THE TELEPHEMERA YEARS: 1988, 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!

1988-89

It was tough time for anything that wasn’t a sitcom in the 1988-89 ratings, with thirty-minute yuckfests filling nine of the top eleven spots, several of them newcomers gatecrashing a party that had been going on for a number of years since the mid-1980s action show slump. Although his terrible sweaters are now far from the worse thing about him, Bill Cosby and his family ruled the roost, although fresh competition from the more blue-collar Roseanne was ready to push it close for the number one slot. The Cosby Show was one of six NBC sitcoms in that top eleven, the rest of the slots filled by Roseanne’s ABC compadres Who’s the Boss? and Anything But Love, with CBS supplying the only non-comedy shows in the list, the ever-dependable 60 Minutes and Murder, She Wrote.

The turn away from hour-long crime and action shows saw Moonlighting, Simon & Simon, The Equalizer, and Miami Vice all enter their final seasons as Fall 1988 rolled around, with the rebooted Twilight Zone and whatever the Hell Highway to Heaven was also coming to an end. In their places, there was fresh hope from Midnight Caller, Father Dowling Mysteries, and time travel show with a difference Quantum Leap, a rare genre arrival on a schedule all but shorn of such fare, although the furries still had ALF and Beauty & the Beast to keep them satisfied. Those were all shows that people remember, though: what about those that failed to make enough of an impact to enter the annals of TV history? This is the story of four of 1988’s lesser lights…

Knightwatch (ABC): Growing up, Kevin Rodney Sullivan wanted nothing more than to be an actor. In sixth grade, he and his entire class were hired to be extras in the Sidney Poitier film They Call Me Mr Tibbs! and at seventeen, he applied to prestigious performing arts school Juilliard in New York, where he was told he had talent but needed more experience. As he gained that experience, Sullivan realised that being black was always going to hinder his chances of securing major roles in the theatre and instead turned his attention to writing, arriving in Hollywood in 1977 looking to break into scriptwriting for movies and TV. While he waited for his big break, he took a few small roles in films such as More American Graffiti and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, and in 1982 and 1983, he finally sold scripts to both Fame and Cagney & Lacey.

Further screenwriting success eluded him and he took a recurring role as Tommy on Happy Days, but was able to use his contacts at ABC to sell them on his idea for a new show based on the Guardian Angels, a quasi-paramilitary organisation founded in February 1979 by Curtis Sliwa, a night manager of a McDonalds in the Bronx, originally to combat crime and anti-social behaviour on the New York subway. Trained to perform citizen’s arrests, members were issued with a distinctive red beret and bomber jacket. It wasn’t long before the Angels began popping up in movies and TV, with 1981’s We’re Fighting Back, 1982’s Fighting Back, and 1983’s Vigilante meeting with varying levels of approval by Sliwa and his organisation.

In Sullivan’s hands, the Angels became the Knights of the City, its membership drawn largely from former gang members under the guidance of the charismatic Tony Maldonado (newcomer Benjamin Bratt). Working alongside local law enforcement, the Knights were trained in unarmed combat in the basement of a church and were given just two directives: no excessive violence and no killing. Among the reformed gangbangers looking to make a difference in their neighbourhood were future Seaquest DSV commander Don Franklin, sex comedy regular Joshua Cadman, One Life to Live’s Ava Haddad, and a young Samantha Mathis, and things got off to a bad start in the pilot when two of the Knights broke the rules and had to be turned in by their comrades.

If things were shaky for the Knights, it was even worse for Knightwatch itself, failing to anchor any kind of position in the ratings under tough competition from new CBS current affairs show 48 Hours and NBC’s ratings juggernauts The Cosby Show and A Different World. Things may have different if Knightwatch‘s original role as a mid-season replacement had materialised, but the Writers Guild of America strike between March and August 1988 left networks scrambling for original programming, and after a delayed start in November, Knightwatch was off the air by mid-January; rather than cleaning up crime, it became just another victim of Bill Cosby.

Nearly Departed (NBC): Although Nearly Departed – which arrived on NBC in April 1989, sandwiched between ALF and Monday Night Football as part of a blockbuster line-up to start the week – was billed as an original creation by John Baskin and Roger Shulman, there’s no doubting that its DNA lay squarely in Thorne Smith’s 1926 novel Topper, the basis for the 1937 film of the same name. Topper starred Cary Grant and Constance Bennett as a pair of footloose-and-fancy-free ghosts who make it their mission to liven up the life of their stuck-in-a-rut friend, Roland Young’s Cosmo Topper. The movie was a box office smash and made a star out of Grant, his natural aptitude for screwball comedy on display at last.

Grant went on to star in Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday, and The Philadelphia Story, some of the most beloved romantic comedies of all time, but Topper wasn’t entirely forgotten as its star ascended. Young reprised his role in two Grant-less sequels, and in 1953, a TV adaptation starring Leo G Carroll, Robert Sterling, and Anne Jeffreys ran for two seasons. Furthermore, in the 1970s, pilots starring John Fink, Stephanie Powers, and Roddy McDowall, and Andrew Stevens, Kate Jackson, and Jack Warden went unsold in 1973 and 1979, respectively.

Baskin and Shulman had begun their writing partnership on Love, American Style in 1973, going on to work on Good Times, The Jeffersons, and Three’s Company, before creating Crazy Like a Fox in 1984. Their Nearly Departed saw Eric Idle and Benson‘s Caroline McWilliams star as Grant and Claire Pritchard, a professional couple who are killed in a rockslide. Returning to their old house as ghosts, they find a new family – the Dooleys – has moved in. Grandpa Jack (Henderson “As the World Turns“ Forsythe) is the only one who can see and hear the ghosts, and through him they strike a deal to stay in their former home in return for helping the family out.

Beetlejuice being a huge hit a year before won’t have hurt, of course, and Idle does his best to bring his ghost character to life, even doing a One Foot in the Grave-style song for the show’s opening theme. The friction between stuffy English professor Grant and Stuart Pankin’s Mike Dooley, a blue-collar plumber, formed the basis of many of the show’s jokes, despite one not being able to see the other, but the whole thing just didn’t come together in the way Topper – in any of its incarnations – had. After just four episodes, NBC yanked it from the schedule, with two completed episodes unshown, although the full slate aired in the UK. Idle returned to the UK to make Nuns on the Run with Robbie Coltrane but Baskin and Shulman were less fortunate. After the failure of Nearly Departed, the two worked on just two more shows as writer/producers, the James Garner starring Man of the People and All in the Family successor 704 Hauser Street, neither of which ignited the passions of TV audiences.

Dirty Dancing (CBS): If you’ve seen any wedding episode of You’ve Been Framed or America’s Funniest Home Videos, you’ll know that the climactic dance scene from Dirty Dancing has made its way into household familiarity, so bountiful are the spines that need realigning after couples fail to pull off the movie’s notorious run and lift manoeuvre. In fact, for a short period in the late 1980s, Dirty Dancing was ubiquitous, certainly amongst young women who dreamed that their own Johnny would rescue them from small town mundanity, and slightly older woman wishing he had. That is surely enough of an explanation as to why a movie that is perfectly self-contained, telling a coming-of-age story that will see a newly emancipated Baby go off to a liberal arts college at the end of her Summer romance, was turned into a TV show.

Dirty Dancing was a production of The Steve Tisch Company, whose founder had gotten his start at Columbia before striking out on his own for 1977’s Outlaw Blues, starring Peter Fonda and Susan Saint James. Risky Business, Emmy Award-winning TV Movie The Burning Bed, and Soul Man followed, and for Dirty Dancing Tisch turned to writers Barra Grant and Robert Rabinowitz to develop the show based on Eleanor Bergstein’s script for the original movie (which she had, in turn, based on her real life experiences growing up Summering in the Catskills).

Having used her in Soul Man, Tisch himself cast Melora Hardin as Frances “Baby” Kellerman, a slightly changed character from the movie’s Frances Houseman. Instead of being a Summer guest at the Kellerman’s resort, she was no the daughter of the owner, but otherwise her story remained much the same. Patrick Cassidy – son of Shirley Jones and brother to David – stepped into Patrick Swayze’s shoes; ironically, Hardin had taken dance lessons as a thirteen-year-old from a pre-fame Swayze, and her continued studies gave her much more dancing experience than her character was supposed to have, something she found difficult in the show’s earlier episodes when baby was supposed to be a novice. The cast was rounded out by Paul Feig (who would go on to create Freaks and Geeks with Judd Apatow) as town nerd and comic relief Norman Bryant, Constance Marie as the sexually adventurous Penny, and M*A*S*H’s McLean Stevenson as Henry Kellerman, Baby’s father and owner of the resort.

With a full series to fill rather than a ninety-minute movie, events moved rather more slowly than they did between Swayze and Jennifer Grey, and there was no sign of Penny’s abortion subplot, but the series did attempt to address issues of the time, such as interracial relationships. Unfortunately, viewers never got to see the blossoming of Baby and Johnny’s relationship as the series was cancelled after eleven episodes, a twelfth completed episode going unaired. The show had debuted with 14.8 rating, decent enough for Saturday nights (when, stupidly, its target audience were probably at the movies), but was down to half that by the time the plug was pulled.

Something Is Out There (NBC): If Frank Lupo learned nothing else from his time working with both Glen A Larson and Stephen J Cannell, it was surely that, “if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.” Both Larson and Cannell had their share of failures, with The Last Precinct – a sitcom he co-created with Lupo in 1986 – one of Cannell’s recent flops. So, when Werewolf – Lupo’s first foray into solo show development in July 1987 – was cancelled after just one season, the writer-producer was ready to try, try again, this time with a blockbuster mini-series originally titled Invader.

Handed a $7.5 million budget for the project, which enabled location shooting in Australia and the special effects talents of Rick Baker and John Dykstra, producing two feature length episodes that went out as Something Is Out There on consecutive nights in May 1988. Golden Raspberry Award winner Joe Cortese starred as Jack Breslin, a police detective investigating murders committed with seemingly impossible precision. After bringing in a woman seen at every crime scene, Breslin discovers that she is Ta’Ra, played by Maryam d’Abo, fresh off The Living Daylights. Ta’Ra is the medical officer from a prison ship that was passing Earth’s orbit and is also hunting the killer, an escaped alien xenomorph.

The mini-series did well in the ratings and NBC president Brandon Tartikoff announced it would become a series, ordering thirteen episodes to air as a mid-season replacement in the Spring of 1989. This is where Lupo hit a snag. From a lavish budget for just four hours of television, he was expected to produce an hour a week for a fraction of that, a purse that would not stretch to keeping Baker and Dykstra. Realising that he’d need to retool the concept a little, the weekly show focussed more on the relationship between Breslin and Ta’Ra, who had opted to leave the ship and stay on Earth. After all, critics hadn’t praised the chemistry between Cortese and d’Abo?

The switch to the human/alien leads was accompanied by a focus on Ta’Ra’s telepathic abilities, leading the show down a more paranormal and supernatural cul-de-sac, rather than the “alien of the week” the mini-series might have suggested. Six episodes into production, when the first episodes had begun to air in a slot opposite Dallas (even in 1988, a considerable ratings draw), Lupo realised his mistake, pulling the horse around and restoring a link to Ta’Ra’s prison ship and its occupants. The damage was done, though, and the show was cancelled after those first six episodes had aired, despite a switch to an earlier slot. Two further episodes had been completed but went unshown, although the Sci-Fi Channel did include them in a full run of the mini-series and the weekly show as part of its SCIFI World daytime block in 2000. Lupo, at least, had Hunter and Wiseguy, two shows he co-created with Cannell, to fall back on, although it would be five years before he managed to get another of solo creations to series.

Next time on The Telephemera Years: even more of 1988’s almosts, including impossible missions and more monsters than you can shake a stick at!

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)