THE TELEPHEMERA YEARS: 1985, part 1

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!

1985-86

The NBC sitcom juggernaut kept on rolling into the Fall 1985 season, with The Cosby Show and Family Ties flying high, joined in the top ten by Cheers and new arrival The Golden Girls, with Night Court, You Again, and another new show in 227 finding spots in the top twenty. CBS put up the best opposition, with Jessica Fltcher nosing around in third, 60 Minutes telling the world about Live Aid in fourth, and perennial favourite Dallas beating out ABC’s Dynasty to sixth place. ABC were in transition, with Benson, The Fall Guy, Hardcastle and McCormack, and The Love Boat all entering their final seasons, although The Colbys, Growing Pains, MacGyver, and Perfect Strangers were all debuting on the alphabet network.

Over on CBS, new arrivals included The Equalizer and a reboot of The Twilight Zone, while NBC took Diff’rent Strokes from ABC to add to its sitcom line-up, and premiered Steven Spielberg’s Amazing Stories. It was once again another year of thin gruel for genre fans, though, with Knight Rider ending its run and only the earthbound angel drama of Highway to Heaven bringing anything in the way of paranormal drama to TV screens. Those were all shows that people talked about for mostly the right reasons, though; what about the less remembered and outright failures? This is the story of four of 1985’s misfires…

Fortune Dane (ABC): Carl Weathers was a former NFL player with a most unremarkable career. Appearing in just eight games for the Oakland Raiders, Weathers failed to record any statistics and was released by coach John Madden for being “too sensitive.” As with many NFL washouts, Weathers headed north to the Canadian Football League, signing for three seasons with Vancouver’s BC Lions, attending college in the off-season and working as an extra on low budget blaxploitation films directed by his friend Arthur Marks, including Bucktown and Friday Foster. TV guest spots followed and in 1976, following an audition in which he criticised Sylvester Stallone’s acting, Weathers secured the role of Apollo Creed in Rocky, a movie written by and starring Stallone.

More movie roles – including Rocky II, III, and IV – followed, and in 1985 Weathers filmed a pilot for ABC for a series called Braker, in which he played a tough police detective saddled with rookie Joseph Bottoms, but ABC passed on taking it to series in favour of greenlighting another pilot he starred in, this time produced by his own Stormy Weathers productions company and crated by Ronald M Cohen. Fortune Dane saw Weathers star as a former athlete and ex-policeman working as special agent for the mayor of Bay City, a fictionalised amalgam of the San Francisco Bay area. In the pilot, Mayor Amanda Harding (Broadway veteran Penny Fuller) tasks Dane with stopping Sonny Landham’s hitman, who has killed nine people including Dane’s friend. Assistance comes from Daphne Ashbrook as Dane’s sidekick Speed, and former Andy Warhol muse Joe Dallesandro as the Mayor’s aide, Perfect Tommy.

Fortune Dane debuted as a mid-season replacement on February 15^th 1986, occupying an unforgiving Saturday night slot already vacated by two other shows, insurance drama Lime Street and violent female cop show Lady Blue. NBC’s The Golden Girls and 227 had already dominated the timeslot but it was hoped that Weathers’ action credentials could mop up those viewers seeking more thrilling fare. Subsequent stories saw Dane tackle a drug ring linked to the mayor’s major fundraiser, become a bodyguard to a South American revolutionary seeking sanctuary, and face an FBI accusation over the disappearance of millions of dollars, but ratings were never great, starting out below what Lady Blue was averaging and consistently finishing behind The CBS Saturday Night Movie. Things rallied for episode six, which saw Dane and Perfect Tommy go undercover in a prison only for Tommy to get stabbed, but by then the decision had been made not to go any further with the series.

Weathers soon bounced back from the cancellation, appearing alongside Arnold Schwarzenegger in Predator, and then starring as the titular hero in the Joel Silver-produced Action Jackson, before returning to TV as Colonel Carl Brewster in Vietnam drama Tour of Duty and spending two seasons dispensing Street Justice in syndication. A long career – with as many misses as hits – followed, before he passed away in February 2024 from atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease at the age of seventy-six.

Stir Crazy (CBS): Scripted by novelist Bruce Jay Friedman, Stir Crazy was a 1980 movie that starred Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder as Harry and Skip, two odd-job men wrongly convicted as bank robbers. Directed by Sidney Poitier, the movie grossed $100 million at the box office, becoming the third highest grossing film of 1980, and Columbia Pictures’ third highest of all-time, behind only Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Kramer vs Kramer. It also made Pryor the first actor to earn $1 million for a role, although it was also during the making of Stir Crazy that he set himself on fire while freebasing cocaine, damaging his prospects for a quick follow-up.

Five years later, CBS announced that Stir Crazy would be part of an all-new Wednesday night line-up on CBS that also included The Equalizer, George Burns Comedy Week, and Charlie & Co, the network’s answer to The Cosby Show. Nobody from the movie was involved in the show, which was developed by Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice writer Larry Tucker and producer Larry Rosen, who formed Larry/Larry Productions in 1980. Stir Crazy was their fourth attempt at a TV show after mixed success with Mr Merlin, Teachers Only, and Jennifer Slept Here, and they based the pilot on Friedman’s movie script, with Larry Riley (The Doctors) and newcomer Joe Guzaldo stepping into the shoes of Pryor and Wilder. However, rather than have their innocence proved by the arrest of the real bank robbers, as in the movie, the TV show saw them escape prison in order to find Crawford, the real culprit, pursued by fearsome prison officer Captain Betty.

Riley and Guzaldo were joined in the cast by Alice‘s Polly Holliday as Beatty and Royce D Applegate as Crawford, but the pilot tested poorly with CBS syndicators and the two were switched out for younger actors in the shape of Street Hawk‘s Jeanne Wilson and character actor Marc Silver from episode two onwards. There was no explanation to the viewers for the change as the pilot aired as filmed as the show’s first episode on September 18^th 1985, with the new cast appearing a week later in a story which – in a call back to the movie – saw Harry and Skip travel to Washington DC where they dress as bunnies at a carnival. Further escapades had the pair searching for treasure on Native American land, working as repo men only to discover a dead body in the trunk of a car they repossess, and helping out Harry’s twin brother, a football star who is being pressured to throw a game by mob bosses.

Although the first episode did a respectable 14.4 rating, numbers fell sharply for episode two and recovered to a point where they were only a semi-distant third place behind ABC sand NBC’s offerings. After six episodes, Stir Crazy was put on hiatus, but no further episodes were produced and the remaining three were shown over the Christmas holidays. Larry/Larry Productions was dissolved soon after.

Blacke’s Magic (NBC): Although he was a respected veteran of the stage, having appeared in eleven major Broadway productions between 1956 and 1974, Hal Linden was largely untested in front of the cameras when he was cast in the lead role of Barney Miller, beginning an eight-season run as the Captain of the NYPD’s 12^th Precinct in Greenwich Village. Linden earned seven Emmy Award and four Golden Globe nominations for his work on the show, and when it was ended by creator Danny Arnold in May 1982, Linden was wary of taking another regular TV role. Instead, he acted in TV movies I Do! I Do! and Starflight: The Plane That Couldn’t Land, turning down an offer to head up the cast of St Elsewhere without even looking at the script, so adamant was he that he needed a break.

By 1984, that wasn’t the case and Linden starred in Second Edition, a pilot for a CBS series created by former M*A*S*H head writer John Rappaport that wasn’t picked up for series. It did signify that Linden was available to for work again, though, and one role that caught his attention was that of Alexander Blacke, a magician who solves crimes that others find impossible to unravel. Linden said that he found the role interesting due to its difference to the purely reactive Miller, also noticing a hint of his beloved Broadway in the larger-than-life illusionist.

Blacke’s Magic was created by Columbo’s Richard Levinson and William Link and developed by Peter S Fischer. The trio had already worked their magic on 1984’s big debut, Murder, She Wrote, and hopes were high that they could repeat the trick with their new show, especially with the addition of Harry Morgan to the cast after his reprisal of Colonel Sherman T Potter in AfterMASH had been cancelled after two seasons. Morgan played Blacke’s con-man father Leonard, who helped him in his crime solving efforts, and the pair were able to deduce the culprit – and the seemingly impossible method – behind such mysteries as a locked-casket murder, a disappearing statue, lights in the sky, and a plane that lands without anyone on board, even the pilot!

The series debuted on Sunday January 5^th 1986 as a mid-season replacement for the cancelled Hell Town (which itself had replaced a struggling Airwolf, which was moved to Saturdays). Against a movie on ABC and Crazy Like a Fox on CBS (which had Murder, She Wrote as a lead-in), the first episode easily won its timeslot, but was then moved to Wednesdays where it faced tougher opposition from ABC’s Dynasty. Although it trailed the glitzy soap, it still beat out Crazy Like a Fox (which followed it to Wednesdays), and the first season of thirteen episodes finished with a decent 15.5 rating. With NBC riding so high in the ratings, however, that wasn’t enough to earn a second season, the one mystery Blacke couldn’t solve. Instead, Linden returned to Broadway in I’m Not Rappaport as a replacement for the departing Judd Hirsch.

George Burns Comedy Week (CBS): Although the history of TV is littered with anthology series, the vast majority of them were dramatic in nature. All three networks had pilot-burning showcases such as ABC’s Just for Laughs, Comedy Theater on NBC, and the CBS Summer Playhouse, but the first run comedy anthology was limited to Love, American Style, which nevertheless enjoyed its share of spin-off successes. For Fall 1985, CBS unveiled the George Burns Comedy Week, featuring the veteran star of radio, TV, and movies hosting a series of comedic presentations.

Burns had begun his TV career in 1950 when he and wife Gracie Allen transferred their successful CBS radio show to the small screen. The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show ran for eight years until Allen, suffering from heart trouble, retired. Burns carried on alone for another year, but the show didn’t work without her. In 1964, Burns began work on a new show, Wendy & Me, in which he played a fictionalised version of himself alongside Connie Stevens’s Wendy. Allen died shortly before the show began airing on ABC and it lasted only a single season, with Burns moving into production afterwards, although he would still perform on stage, wowing audiences with a sold-out season at Carnegie Hall.

In 1974, he was tempted out of retirement to appear in Neil Simon’s The Sunshine Boys as a replacement for his good friend Jack Benny, who passed away shortly before filming was scheduled to begin. He won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, at eighty-years-old the oldest Oscar winner until Jessica Tandy usurped him in 1989. The Sunshine Boys was followed by Oh, God! in 1977, with Burns in the title role alongside John Denver’s supermarket manager turned prophet. He reprised the role in 1980’s Oh, God! Book II and Oh, God! You Devil! four years later in which he had a dual role as God and his evil counterpart. As part of the publicity for the third film, Burns appeared on the cover of Penthouse magazine with Vanessa Williams, who was nude inside alongside a debuting (and underage) Traci Lords.

Burns consistently appeared on talk shows over the years, but George Burns Comedy Week would be the comedian’s first regular TV show for thirty years, even if his involvement was restricted to introducing the show and occasionally providing narration. Still, he was advertised as the oldest person – at eighty-nine – to star in a television series, and he was good value even in a reduced role. The show was executive produced by Carl Gottlieb and Steve Martin, through their 40 Share Productions company, who had first dipped their toes into TV with the Twilight Theater comedy showcase TV movies, also producing The Winds of Whoopee and The Jerk, Too, before embarking on their first series, 1984’s Domestic Life, which starred Martin Mull, a friend of Martin’s from his stand-up days. Mull played Martin Crane, an advice columnist at Seattle’s KMRT-TV who – as Burns had done in his TV days – would talk directly to the camera. If certain elements of that show sound familiar, Frasier’s David Angell was on the writing team.

Domestic Life ran for just six episodes on CBS, but Mull was brought back to be a part of Comedy Week, which would have a different comedic set-up each week. Some were obviously originally conceived to be sitcoms in their own right, while others were little more than extended sketches, and the involvement of Martin and Burns brought some big names to the table, with directors Neal Israel, John Korty, and John Landis signing on to helm scripts by Fast Times at Ridgemont High’s Amy Heckerling, Late Night with David Letterman and Saturday Night Live’s Andy Breckman, and a young David Simon.

The series launched on September 18^th 1985 as part of a revamped Wednesday schedule that had previously relied on The CBS Wednesday Night Movie as an anchor. With CBS comfortably in third place on Wednesdays, it was hoped that the all-new line-up might tempt viewers away from Highway to Heaven, Dynasty, and Hotel on the other networks, and they went big for the opener, “The Dynamite Girl.” Written by Gottlieb and Martin, SCTV‘s Catherine O’Hara starred as a woman with an infinitely suggestible photographic memory who inveigles herself into a terrorist incident, much to the chagrin of Tim Matheson’s police lieutenant.

Further episodes featured Eugene Levy as man reluctantly joining his new neighbours on a fishing trip, Joe Piscopo as a man declared legally dead but denied his life insurance pay-out, and Mull as one of four people in witness protection who are forced to live together as a family. Don Rickles and Don Knotts starred in “Disaster at Buzz Creek,” Telly Savalas was a mysterious big game hunter, Dave Thomas and Bronson Pinchot played a pair of cosmonauts stranded outside Las Vegas, and a cartoon producer (Howard Hessemann) is so sick of his beloved creations that he creates an episode where they are killed off.

Episode five, “The Couch,” featured Harvey Korman and Valerie Perrine as a couple trying to buy a wedding present for their daughter, and was eventually spun off into its own show, Leo & Liz in Beverly Hills, but perhaps the best remembered episode of George Burns Comedy Week was “Christmas Carol II: The Sequel.” Written and directed by Gottlieb, it starred Ed Begley Jr as a Tiny Tim who has grown up to resemble his father’s stone-hearted employer.

Although the show did a decent 14.5 rating for its premiere, numbers fell off afterwards, comfortably beaten by ABC’s Dynasty and NBC’s Hell Town, and obliterated on weeks when NBC showed baseball. Comedy Week was cancelled after thirteen episodes, its final outing starred Peter Bonerz and Michael McKean as two kidnappers who become exasperated with their hostage (Candice Azzara). Although he continued to make appearances on chat shows and variety performances, Burns never took another regular TV role and died in March 1996, two months past his hundredth birthday. He was buried alongside his beloved Gracie.

Next time on The Telephemera Years: more of 1985’s unsuccess stories, including that essential Fast Times at Ridgemont High adaptation!

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: 1973 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1974 (part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)