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THE TELEPHEMERA YEARS: 1988, part 2

Written By:

Alan Boon
Mission Impossible, 1988-89

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 near-misses…

Mission: Impossible (ABC): As many a sneaky murderer has found, going up against Angela Lansbury is foolhardy, with Murder, She Wrote never dipping below thirteenth in the ratings in its twelve-season run on CBS. In the 1987-88 season, the show averaged over twenty million viewers, blowing away Sunday night competition on ABC which included Spenser: For Hire and Supercarrier, necessitating some serious thinking on behalf of the Alphabet Network if they were to chip away at Jessica Fletcher’s golden throne. For Fall 1988, though, ABC put its faith in an old CBS property and called Impossible Missions Force head Jim Phelps out of retirement to take it straight to the witch of Cabot Cove.

Mission: Impossible had originally run for seven seasons on CBS, from its September 1966 debut to a March 1973 cancellation, when producer Paramount realised it could make more money from syndicating old episodes than making new ones. There had been an attempt to bring it back in 1980 with the bulk of the original cast, but an inability to find the right storylines delayed the project until 1983, by which time it had become a one-off reunion movie, entitled Good Morning Mr Phelps. Spiralling cast costs eventually put paid to even that, but as industrial action by the Writers Guild of America in 1988 wore on, studios began to look what they had in their vaults, especially at Paramount, where Star Trek: The Next Generation used scripts from an aborted Star Trek revival.

Mission Impossible, 1988-89

Discovering several unused Mission: Impossible scripts, the decision was made to bring the show back as a cheap filler, with a new cast playing the old roles, but a new introduction sequence was written to bring Peter Graves’s Phelps out of retirement after his successor is killed, his first mission to track down the man that killed his protégé! Although Graves was the only member of the original cast to return, his new team featured the son of Barney Collier (Grant, played by The Young and the Restless‘s Phil Morris), as well as interior designer turned undercover agent Casey Randall (Terry Markwell), actor and disguise expert Nicholas Black (Thaao Penghlis), and strongman Max Harte (Anthony Hamilton).

That the latter two were based in Australia betrayed another cost-cutting secret, that the secries was shot Down Under to save money, using a mostly local crew. Although it didn’t make much of a dent in Murder, She Wrote’s ratings, Mission: Impossible did well enough to be moved to a better timeslot on Saturdays and was renewed for a second season. Halfway through season one, Casey Randall became the first agent in the history of the show to be killed in action, disavowed as promised afterwards, although mourned by the team. That mourning was soon felt by anyone who’d become attached to Phelps and his new team as a move to Thursdays, opposite The Cosby Show and A Different World, proved too impossible a mission and – cheap filler or not – it was cancelled after sixteen episodes of its second season.

Unsub (NBC): For many, and despite two number one singles in the 1970s with “Silver Lady” and “Don’t Give Up On Us,” David Soul will always be Ken Hutchinson, one half of funky crime fighting duo Starsky & Hutch. After the pair arrested their final perp, Soul appeared in palate-cleanser Salem’s Lot, but found post-S&H roles hard to come by and moved to the UK, where he co-hosted 6:55 Special with former Tiswas presenter Sally James. During this time, he continued to secure guest roles on US TV, even taking a leading role in Dallas-photocopy Yellow Rose in 1983, but it would be 1989 before he’d be afforded that opportunity again.

The chance came courtesy of titan of telephemera Stephen J Cannell, presently in a state of transition after building his own production facilities on Vancouver’s North Shore. Long-running mainstays The A-Team, Hardcastle and McCormack, and Riptide had all come to an end in 1986 and 1987, but the 1987-88 season saw the debut of four new Cannell shows, led by the edgy 21 Jump Street on Fox, all filmed at North Shore. Although two of the new shows, failed to catch the attention of the viewers, Cannell had another one in the works for the 1988-89 season, again produced in Vancouver.

Unsub, 1988-89

Unsub was the creation of David J Burke and Stephen Kronish. Burke had spent twenty years as a journalist before scripting the pilot and several episodes of Michael Mann’s short-lived Crime Story, while Kronish got his start on Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Cannell further developed their creation into the story of an elite FBI forensic team that investigates serial killers and other violent criminals, the “unsub” of the title standing for the as yet “unidentified subjects” of their investigations. Soul’s John Westley “Wes” Grayson led a team which also included M Emmet Walsh as old school cop Ned Platt, Adam-12’s Kent McCord as lab expert Alan McWhirter, and Richard Kind and Jennifer Hetrick as Jimmy Bello and Ann Madison, the Unsub team’s field investigators. From the off, the team investigated serial killers, creepy child predators, bombers, and someone strangling and castrating male victims, with a pre-Usual Suspects Kevin Spacey among the guest perpetrators.

NBC’s Fall 1988 line-up had launched with Cannell’s Sonny Spoon leading off a Friday night line-up, but when both Sonny Spoon and Something Is Out There were cancelled, Unsub was brought in to plug the gap, closing out the Peacock Network’s prime-time hours, with Miami Vice moving forward as a lead-in and Father Dowling Investigates the new opener. This put Unsub up against 20/20 on ABC and Falcon Crest on CBS, not exactly stellar competition but still enough to put a dent in its potential audience. By its sixth episode, viewing figures had dipped below thirteen million, and although it rallied slightly from that point, the decision was made to pull the plug after episode eight. If anything, with its focus on forensic science, Unsub was ahead of its time, as CSI and its various offshoots later proved.

Monsters (syndication): In July 1949, NBC adapted popular radio show Lights Out for TV, running for over three years and establishing a template for every horror and suspense anthology that followed. The Twilight Zone upped the game in 1959, with Tales of Mystery, The Outer Limits, and Night Gallery all capturing the imagination of the American public over the next decade with one-off stories of temptation, misadventure, retribution, and more, many with an O Henry style ending. The anthology largely went out of fashion in the 1970s, with just Quinn Martin’s Tales of the Unexpected and Fantasy Island the only major examples between the end of Night Gallery in 1970 and 1981’s short-lived Darkroom.

In 1983, with horror going mainstream after escaping its grubby 1970s ghetto, George A Romero decided to do a TV version of his tribute to the 1950s heyday of EC Comics, Creepshow. Rights issues prevented Romero directly transferring Creepshow to TV; in its stead came Tales from the Darkside, with stories by genre legends such as Clive Barker, Robert Bloch, Harlan Ellison, and Stephen King (who adapted his own short story, Sorry, Right Number, for the show) brought to life with some fantastic effects courtesy of a crew of hungry, young talents. Tales from the Darkside ran for four seasons (and a 1990 movie), finishing in July 1988.

Monsters, 1988-89

Executive producer Richard P Rubenstein, who founded Laurel Entertainment with Romero in the mid-1970s, was keen to continue the format, albeit with a tweak to acknowledge both the outstanding effects work done on Tales from the Darkside and the popularity of movie monsters such as Jason Voorhees, Michael Myers, and king of the hill, Freddy Krueger. Putting together a demo reel of the various effects-laden creatures from Tales from the Darkside, Rubenstein secured a partnership with Tribune Entertainment, one of the US’s foremost syndication companies. Monsters – as the show was aptly titled, concentrating entirely on horror rather than the mixed fantasy fare of Tales from the Darkside – made its bow on October 22nd 1988, its start delayed until the end of the writers’ strike.

Each episode featured a monster of the week in self-contained stories, with first season creatures including a children’s TV puppet gone rogue, a zombie boyfriend, a man-eating bed, and a vampire pool shark, all created by effects overseen by veteran make-up artist Dick Smith. The anthology format also allowed for guest appearances by a kaleidoscopic array of acting talent, including David McCallum, Tempestt Bledsoe, Linda Blair, Meat Loaf, Jeff Conaway, and Adrienne Barbeau, and the show was renewed for a second season. A third followed, for a total of seventy-two episodes, most of which were based on original stories by some of Hollywood’s top young writers (some of whom were also doing double duty on Saturday morning cartoons featuring monsters of a slightly less gruesome nature). The final episode was fittingly an adaptation of The Moving Finger, a story by Stephen King, who had scripted Creepshow for Romero and kicked off the whole shebang.

Police Story (ABC): The creation of former police officer Joseph Wambaugh, whose earlier novels based on his previous life had been turned into the movie The New Centurions and miniseries Blue Knight, Police Story was a long-running anthology series on NBC, with eighty-eight episodes airing between September 1973 and April 1977. Although the show revelled in its anthology format, there was one some common theme in that the protagonist was always an officer of the Los Angeles Police Department, although the exact branch of the LAPD differed from week to week. As such, there were some recurring characters, but the show was an exercise in a new style of police procedural, informed by Wambaugh’s time on the beat and info from the contacts he still enjoyed.

Episodes of Police Story were often used as backdoor pilots for potential new shows, with Angie Dickinson’s Police Woman making her first appearance in season one episode “The Gamble,” Joe Forrester spinning out of “The Return of Joe Forrester,” starring Lloyd Bridges, and David Cassidy vehicle Man Undercover starting life as one of a series of nine TV movies that followed the regular series between September 1977 and April 1980. In 1987, Police Story was brought out of mothballs for a one-off, four-hour story, “The Freeway Killings.” Angie Dickinson returned (although not as Suzanne “Pepper” Anderson), as did Tony Lo Bianco and Don Meredith, who’d each made five appearances in the original series.

Police Story, 1988-89

Although Police Story: The Freeway Killings didn’t spark an immediate revival for the anthology series, the one-off meant that it was fresh in the minds of Columbia Television Pictures when the writers’ strike left the networks scrabbling for new content. With almost a hundred Police Story scripts in the vault and no need for recurring characters, it was a simple decision to dust off some classic episodes and remake them, giving ABC five weeks of content until the strike was resolved and new shows could resume. The majority of the stories chosen were from the TV movie era of the show, although “Monster Manor” was based on the season four of the same name that had earlier starred Joe Santos as a cop who splits up with his wife and moves into a party house, attracting a lot of unwanted attention from the wrong sort of crowd.

This time around it was Clayton Rohner in the starring role, with others in the series featuring Lindsay Wagner as a vice cop who has difficulty dealing with her partner’s suicide, Jack Warden as a veteran Watch Commander, Ken Olin as a cop whose best friend is the victim of a cop killer, and Robert Conrad as a maverick officer framed for murder and sent to prison, with only ex-partner Benjamin Bratt and internal affairs man Ed O’Neill working to free him. Intended as a short-term replacement for the strike-delayed ABC Mystery Movie, the five episodes did their job and the first episode of the new series – a revival of Columbo – duly appeared on February 6th.

Next time on The Telephemera Years: even more of 1988’s forgotten treasures, including cuddly serial killers and Henson’s last hurrah…

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)

The Telephemera Years: 1975 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1976 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1977 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1978 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1979 (part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6)

The Telephemera Years: 1980 (part 12, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1981 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1982 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1983 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1984 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1986 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1987 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1988 (part 1)

The Telephemera Years: 1989 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1990 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1991 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1992 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1994 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1995 (part 12, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1997 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1998 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1999 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 2000 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 2001 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 2002 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 2003 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 2005 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 2006 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 2007 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 2008 (part 1, 23, 4)

The Telephemera Years: O Canada! (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

Titans of Telephemera: Irwin Allen

Titans of Telephemera: Stephen J Cannell (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

Titans of Telephemera: DIC (part 1, 2)

Titans of Telephemera: Filmation (part 1, 2)

Titans of Telephemera: Hanna-Barbera (part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

Titans of Telephemera: Kenneth Johnson

Titans of Telephemera: Sid & Marty Krofft

Titans of Telephemera: Glen A Larson (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

Titans of Telephemera: Quinn Martin (part 1, 2)

Titans of Telephemera: Rankin/Bass

Titans of Telephemera: Ruby-Spears

Titans of Telephemera: Sunbow

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