THE TELEPHEMERA YEARS: 1972, part 2

Written By:

Alan Boon

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!

1972-73

The 1972 season would turn out to be a disastrous one for ABC, with no shows in the top twelve, which was evenly shared between CBS and NBC. Marcus Welby, MD – which had been the number three show of the 1971-72 season – was their highest placing show, with their next best effort coming in at number seventeen. ABC did have two promising new shows making their bow in Kung Fu and The Streets of San Francisco, but it would be another few years before the Alphabet Network could hold its own in the race for ratings. The sitcom still ruled the roost, with All in the Family, and The Mary Tyler Moore Show all doing good business for CBS, alongside new arrivals Maude and Bridget Loves Bernie (which would end up having just a single season despite good ratings due to threat from the Jewish Defense League over its inter-faith couple).

For NBC, Sanford and Son was a strong number two to Archie Bunker in the ratings, while The NBC Sunday Mystery Movie – a “wheel” show with four rotating features – gave audiences another taste of Columbo, McCloud, and McMillan & Wife, alongside less popular newcomer Hec Ramsey. Other new arrivals included The Bob Newhart Show, M*A*S*H, and The Waltons, with Bonanza, Mission: Impossible, The Mod Squad, and Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In all entering their final seasons. Those were all shows that people remember, though: what about those that didn’t make such an impact? This is the story of more near-misses from the 1972-73 season…

Banyon (NBC): Ed Adamson was a veteran TV writer, working on dozens of shows, includingd Lassie, The Untouchables, The Outer Limits, Bonanza, and Rawhide. In March 1971, NBC aired a pilot he created as part of its NBC Monday Night at the Movies strand, starring Robert Forster as a rough but honest private eye working for $20 a day plus expenses in 1930s Los Angeles. A period piece designed to evoke the work of Dashiell Hammett and Mickey Spillane, Banyon was produced in-house by Richard Alan Simmons, and the network liked the movie enough to take it to series. Someone else who liked the pilot was Quinn Martin, who – after a decade of producing shows for ABC, and with a lengthy legal battle with them settled – was looking to work with other networks, scoring a hit right out of the gate with Cannon for CBS in 1971.

Martin had previous with the era and the genre, having birthed The Untouchables when he was at Desliu Studios and a string of detective shows after establishing QM Productions in 1960. NBC intended the show to debut as a mid-season replacement during the 1971-72 season, but the involvement of Martin resulted in Banyon becoming one of the network’s brightest hopes for Fall 1972. Forster signed on for his first TV series, which placed the Miles C Banyon’s offices in the same building as a secretary school run by Joan Blondell’s Peggy Revere. This gave Banyon access to Revere’s students, who he employed on a work experience basis to save spending money on a secretary of his own, as well as provide the audience with a different pretty girl each week, including a young Terri Garr.

Alongside Blondell, the show’s other regulars included Banyon’s girlfriend Abby, a nightclub singer played by Julie Gregg, and world-weary LAPD detective Pete McNeil (Richard Jaeckel), but the case of the week formula allowed for plenty of guests, including Tom Bosley, Jack Klugman, John Saxon, and Dick van Patten. Besides the pilot, Adamson wrote another three episodes of the series, but died after three episodes had aired at the age of fifty-seven. Other scripters engaged by QM were Morton Fine, Barney Miller creator Theodore J Flicker, Mann Rubin, and Shane writer Jack Sher.

Banyon debuted on September 15^th 1972 as part of a refreshed Friday night line-up for NBC and earned a strong opening rating of 30.0, a figure which would have seen it finish as the year’s number two show if it had kept up. Unfortunately, it didn’t. Critics panned the show, and it lost a third of its audience for the second episode a week later, eventually sinking to the bottom of the NBC ratings, with just five shows earning fewer viewers for the Peacock network. After fifteen episodes, NBC pulled the plug and Banyon joined hundreds of other TV detectives in the unemployment line. QM, though, had hedged their bets and provided a new show for ABC that season; The Streets of San Francisco fared much better.

The Men (ABC): Launching in September 1972, The Men was ABC’s response to the success of NBC’s popular “wheel” series The Bold Ones and The NBC Mystery Movie. Unlike the NBC shows, which were produced by Universal Television, the three shows making up The Men came from different production studios, with Universal pitching in here, too, alongside Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Television and Warner Bros Television. The shows were united by the style of their protagonists, each a rugged loner working at arm’s length from their parent organisation. Debuting on September 21^st 1972, occupying a Thursday night slot against reliable ratings winner Ironside on NBC, The Men had three spokes to its wheel, initially airing in a three-week rotation. It also had a killer theme, courtesy of Isaac Hayes, which reached number thirty-eight on the Billboard Hot 100.

First up to the plate was Universal’s offering, Jigsaw, which starred James Wainwright in his first regular role as an investigator for the California State Police Department’s Bureau of Missing Persons. Wainwright had come to acting late, securing his first guest roles in his late twenties before landing a recurring guest spot on Daniel Boone in 1970. His Lieutenant Frank Dain was dogged in his pursuit of his prey, bristling at regular police procedure and piecing together his cases like a puzzle, giving the show its name.

Created by Robert E Thompson, who was nominated for an Academy Award for his screenplay for They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, the Jigsaw pilot had aired in March 1972 as part of The ABC Sunday Night Movie, with a story that opened with Dain waking up in the apartment of a murdered state official. Subsequent cases saw Dain hunt for a missing author, a missing priest, and a man with huge gambling losses, with the likes of Eileen Brennan, Jackie Coogan, and Pernell Roberts guesting. Episode five saw Dain fired from his job while under investigation for the murder of an ex-girlfriend, setting up shop as a private detective to find the killer, the show’s status quo thereafter.

A week after Jigsaw debuted, Assignment Vienna took its shot, again after a successful pilot movie earlier in the year. Then set in the Bavarian capital, Assignment Munich starred Roy Scheider as Jake Webster, the owner of Jakes’ Bar & Grill in the West German city. The bar was just a cover for Webster’s real reason for being in Munich, to hunt down foreign criminals and agents for a US intelligence agency that has something on him, something that if he doesn’t play ball will see him deported back to the US and jailed. Scheider opted not to return when the series – co-created by Eric Bercovici (who would later adapt James Clavell’s Shogun for TV) and Jerry Ludwig – was greenlit, with the location changed to Vienna to avoid the logistics of location filming while the 1972 Summer Olympics were going on in Munich.

Stepping into Scheider’s shoes was Robert Conrad, whose post-The Wild Wild West show The DA had been cancelled after fifteen episodes. Conrad was backed by Charles Cioffi (Richard Basehart in the pilot) as Major Bernard Caldwell, his agency handler, and by Anton Diffring (replacing Werner Klemperer) as Inspector Hoffman, Webster’s local police contact. Escaped criminals, smuggled microfilm, the Royal Crown of Bosnia, and a stolen emerald were among the objects of Jake’s attention, with Victor Buono, Leslie Nielsen, and Susan Strasberg among the guest stars pitching up at Webster’s establishment during the course of the series.

Arriving on October 5^th was The Delphi Bureau, from the fertile imagination of Sam Rolfe, the creator of Have Gun – Will Travel and the man who shaped The Man from UNCLE from an initial idea by Norman Felton and Ian Fleming. Again, the pilot aired as a standalone TV movie, this time part of The ABC Monday Night Movie in April 1972, and starred Laurence Luckinbill as Glenn Garth Gregory, an operative of an obscure US government agency who uses his photographic memory to do research for the President. This is a cover, of course, and the agency really engages in counterespionage, with Gregory answering to Sybil van Lowreen (Anne Jeffreys, replacing the pilot’s Celeste Holm), who poses as a society hostess to throw off interest in her spying activities.

Each instalment of The Delphi Bureau was built around a limerick, revealed line by line as the adventure progressed, with Gregory utilising his eidetic memory to solve the mystery of the disappearance of an entire fleet of US Air Force planes, a Supreme Court nominee who is strangely being backed by one of his enemies, and a plot by a group of hippies to assassinate two dozen liberal leaders. As with Jigsaw and Assignment Vienna, guest stars including Richard Anderson, Bob Crane, and Roddy McDowall took their turns to intercede themselves into The Delphi Bureau’s business, and DC Fontana was among those contributing scripts to the show.

The Men struggled in the ratings, with an audience just a quarter of the combined viewing figures for Ironside and the CBS Thursday Night Movie, and in January 1973 the wheel was moved to Saturday nights, with Kung Fu making an immediate impact in its place. The move was used to try out a tweaked formula, with the three-weekly rotation largely abandoned in favour of giving each show a run of a few episodes before the next would do the same. Unfortunately, Saturday nights were ruled by a killer line-up on CBS that finished with The Carol Burnett Show at 10pm, directly opposite The Men (and the second hour of NBC Saturday Night at the Movies). On April 7^th 1973, the final instalment went out, with a last outing for The Delphi Bureau completing a run of eight episodes for each spoke of the wheel. Although The Bold Ones also came to an end in May 1973, the Mystery Movie proved more enduring on NBC, lasting in one form or another until May 1978, although it was revived by Universal – ironically on ABC – in 1989.

Escape (NBC): Jack Webb was the master of the semi-documentary. Webb cut his teeth on Dragnet, a series he created for radio in 1949, where it ran for eight years. He also oversaw its transfer to TV in 1951 and played the lead role of Sergeant Joe Friday in a combined 590 episodes across the two mediums, returning in 1967 for almost another 100 outings. To make Dragnet, Webb established Mark VII Productions, also delivering several other hit shows for NBC including Adam-12, Emergency!, and Hec Ramsey. All of Webb’s shows attempted to present an accurate as possible depiction of the scenarios they inhabited, whether it be police work, that of the medical and rescue services, or even the early 1900s Wild West, and in 1973 he decided to apply the technique to an anthology series.

In Escape, the protagonists have one thing that unites them: they all need to escape the situations they’ve found themselves in. The series would have no recurring characters and each episode would present a fresh thrill, all supposedly based on true stories, and NBC were interested enough to order a trial run of four episodes, slotted in on Sunday nights while Rod Serling’s Night Gallery took a break. The series began on February 11^th with “Hold Down,” a story set during World War II of a crippled submarine, stranded on the ocean floor, its captain knowing that a Japanese destroyer awaits anyone who can make it out alive. Ed Nelson led a cast that also included Christopher Cane, Ron Hayes, and Kip Niven, with Webb himself narrating each episode. A week later, “Render Safe” saw Bernie Hamilton as an alcoholic demolitions expert who wakes from a binge with the sudden realisation that a bomb he drew for a stranger who bought him drinks the night before (Norman Fell) will be used to blow up a ship at noon.

After a gap of five weeks, Escape returned for its third outing, the story of a nine-year-old boy and his baby sister, lost in California’s San Gabriel Mountains. “The Wilderness” starred Lee Montgomery, fresh from a turn as a dying child in the Oscar-nominated Pete and Tillie (and as the boy with the rat in Ben), trying to find his way home to worried parents Glenn Corbett and Marion Ross. The series finished a week later with “Walk South,” starring James Gregory as a US General who is blinded when he crashes behind enemy lines during the Korean War and must trust a North Korean girl (Charlene Wong) to lead him to safety.

The four episodes were re-run over the Summer and ratings were decent enough, eclipsing those for Night Gallery and for both Emergency! and Hec Ramsey, which was shown as part of The NBC Sunday Mystery Movie. Despite this, no further episodes emerged and Mark VII moved on to Chase – the first show created by future titan of telephemera Stephen J Cannell – and an animated, Saturday morning companion to Emergency!, Emergency +4, outsourced to Fred Calvert.

The New Bill Cosby Show (CBS): Starting out in the comedy clubs of Philadelphia and New York, Bill Cosby was hailed as one of the best new stand-up comedy talents of the 1960s, breaking through after an appearance on The Tonight Show in 1963. A recording contract with Warner Bros followed, resulting in a string of acclaimed comedy albums from 1963’s Bill Cosby is a Very Funny Fellow…Right! to Inside the Mind of Bill Cosby nine years later selling millions of copies. In 1965, Cosby became the first African American to star in weekly TV drama when he was cast alongside Robert Culp in I Spy, winning three consecutive Emmy Awards for his portrayal of Alexander “Scotty” Scott. After that show was cancelled, Cosby was given his own sitcom on NBC – The Bill Cosby Show, where he played physical education teacher Chet Kincaid – which lasted for two seasons, ending in March 1971 when ratings dipped below NBC’s threshold for renewal.

Still, Cosby remained immensely popular as a stand-up comedian and so CBS took a chance and gave him his own variety show, a format that was becoming less common as the 1960s became the 1970s, but which still brought ratings for the network’s two extant examples, The Carol Burnett Show and The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour. With Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In’s George Schlatter producing and an ensemble cast that included Foster Brooks (who brought his drunk act over from The Dean Martin Show), Mel Brooks collaborator Ronny Graham, variety show regular Ray Jessel, Don Rickles’ straight man Pat McCormick, and Here Come the Bride’s Susan Tolsky, The New Bill Cosby Show debuted on September 11^th 1972 in a Monday night slot opposite NBC Monday Night at the Movies and a new season of ABC NFL Monday Night Football.

Each show was opened by a dance from Lola Falana, Cosby’s first hire for his new show, having known each other going back to their early years in Philadelphia nightclubs. Falana was a dancer and singer most associated with Sammy Davis Jr, who cast her in his 1964 Broadway musical Golden Boy and help launched her musical career on Frank Sinatra’s Reprise label. Known as Black Venus, in 1969 Falana made a conscious decision to break away from Davis, not wanting to be permanently thought of as “the little dancer with Sammy Davis Jr,” and posed for Playboy magazine. After Falana had introduced the show, regular sketches included “The Wife of the Week” and “The Dude,” with Cosby playing a man so cool he is unfazed by the madness going on around him.

Despite guest appearances from the likes of Harry Belafonte, Henry Fonda, Don Knotts, Sidney Poitier, Richard Pryor, and Peter Sellars, and killer music by Quincy Jones, The New Bill Cosby Show struggled against strong competition on rival networks and was cancelled after a single twenty-one-episode season, its finale airing on May 7^th 1973. That would be Cosby’s final regular TV appearance for eleven years, until the launch of The Cosby Show in September 1984.

Next time on The Telephemera Years: Eyes, sins, race cars, and outlaws all feature in 1972’s unsold pilots!

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: 1971 (part 1)

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