THE TELEPHEMERA YEARS: 1985, part 3

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 made it to air, though; what about the shows that didn’t get their season order? This is the story of 1985’s unsold pilots…

Generation (ABC): Set during the final week of the millennium, Generation takes the extended Breed family and projects what life in 1999 might be like, with not altogether accurate results. Created by Gerald di Pego, whose earlier works include the screenplay for Sharky’s Machine and the controversial 1974 Linda Blair movie Born Innocent, the pilot is essentially a depiction of a family falling apart ahead of a major reunion of the Great Eve, or the night before the year 2000. The pilot starred Westside Story’s Richard Beymer as Allan Breed, a man neglecting his wife and daughter in favour of a fast-tracked career as an engineer. Wife Kate (Tales of the Gold Monkey‘s Marta Dubois) is a social worker equally focussed on her work, although the gangs (armed with slingshots!) are preventing her from getting to the people she really needs to see in the inner city, and all this leaves daughter Hel (Hannah Cutrona), a science prodigy who wants to be an astronaut, spending too much time on her own.

Allan’s brother, Jack (played by Drake Hogestyen from the short-lived TV version of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers), is a professional combat hockey player who is concerned that Allan’s invention of a powered armoured suit developed to help amputees will result in too many injuries if it is adapted the sport. He is eventually proved right when an enhanced player named Hockeyman is introduced, and the brothers must work together to overcome the issue. Meanwhile, sister Roma (Nashville’s Cristina Raines) is a doctor aboard a mobile surgical unit touring the crime-ridden streets of Los Angeles in search of patients and wants nothing to do with their father, Tom, much to the distress of their mother Ellen (Bert Remsen and Priscilla Pointer, respectively).

As an exercise in futurology, di Pego’s worldbuilding fares badly, and its unique selling point – the futuristic sport of combat hockey – is well-realised but underutilised and pales in comparison to the brutality of the likes of Rollerball or even the hard-hitting action of prison football in Sharky’s Machine. Still, the direction by British director Michael Tuchner (The Hunchback of Notre Dame), keeps things moving, if sometimes a little too fast, and you can’t help but feel that di Pego showed his hand too early.

Generation was di Pego’s second attempt at shepherding one of his creations to series, having failed to secure an order for 1984’s The Sheriff and the Astronaut. Produced in association with Embassy Television and the Finnegan-Pinchuk company, ABC were interested enough to greenlight a pilot but ultimately opted not to take it to series, although they did air the pilot as a TV movie in May 1985, where it garnered a measly 6.5 rating, even with CBS showing Caddyshack instead of Dallas, and a re-run of Miami Vice on NBC. Di Pego later delivered the scripts for two of the TV movies that revived The Incredible Hulk in the late 1980s, as well as the John Travolta superpowers flick Phenomenon (and its lesser-known 2002 sequel).

D5B – Steel Collar Man (CBS): In May 1980, Lorne Michaels left NBC for Paramount Pictures after failing to secure a deal to put his baby, Saturday Night Live, on hiatus for a year, or secure one of his favoured replacements to head up the show in his absence. Michaels was burned out and felt SNL suffered as a result, and his departure was accompanied by the resignation of the entire cast, including Jane Curtin, Bill Murray, Laraine Newman, and Gilda Radner. Michaels assumed that associate producer Jean Doumanian would join him at paramount and was surprised when she was named as SNL’s new executive producer.

Doumanian’s first task was to assemble an all-new cast and she introduced the world to Gilbert Gottfried, Gail Matthius, and Joe Piscopo, as well as a former newsreader and accordion player named Charles Rocket. Rocket had been part of the same Rhode Island underground scene that included David Byrne and Gus van Sant, and he was promoted as a cross between Chevy Chase and Bill Murray, something he himself declared during the first sketch of the new cast’s first show in November 1980. Rocket had a regular segment – The Rocket Report – and impersonated the likes of Ronald Reagan, David Rockefeller, and Prince Charles, as well as playing the character of Phil Lively, a game show host who took his work home with him. The new cast took some time to settle in, but the addition of a young Eddie Murphy boosted interest in the show, and Rocket’s bits were regarded as one of its strongest assets.

On February 21^st 1981, SNL had Dallas’s Charlene Tilton as a special guest and Rocket flirted with her throughout, much to the (storyline) chagrin of his co-stars. After he is shot by an unknown sniper in a parody of the “Who shot JR?” storyline that had dominated that year’s news, Rocket is asked by Tilton how he feels and his reply of “Oh man, it’s the first time I’ve ever been shot in my life. I’d like to know who fuckin’ did it” sent the cast and audience into peals of laughter. NBC, however, were less than happy, even if the curse was uttered past “safe harbor” of 10pm. After taking a week to decide what to do, the network fired Doumanian and replaced her with Dick Ebersol, and his first move was to put the show on hiatus for a month. And then he fired Charles Rocket.

To be fair, Rocket wasn’t the only one let go – Gottfried and Ann Risley were also given their marching papers – and by the time the show returned in October 1981, only Murphy and Piscopo remained from the Doumanian era. It was more than three years before Rocket returned to TV, as inventor Stanley Flynn opposite Chris Lemmon in The Outlaws, an ABC TV movie that aired in the Summer of 1984. Later that year, he starred in HBO’s short-lived news spoof series The Investigators, which gave early TV spots to Paul Reiser and Jerry Seinfeld, and made guest appearances on Hawaiian Heat, Remington Steele, and Hardcastle and McCormick. Another TV movie for ABC – California Girls – followed in the Summer of 1985, and he appeared as Richard Addison, brother of Bruce Willis’s David, in the season two opener of Moonlighting.

Regular TV work, though, was the goal, and he secured the starring role in a pilot for CBS ahead of the Fall 1985 season. The Steel Collar Man was written by Dave Thomas, one half of the Bob and Doug MacKenzie duo with Rick Moranis, and an alumnus of the Second City improv theatre’s Toronto arm. Thomas auditioned for Second City out of boredom while working in advertising and soon became one of the troupe’s most valued assets, starring in Second City TV from its beginnings on Canadian network Global through its graduation to CBC (and NBC in the US). Thomas also made the MacKenzie brothers movie Strange Brew, and then wrote and performed in The New Show, Lorne Michaels’s ill-fated attempt to a pre-recorded version of SNL which ran for just nine episodes in early 1983.

In 1980, Thomas had recorded a special – From Cleveland – for CBS as part of the SCTV cast, and in one sketch he got into the ring between fights at a toughman contest to perform his Bob Hope impression. The crowd grew hostile and began throwing bottles at Thomas, with one of them hitting another member of the audience and sparking a riot. Thomas, thinking he could ride it out, kept his act up as 15,000 fans ran wild, and this impressed CBS President Harvey Shepherd, who remembered it when Thomas pitched his pilot to the network, personally giving it the greenlight and a $1 million budget.

The Muppet Movie’s James Frawley was installed as director, with Stan Winston – fresh off The Terminator – handling the special effects. The story revolved around an android, given the designation D5B, who was created by the government as a weapon but who rebelled against his programming and went on the run. Charles Rocket was cast in the title role, delivering his lines in a deadpan monotone, playing opposite Hoyt Axton’s friendly trucker, who wants to help D5B get to Washington, DC, where he will make a plea for his continued existence to the President himself. Opposing them is Chuck Connors’s government agent, bringing a touch of the sinister to Thomas’s light-hearted script.

Despite Shepherd’s patronage, CBS passed on taking The Steel Collar Man to series but aired the pilot in August 1985, where it earned a 11.0 rating, beating all of ABC’s offerings on the night. After the pilot, Rocket would pop up as a guest star on various shows, occasionally enjoying shorts run on shows such as Max Headroom, Murphy’s Law, and Touched by an Angel, working steadily through to the mid-2000s. Away from the cameras, though, Rocket was clearly struggling; on October 7^th 2005 he was found in a field he owned in Connecticut having bled to death from a cut throat.

Covenant (NBC): Jane Badler set pulses racing (and probably sparked more than a few fetishes) as the rodent-snaffling alien Diana in V, rising from second-in-command to Supreme Commander by the time V: The Series hit screens in October 1984. A former Miss New Hampshire, Badler began acting after graduating from Northwestern University with a degree in drama, securing a regular role as Melinda Cramer on One Life to Live in 1978. After three years on the soap, she replaced Laurie Klatscher as Natalie Bell on long-running serial The Doctors, alongside Alec Baldwin (in his first role), and when NBC cancelled the soap, she auditioned for the role of Diana.

Creator Kenneth Johnson described the character as “a domineering dominatrix who is incredibly sexy, seductive and probably bisexual,” and Badler fit his description to a tee, although she claims she had to work on giving off an air of danger, something she achieved with aplomb. V catapulted her to stardom, the initial two-part mini-series shown on successive nights on NBC in May 1983 and blowing away its opposition on rival networks. V: The Final Battle followed a year later, this time in three instalments and again doing massive ratings, with the final part watched by over forty percent of those watching TV at the time. Although Johnson was against it, it was inevitable that a series would follow, and it debuted just five months later, with many of the cast returning for a regular dose of visitor versus resistance again. Ratings were half of those for the two mini-series and, despite its charms, it was cancelled after nineteen episodes, its story unresolved.

Badler remained under contract to NBC, who refused to release her to take a role in another blockbuster mini-series, North and South on ABC, and instead she was encouraged to take the lead role in The Covenant, a horror-tinged pilot created by JD Feigelson and Dan DiStefano. Feigelson had early success with Horror High, a 1973 feature that took the Strange Case of Dr Jeckyll and Mr Hyde and set it in a Texan high school. Ambrose Pierce adaptation One of the Missing followed in 1979 and two years later he pretty much invented the “killer scarecrow” genre with Dark Night of the Scarecrow, initially meant to be an independent horror feature but bought by CBS and made as a TV movie. DiStefano, meanwhile, was better known for his work on Saturday morning cartoons such as Sport Billy and The Biskitts, although he did make his writing debut on Sexcapade in Mexico, a grindhouse offering that was actually banned in Mexico and came with the tagline, “Will This Daughter Follow in the Footsteps of Her Nymphomaniac Mother?”

Directed by TV veteran Walter Grauman, The Covenant is the story of the Noble family, a powerful San Francisco elite who control the world’s banks and owe their wealth and influence to a pact they signed with the Devil. Heading up the family is Victor, a former confidante of Adolf Hitler played by José Ferrer, who is preparing his eighteen-year-old granddaughter, Angelica (Knot’s Landing‘s Whitney Kershaw) for a once in a century virginal blood sacrifice to take place in three years. Playing to type, Badler is Dana, Victor’s second wife who has machinations of her own and possesses supernatural powers, including the ability to set someone on fire. Oh, and Dana is also Victor’s niece; he murdered his brother to take his wife, and Dana then murdered her to take her husband!

Standing in the way of the Nobles are The Judges, an underground cabal led by Barry Morse’s Zachariah who have opposed the Nobles since biblical times, and Whitney’s mother, Dana’s twin sister Claire (Michelle Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas). The cast also includes Kevin Conroy (the voice of Batman in Batman: The Animated Series), Bradford Dillman, All My Children‘s Charles Frank, and a young Tia Carrere. The Covenant was produced by Michael Filerman, the man who suggested the title Dallas to series creator David Jacobs, and who produced its spin-off Knots Landing and the similarly glitzy Falcon Crest, and it had all the ingredients of an over-the-top, Dallas-style weekly soap. As they had done earlier that Summer with Code of Vengeance and Stingray, both of which did earn series, NBC tested the waters, airing the pilot as a TV movie in August 1985, where it was narrowly beaten by a re-run of Kate & Allie on CBS and another unsold pilot shown as a TV movie – Command 5 – on ABC. This wasn’t the result the network was looking for and they declined to take the show to series, prompting NBC president Brandon Tartikoff to reconsider the viability of finding a prime-time soap to rival Dallas and Dynasty. Feigelson, DiStefano, and Grauman would later reunite for 1990’s Nightmare on the 13^th Floor, a TV movie about a travel journalist investigating the floor of a hotel walled up for a hundred years after a maniac killed its every inhabitant.

After The Covenant, Badler played a stern but sexy controller in The Highwayman and then reunited with Filerman on season six of Falcon Crest as the stern but sexy Meredith Braxton (who was originally written as the lesbian love interest of Jill Jacobsen’s Erin Jones, but changed to her sister on the insistence of stuffy old Jane Wyman), and then travelled to Australia to film the Mission: Impossible revival, in which she was only occasionally stern. Finding the country to her liking, Badler opted to stay in Australia after the show was cancelled, marrying businessman Stephen Harris and raising two children. She continued to act and finally fulfilled her compulsory obligation to appear in Neighbours in 2010, a year before she returned to play Diana in season two of the V reboot. Her character was completely rewritten to be an imprisoned ex-queen of the aliens who wishes for the visitors and the humans to live together in peace, putting her in opposition to her daughter, the current queen. Stern no more.

Northstar (ABC): Way before he developed Dexter for TV, back before even Suddenly Susan and Parker Lewis Can’t Lose, Clyde Phillips worked with his friend Daniel Grodnik on a script for a superhero story with a difference. Grodnik, who was primarily a producer, further developed the story and sold it to ABC, although both he and Phillips were given executive producer credits. ABC put Howard Lakin – son of Rita, one of the first female showrunners in American television and creator of The Rookies and Flamingo Road – in charge of the project and, after he gave the script a polish, Northstar was born.

Northstar starred Greg Evigan as astronaut Jack North who, while attempting to photograph an eclipse during a spacewalk, is hit by mysterious cosmic radiation. When he returns to Earth, he finds that he has fantastic powers whenever his eyes are exposed to sunlight. However, too much exposure to sunlight will cause him to overheat, and so he must learn to control his abilities – and find a pair of sunglasses. Evigan had finished a four-season run on BJ and the Bear in May 1981 and was cast as one of three leads alongside Rod Taylor and Kirstie Alley in another Glen A Larson show, Masquerade, in 1983, but that show failed to set the ratings alight and was cancelled after thirteen episodes.

He was joined in Northstar by Deborah Wakeham as Dr Alison Taylor, the scientist tasked with helping Jack get used to his newfound abilities, which are split into blue, yellow, and red levels. Corresponding to the colour his eyes turn when he is using them. Blue allows him to access any knowledge he’s ever had and easily acquire new knowledge, while yellow pushes his body far beyond normal limits, although it may erode his memories and shorten his life expectancy. Red is the most dangerous, risking brain damage or even death, and resulting in the need to stay in the shade for a while. Sowing seeds for future storylines, Dr Taylor’s husband is missing after an expedition in the Andes, but that doesn’t stop the sexual tension between the pair.

The whole thing is overseen by Mitchell Ryan’s General Even Marshall, but North’s first priority is to solve the mystery behind the death of his friend and fellow astronaut, Bill Harlow, even if he has to go against Marshall’s orders – and risk his life – to do it. Essentially a Six Million Dollar Man for the 1980s, but with added peril, Northstar didn’t get ABC executives excited, and it never progressed beyond the pilot stage. The pilot was burned off as an ABC Sunday Night Movie in August 1986, and September 1987 saw Evigan cast in the role most remember him for, as one of Nicole’s twin father figures alongside Paul Reiser in My Two Dads. As an interesting postscript, retro synthesiser outfit Dread Phallinoid imagined a world where Northstar was picked up as a series in Fall 1987, releasing an imaginary soundtrack on their Bandcamp page in July 2022.

Streets Of Justice (NBC): Christopher Crowe’s first brush with stardom came while working at his father’s graphic arts company in Racine, Wisconsin. The young designer was a fan of a local band who were trying to make their way in the Wisconsin and Illinois club scene and visited them at noted Milwaukee dive Humpin’ Hanna’s to present them with a logo he’d designed. That logo – and the band – were soon plastered all over billboards and magazines across the US as Cheap Trick made it big, although Crowe never saw a penny off his creation, seeing it as a gift from one struggling artist to others.

By the time Cheap Trick released their self-titled debut album in 1977, Crowe was in Hollywood, where he was trying his hand as a screenwriter. He sold three scripts for the third season of Baretta secured a dual role as story editor and scriptwriter on The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries, and then got his first taste as a producer with 1978’s Sword of Justice. His big break arrived later that year when producer Glen A Larson picked up his original idea for a trucker and his chimpanzee pal, debuting in February 1979 as BJ and the Bear. Greg Evigan spent four seasons behind the wheel of Crowe’s eighteen-wheeler before the show was cancelled in May 1981, a retooling not enough to halt sliding ratings. Crowe moved over to anthology show Darkroom, again contributing scripts and working as a producer, and also wrote two feature films: 1981 dystopian future car yarn The Last Chase (for which he was credited as CR O’Christopher) and horror anthology Nightmares from 1983.

Having worked with NBC on both Sword of Justice and BJ and the Bear, he found the network receptive to a pilot script he wrote for a potential series that would cash in on the popularity of Michael Winner’s revenge flick Death Wish, which had enjoyed a new lease of life on the home video market, leading to two sequels making headlines in the press and a quick buck for producers Cannon Films. Streets of Justice saw the wife and son of blue collar auto-worker Hudson James murdered by a gang of out-of-control bikers when they take a turn into the wrong neighbourhood. After one of the four culprits walks away scot-free, James snaps and begins his own search for justice, living a double life as an after-dark vigilante.

Besides Footloose’s John Laughlin in the main role, the pilot also starred Lance Henrikson, Robert Loggia, Cristina Raines, and Jack Thibeau, with Crowe given his first chance to direct. Despite their obvious inspiration, a negative backlash to the bloodthirsty nature of the Death Wish movies didn’t help Streets of Justice’s chances of being taken to series, and NBC ultimately passed, with Crowe moving on to Alfred Hitchock Presents, where he wrote, directed, and acted as Executive Producer. The Streets of Justice pilot was eventually shown as a TV movie in November 1985 but paled in opposition to mini-series North and South on ABC.

Next time on The Telephemera Years: 1985’s hot new kids’ shows (and Hulk Hogan)…

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)