we're going to do a dance show, and we're going to do a game show."

The game show was chosen partly because the math already worked somewhere else on cable. "One of the reasons they landed on the game show was Nickelodeon, which was also in its infancy, was doing game shows," Herzog said. "They had done Double Dare, which was a big hit for them. So the network understood you could make 65 of them pretty cheaply." Director Dana Calderwood, who came over from Double Dare, put the logic bluntly: "with almost every new cable network, at some point one of their early shows is a game show, and it's all about money. You can mass-produce them. Let's go with the cheapest thing possible." Inside MTV, run largely by radio and record people, a non-music show was a fight. Herzog called it "highly controversial, both internally and externally."

The Hilton, and a room full of amateurs

Herzog, Davola, and Dugan pulled a small group from around MTV and sequestered them inside a Manhattan Hilton to invent the show. Their biggest asset was that none of them knew how a game show was supposed to work. "One great thing about the brainstorming session is that no one had game show experience," senior writer Sue Flinker said. "Nobody forced us to look at old models. We could just do whatever we wanted. That's the one thing about MTV: You could never go too far." According to Herzog, "The basic idea for the show was created in that room on that day."

The idea was trivia, but not about music. It was about the television everyone in the room had absorbed growing up. "We were able to span a couple of generations because we watched the same shows while we were growing up," co-creator Joe Davola said. "Brady Bunch, Green Acres, all those shows are on a loop. That's when you're really picking up the minutiae, and that's why we can go really deep on some of these questions." The game board treated each subject as its own TV channel, a joke that ran slightly ahead of reality. "Every subject was a channel, which was ahead of where cable TV was at that point," Herzog said. "This was 1986 or 1987. There was no cooking channel and there was no Travel Channel and there was no dog channel."

The basement, the recliners, and the wall

The show's look was a shared memory rendered in set dressing: the suburban basement, address given as 72 Whooping Cough Lane, where the family stored the previous decade. "Mike [Dugan] and I talked about the basements in our houses, because when you grow up in the '60s and '70s," co-creator Joe Davola said, everything left over from the '50s and '60s ends up down there. That is why the set had a washer, a dryer, and three Barcaloungers.

Finding the chairs was its own small saga. "The Barcalounger knockoff Naugahyde recliners were actually kind of hard to find in Manhattan," said season-one set designer Byron Taylor. "We had to go all the way down to the Lower East Side to some used furniture places to find three that were vaguely the same. And then they were all brown, so we wound up spray-painting them." The recliners fed the show's signature cruelty. Rather than send a losing contestant off with parting gifts, the team ejected them. "You've got to eject them off the stage," Flinker said. In season one, stagehands physically pulled each Barcalounger backward through a hole in the wall; later seasons upgraded to chairs that flipped and spun.

The grand-prize round was pure late-night-TV nostalgia. Michael Shore, pulled in from MTV News, pitched strapping the winner to a Craftmatic adjustable bed in front of nine televisions. "The idea of the final round was an outgrowth of the idea of lying in your bed when you're ready to pass out and you might fall asleep with the TV on," Shore said. "This is the generation that grew up falling asleep with the TV on." To figure out whether it worked, Davola prototyped it by dragging every TV set he could find at MTV into a hallway, playing clips on all of them, and having people switch them off one at a time.

Making the chaos work as a game

The one thing the amateurs could not wing was fairness. MTV brought in game-show consultant Howard Blumenthal and leaned on Double Dare's Calderwood to turn the zaniness into a game that actually held up. Producer Lauren Corrao described the tightrope. "There was a delicate balance of trying to figure out what that show was between how much comedy versus how much game, because it actually had to work as a game show," she said. The team learned that the parody only landed if the competition underneath it was real. "You had to be able to play along, that people would actually care if it was fair or not."

Kenny, and the comedians in the basement

The host had to belong in that basement without taking it over. Ken Ober did. "[When Ken Ober] came in, it was natural," Herzog said. "He was incredibly quick-witted. He was super smart, super funny." The counterweight was announcer Colin Quinn, whose sarcasm was so raw it nearly ended his run before it started. Quinn has said he almost got fired in the first week over his attitude on the commercial reads. Dugan noted Quinn "still always wanted to host the show."

The show's most durable legacy walked in as freelance question-askers. In later seasons, Denis Leary and, in Leary's words, an unknown quantity, joined as recurring characters in Kenny's Basement, including an NYU student named Adam Sandler doing a bit called "Stud Boy." Head writer Mike Armstrong remembered his first reaction to the pitch: "Adam comes in and he starts describing this character he wants to do called Stud Boy... I'm just standing there beside myself because I don't get it at all." Nobody was doing it for the paycheck. "Everyone made no money, relatively speaking," Leary said. "None, none!"

How the telling has grown over the decades

• 1987 to 1990, the show as it aired. In real time, Remote Control was a cult MTV oddity, not a documented production. The making-of was invisible to viewers; what they saw was the basement, the Barcaloungers, and the wall.
• The alumni years. For decades the show survived mostly through the fame of the people who passed through it. Adam Sandler and Denis Leary became stars, Colin Quinn became a fixture, and the show was remembered in fragments as the place they started. Host Ken Ober's death in 2009 prompted a wave of remembrances that kept the show in circulation.
• 2021, the A.V. Club oral history. The definitive telling arrives late. Marah Eakin assembles 21 producers, writers, cast members, and contestants into a single account, and only then does the full story get told in one place: the Hilton, the basement, the recliners, the Craftmatic bed, and the careers that came out of it.

The honest note on the record is that there is essentially one deep telling. Most of what is known about how Remote Control was made comes from that 2021 oral history rather than from decades of scattered interviews. The people quoted here largely agree with one another, which is its own small warning: this is the makers remembering a beloved job more than thirty years later, and fond memory rounds the edges off. The dates and the credits are firm. The texture is the crew's own affectionate version of events.

The honest bottom line

Remote Control was built to be cheap. It existed because MTV needed to keep viewers from changing the channel and because game shows were the least expensive way to fill a half hour, a lesson the network took directly from Nickelodeon. Strip away the nostalgia and it is a bargain-basement trivia show, literally set in a basement, that ran five seasons on a music channel that did not want to admit it was becoming a television network. What makes it matter is what it proved and who it launched. It showed that MTV could hold an audience with something other than videos, it turned a room of amateurs into the executives who would run cable comedy for the next two decades, and it gave Adam Sandler and Denis Leary a first stage. The chairs were spray-painted and the prizes were cheap. The talent was not.

Sources

• A.V. Club, "Kenny wasn't like the other kids: An oral history of MTV's Remote Control," Marah Eakin, February 23, 2021 (interviews with 21 producers, writers, cast, and contestants, quoted verbatim).
• Wikipedia, "Remote Control (game show)" (premiere and end dates, seasons, network and syndication, creators, host, cast, and studios, cross-checked).

More show stories live at /full-story/. Related: the full story of Double Dare and the man who beat Press Your Luck.

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