Ah, telephemera… those shows whose stay with us was tantalisingly brief, snatched away before their time, and sometimes with good cause. They hit the schedules alongside established shows, hoping for a long run, but it’s not always to be, and for every Street Hawk there’s two Manimals. But here at STARBURST we celebrate their existence and mourn their departure, drilling down into the new season’s entertainment with equal opportunities square eyes… these are The Telephemera Years!
1988-89
It was tough time for anything that wasn’t a sitcom in the 1988-89 ratings, with thirty-minute yuckfests filling nine of the top eleven spots, several of them newcomers gatecrashing a party that had been going on for a number of years since the mid-1980s action show slump. Although his terrible sweaters are now far from the worse thing about him, Bill Cosby and his family ruled the roost, although fresh competition from the more blue-collar Roseanne was ready to push it close for the number one slot. The Cosby Show was one of six NBC sitcoms in that top eleven, the rest of the slots filled by Roseanne’s ABC compadres Who’s the Boss? and Anything But Love, with CBS supplying the only non-comedy shows in the list, the ever-dependable 60 Minutes and Murder, She Wrote.
The turn away from hour-long crime and action shows saw Moonlighting, Simon & Simon, The Equalizer, and Miami Vice all enter their final seasons as Fall 1988 rolled around, with the rebooted Twilight Zone and whatever the Hell Highway to Heaven was also coming to an end. In their places, there was fresh hope from Midnight Caller, Father Dowling Mysteries, and time travel show with a difference Quantum Leap, a rare genre arrival on a schedule all but shorn of such fare, although the furries still had ALF and Beauty & the Beast to keep them satisfied. Those were all shows that people remember, though: what about those that failed to make enough of an impact to enter the annals of TV history? This is the story of four of 1988’s less impactful series…
Freddy’s Nightmares (syndication): “How do you solve a problem like Freddy?” That was the conundrum facing producers at New Line Television who were eager to cash in on the popularity of the A Nightmare on Elm Street series and, in particular, its antagonist Freddy Krueger. Played with delectable glee by Robert Englund, who’d previously been typecast as a nerdy type, Krueger exploded out of his cinematic constraints and became a genuine pop culture idol, earning his own theme park ride at Six Flags, a Marvel comic book magazine, a videogame for the Nintendo Entertainment System, and dozens of other unlicensed cash-ins. And, with 1987’s A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors going gangbusters in theatres and A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master ready to go in August 1988, the next natural step was TV.
The problem facing New Line bosses – ignoring the child-murdering elephant in the room – was that any TV version of the films would cut through its cast at an alarming rate, with characters no sooner introduced than falling victim to Freddy’s bladed glove. This would have its merits, of course, but they instead decided to turn Freddy into that most American of institutions, the horror host. October 8th’s premiere episode – which was directed by Tobe Hooper – told of the arrest and trial and eventual release on a technicality of the human Mr Krueger. After that, Freddy – played, as usual, by Englund – would top and tail subsequent episodes, all of which would aim to have the feel of the movies, TV standards and practices notwithstanding.
A year earlier, Friday the 13th had been turned into a TV series without Jason Voorhees (and is generally considered canon, regardless), but this was the real deal. After the opening instalment, subsequent episodes introduced by ol’ scarred face featured two tales of misfortune, often linked, and almost always with a gruesome ending. Freddy himself popped up in a few episodes, with one being a direct sequel to the opener, focussing on the cops who messed up his original arrest. There were no other recurring characters and a host of guest stars made appearances, including Jeffrey Combs, Jeff Conaway, George Lazenby, and Susan Oliver in her final role.
The show also helped launched the careers of the likes of Mariska Hargitay, Lori Petty, Brad Pitt, and Pussycat Dolls founder Robin Antin, and did well enough in syndication that a second season launched in October 1989, opening with two stories that featured Freddy before settling into the same pattern as the first. Across its two seasons, Freddy’s Nightmares often found itself the subject of censorship through editing, with eight minutes removed from one episode for the most sensitive syndicated markets. As the second season came to a close, the received wisdom at New Line was that it was time to move on from Freddy, with a final instalment of the film series – Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare – in pre-production, the decision was made to put an end to Freddy’s Nightmares, too.
The Jim Henson Hour (NBC): Although The Muppet Show ended its run in 1981, its cast members were still kept busy throughout the 1980s with their movie sideline, occasional TV specials, Kermit’s appearances on Sesame Street, and the animated adventures of their infant counterparts. Jim Henson Productions also produced The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth movies and had Fraggle Rock and The Story Teller on TV. All in all, it seemed there was more than enough Muppetry to go round, but can there ever be enough? Really?
On April 7th 1989, NBC aired Sesame Street… 20 Years and Still Counting in its tricky Fridays at 8pm slot. Hosted by Bill Cosby, the hour-long special celebrated two decades of Henson’s delightfully immortal educational programme and featured guests appearances from Placido Domingo and Ray Charles, who sings “It’s Not Easy Being Green.” A week later, in the same slot, The Jim Henson Hour premiered, bringing the puppeteer’s famous creations back to TV on a weekly basis for the first time in eight years. The show was split roughly into two halves, with the first taken up by MuppeTelevision, an updated version of The Muppet Show where the characters ran a TV station rather than a vaudeville theatre.
MuppeTelevision would have a musical number and parodies of current movies and TV shows, alongside the usual sketches, and – as with The Muppet Show, each episode of MuppeTelevsion had a celebrity guest star, and the likes of Ted Danson, punk legend David Johansen (in his Buster Poindexter guise), kd lang, and Smokey Robinson queued up to submit themselves to the week’s tomfoolery. The second half of the show differed each week, with most weeks featuring a Henson-produced short film/backdoor pilot – Dog City, Lighthouse Island, Miss Piggy’s Hollywood, The Song of the Cloud Forest – or an unaired episode of The Story Teller. Once, the show forewent MuppeTelevision altogether, with the hour-long Monster Maker topped and tailed by Henson talking about the work of the Creature Shop.
Throughout its run, MuppeTelevision made light of low ratings, but it was a very real problem for The Jim Henson Show. By episode seven, ratings had tumbled from a decent 12.5 for the opener to 6.6, half of what Father Dowling Mysteries had averaged in that timeslot. The decision was made to cancel the show with episode nine (which, of course, saw a small ratings spike), leaving three already produced episodes on the shelf. Two of them were hour-long specials, showcasing Living with Dinosaurs (which had originally been made for ITV in the UK) and The Secrets of the Muppets. It had been a noble experiment but possibly too scattershot to retain a regular audience. Regardless, the Muppets were off TV again, although a new special – The Muppets at Disney World – would air on May 6th 1990. Ten days later, Henson died, and the next TV special was the heartbreaking The Muppets Celebrate Jim Henson in November. Fittingly, the special ended with Kermit promising “more Muppet stuff because that’s the way the boss would want it.”
TV 101 (CBS): Many of the shows that feature in The Telephemera Years have been completely forgotten, although reading about them may trigger long dormant memories of the odd episode. There are a few, however, that – for the small amount of people that saw them before they were cancelled, retain a place in the mind’s TV hall of fame, despite the wider world of TV fandom having little or no recollection, or even any idea that they existed in the first place. All of that is a long-winded way to say that TV 101 made an impact on those who saw it.
TV 101 starred Sam Robards as Kevin Keegan (yeah, I know), a newly divorced photojournalist who quits his job to return to his old high school and teach journalism. Rather than focus on stuffy old ink and newsprint, though, Keegan opts to prepare his class for the future of journalism by teaching them how to make television news reports, to be shown on the school’s CCTV system every morning and on the local cable access channel on Friday nights. Keegan is brought to the school by his old journalism teacher Emilie Walker (Bryn Thayer), with whom there is a frisson of sexual tension, and immediately butts heads with Leon Russom’s crusty old Principal Steadman.
TV 101 was created by Karl Schaefer, a young writer from Downey, California (where he attended a high school very much like the show’s Roosevelt High), who got his big break when a script he wrote for a romantic comedy called What I Did to the President’s Daughter was picked up by the Zucker brothers. The Airplane producers were impressed by Schafer’s inclusion of a pre-printed acceptance or rejection letter in the form of a kidnap note, and although the script was never filmed, it gave him a foot in the door at former NBC president Grant Tinker’s production company, GTG, where TV 101 was his very first project.
GTG sold the show to CBS, who were looking to bring down the age of their average viewer by lining up a few shows that appealed to a younger demographic, hoping to ape the success Fox had with 21 Jump Street. While Murphy Brown and Almost Grown targeted twenty- and thirtysomethings, TV 101 went straight for the teen market, lining up a collection of promising young actors as Keegan’s young charges. Most notable amongst them now is Matt – then Matthew – LeBlanc as football jock Chuck Bender, looking to take an easy class to keep his grades up at the behest of his coach.
TV 101 was LeBlanc’s first role and probably the best-known youngsters at the time were Teri Polo, fresh off a stint on daytime soap Loving, where she starred alongside Luke Perry, and Mary B Ward, who collected a few guest roles since her 1986 debut on Playing for Keeps, including a stint on One Life to Live. They played head cheerleader Amanda Hampton and sparky Penny Lipton, always eager to please. They were joined by Andrew Cassese, playing to type as geek Sherman Fischer (and almost reprising his role of Wormser in the Revenge of the Nerds series), and a “not yet a right-wing lunatic” Stacey Dash, who had a few episodes of St Elsewhere under her belt and tried to be all enigmatic as Monique (“just Monique”).
The rest of the class was made up by relative or actual newcomers Alex Désert (streetwise wisecracker Holden Hines), Stewart Goddard (wheelchair-bound cartoonist Marty Voight), Monique Salcido (Latinx cipher Angela Hernandez), and Andrew White, whose Vance Checker is at the centre of the first episode’s plot, rejecting a life of dope and booze just in time to avoid being killed in a car crash. Vance’s redemption story also forms the crux of the kids’ first broadcast, which – after the principal bars its showing at school – goes out in full on cable access, a gambit Keegan knows will either see his programme shut down or given a green light.
Delays caused by the writers’ strike meant TV 101 debuted on November 29th, the last of the new Fall shows to hit the air. On Tuesdays at 8pm, it faced tough competition from Matlock on NBC, and both Who’s the Boss? and Roseanne on ABC; after just four episodes it was moved to Wednesdays where it faced the popular Unsolved Mysteries on NBC and ABC’s youth-oriented pair of Growing Pains and Head of the Class. It was while the show was on Wednesdays that it featured its most controversial storyline. First Love – a three-parter – saw Chuck get girlfriend Jamie pregnant, a storyline that eventually ended in her seeking an abortion.
The storyline met with furious opposition from the Right to Life League, who started a letter-writing campaign to urge local affiliates not to air the third part of the story. It was just the latest – although by far the most controversial – in a line of hot button topics that saw the young class deal with drubs, homelessness, graffiti, and an extraordinary storyline where undercover cop Sherilyn Fenn engages in a sexual relationship with Vance (and tempts him back to smoking dope) in order to catch a local drug dealer. At the time, sex between an older woman and a younger male wasn’t even illegal, and Fenn’s boss merely notes her “procedural errors.”
The controversy and lower than hoped for ratings brought about TV 101 cancellation, with just one more episode airing after the culmination of the abortion storyline (teenage steroid abuse, if you’re wondering). Four further episodes went unaired, although they were later shown overseas. Within a few years, shows such as Beverley Hills 90210 would run where TV 101 walked, and Kurt Schaefer bounced right back with his next effort, Eerie, Indiana, which he co-created with José Rivera. TV 101 has never been released on home media and, although many of the episodes can be found online, it is frustratingly incomplete; obviously this needs to be remedied, if only in a Friday night slot on cable access TV…
A Man Called Hawk (ABC): When novellist Robert B Parker created the tough, urbane private detective Spenser in 1973’s The Godwulf Manuscript, he struck gold. Parker wrote another thirty-nine Spenser novels before his death in 2010, and the series continued for a further ten books in the hands of Ace Atkins. Most people, though, know Parker’s work through the TV adaptation of his most famous character, which debuted on ABC in September 1985. With Robert Urich in the title role, the show was never a massive ratings success but developed enough of a following that, despite high costs associated with location filming, it lasted for three seasons before the axe fell.
It wasn’t all bad news for Spenser: For Hire fans, though, as ABC greenlit a spin-off, featuring a character introduced to the series as a respected rival working for mob boss King Powers whose moral centre eventually led him to switch sides. Hawk had made his first appearance in Parker’s 1976 novel Promised Land, the fourth in the Spenser series, subsequently adapted for the Spenser: For Hire’s pilot. Hawk was played with suave efficiency by Avery Brooks, who had earned rave reviews in his first TV performance as abolitionist Solomon Northrup in an episode of American Playhouse. Smartly dressed and with a unique code of ethics, Brooks’s Hawk was more than a match for Spenser, even as his associate, and the actor himself stated, “I never thought of myself as the sidekick… I’ve never been the side of anything. I just assumed that I was equal.”
A Man Called Hawk debuted on January 28th 1989, with the revived Mission: Impossible as a lead-in as part of a new-look NBC Saturday night. As well as reprising the role of Hawk, Brooks also co-wrote the theme tune with jazz legends Stanley Clarke and Butch Morris. The first episode establishes Hawk’s new status quo, having moved back to Washington, DC, from the Boston setting of Spenser: For Hire. Still in the private detective/bodyguard/enforcer business, the first episode has Hawk trying to find an old Vietnam buddy who has turned killing machine before it’s too late.
Subsequent stories see him accused of a murder he didn’t commit, protecting a family targeted for kidnap, trying to take infected drugs off the streets, and saving his cousin who has become a mob target after his romancing a gangster’s moll, all with the aid of advice from Old Man, a father figure played by Moses Gunn. As a mid-season replacement, thirteen episodes were produced, averaging a rating of 8.5; this was just below ABC’s threshold for renewal and there was no second season. Both Brooks and Hawk were off-air for four years, until they both returned in a series of Spenser TV movies, by which time Brooks was also starring as Benjamin Sisko in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Both Hawk and Spenser have made sporadic returns to TV since, the last of which starred Mark Wahlberg as Spenser, a production criticised by Spenser himself in the final two Atkins novels.
Next time on The Telephemera Years: some of 1988’s unsold pilots, including the far future of 2005 and a returning Hulk!
Check out our other Telephemera articles:
The Telephemera Years: pre-1965 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)
The Telephemera Years: 1965 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)
The Telephemera Years: 1966 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)
The Telephemera Years: 1967 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)
The Telephemera Years: 1968 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)
The Telephemera Years: 1969 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)
The Telephemera Years: 1970 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)
The Telephemera Years: 1971 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)
The Telephemera Years: 1973 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)
The Telephemera Years: 1974 (part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)
The Telephemera Years: 1975 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)
The Telephemera Years: 1976 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)
The Telephemera Years: 1977 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)
The Telephemera Years: 1978 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)
The Telephemera Years: 1979 (part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6)
The Telephemera Years: 1980 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)
The Telephemera Years: 1981 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)
The Telephemera Years: 1982 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)
The Telephemera Years: 1983 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)
The Telephemera Years: 1984 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)
The Telephemera Years: 1986 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)
The Telephemera Years: 1987 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)
The Telephemera Years: 1988 (part 1, 2)
The Telephemera Years: 1989 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)
The Telephemera Years: 1990 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)
The Telephemera Years: 1991 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)
The Telephemera Years: 1992 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)
The Telephemera Years: 1994 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)
The Telephemera Years: 1995 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)
The Telephemera Years: 1997 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)
The Telephemera Years: 1998 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)
The Telephemera Years: 1999 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)
The Telephemera Years: 2000 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)
The Telephemera Years: 2001 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)
The Telephemera Years: 2002 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)
The Telephemera Years: 2003 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)
The Telephemera Years: 2005 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)
The Telephemera Years: 2006 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)
The Telephemera Years: 2007 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)
The Telephemera Years: 2008 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)
The Telephemera Years: O Canada! (part 1, 2, 3, 4)
Titans of Telephemera: Irwin Allen
Titans of Telephemera: Stephen J Cannell (part 1, 2, 3, 4)
Titans of Telephemera: DIC (part 1, 2)
Titans of Telephemera: Filmation (part 1, 2)
Titans of Telephemera: Hanna-Barbera (part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)
Titans of Telephemera: Kenneth Johnson
Titans of Telephemera: Sid & Marty Krofft
Titans of Telephemera: Glen A Larson (part 1, 2, 3, 4)
Titans of Telephemera: Quinn Martin (part 1, 2)
Titans of Telephemera: Rankin/Bass
Titans of Telephemera: Ruby-Spears
Titans of Telephemera: Sunbow
