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THE TELEPHEMERA YEARS: 1979 – PART 1

Written By:

Alan Boon
Here's Boomer, 1979-80

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!

1979-80

Brand new for 1979, ABC’s That’s Incredible was became the third most watched show in 1979, completing a top three that also saw the alphabet network’s Three’s Company come in at number two, well behind the current affairs juggernaut of 60 Minutes. Otherwise, CBS dominated the ratings, even if it was saying goodbye to Hawaii Five-O. From Alice in fourth, down to the debuting Archie Bunker’s Place in eleventh (and taking in M*A*S*H, Dallas, and The Dukes of Hazzard, the Tiffany network was riding high, something that really could not be said for NBC, who had just three shows in the top twenty-five for the year and would soon bid farewell to old favourite The Rockford Files as it entered its final season.

There was no let up from CBS, either, with Flo, Dallas spin-off Knots Landing, M*A*S*H spin-off Trapper John MD, and the Salem’s Lot mini-series all arriving. ABC countered with Benson and Hart to Hart, while the peacock network pinned their hopes on The Facts of Life, The Misadventures of Lobo, and Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. For genre fans, Buck joined Fantasy Island, Mork & Mindy, Salvage-1, and The Incredible Hulk, but those were all shows that people remember… What about the ones that didn’t outstay their welcomes? This is the story of four shows from the 1979 season you may not remember…

Here’s Boomer (NBC): Of all the shows to earn a spin-off, The Red Hand Gang – a live-action Saturday morning show about a gang of crime-solving kids from D’Angelo-Bullock-Allen Productions that ran for just one season of twelve episodes in Fall 1977 – was probably never high on anyone’s list. The show had a breakout star, though, and – after he’d successfully starred in a Christmas move used as a backdoor pilot – Boomer the dog got a show of his own. His name wasn’t really Boomer, of course; Johnny the dog was a four-year-old mongrel rescued and trained by Ray Berwick, and the show was almost called Here’s Johnny, but for Johnny Carson’s famous catchphrase (that was borrowed by Jack Nicholson in The Shining).

After Christmas for Boomer did decent enough ratings for NBC in December 1979, a nine-part series was scheduled for March 1980 as a mid-season replacement for The Partridge Family’s Shirley Jones’s short-lived eponymous sitcom. Thematically, the show followed the “walking the Earth” formula used by the likes of Kung Fu and The Incredible Hulk, only with a nice dog doing the walking rather than Kwai Chang Caine or a massive green monster. It wasn’t a new idea, following in the pawprints of four Benji movies and coming six months after the arrival of The Littlest Hobo on CTV in Canada, which itself was based on a syndicated 1963 show.

Here's Boomer, 1979-80

A typical episode saw Boomer blow into town in time to help out a child, drunken adult, fellow dog, or family in need, before moving on at the end of the show to a fresh adventure. Given the nature of the show, Johnny was the only regular cast member, with a revolving door of guest stars each week, including early work for Rosanna Arquette, Scott Baio, Todd Bridges, and Michael J Fox, as well as the likes of Tom Bosley, Jonathan Frakes, Ken Kercheval, Roddy McDowall, and Harlem Globetrotter Meadowlark Lemon. The first series did well enough that a second Christmas special was filmed, this time with the twist that the audience would hear Boomer’s internal monologue, voiced by Jackie Cooper. “Boomer and Miss 21st Century” aired on December 7th 1980 and saw our hero foil a plot to fix a beauty contest, and there was some consideration given to keeping the audible thoughts gimmick, but when the second season arrived in October 1981, Boomer was silent once more.

Ten episodes were produced for season two, which moved to Sunday evenings, and – from the fourth episode on – doubled up with two episodes a week. Episodes eight and nine went out on November 8th 1981, after which… nothing. The tenth episode finally aired in July 1982 and that was it for Boomer, who went off to find his next mark. The Littlest Hobo fared slightly better, running for six seasons until March 1985, until he too reached the end of his leash. History does not record what happened to Johnny after Here’s Boomer, but he certainly earned his place in dog heaven.

Big Shamus, Little Shamus (CBS): The annals of TV history are full of failed TV shows, some of which made it to the end of their first season but most of which fell well short of that target. Rarely, though, does a show perform so badly from the outset that it fails to get beyond its second episode, but this is the story of one such calamitous enterprise. Big Shamus, Little Shamus was created by actress and writer Tracy Hotchner, not to be confused with the contemporaneous author of the same who wrote books on pregnancy.

Formerly married to Warner Bros executive Mark Rosenberg, Hotchner would go on to win a Raspberry award in 1981 for Worst Screenplay for Joan Crawford biopic Mommie Dearest. Her story outline for Big Shamus, Little Shamus – a father and son detective team at an Atlantic City casino – was taken by former Writers Guild of America West president Christopher Knopf, a veteran screenwriter who got his start in B-movies before becoming a go-to Western writer in the 1960s and who had latterly been writing unsold pilots and TV movies. Knopf shaped the show, introducing Brian Dennehy as Arnie Sutter – the Big Shamus of the title, “shamus” being slang for a detective.

Big Shamus, Little Shamus, 1979-80

Although he was already in his forties, Dennehy had only been in the business for a couple of years and Arnie was his first big role, the house detective for The Ansonia Hotel, a formerly illegal gambling den gone straight. You’d have thought that would make life easier for Sutter, but the legalisation brings in even more undesirables and even more problems, some of which he can only solve with the help of his teenage son – and Little Shamus – Max. Also part of their team are assistant manager Stephanie Marsh (Dark Shadows’s Kathryn Leigh Scott), receptionist Jerry Wilson (Ty Henderson), and Cynthia Sykes as Jingles Lodestar, an undercover security guard posing as a waitress, all working for hotel manager George Korman (George “Spaceballs” Wyner).

Heavily hyped in the pre-season advertising, the first episode aired on Saturday September 29th 1979 in a slot previously occupied by the CBS Movie, opposite The Love Boat on ABC and BJ and the Bear on NBC. Despite CBS’s dominance at the top of the ratings, the network also had the bottom five rating shows that week, of which Big Shamus, Little Shamus was bettered (worsed?) by only two shows, the Michael Keaton and Jim Belushi starring Working Stiffs and The Last Resort, an Animal House-style college sitcom. A week later, CBS enjoyed just four of the bottom five shows, but Big Shamus, Little Shamus was rock bottom and enough was enough.

Although nine episodes had been completed by that point, production was immediately halted as the show was yanked from the air, along with lead-ins Working Stiffs and The Bad News Bears, a spin-off from the Walter Matthau baseball movie (without Walter Matthau). The other seven episodes never got an airing, and little remains of those that did, a truly forgotten and unmissed show.

3’s a Crowd (syndication): If there was such a thing as a game show king, Chuck Barris would have a genuine claim to the throne. After breaking into TV on American Bandstand (with a sideline of writing and producing hit songs, such Freddy Cannon’s 1962 number three hit “Palisade’s Park”), Barris was put in charge of daytime programming at ABC, where he constantly butted heads with his superiors about the quality of the shows on offer. In 1965, he left ABC to set up Chuck Barris Productions, scoring a hit right out of the gate with The Dating Game and following that with The Newlywed Game, establishing his position as a game show maven.

Further hits, including Dream Girl of ’67 and The New Treasure Hunt followed, and in 1976 Barris stepped in front of the cameras to host The Gong Show, a talent show featuring some of the worst American showbiz had to offer, most of whom would be “gonged” off long before the end of their act. With the success of The Gong Show leading to revivals of The Dating Game and The Newlywed Game, it seemed like Barris could do no wrong, something he tested with the $1.98 Beauty Show in 1978, a post-modern satire of beauty contests that, on the surface at least, appeared to be a genuine – if low rent – competition.

3s a Crowd, 1979-80

A year later, Barris introduced his latest concept. 3’s a Crowd would take The Newlywed Game – on which couples had to demonstrate how much they’d learned about each other since their marriage – and put a wicked spin on it, introducing a third wheel, most often in the shape of the husband’s secretary. Thus, the crux of the show would be whether a man’s wife or his secretary knew him better, with the questions asked heavily skewed towards pointing out any potential infidelity. The first episode aired in syndication in September 1979, with daily episodes following after.

Reaction to the show was immediate and strong. With an emphasis on innuendo and a situation built to pit women against one another, both conservative groups and feminists railed against 3’s a Crowd, inundating local channels with their complaints. Still, the show remained on air through to February 1980 before enough was enough and it was replaced by another Barris show, Camouflage. One of the most vocal critics of the show was Jackie Autry, wife of Gene, and co-owner of KTLA in Los Angeles, where The Newlywed Game was produced. The Autrys wanted the show expelled from their studios, but it was cancelled – along with all of Barris’s shows – by the end of the year, anyway.

Barris took the negative reaction badly, revealing in his 1984 memoir Confessions of a Dangerous Mind that he retreated to his Malibu mansion for the best part of a year. Of course, he also revealed in that book – later made into a movie by George Clooney – that he’d been a CIA assassin in the 1960s and 1970s, so your mileage may vary on its accuracy…

Beyond Westworld (CBS): Michael Crichton’s writing career began while he still as student at Harvard Medical School, a series of pseudonymous novels helping to alleviate the tedium of his studies. Realising towards the end of his time at Harvard that medicine was not going to be his main career, Crichton began writing under his own name, penning The Andromeda Strain in 1969, a book which made him an immediate bestselling novelist and was adapted as a movie in 1971. Crichton always had his sets set higher than being a simple novelist and yearned to break into Hollywood himself; in 1972 he was given his first chance as a director on the TV movie Pursuit, adapted from Binary, a novel he wrote under the name Jack Lange.

Later that year, he met producer Paul N Lazarus III and the two began shopping around a script Crichton had written to all the major studios, on the understanding the writer would direct. Only Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer were interested and Westworld went into production at the back end of 1972 with a budget of $1.25 million. Yul Brynner – who took a pay cut to appear in the movie – starred as a lifelike robot employed at the eponymous theme park, where paying guests could relive the Old West experience. Of course, things go disastrously wrong, to the delight of a filmgoing audience that eventually brought in ten times the budget at the box office.

Westworld begat a sequel – Futureworld – in 1976, again produced by Lazarus after Crichton declined any involvement in the project. Lazarus concocted a basic story and hired Mayo Simon and George Schenck to write the screenplay, with only Brynner returning from the Westworld cast (and even then only in flashback and dream sequences). The film was a critical and commercial failure (although it did become the first American film to play in China), but that didn’t stop veteran producer Lou Shaw, who had co-created Quincy, ME with Glen A Larson, from preparing another tilt at the Westworld windmill, this time on TV.

Beyond Westworld, 1979-80

Beyond Westworld ignored Futureworld and set itself up as a straight sequel to the first film, although it did borrow the sequel’s idea for the Westworld robots to be used to replace important world figures. Jim McMullan’s Delos Corporation security chief John Moore was pitted against evil scientist Simon Quaid (James Wainwright), with an “android of the week” formula playing out over the series, presumably leading to a climactic showdown. I say “presumably” because Beyond Westworld – which debuted on March 5th 1980 – lasted just three episodes before CBS pulled the plug, the remaining two finished episodes remaining unseen other than in some overseas markets.

The concept fared far better when it was brought out of mothballs in 2016 by JJ Abrams, Lisa Joy, and Jonathan Nolan for HBO. The revamped show was set in 2050 and lasted for four seasons with an all-star cast including Evan Rachel Wood, Thandiwe Newton, Jeffrey Wright, and James Marsden, although none of them donned a bald cap.

Next time on The Telephemera Years: More of 1979’s lesser lights, including Frankenstein’s monster and a hot hero sandwich…

Check out our other Telephemera articles:

The Telephemera Years: pre-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: 1980 (part 12, 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: 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: 1995 (part 12, 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, 23, 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

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