Open All Night

This show had a very, very, very short run on ABC; I’ve posted the title song before (which is sort of famous even though the show isn’t). It was the first show created by the team of Tom Patchett and Jay Tarses after they left MTM productions, where they had produced The Bob Newhart Show and created The Tony Randall Show. (I think it was also one of the first shows, if not the first, where Patchett and Tarses’s powerful manager, Bernie Brillstein, gave himself an executive producer credit, paving the way for zillions of similar credits for Hollywood agents on TV shows.) It was similar to the British show Open All Hours, which was also about a guy who runs an all-night supermarket, but it was never formally credited as a remake, and I think this is one of those cases where the producers used a similar idea but changed enough things that they didn’t actually have to bill it as a remake.

You know my love of theme songs that explain the premise — a lost art, at least for the moment. (Networks don’t have time to do them, and HBO and Showtime, which do have room for longer title sequences, don’t want to do that kind of theme song, even for comedies.) But I was wondering which of these theme songs contains the greatest amount of exposition. That is, who gets the most information into the lyrics of a one-minute song?