THE TELEPHEMERA YEARS: 1979 - PART 2

THE TELEPHEMERA YEARS: 1979 – 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!

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 25^th 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 more shows from the 1979 season that came and went…

Struck By Lightning (CBS): Heralded by the gravelly tones of Joe Cocker belting out “You Are So Beautiful,” Struck by Lightning debuted on CBS on September 19^th 1979, part of a double bill with another new show, The Last Resort. Scheduled for Wednesdays in a slot that the network had found hard to fill since the heyday of Good Times and The Jeffersons, it was hoped that this curious comedic take on one of the oldest horror stories might finally prove to be the right show to go head-to-head with ABC’s Eight is Enough. Struck Lightning was the first production of The Fellows-Keegan Company, formed by Paramount vice-president of creative affairs Terry Keegan and producer Arthur Fellows. While at Paramount, Keegan had overseen the development of Happy Days, Laverne & Shirley, and the Shogun mini-series, while Fellows could count Cannon and The Streets of San Francisco on his production résumé.

Their new creation was a sequel of sorts to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or at least subsequent film and TV interpretations of Shelley’s novel. Probably best known as Deputy Hendricks in the first two Jaws films, Jeffrey Kramer played Ted Stein, a science teacher who happens to be the last descendent of Dr Victor Frankenstein. Stein inherits an old New England inn, whose caretaker is a friendly (if occasionally homicidal) man named Frank. Ted soon learns that the inn is actually Castle Frankenstein, transplanted from Europe to Maine piece by piece by Ted’s grandfather. Furthermore, Frank (Western veteran Jack Elam) is the actual monster himself, and needs a serum to keep him alive, the secret formula of which Ted’s grandfather died without passing on.

From such high concept beginnings, the show settled into its sitcom groove quite quickly, with the exasperated Ted trying to keep Frank’s existence a secret while also attempting to recreate his ancestor’s science experiments and dealing with the everyday problems of running an inn. The cast was rounded out by Millie Slavin (as Nora, who worked at the inn and expected to inherit it), Jeff Cotler (as her son, Brian), perennial guest star Bill Irwin (an almost permanent resident), and familiar face Richard Stahl as a realtor who stands to make a commission if Ted sells.

The debut episode earned around fifteen million viewers, an acceptable enough figure before factoring in that Real People on NBC was watched by more than twice that, and Eight is Enough had over forty million viewers. Coming a very distant third, Struck by Lightning was also savaged by critics, who found little to recommend the show, save for the performance of Elam. Things were no better in week two and although episode three saw a rise to eighteen million viewers, it was still far from the figure needed to ensure its survival. Both Struck By Lighting and The Last Resort were put on hiatus, replaced temporarily by movies, but although The Last Resort returned on a different day in December, Struck By Lightning never did, the slot given over to Young Maverick in its stead.

Paris (CBS): There would be a time when the prospect of James Earl Jones starring in a new Steven Bochco production would have sent millions of Americans scrambling to ensure their VCRs were set, lest they miss such a mouth-watering prospect, but that time clearly wasn’t Fall 1979. Paris was the first show Bochco created after joining MTM Enterprises, a company set up by Mary Tyler Moore and her then-husband Grant Tinker in 1969 to produce The Mary Tyler Moore Show for CBS. MTM had been behind The Bob Newhart Show and WKRP in Cincinnati, as well as Mary Tyler Moore Show spin-offs Rhoda, Phyllis, and Lou Grant, and Paris was its first police drama, a rare step away from the sitcom for the company.

Bochco had started out as a writer and later script editor on shows such as Ironside, Columbo, and McMillan & Wife for Universal Pictures, and he saw his switch to MTM as a way of moving more into the production side of TV. Bochco worked with veteran producer Edward de Blasio, who had just finished up on Police Woman, in developing Paris, with former NYPD detective Burton Armus also pitching in with scripts. The Paris of the title was Woody Paris, an LAPD captain in charge of a squad of rookie detectives who also moonlighted as a professor of criminology at a local college.

Cast in the role of Paris was James Earl Jones, a former soldier who turned to acting on leaving the military in 1953. Starting in New York theatre, Jones secured small roles in film and TV, including Lt Lothar Zogg in Dt Strangelove, and was part of the test runs for Sesame Street. Jones’s breakthrough role came in Claudine, for which he was nominated for a Golden Globe, and in 1977 was given the role that would define him for a generation, voicing Darth Vader in the Star Wars movies. Paris was his first starring role on TV, and he was joined by Cecilia Hart (his future wife), Jake Mitchell, Frank Ramirez, and Michael Warren as his young charges. Rounding out the cast were Hank Garrett as his superior, and Lee Chamberlain as Barbara Paris, Woody’s wife.

Despite a decent buzz and critical appraisal in the press, Paris was given a stinker of a timeslot, going out at 10pm on Saturday nights when half the country was out doing stuff and the other half just wanted to watch a movie. After low episodes for its first five episodes, the show took a break for a month and returned on Tuesdays, with ratings picking up accordingly. The damage was done, though, and just six more episodes were shown before CBS cancelled the show. Production had halted some weeks before and there were just two episodes left unshown, one of which would have been future Buffy the Vampire Slayer producer’s David Solomon first writing credit. Bochco wasn’t too concerned as he was already working on his next show, another police show called Hill Street Blues…

Hot Hero Sandwich (NBC): Although Saturday morning cartoons (and syndicated re-runs thereof) took care of the vital children’s demographic for the network TV stations, it was often thought that they neglected those kids’ older brothers and sisters, expecting to latch onto teenage characters in their parents’ shows, such as Joanie and Chachi on Happy Days, the older children from eight is Enough, or the classroom clowns of Welcome Back, Kotter. Outside the odd after-school special, rarely was there a show made especially for teens, although NBC did try their hand in the mid-1970s with The Krofft Superstar Hour (later renamed The Bay City Rollers Show).

Bruce and Carole Hart were a husband-and-wife team who had written for the first season of Sesame Street, with Bruce penning the lyrics for the show’s iconic theme song, and Carole becoming the first female writer to be credited on the ground-breaking production. They left after that first season to work on other project, including the NBC Children’s Theatre and an adaptation of gender role challenging book Free to Be… You and Me. In 1979, they returned to TV with Hot Hero Sandwich, their attempt to do Saturday Night Live! for the adolescent crowd. Filmed on the same set as Lorne Michaels’s senior show, Hot Hero Sandwich featured a house band – The Hot Hero Band, put together by Mark Cunningham, who had worked with the Harts on rock ‘n’ roll movie Sooner or Later, and produced by Mountain’s Felix Pappalardi (who worked on the Cream album Disraeli Gears) – and a cast of young hopefuls.

Among the “hot heroes” were Matt McCoy, The Patty Duke Show’s Paul O’Keefe, newcomer Denny Dillon (who had made her debut in Saturday Night Fever two years earlier), and ABC Afterschool Special regular Vicky Dawson, and they engaged in a mix of comedy sketches, talk show segments, and American Bandstand-style musical performances, both by The Hot Hero Band and guest performers. Among those guesting on the show were Judy Blume, Levar Burton, Stockard Channing, Erik Estrada, Henry Fonda, Kareem Abdul Jabar, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, Joe Jackson, Bruce (now Caitlyn) Jenner, KISS, Leonard Nimoy, Olivia Newton John, Richard Pryor, Christopher Reeve, Sister Sledge, Barbara Walters, and Martin Luther King Jr’s widow, Coretta Scott King.

Hot Hero Sandwich was placed in a difficult spot, the buffer between NBC’s Saturday morning cartoon line-up and the start of NBC Sports, its second half clashing with American Bandstand itself on ABC. A tentative half-season was ordered, but it was soon clear that the show wasn’t working, parts of it too childish for older teens and other parts beyond the grasp of the younger viewers. Importantly, no viewer testing was done, which could have ironed out these issues beforehand, and there was little surprise when NBC pulled the plug, three episodes short of its promised thirteen-episode run. Ironically, NBC president Fred Silverman named Hot Hero Sandwich as one of several shows that demonstrated the network’s commitment to “informational children’s programming,” six days after the final episode aired in January 1980.

Working Stiffs (CBS): From an initial concept by Harry Colomby, Working Stiffs was the big new sitcom hope for the Fall 1979 season from Frog Productions and Huk Inc, development companies formed by sitcom veterans Bob Brunner (the man who came up with the name “Fonzie” for Happy Days) and Arthur Silver, another Happy Days veteran who had earlier created the short-lived spin-off Blansky’s Beauties. Brunner, Colomby, and two other Happy Days and Laverne & Shirley writers – David Duclon (who would go on to create both Punky Brewster and Silver Spoons) and Marc Sotkin – developed Colomby’s story of two brothers trying to work their way up – literally – in the world of business, starting as janitors in the basement of an office building owned by their uncle.

Cast in the roles of Ernie and Mike O’Rourke were James Belushi and Michael Keaton, two relative newcomers to the comedy industry. Belushi, whose brother John had shot to fame as one of the Not Ready for Prime-Time Players on Saturday Night Live and then hit the big screen in Animal House, was a graduate of Chicago’s famed Second City Players, while Keaton came through Pittsburgh local television – including portraying one of the Flying Zookeeni Brothers and working as a production assistant on Mr Rogers’ Neighborhood. Moving to Hollywood in 1977, Keaton got his big break as a regular on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, bringing him to the attention of Brunner and Silver.

With a pilot episode written by Sotkin and directed by Penny “Laverne” Marshall, Working Stiffs formed a double-bill of Frog-Huk productions with the TV adaptation of The Bad News Bears on Saturday nights, a problem night for CBS (and most networks, save for NBC, who scored some rare successes in that slot with a series of adventure shows including Emergency!, The Bionic Woman, and CHIPS). Still, it was hoped that the Happy Days magic would rub off on the show, with a cast completed by Alan Arbus (husband of famed photographer Diane), Val Bisoglio (Frank Manero Sr in Saturday Night Fever), and Lorna Patterson (later to be TV’s Private Benjamin).

Sadly, those viewers that weren’t tuning into the adventures of Jon and Ponch on CHIPS were swayed by the earthy charms of The Ropers on ABC, and so never got to see Belushi and Keaton in full flight, their chemistry succeeding where the deficiencies of the script left them marooned. The lack of viewers was a problem, but not one exclusive to Working Stiffs, and the entire CBS Saturday night line-up was put on hiatus in October 1979 while a reshuffle was considered, with just four episodes of Working Stiffs making it to air. Of the four shows given an unplanned break, only Paris and The Bad News Bears returned, but even a move to a different night ultimately didn’t save them from the axe. Keaton and Belushi, of course, went on to have pretty good careers, and Brunner would soon unearth both Diff’rent Strokes and Webster to assuage any post-Happy Days blues.

Next time on The Telephemera Years: 1979’s unsold pilots, including the Sentinel of Liberty and the America of the future!

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)