Joe Flaherty will often continue being dear to comedy followers, many thanks to ‘SCTV’ and ‘Freaks and Geeks’

Nevertheless he labored steadily into the second decade of this century, Joe Flaherty, who died Monday at 82, will be remembered for two series: the Canadian sketch comedy “SCTV,” which sneaked on to American tv by way of late-evening syndication in the late 1970s, and “Freaks and Geeks,” the 1999 NBC comedy that would confirm to be ground zero for American comedy in the 2000s.

Neither ended up vastly profitable in their time — “SCTV,” though it twice received Emmys for composing, shared by Flaherty, was overshadowed by “Saturday Night Dwell,” the other sequence to arise from 2nd Town, and “Freaks and Geeks” lasted only a single, 18-episode period. But both are pricey to the heart of comedy lovers, and the figures Flaherty produced there stay large in my mind, and I hope in yours.

“SCTV,” which purported to symbolize the programming day of a tiny-town station — Melonville was the imaginary local community — was a vehicle for tv, commercial and movie parodies, but it also pulled again to target on the enterprise of the station alone, owned by Flaherty’s Person Caballero. Putting on a white accommodate and a panama hat, seated in a wheelchair of which he had no actual will need, he was Lionel Barrymore Jr. as a low-priced, shady media mogul. It was my preferred late-night sketch comedy, for its globe-building, oddness and otherness and, not incidentally, mainly because it felt like a little something of a top secret, a treasure 1 stumbled upon, alternatively than the greatly promoted, Rolling Stone-authorized, main-community “SNL,” with its A-listing visitor hosts and musicians.

Tall and great on the lookout, Flaherty — American, born in Pittsburgh — was as close to a regular top male as “SCTV” experienced on tap Kirk Douglas, Alan Alda and Gregory Peck were being among the actors he impersonated. (For what it’s well worth, he was more mature, and so marginally far more experienced, than his castmates.) Amid his notable initial people have been Caballero Sammy Maudlin, the overly effusive, overemotional host of a wide range converse demonstrate and most memorably, Depend Floyd, the howling, cackling, disappointed vampiric host of “Monster Chiller Horror Theatre.” (In the globe-within just-a-globe way of the collection, Count Floyd was performed by one more Flaherty character, Floyd Robertson, the upright co-host of “SCTV News” with Eugene Levy’s clownish, annoying Earl Camembert.)

Floyd, whom one associates with the phrase “Oooh, frightening, youngsters!,” even though I just cannot essentially uncover an example of him expressing all those words in that buy, experienced a existence over and above “SCTV” as properly: “Rely Floyd’s Scary Tales” was a stay-motion phase of “SCTV” castmate Martin Short’s 1988 animated sequence, “The Absolutely Psychological Misadventures of Ed Grimley,” even though Canada’s Hurry highlighted him on movie introducing “The Weapon” on their 1984 Grace Less than Stress Tour: “It’s a frightening music, a person of the scariest I have at any time heard!” Flaherty also released an EP as Depend Floyd, in 1982, together with the disco variety “Treat You Like a Lady” and “Reggae Xmas Eve in Transylvania.”

On “Freaks and Geeks,” Flaherty performed Harold Weir, the middle-aged, middle-course father of central people Lindsay (Linda Cardellini) and Sam (John Francis Daley), husband to Becky Ann Baker’s Jean, and a stand-in for creator Paul Feig’s own father. A hardworking gentleman who preferred as minor disruption in his residence as doable — Harold owned a sporting goods retailer, whereas Feig’s father was in components — his children’s conduct frequently challenged his tolerance and knowledge but there had been also scenes of excellent tenderness, all the a lot more highly effective for remaining surprising. (As when he provides significant tips to Jason Segel’s floundering Nick, a momentary home visitor.) Wherever sitcom fathers have tended to be possibly impossibly great or buffoons, Flaherty imbued Harold Weir with comedian dignity, no less dignified for being comedian, nor comedian for getting dignified — an imperfect ideal father. It is a stunning general performance.

“Everybody in this small business, when they are acquiring a display together, they all say, ‘Oh, I want it to be character pushed,’ and no person is capable to do that definitely effectively,to be trustworthy,” Flaherty said when I interviewed him in 2012 for a “Freaks and Geeks” oral history. “But this display genuinely was. It was all about people, and habits, and interactions.”

Flaherty will be remembered far too, for a small but key aspect in a large film franchise. At the climax of the 1989 “Again to the Potential II,” a shadowy figure emerges from a car or truck in the rain to provide a letter to Michael J. Fox’s Marty McFly the affect of that scene for some of us was not, “Doc Brown is in the Old West,” or “There’s one more a single of these movies coming,” but “Hey, it is Joe Flaherty!” (The document shows that he manufactured an impact as a heckler in Adam Sandler’s 1996 “Happy Gilmore,” but that is a movie I have nonetheless to see.) If he in no way obtained the big-display stardom that arrived to “SCTV” castmates like Small, John Sweet, Andrea Martin and Rick Moranis, or the late-occupation renaissance that “Schitt’s Creek” brought Levy and Catherine O’Hara — Flaherty was in his late 50s when “Freaks and Geeks” came calling 25 many years back — that may have simply just been the destiny of a functional frequent dude who could vanish into a element.

Nonetheless, he leaves a significant legacy.

“I’ll go to YouTube and glance at the scenes and I’ll go, ‘That’s great, we did perfectly there,’” Flaherty instructed me about “Freaks and Geeks.” “And I had that emotion with ‘SCTV’ when we all collected about as a solid and we watched the clearly show, I remember imagining, ‘Damn, that was very good, I would enjoy that clearly show.’ Very same detail when we watched ‘Freaks and Geeks’ as a forged, gathered round, I believed ‘Damn, that was fantastic!’”