If you're interested in finding out how games that aired live handled the unexpected death of a regular, tune in (or tape) tonight's What's My Line?, airing at 3:30 a.m. Thursday night (or Friday morning, depending on your point of view). As Mark Evanier notes in his blog:
While I've got you here: Thursday morning, GSN should be running the 3/11/56 episode of What's My Line?, which as originally broadcast featured two Mystery Guests -- Dinah Shore and famed clown Emmett Kelly. The segment with Ms. Shore is apparently lost so the episode has awkward continuity and GSN will probably have to pad out the half-hour with ten or eleven commercials for the Rascal Scooter. More significantly, that episode represented Fred Allen's final appearance. He died six days later, on Saturday, March 17. The following night, a rather glum episode of What's My Line? was broadcast, and GSN will presumably run that on Friday morning.
The Emmitt Kelly episode did run last night (he wasn't billed as a Mystery Guest), and the show is so padded that, combined with the fact that I have only 20 minutes left on the tape (I'm in the middle of moving, and all my other blank tapes are in the house), I'm just taping over it to avoid losing anything. Steve Allen (who was hosting The Tonight Show show by that time) sits in.
