Mary Hart: A Daytime TV Career With Legs

Next week, in conjunction with the annual Daytime Emmy Awards, the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences will honor two daytime syndication icons — Mary Hart, former host of Entertainment Tonight, and Harry Friedman, producer of two of the most successful game shows in television history, Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune — will be honored with Lifetime Achievement Awards this year. Friedman will receive his at the 44th Daytime Creative Arts Emmy Awards on Friday, April 28. Hart will be honored on Sunday, April 30, at the 44th Daytime Emmy Awards. Both presentations will take place at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium in Southern California. TVNewsCheck today profiles Hart and tomorrow will highlight Friedman.

Few people can claim to have helped create an entire genre of television show. Mary Hart can.

While she wasn’t a part of a new type of show devoted to entertainment news when Entertainment Tonight premiered on Sept. 14, 1981, the following year distributor Paramount Domestic Television brought her on board to co-host with Ron Hendren.

In its early years, Entertainment Tonight — following a local newscast-style format — consisted primarily of coverage of the latest movies, music and television releases and projects. Stations were wary of the idea of devoting a half-hour every day to this untested format.

As the show’s unofficial ambassador, Hart crisscrossed  the country in ET’s early years and met personally with station managers who, warmed by her charm, kindness, determination and wit, gave the show a chance. They were happy they did. America fell in love with Mary Hart and became obsessed with breaking news about entertainment and celebrities, a topic not covered by local or national news.

“We were the first ones to talk about television ratings and box office grosses over the weekend,” Hart. In those early days it also focused on coverage of the latest music and television shows and projects.

Hart hosted Entertainment Tonight from 1982 to 2011, which is a record number of years hosting a magazine show. A former high school English teacher, she began her full-time television career at KELO in Sioux Falls, S.D. In 1976, she went to KTVY (now KFOR) in Oklahoma City, where she co-hosted a show with Danny Williams called Dannysday.

Determined to leave journalism behind, she moved to Los Angeles in 1979 with $10,000 in the bank. Hart landed a small role on Days of Our Lives. Almost broke, she became a co-host on the Los Angeles version of the syndicated PM Magazine.

That led to a job in 1981 as co-host of Regis Philbin’s first national talk show on NBC. When that show was canceled four months later, Entertainment Tonight interviewed her about what it felt like to be canceled. The day after the interview, she was hired as an ET correspondent. Thirteen weeks later, she was named the show’s co-host, along with Hendren. Robb Weller, John Tesh, Bob Goen and Mark Steines would join her throughout the decades to come.

On Aug. 5, 2010, Hart announced that she was leaving the show at the end of its upcoming 30th season. Hart’s final episode aired on May 20, 2011 — closing out her 29-year history with the program.

In October 2015 Hart returned to the show to celebrate the 35th anniversary of the longest-running entertainment news show, distributed by CBS Television Distribution since 2007. At the time she said: “What gets me today is people under the age of 35 don’t know that ET was alone in this genre and created it, and that every time you see an entertainment news story anywhere today, it’s because we started there.”

During her tenure at the show, Hart said she was born to work at ET : “The very first time somebody put a microphone in front of my face, I knew I wanted to be on the other end of the microphone. And here I am now, doing what I love to do.”

Hart made news herself during her hosting days. First, her manager had her legs insured for $1 million each, generating a lot of press for her and the show. Then, in a 1992 Seinfeld episode, Kramer suffers blackouts that are triggered whenever he hears Hart’s voice anchoring ET, the episode based on a New England Journal of Medicine report that the sound of her voice had triggered seizures in an epileptic woman from New York.

Currently, she is actively involved as a member of the board of trustees of Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. She also serves on the board of trustees for the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the board of directors for the Museum of Tolerance.

In addition to her philanthropic activities, Hart has a recurring role on the Freeform series Baby Daddy, where she plays a comical fictionalized version of herself, who hosts a morning show, Mary — art imitating life as it were.