I love going down to New York City. Recently, my son Michael and I drove down to spend the day with my daughter Liz and my granddaughter Adeline.  My son-in-law was on a business trip, so it was just the four of us.  It was a rainy day in Manhattan, but not to worry. My daughter always has some tricks up her sleeve.  After a wonderful lunch at the Grand Brasserie in Grand Central Terminal, we walked over to Rockefeller Center.  Liz was able to nab us 4 tickets for the NBC Studio Tour and we were ready!

If you haven’t taken the Tour, I highly recommend it.  It is led by two NBC pages who meet you in the NBC store on the plaza level and take you upstairs to the many studios in the building.

We began with a video history of NBC, which is celebrating 100 years of broadcasting in this year.  I’m pleased to inform you that I am old enough to remember lots of the history of the station, from the 1950s broadcast of the Today Show with Dave Garroway to Jack Paar’s Tonight Show and Howdy Doody.  I also recall The Huntley-Brinkley Report, the news show Mom and Dad watched faithfully each evening after dinner.

After the history lesson, we got to see the set of Jimmy Fallon’s Tonight Show. Jimmy, we were told, brought the show back to New York from Los Angeles, and was given free rein to create the studio he wanted. There are rows of gorgeous red leather chairs for the audience surrounded by detailed, highly acoustic wooden walls.  It is beautiful, but smaller than it seems on air.

We also saw the set of Late Night with Seth Meyers, but the highlight was being able to enter the Saturday Night Live studio and sit in the bleachers. Fun fact: those seats came from the old Yankee Stadium! Again, the set is smaller than you might imagine from seeing it on television, and you definitely get a better view of everything while watching at home.  The band was setting up, and we were able to see how the stage in front of them gets pulled out for the monologue after the Cold Open takes place.  Here’s another bit of fun trivia: the show uses about 80 wigs per episode and to make it easier for the host, he or she comes out wearing a wig that looks exactly like their own hair to do the monologue.  That makes it easier to change wigs during the hectic scene changes.

Finally, our entire tour group of 12 took part in a filming of a mock episode of the  Today Show.  Of course, my family is far from shy, so Mike and Adeline served as hosts of the show, my daughter played a rock star and I interviewed her.  The results were hilarious!  The resulting video gets sent to the participants as a keepsake, and we’ve had lots of laughs watching it.  I would say that the 90-minute tour, while not inexpensive (about $48 per person), is worth it if you have always wanted to go behind the scenes at a television station. We had a blast.