America 2-Night
television series
America 2-Night is the continuation of the talk-show parody series Fernwood 2 Night, broadcast weeknights from April 10 to July 7, 1978. As on Fernwood, Martin Mull portrays host Barth Gimble and Fred Willard appears as sidekick/announcer Jerry Hubbard. Frank De Vol returns as bandleader Happy Kyne.
Premise
After being picked up by the UBS network, Fernwood 2-Night was revamped as America 2-Night and moved from the fictional Fernwood, Ohio, to the fictional "Quad-City" area of Alta Coma, El Tijo, Alta Luna and the City of Merchandise in Southern California. According to Hubbard's announcement at the beginning of every show, Alta Coma was "the unfinished furniture capital of the world!". This new Southern California setting made it more plausible for Hollywood celebrities to appear on the show as themselves. Among the celebrities who appeared as guests were Vincent Price, George Gobel, Carol Burnett, Burt Lancaster, Steve Allen, Milton Berle, Paul Lynde, Rita Moreno, Barbara Feldon, Cindy Williams, Rob Reiner, Carl Reiner, Peter Frampton, Mark Hamill, Gary Coleman, Karen Black, Steve Garvey, Arte Johnson, Sherman Hemsley, Shari Lewis, McLean Stevenson, Billy Crystal, Robert Conrad, Abe Vigoda, Connie Stevens, Anne Murray, Lou Rawls, Tom Waits, Vikki Carr and José Feliciano. In the final episode, Mull and Willard appeared as themselves.
America 2 Night was broadcast on the fictional UBS network, located on the UBS Broadcast Mall, whose logo featured an ear (a spoof of the CBS "Eye" logo) and whose slogan was "We put U before the BS".
In 2001, Martin Mull and Fred Willard reprised their roles of Barth and Jerry in a stage appearance and retrospective at the US Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen, Colorado.
“America 2-Night” enters the record as television series. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what America, 2-Night and television can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“America 2-Night” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, America, 2-Night and television provides the most credible route into that argument.
Attribution, date and provenance are strongest when supported by the original work, a catalogue record and documented transmission. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 10, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4742732. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1978 and 2001.
Later fame can flatten the distinction between original context, subsequent adaptation and institutional collecting history. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Separate the work, its editions or performances, and its later reception. Catalogue records, publication histories and object files often preserve different parts of that story.
- Identifying works and editions
- Tracing reception history
- Finding collection records
The original object or edition, catalogue raisonné, performance record, rights file and holding institution.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “America 2-Night”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow America 2-Night primary sources, America 2-Night archive and America research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
- Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “America 2-Night”?
- How did later circulation or interpretation alter the work’s reception?
- Where is authorship, date or provenance documented?
Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “America 2-Night” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.