THE TELEPHEMERA YEARS: 1979 - PART 5

THE TELEPHEMERA YEARS: 1979 – PART 5

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 made it to air… What about the ones that fell at the final hurdle? This is the story of even more unsold pilots from the 1979 season…

The Ultimate Impostor (CBS): The annals of TV history are filled with backdoor pilots, those episodes of an established TV show given over to concepts and characters with the intention of spinning them off into their own shows if the audience reaction is favourable enough. It’s rare, though, that such concepts get two bites of the cherry, but The Ultimate Impostor was either too good a premise (or at least too catchy a name) that it bucked the trend. The first “Ultimate Imposter” came as the twelfth episode of the fourth season of The Six Million Dollar Man, broadcast on January 2^nd 1977, an episode directed by Paul Stanley and written by Lionel E Siegel and William T Zacha.

Topped and tailed by appearances from Steve Austin, the episode focussed on his friend Joe Patton, the subject of an experiment to transfer knowledge from a computer into a human brain. Using his acquired knowledge and abilities, Patton becomes the Office of Scientific Intelligence’s newest agent, but the process has hidden dangers that soon become apparent. The backdoor pilot didn’t pay off, and the episode marked the only appearance of Patton, as played by Stephen Marcht, who later became Gene Roddenberry’s first choice to play Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation before the role was given to Patrick Stewart,

Two years later, Stanley, Siegel, and Zacha tried again, this time teaming up for a TV movie to act as pilot for a prospective series, The Six Million Dollar Man having finished its run the year before. This time, The Ultimate Impostor (with an O in place of an E) was Frank Monihan (Joseph Hacker), an American spy who is captured by the Commies and has his memory wiped clean. Returned to the boss Eugene Danziger (Tora! Tora! Tora!’s Keith Andes), Monihan is considered perfect for the experimental transfer of a volume of information from a computer in order to give him the knowledge and abilities to save a Russian defector from enemy agents. The only catch? The transfer last for just 72 hours, setting a fixed deadline for the rescue! Hacker was joined in the cast by Norman Burton as Soviet refusenik Papich, with Erin Gray (soon to set teenage hearts aflutter as Dr Wilma Deering in Buck Rogers in the 25^th Century) as Monihan’s concerned girlfriend, Bucky, Macon McCalman as the scientist who performs the operation, and a debut for Rosalind Chao.

As with the earlier backdoor pilot, the network – this time CBS, rather than ABC – were not interested in taking the pilot to series, instead airing it in their Saturday CBS Movie slot on May 12^th 1979. Both Siegel and Zacha continued to work in TV into the 1980s, although Zacha returned to his first love of acting, appearing in minor roles in shows such as CHiPs, Quincy, ME (which he also wrote for), The Greatest American Hero, and Hunter, while director Stanley helmed episodes of Knight Rider, Street Hawk, MacGyver, and Crazy Like a Fox before his retirement in 1987.

Vampire (ABC): Although the James Earl Jones-starring Paris was not the hit he’d hoped for, it was clear that signing up with MTM Enterprises was a solid move by Steven Bochco. The company, established by Mary Tyler Moore and her then-husband Grant Tinker, had promised to give Bochco the production opportunities he was unable to secure at Universal Television, where he’d worked on Columbo, Ironside, and other detective yarns. In development alongside Paris were two other shows, a medical drama called Operating Room and Vampire, a blend of detective drama and horror, the latter no doubt inspired by Stephen King’s ‘Salem’s Lot, a 1975 novel about vampiric murders in a small town sparked by the arrival of an Austrian antique dealer.

‘Salem’s Lot was itself turned into a TV mini-series starring David Soul and James Mason on CBS in November 1979, which probably didn’t do much for Vampire’s prospects of being picked up as a series, but ABC ordered a pilot for Bochco’s new project, which he wrote it with Michael Kozoll. Kozoll got his start on Kolchak, The Night Stalker, a proto-X-Files that began with a vampire yarn; he came into Bochco’s orbit on Delvecchio, also working on Richie Brockelman: Private Eye and Paris, and would go on to co-create Hill Street Blues with his mentor. Their script for Vampire was set in San Francisco, where wealthy architect John Rawlins attends a dedication ceremony for an old estate that it being turned into a church. As the crowd leaves, no-one notices that the shadow of the newly raised cross is burning the ground, smoke that materialises into a shadowy figure…

This is Anton Voytek, a Hungarian prince who makes his public debut days later under the cover of arriving in the city to unearth a buried museum that once belonged to his family. Voytek’s arrival coincides with a series of brutal, vampiric murders, including Rawlins’s wife, Leslie. Seeking answers, Rawlins teams up with retired cop Harry Kilcoyne, who remembers the last time the city was struck by a spree of unsold murders, thirty years before. A wealthy architect out to avenge the murder of his trophy wife may have been an odd choice of protagonist, but Jason Miller had already earned supernatural sympathies as Father Damien Karras in The Exorcist, and his pairing with EG Marshall – one of the first graduates of Elia Kazan’s Actors Studio – paid decent dividends as they sought to combat Richard Lynch’s ancient evil.

TV veteran EW Swackhammer was brought in to direct, his record of shepherding two of every three pilots he directed to series an attractive prospect, and hopes were high that the show would join ABC’s Fall 1979 line-up as a rare TV horror outing. Unfortunately, the network passed, but showed the pilot as a TV movie in October 1979, beating ‘Salem’s Lot to air by a month. Mostly forgotten now, contemporary critics were generally complementary, with particular praise for the acting, and Lynch himself declared it his favourite role of a long career.

Ebony, Ivory and Jade (CBS): Ah, the ongoing search to find a fresh angle for the standard private detective drama! In 1979, the nets cast in deeper waters dredged up Ebony, Ivory and Jade, unrelated to the blaxploitation classic of three years earlier (and which would have made a good TV show itself, a mixed-race Charlie’s Angels two decades before Drew Barrymore, Lucy Liu, and Cameron Diaz took up that mantle). This Ebony, Ivory and Jade starred Bert Convy, a former minor league baseball player turned Broadway actor best known as a guest panellist on game shows such as The Match Game and What’s My Line? Convy played Mick Jade, a former tennis bum turned Las Vegas song and dance man, who moonlights as a private eye, possibly as part of some wider intelligence agency (the pilot isn’t clear on this).

To solve his cases, Jade teams up with two female dancers – Ebony and Ivory – played by future Fame taskmistress Debbie Allen and Martha Smith, a former Playboy Playmate of the Month who had just made her feature film debut as Babs Jensen in National Lampoon’s Animal House. This unorthodox set-up was the creation of Ann Beckett and Mike Farrell, or rather their pen names of Annie Scott and DB Cooper. Beckett received her first writing credit on an episode of Little House on the Prairie in 1975, before scripting several episodes of the Rich Man, Poor Man Book II adaptation. Farrell was better known to many as BJ Hunnicutt on M*A*S*H, a part he played from 1975 until the show’s much-watched finale in 1983.

Their script was given a polish by veteran British screenwriter Jimmy Sangster, who had written many of Hammer’s most vaunted horror films and produced the project for Ernie Frankel’s Frankel Productions, purveyors of such fine fare as Young Dan’l Boone and Nashville 99. CBS ordered a pilot, which was shot by John Llewellyn Moxey, a British director who worked on classic genre shows The Avengers, The Baron, and The Saint, before moving to the US and continuing his career with episodes of Mission Impossible, Hawaii Five-O, The Mod Squad, and Kung Fu, and the pilots for The Night Stalker and (perhaps most apposite) Charlie’s Angels. In the pilot, the trio have to go undercover to help Dr Adela Teba (Nina Foch), a Middle Eastern scientist, reach Washington DC with her cachet of secret formulas before assassins – led by Donald Moffet and Lucille Benson – can strike.

At some point, both singer Frankie Valli and comedian David Brenner pop up as themselves, but the whole thing makes about as much sense as you’d expect, even if the dialogue, direction, and individual performances are snappy. With plenty of potential for a series both set in Vegas and following this Ebony, Ivory, and Jade around, it was probably a surprise when CBS passed, showing the pilot as a TV movie in August 1979, right before the start of a new season in which it had every right to be a part of.

Return of the Mod Squad (ABC): Bursting onto television screens in September 1968, right as the rest of America was feeling the groove from the summer of love the year before, The Mod Squad was an attempt to cross counterculture cool with cop show conflict. Created by Buddy Ruskin, a former police officer who later became a private detective, The Mod Squad was based on his experiences working undercover on the narcotics squad of the Los Angeles Sheriffs department. Ruskin wrote the first pilot in 1960, at the tail end of the beatnik culture, but couldn’t sell it until 1968, right when the counterculture had swung back into vogue.

The Mod Squad went on to enjoy a five-season run, finally bowing out in March 1973. The core cast remained throughout, with Tige Andrews’s Captain Adam Greer overseeing a trio of young charges, offered a chance to work as undercover cops rather than face criminal charges. Rebellious rich kid Pete Cochran had turned on his family and was arrested for burning out a car, flower child Julie Barnes (former model Peggy Lipton) was picked up for vagrancy after running away from her prostitute mother’s home, and Lincoln Hayes (Clarence Williams III) had been involved in the Watts riots. In the hands of producers Aaron Spelling and Danny Thomas, the show became an instant hit, watched by over seventeen million viewers in its first season and a high of over twenty million in season three.

Once The Mod Squad ended, all three of its young principals had trouble finding regular work. Cole drifted and Williams mostly took to the stage, while Lipton married musician Quincy Jones and retired to raise a family. Their relative lack of stardom made them available in 1979 when Spelling decided to bring The Mod Squad back, detailing former actress Lynn Loring (who had moved into producing in the mid-1970s) with overseeing the project. Lipton said she did the pilot as a favour for Spelling, who also managed to tempt back Andrews to reprise the role of Captain Greer with a story that saw the (now not so) young trio reuniting to combat a threat to Greer’s life, a ploy to get them back together so one of their former enemies – played by Tom Bosley – can exact his revenge.

Return of the Mod Squad was aired on ABC on May 18^th 1979 as an ABC Friday Night Movie, but with ratings less than hoped for – and Lipton’s reluctance to return to full-time acting, something she didn’t consider until Twin Peaks in 1989 – there were no further outings for the trio, despite Spelling hoping to bring the show back for the Fall 1979 season. Instead, The Mod Squad lay dormant, the butt of lazy jokes, until 1999, when indie director Scott Silver made his major studio debut with a remake, starring Claire Danes, Omar Epps, and Giovanni Ribisi. The movie bombed, falling short of its modest budget at the box office, and The Mod Squad returned to being purely the stuff of nostalgic yearnings.

Next time on The Telephemera Years: Finally, we move on from unsold pilots to what the kids were watching in 1979!

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)