Dad steps into the backyard, a child picks up a plastic bat, and somewhere on the other side of the television, viewers brace for impact. Nearly 37 years into America’s Funniest Home Videos, they recognize the setup. Dad’s going to get hit in the nuts. The camera keeps rolling, the family erupts, and another ordinary afternoon becomes television material.
On November 26, the ABC series marks 37 years since its 1989 debut, having outlasted generations of television comedies while turning birthday disasters, runaway pets and spectacular lapses in judgment into a national viewing habit. Now in its 37th season, the program remains on ABC with host Alfonso Ribeiro.
Long before phones made everyone a potential videographer, families hauled out camcorders to record holidays, weddings and children’s first steps. Occasionally, they captured something nobody could have scripted. A cake slipped. A dog intervened. A proud parent demonstrated a skill that apparently required more practice.
Those recordings gave producer Vin Di Bona the material for a television special hosted by Bob Saget on November 26, 1989. By January 14, 1990, America’s Funniest Home Videos had become a regular weekly series.
Saget was already familiar to ABC audiences as Danny Tanner, the widowed father on Full House. On AFV, he supplied comic voices, running commentary and punch lines while Americans supplied the pratfalls. A family’s embarrassing few seconds could reach living rooms across the country, with a cash prize offering some compensation for surrendering its dignity.
Saget’s run continued through 1997. John Fugelsang and Daisy Fuentes followed as co-hosts before Tom Bergeron took over in 2001. Bergeron spent 14 years guiding viewers through the footage before handing the program to Ribeiro in 2015.
Each brought a different delivery to the same unpredictable cast: children, parents, grandparents and animals with little interest in cooperating. The host could prepare his jokes. The family cat had already handled its own timing.
Across its first 36 seasons, AFV evaluated more than 2 million submitted clips, aired more than 800 episodes and awarded more than $18 million in prize money. The show is distributed in more than 103 territories worldwide and remains ABC’s longest-running primetime entertainment program.
Its 37th season premiered September 27. The series airs Sundays from 7 to 8 p.m. Eastern and Pacific time.
During the show’s earliest years, getting a home movie onto national television meant submitting a recording and waiting. Today, phones capture everyday life almost continuously, and an embarrassing moment can circulate before its participants have finished laughing. AFV has continued producing its television hour through that shift, selecting footage and building sequences around the domestic comedy arriving from viewers.
The equipment has improved considerably. Human coordination has been less consistent. Backyard athletes still overestimate their abilities, children still deliver devastatingly honest answers, and dogs still find ways to become the center of events arranged for somebody else.
Much of the comedy unfolds before the mishap itself. Viewers notice the unstable chair, the approaching animal or the father standing within striking distance. Then comes the reaction: stunned silence, an indignant look or laughter so forceful that the person filming loses control of the picture.
Some of that home-video history now belongs to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. Artifacts presented in 2008 included the camcorder used to record the first winning entry, an annotated script and an audience voting machine.
Next month’s anniversary arrives with the show still collecting footage from American households. Children who watched Saget are now old enough to submit videos of their own children. Some have become grandparents. And somewhere, another dad is stepping confidently into the backyard while a member of his family reaches for the camera.