The Super (TV series)

• Richard S. Castellano....Joe Girelli
• Ardell Sheridan....Francesca Girelli
• Margaret Castellano....Joanne Girelli
• Bruno Kirby....Anthony Girelli
• Phil Mishkin....Frankie Girelli
• Ed Peck....Officer Clark
• Virginia Vincent....Dottie Clark
• Janet Brandt....Mrs. Stein
• Louis Basile....Louis

Joe Girelli, the Italian-American superintendent (or "super") of an apartment building in a lower-middle-class section of New York City, is a big man (260 pounds; 118 kg) who prefers to be left alone so that he can drink beer while watching television. However, he rarely gets left alone. His family – wife Francesca, daughter Joanne, son Anthony, and brother Frankie, a big-shot lawyer – continually bothers him, the building's tenants are constantly banging on the pipes and complaining about him and one another, and city officials always are trying to condemn his building. His children are disrespectful toward him, and an endless series of ethnic and cultural disputes break out among the tenants, which include political revolutionaries, homosexuals, social workers, and police officers, and Italian Americans, Irish Americans, Polish Americans, Jewish Americans, African Americans, and Puerto Ricans.[1][3][4]

After CBS's All in the Family debuted in 1971, both NBC and ABC tried to emulate its success with situation comedies similarly centered on blue-collar families. NBC's show, Sanford and Son, premiered in January 1972 and became a major hit.[4] For ABC, meanwhile, Rob Reiner, Phil Mishkin, and Gerry Isenberg created The Super, which premiered in June 1972.[3] Reiner and Mishkin wrote the show's first episode.[2]

Mishkin appeared in The Super as Frankie Girelli, while Richard Castellano's real-life daughter Margaret played Joe Girelli's daughter Joanne.[1][2][3] Coincidentally, Richard Castellano and Bruno Kirby, who played Joe Girelli's son Anthony in The Super, both portrayed Pete Clemenza in the Godfather movies, Castellano in The Godfather in 1972 and Kirby as Clemenza as a younger man in The Godfather Part II in 1974.

The Super aired on ABC at 8:00 p.m. Eastern Time on Wednesday throughout its brief run.[1][3] It never gained the audience that All in the Family and Sanford and Son did, and was cancelled after only 10 episodes had aired;[4] its eleventh and twelfth episodes, preempted by television coverage of the 1972 Summer Olympic Games on August 30 and September 6, 1972, respectively, were never broadcast.[2]