Feature Category: Article

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 Knight Rider there’s two Street Hawks. 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!

1971-72

Just as America was dragging itself out of the long Sixties and into their funky successor years, US TV was undergoing a season change in 1971, with the last of the great western TV shows reaching the end of their runs. Audiences could still thrill to Alias Smith and Jones, Gunsmoke, and Bonanza, but the cop show ruled the roost, with The Mod Squad, Hawaii Five-O, and Ironside joined at the top of the ratings by new arrivals Cannon and McMillan & Wife.

A dry period for genre fans saw interest lay mostly with Mission: Impossible and Night Gallery, although Bewitched could be relied upon for some supernatural nose-twitching fun, but the big new hits were The New Dick Van Dyke Show and transatlantic transplant Sanford and Son. But what of those shows that didn’t even get past the pilot stage? This is the story of four of 1971’s unsold shows…

Inside OUT (NBC): In this TV pilot developed by Lawrence J Cohen and Fred Freeman, The Office of Unusual Tactics – or OUT, get it? – is a US government agency tasked with dealing with problems caused by inept officials in other government departments. Headed up by Bill Daily’s Ron Hart, the debut outing saw them attempt to recover counterfeit money accidentally sent to a bank by the Secret Service.

Inside OUT was one of three pilots stitched together and shown as Triple Play on NBC’s Monday Night at the Movies on March 22^nd 1971, the others being Cohen’s own The Good Life and small-town medical comedy Is There a Doctor in the House. Introduced by Rowan and Martin, it was hoped that all three would make it to series but only The Good Life was picked up by NBC (and even that lasted only half a season).

The pilot featured a young Farrah Fawcett as a member of Daily’s team, and the comedy relied on Three Stooges-like set-ups, with obvious disguises and telegraphed pratfalls the order of the day, and it’s still a very funny watch on YouTube, where it has been preserved for posterity.

Fawcett, of course, would soon find fame as one of Charlie’s Angels, and Daily would become a regular on The Bob Newhart Show, for which he is probably best known (alongside his turn as Major Healey in I Dream of Jeanie). Director Reza Badiyi would continue to direct a plethora of TV shows over the years but would become particularly in demand as a “title visualiser,” responsible for the opening credits of such joys as Hawaii Five-O, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and Holmes and Yoyo.

Earth II (ABC): Earth II creators Allan Balter and William Read Woodfield were veterans of Irwin Allen’s technicolour schlock and had latterly worked on Mission: Impossible together; in 1971 they came up with this gripping yarn of an orbiting colony of Americans under threat from the attentions of Communist China.

2001: A Space Odyssey’s Gary Lockwood starred as the colony commander, faced with a decision of whether to intercept a Chinese satellite on a collision course, made more complicated by politics down on Earth, where Earth II is a member of the United Nations and is frantically scrambling to end the crisis through diplomacy.

Balter and Woodfield fill the cast with an interesting variety of characters, including a pair of Soviet defectors, and Lalo Schifrin provided a score every bit as tense as the action on board. The pilot was shown as a TV movie on November 28^th 1971, with the intention that it launch a series but the cost and complexity of the production prohibited any further adventures for the crew of Earth II.

The pilot was released theatrically outside of the US and performed reasonably well, despite being caught in the budgetary gap between TV and Hollywood, but Balter and Woodfield returned to jobbing scriptwriting, at least until the former was given the chance to develop another show, which turned out to be 1983’s The Powers of Matthew Star…

Charlie Chan (NBC): Poor old Charlie Chan… Created by novelist Earl Derr Biggers in 1919 as a response to the proliferation of “Yellow Peril” Chinese stereotypes in popular literature, the amiable detective has become a byword for racially-insensitive casting, undoing all of Biggers’s work – his Chan is capable, independent, and frequently gets the better of white criminals – with a parade of Caucasian men pretending to be Asian.

By 1971 it had been fourteen years since Chan was last on television (and a further eight years since the final movie outing) and, given several other classic detectives had been revived in recent years, it was felt the time was right for another tilt at the Hawaiian sleuth. Once again, a white man was cast as Chan as Ross Martin (a Polish Jew for good measure!) stepped into the role, investigating the death of a wealthy Greek tycoon aboard his luxury yacht.

The usual formula for such productions was that they be shown as part of the networks’ various movie showcases and, if critical and audience reception was positive, be greenlit for a full series the following Fall. Not only did this latest edition of Charlie Chan not get picked up for a full treatment, even the pilot sat unloved for two years, until it was finally shown as The Return of Charlie Chan on July 17^th 1973, as part of NBC’s Tuesday Night at the Movies strand.

A year before, and possibly inspired by the pilot, CBS added The Amazing Chan and the Chan Clan to its Saturday morning line-up, a Hanna-Barbera cartoon that cast Keye Luke (who had played “number one son” Lee Chan in the golden age movies) as the detective, the first Chinese-American actor to portray the character.

Escape (ABC): With a high concept premise every bit as home in the 1970s sci-fi boom as Westworld or The Andromeda Strain, Escape saw Christopher George’s former escapologist turned private detective trying to stop a scientist before he can create the first artificially made living organism, a race against time that tests George’s skills from both his former and new careers.

Character actor John Vernon – probably best known as the mayor in Dirty Harry – hams it up as maniacal scientist Charles Wending, who has kidnapped his brother and niece to force them to work on his crazy scheme which, if seen to its conclusion, threatens the existence of all life on Earth!

The pilot aired as a TV movie on April 6^th 1971 and presumably a full series would have shoehorned in any number of situations where being a former escape artist (actually, can you be a former escape artist?) would be crucial to solving a crime. We’ll never know because ABC declined to send Escape to series and viewers were robbed of such a development but you can watch the pilot on YouTube.

Given his experience in the field, writer Paul Playdon was hired in 1974 to write for The Magician, starring Bill Bixby as a stage magician who moonlights as a detective, and would later develop CHiPs for television, shepherding Rick Rosner’s motorcycle cop show onto the air.

Next on The Telephemera Years: What were the kids were watching in 1971? Something funky!

Check out our other Telephemera articles:

The Telephemera Years: 1966 (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: 1971 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1973 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1975 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1977 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1980 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1982 (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: 1990 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1992 (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: 2000 (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: 2008 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

Titans of Telephemera: Irwin Allen

Titans of Telephemera: Stephen J Cannell (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

Titans of Telephemera: Hanna-Barbera (part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

Titans of Telephemera: Kenneth Johnson

Titans of Telephemera: Glen A Larson (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

Titans of Telephemera: Quinn Martin (part 1, 2)

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 Knight Rider there’s two Street Hawks. 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!

1971-72

Just as America was dragging itself out of the long Sixties and into their funky successor years, US TV was undergoing a season change in 1971, with the last of the great western TV shows reaching the end of their runs. Audiences could still thrill to Alias Smith and Jones, Gunsmoke, and Bonanza, but the cop show ruled the roost, with The Mod Squad, Hawaii Five-O, and Ironside joined at the top of the ratings by new arrivals Cannon and McMillan & Wife.

A dry period for genre fans saw interest lay mostly with Mission: Impossible and Night Gallery, although Bewitched could be relied upon for some supernatural nose-twitching fun, but the big new hits were The New Dick Van Dyke Show and transatlantic transplant Sanford and Son. But what of those shows that didn’t make such an impact on American audiences? This is the story of four more of 1971’s ratings misses…

The Persuaders! (ABC): Sometimes a show outlives its limited time on the air and becomes a beloved institution, and when your principals are Roger Moore and Tony Curtis – and your show is the latest in a long line of treasured adventure serials from ITC – there’s a fair chance that your one-season run will live long in the imagination of genre TV fans.

The Persuaders! came hot on the heels of Strange Report, Department S, and Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) and starred Moore and Curtis as a pair of playboy adventurers who find themselves in hot water with the authorities on the French Riviera. Given the choice of serving ninety days in jail or helping Laurence Naismith’s retired judge right wrongs, they opt for the latter and begin a series of cases that involve crime syndicates, coups d’etat, and plastic surgery clones, amongst other fantastic crimes.

Curtis was a beloved Hollywood institution who had recently tried to broaden his repertoire by playing the Boston Strangler, while Moore was fresh off The Saint, having turned down the opportunity to play James Bond to take that role, although he would not be able to fight fate for much longer. The show was an instant hit in the UK, where it aired on ITV’s regional networks, but floundered in the US, dumped on Saturday nights against Mission: Impossible and NBC’s Saturday Night at the Movies slot.

Despite being cancelled after just one twenty-four-episode season, the series has lived on in the hearts of a very passionate ITC fandom, regularly reissued on home video and given the full Network DVD treatment in 2011. A proposed film version of the show, starring Steve Coogan and Ben Stiller, stalled in 2008 but the inevitable Hollywood remake awaits…

Sarge (NBC): George Kennedy won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar in 1967 for Cool Hand Luke and followed that with a series of Westerns and a vital role in Airport, the film that kicked off the penchant for disaster movies in the 1970s. In 1971, Kennedy was offered the starring role in Sarge, a crime procedural series with a reverent twist…

Samuel Cavanaugh was a San Diego police sergeant who decides to change his life after – and this was becoming quite the theme for new crime shows in the 1971 Fall season – his wife is murdered/ Having trained for the priesthood before World War II, Cavanaugh picks up his bible and takes holy orders, but is unable to leave police work completely behind.

After a successful pilot (in which Kennedy’s character was called Swanson, not Cavanaugh), the decision was made to launch the show as part of a crossover with Ironside, and the first viewers saw of Cavanaugh was on that show, having travelled to San Francisco to investigate the death of an old friend. The story took up a two-hour slot and viewers found Sarge in his own show in the second hour from the next week, as strong a lead-in as a new show could hope for.

Unfortunately, even with the help of Raymond Burr’s wheelchair-bound cop, Sarge couldn’t compete against Hawaii Five-O on CBS; even giving it Ironside‘s slot while that show was on a break didn’t help and it was cancelled after its fourteenth episode in January 1972. Kennedy came back to cop work in 1975 with The Blue Knight but will always be best remembered for his airline disaster work, both straight and comedic.

Me and the Chimp (CBS): Created by the team of Garry Marshall and Thomas L Miller, who would later go on to huge success with Happy Days and its various offshoots, Me and the Chimp was almost put out of its misery before it was even born when star Ted Bessell threatened to pull out, and many of those involved probably wish it had been gently euthanised at the stage.

Bessell, fresh off a five-year run on That Girl, wasn’t happy with the grammatically correct title of The Chimp and I but that seems to be the least thing wrong with the original concept of a dentist who is persuaded to adopt a chimpanzee by his family, only to find out that the chimp was part of the space program and is very invested in mischief.

The hijinks began on January 13^th 1972, a mid-season replacement for the late-period Western Bearcats!, but fared little better in the ratings, shuffling off after just thirteen episodes, itself replaced by re-runs of My World and Welcome To It. Marshall moved on to The Brian Keith Show, which at least lasted two seasons, before arriving at the Cunninghams’ front door two years later.

In 2002, TV Guide voted the show the forty-sixth worst show of all-time, and you won’t be surprised to learn that it seldoms troubles the re-run schedules and has never been released on home video, although some enterprising sort has uploaded a single episode to YouTube.

The Sixth Sense (ABC): In a season short of science-fiction and paranormal elements, The Sixth Sense stood out like the proverbial, a rare out-and-out fantasy show on a schedule full of crime dramas. Gary Collins starred as professor of parapsychology Michael Rhodes, who is aided by his research assistant Nancy (Catherine Ferrar) in solving apparently supernatural crimes.

Created by jobbing TV writer Anthony Lawrence, and based on his earlier TV movie Sweet, Sweet Rachel, The Sixth Sense was given the slot recently vacated by The Persauders!, which had been moved to Wednesday nights. Perhaps expectations were lower for Lawrence’s show, but it did well enough in the ratings to earn a second season, which arrived as part of the 1972 Fall line-up, the network impressed by producer Stanley Shpetner’s ability to grab big-name guest-stars.

A typical episode found Rhodes and Nancy presented with a seemingly impossible crime, which can only have been committed by a ghost (or a psychic or a ghost psychic) and left little doubt that there were strange forces at play, predating The X-Files by over two decades. Despite its unique air, ratings declined, and the second season was cancelled by January, although novelisations of some episodes proved popular gifts that Christmas.

The show was heavily edited and included as part of a syndicated package with The Night Gallery but the originals were given a DVD release by French distributor Elephant Films and have found their way onto video-sharing sites; many shows are described as being before their time but this might be one rare occasion when that holds true.

Next on The Telephemera Years: the shows that didn’t make it to air in 1971, including second Earths and horrible Asian stereotypes!

Check out our other Telephemera articles:

The Telephemera Years: 1966 (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: 1971 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1973 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1975 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1977 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1980 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1982 (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: 1990 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1992 (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: 2000 (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: 2008 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

Titans of Telephemera: Irwin Allen

Titans of Telephemera: Stephen J Cannell (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

Titans of Telephemera: Hanna-Barbera (part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

Titans of Telephemera: Kenneth Johnson

Titans of Telephemera: Glen A Larson (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

Titans of Telephemera: Quinn Martin (part 1, 2)

No cartoon epitomizes “zany” the way Animaniacs so joyously does. One of the most endearing aspects of the series—both the original show and its revival—is the immense joy it takes in being a cartoon. Even now, decades after the original series premiered, the Steven Spielberg-produced cartoon resonates.

The original series centred around Yakko, Wakko, and Dot Warner, three 1930s cartoon characters who are trapped in the WB Tower for 60 years before escaping. Many of their adventures took place on the Warner Bros lot, where they proved a major headache for franchise staples such as studio psychiatrist Dr. Otto Scratchansniff and the hapless Ralph the Security Guard.

The revival rightly retains the puckish spirit of the original. Hulu’s highly anticipated Animaniacs finds that elusive balance of reverence and relevance, all while devising new ways to make us laugh and bring us closer to the Warner Brothers (and Warner Sister). It’s remarkable, really. Now in its second season, the show’s triumphant return becomes less concerned with selling audiences on a reboot and more focused on predicting its style and humour on the sociopolitical zeitgeist of 21^st century America. Viewers bemoaning the revival’s emphasis on “political correctness” forget the acerbic wit and social conscience of its predecessor. But for co-executive producer Gabe Swarr, the challenge wasn’t winning fans back over. It was adapting to evolving industry practices.

“It’s hard enough to make a traditionally animated show nowadays because it’s just not done“, Swarr told us during a virtual roundtable interview. “But then to put all these other styles and all these other mediums in there too, that’s what really makes it unique. I think that’s the way we can push it.”

Looking at the first season of Hulu’s revival, it’s easy to see what Swarr means by ‘unique.’ Most immediately, the first episode flirts with an anime style before reverting back to its default wackiness. Jess Harnell, the voice actor behind Wakko Warner, teased that the second season will stretch its style in similarly unexpected ways.

“They do this Thundercats thing in the new season where they’re going with that kind of style,” Harnell said. “They’re sort of re-adapting these familiar images and characters into these new and different varied styles that always just leave me knocked out.”

But as intent as this new series is on enjoying animation’s inherent pliability, it’s also committed to retaining the style and substance that made the original a smash-hit. “Right from the get-go, I always thought that Animaniacs was easy on the eye,” Dot Warner’s voice actress, Tress MacNeille, said. “It was easy on the ear and it was easy on the eye.” Thankfully, Swarr and the other animators have made that the case here, too.

For other members of the cast, it was the writing that captured their attention. “I love the fact that we’re self-aware, and that we lampoon everybody. Including ourselves,” Rob Paulsen, the voice actor for Pinky and Yakko Warner, said. “In fact, if you guys recall, when we do the theme song, the first half is the old animation and the old lyrics. Then it switches to the new stuff, where we become self-aware. They even say, ‘Gender-balanced, pronoun-neutral, and ethnically diverse, the trolls all say we’re so passe, but we did meta first.’ Before one word of dialogue is spoken, the theme song lets you know what you’re in for.”

For longtime fans, this is great news. The appeal that catapulted the Warner siblings to stardom isn’t just intact. It’s smarter, cleverer, quippier than ever. The spirit of our favourite ’90s cartoon is alive and well, and we can only imagine where these genetically ambiguous goofballs will take us next.

The second season of the ANIMANIACS revival is now streaming in the US on Hulu

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 Knight Rider there’s two Street Hawks. 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!

1971-72

Just as America was dragging itself out of the long Sixties and into their funky successor years, US TV was undergoing a season change in 1971, with the last of the great western TV shows reaching the end of their runs. Audiences could still thrill to Alias Smith and Jones, Gunsmoke, and Bonanza, but the cop show ruled the roost, with The Mod Squad, Hawaii Five-O, and Ironside joined at the top of the ratings by new arrivals Cannon and McMillan & Wife.

A dry period for genre fans saw interest lay mostly with Mission: Impossible and Night Gallery, although Bewitched could be relied upon for some supernatural nose-twitching fun, but the big new hits were The New Dick Van Dyke Show and transatlantic transplant Sanford and Son. But what of those shows that didn’t make such an impact on American audiences? This is the story of four of 1971’s lesser-known delights…

Longstreet (ABC): They say justice is blind but never was that more the case than in Longstreet, where James Franciscus played a blind detective (of sorts). 1967’s Ironside had broken new ground with its protagonist, a confined to a wheelchair Raymond Burr, and with CBS introducing Cannon – he’s somehow a good cop despite being morbidly obese – it was clear there was a movement underway, although your mileage may vary on the intentions of that movement.

Franciscus, who was best known for his school sitcom Mr Novak, was Mike Longstreet, an insurance investigator blinded by a bomb hidden in a champagne bottle that kills his wife. Despite his injuries, Longstreet pursues and captures his wife’s killers and then settles into a life of hardcore insurance fraud investigation, aided only by his guide dog Pax and martial-arts instructor Li Tsung (Bruce Lee, about to leave Hollywood behind and become The Dragon).

The show was loosely based on a series of novels by Baynard Kendrick and, even though it stretched its premise beyond simple insurance fraud and into plain old detective stuff, it would seem that “blind detective” wasn’t enough of a hook to hang a series on; the show was cancelled after its final episode had run, in March 1972.

The complete series was released on DVD in 2017 but – beyond Bruce Lee obsessives – it has gained little notoriety in the popular imagination, save for its elevator pitch premise. Creator Stirling Silliphant went on to script The Enforcer, The Towering Inferno, The Poseidon Adventure, and Over the Top, one of which isn’t quite as notable as the others.

The Good Life (NBC): In many ways, calling Larry Hagman “the American Richard Briers” would seem to be a step too far but one time that it was actually bang on the money was in 1971, when he played a middle-class man, tired of his mundane life in the rat race, who decides he needs a change and… wait a minute, this isn’t that show!

In this version of The Good Life, created four years before the more familiar BBC sitcom, Hagman and wife Donna Mills are a middle-class couple, and they do tire of their mundane life, but rather than quit it all to grow vegetables in their suburban garden, much to the annoyance of their hoity-toity neighbours, they take jobs as a live-in butler and cook for a millionaire industrialist and his teenage son, earning the ire of the rich man’s sister, who thinks they are simply too common to have around.

Based on the novel by Douglass Wallop, the show was developed by former Gilligan’s Island and Andy Griffith Show writers Lawrence J Cohen and Fred Freeman, and it settled into a comfortable routine of Hagman and Mills floundering like fish out of water, almost getting fired by the stuffy sister, only for the teenage son – who thinks they’re great fun ­– to surreptitiously come to their rescue.

Unlike the beloved BBC treasure – which was renamed Good Neighbours when it was shown in the US to avoid any confusion – audiences did not take Hagman and Mills to their hearts and went quietly into the night after just fifteen episodes had aired, in January 1972. Nine years later, Hagman would reunite with Mills on the Dallas spin-off Knots Landing, having already worked with his Good Life boss David Wayne, who played Digger Barnes on the Texas oil drama.

O’Hara, US Treasury (CBS): While Longstreet was using his other enhanced senses to investigate insurance fraud, there was a different twist put on the detective show over on CBS. David Janssen – who did eventually put that one-armed man away in The Fugitive – played James O’Hara, a US Treasury agent, or “T-man” (which means something completely different now, Google at your peril), ready to be deployed to any Treasury department which needed his services.

This incredibly wide remit meant that O’Hara could be called in to investigate crimes involving counterfeiting, drug-smuggling, bootlegging, and more, a step up from his previous life as a county sheriff, which he left behind after his wife and child were killed in a mysterious fire. The varied format saw Janssen as the sole series regular, given his assignment at the beginning of the show and encountering a new cast of characters along the way.

Produced by Jack Webb’s Mark VII Productions, O’Hara was the first of their shows to run a full hour, but couldn’t compete against The Partridge Family on ABC, finding itself in the lower half of the ratings despite its intriguing premise. Twenty-two episodes – each of which was named Operation: something – aired but there was little chance of a second season and Janssen moved on to boat-dwelling detective show Harry O, which is almost an anagram of O’Hara.

The show has never been released on home video but occasionally pops up in re-runs on classic TV channels, and a full run of episodes can be found on YouTube if you’re curious to see whether we ever found out who killed his wife and child.

The Partners (NBC): With an opening theme by Lalo Schiffrin, The Partners starred Don Adams – Maxwell Smart from Get Smart – as a bungling police detective who somehow manages to solve crimes, much to the chagrin of precinct Captain Andrews (Adams’s Get Smart compatriot John Doucette).

Created by Adams himself, the show focussed on his Lennie Cooke, who had a fear of heights and a terrible memory, who is constantly aided (and frequently saved) by his partner, George Robinson. Played by Rupert Crosse (who would tragically die from cancer after completing the series), Robinson is a streetwise black detective whose only fear is of Lennie’s driving. Along the way, the two detectives must navigate the obstacles placed in their way by desk sergeant Higgenbottom (the wonderful Dick van Patten) and deal with Freddie Butler, a habitual confessor to other people’s crimes.

The pilot tested well with audiences and NBC scheduled it for Saturday nights at 8pm, up against the moribund My Three Sons on CBS and new show Getting Together on ABC, but CBS switched their schedules at the last minute, putting The Partners up against All in the Family, the number one show in the ratings. The show took a dive and never recovered, yanked from the air in January 1972 after just fifteen episodes had aired, the remaining five going out over the Summer months.

It’s a shame because The Partners had something; given that it relied on the wonderful chemistry between Adams and Crosse, however, it’s unlikely that it would have survived Crosse’s passing in any case. It’s never been released on home video but there are some clips available on video-sharing sites should you be unable to resist a show whose first episode is titled, “Here Comes the Fuzz.”

Next on The Telephemera Years: more of 1971’s flops, including a non-Bond Bond!

Check out our other Telephemera articles:

The Telephemera Years: 1966 (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: 1971 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1973 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1975 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1977 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1980 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1982 (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: 1990 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1992 (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: 2000 (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: 2008 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

Titans of Telephemera: Irwin Allen

Titans of Telephemera: Stephen J Cannell (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

Titans of Telephemera: Hanna-Barbera (part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

Titans of Telephemera: Kenneth Johnson

Titans of Telephemera: Glen A Larson (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

Titans of Telephemera: Quinn Martin (part 1, 2)