THE TELEPHEMERA YEARS: 1994 - PART 1

THE TELEPHEMERA YEARS: 1994 – 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!

1994-95

Other than perennial favourites 60 Minutes and Murder, She Wrote, the top ten ratings made poor reading for CBS in the 1994-95 season, but the network had high hopes for some of their new shows, especially sitcom Cybill – Cybill Shepherd’s return to TV after failing to translate her Moonlighting fame into movie success – and the mawkish Touched by an Angel. NBC still ruled the roost, with Seinfeld joined at the top of the ratings pile by new arrivals ER and Friends, completing an irresistible Must See TV block on Thursday nights with Mad About You. Sitcoms were also popular over at ABC, where Home Improvement, Grace Under Fire, and Roseanne all pitched up in the top ten.

Also making their bow in Fall 1994 were Party of Five on Fox and something called The Daily Show on Comedy Central, but it was genre fans who were treated best in terms of new arrivals, with Sliders (Fox), Star Trek: Voyager (UPN), and both Gargoyles and Hercules: The Legendary Journeys in syndication making it a banner year for fans of sci-fi and fantasy TV, even if they would be saying goodbye to the ground-breaking Batman: The Animated Series at the end of the year. Those were all shows that made an impact in the right way, though, but what about those that failed to land a punch or were just too damn weird for TV? This is the story of four shows from 1994 that missed the mark…

My So-Called Life (ABC): After years of striving on the New York improv comedy scene, Winnie Holzman finally got her big break in 1987 when Birds of Paradise, a musical she co-wrote years before at university, began an off-Broadway run. Unfortunately, the reviews were scathing, but Holzman moved to Los Angeles with actor husband Paul Dooley (who’d co-created The Electric Company in 1971 and was a regular guest star on TV sitcoms and dramas) and submitted a spec script to thirtysomething after visiting her cinematographer brother on the show’s set. Holzman became a staff writer for the show, even appearing in one episode, and wrote for The Wonder Years.

thirtysomething co-creator Marshall Herskowitz had wanted to do a coming-of-age drama for some time, going so far as to unsuccessfully pitch a show called Secret/Seventeen to Showtime. Holzman, though, was taken by the idea of a “very personal, very internal” show about teenage life and – drawing on her own adolescent experiences – came up with her own “uncensored depiction of teenage life,” conducting research by talking to local teens. One of whom – the niece of a thirtysomething script co-ordinator – gave her name to the show’s main character, Angela, as well as a key phrase that would shape the whole concept: “boys have it so easy.”

With Herskowitz and thirtysomething co-creator Edward Zwick producing, ABC ordered a pilot to be filmed in April 1993, with newcomer Claire Danes grabbing the role of Angela after Alicia Silverstone came near, and debutant Wilson Cruz securing the part of Rickie, Angela’s sexually-ambiguous best friend. Jordan Catolano, Angela’s crush in the pilot, was played by Jared Leto, another rookie with just a handful of minor roles under his belt, and reaction to his performance – or at least his smouldering – was such that he was kept on for the subsequent series, which debuted on August 25^th 1994 in a Thursday night slot against ratings juggernauts Mad About You and Friends on NBC. Despite the tough opposition, My So-Called Life earned a hardcore following from the outset, with storylines dealing with gun violence, underage drinking, homosexual experiences, teen pregnancy, and homelessness winning critical acclaim from TV reviewers and write-ups in teen magazines like Sassy.

ABC, though, didn’t seem to understand that there was a market for shows aimed at teenage girls and, despite a spirited campaign to save the show when the network announced its cancellation, the plug was pulled after just one season. A little over a year later, Danes starred in Romeo + Juliet and suddenly America realised it could market to teenage girls, with Buffy the Vampire Slayer debuting on UPN soon after, leading to a slew of shows that sought to portray the realities of teen life, with or without the threat of vampires. For a show with such a short existence, the impact of My So-Called Life was huge, making stars of Danes and Leto, influencing a generation of future TV shows, and making the 2013 list of the Writers Guild of America’s 101 Best Written TV Shows.

Muscle (The WB): In January 1995, The WB and UPN became the fifth and sixth networks to take to the air, nine years after Fox became the fourth, and forty-seven years after ABC broke CBS and NBC’s duopoly. The WB initially launched on Wednesday nights only, with a four-show attack led by The Wayan Bros, a sitcom starring Marlon and Shawn Wayans. Also in the line-up were family yukker The Parent ‘Hood, dysfunctional imaginary friend affair Unhappily Ever After, and Muscle, a soap opera parody starring Adam West.

Muscle was created by Rob LaZebnik, a Harvard graduate from a family of screenwriters, got his start on HBO’s satirical current affairs show Not Necessarily the News before moving onto Women in Prison (a soap opera parody set in a jail) and Empty Nest, where he also worked on the production staff. The latter was produced by Paul Junger Witt and Tony Thomas who also backed Muscle, adding it to a slate that included Blossom, The John Larroquette Show, and short-lived Dudley Moore outlet Daddy’s Girls. Although West was the big name, it was the death of his character – “Big” Jim Atkinson, founder of Survival Gyms – that kicked off the show, although he occasionally appeared in flashback in subsequent episodes.

The real main character was Jim’s rebellious son Kent, played by Dan Gauthier, best known for Tour of Duty and Pauly Shore vehicle Son in Law. His relationship with his father was so poor that it Jim’s death appeared to be from a heart attack suffered when he discovered his trophy wife Jane in bed with Kent, but the revelation that Jim had been poisoned set Kent on a redemptive path to find the real killer, with Jane (Australian actress Shannon Kenny) – who inherited Survival Gyms on Jim’s death – the prime suspect! Other characters included Amy Pietz as Bronwyn Jones (Kent’s cousin and closeted lesbian newsreader), secretive gym employee Cleo (former As the World Turns star Wendy Benson), blackmailer Robert Bingham (Jerry “Teen Wolf“ Levine), and Alan Ruck as psychiatrist Dr Gold.

With more – and more ridiculous – storylines than you could shake a stick at, Muscle earned good reviews in Variety and other trade publications but struggled to find an audience who weren’t already getting their outlandish soap antics from the usual daily crop. The final episodes of the first season of all four new WB shows aired in late May, with Muscle – eager to flaunt its soap opera credentials – ending on a cliffhanger. Unfortunately, when The WB released its slate for Fall 1995, Muscle was the only one of the four missing, earning the dubious accolade of becoming the first show to be cancelled by the new network, replaced by ABC transplant Sister, Sister. LaZebnik moved on to create legal sitcom Common Law for ABC, which lasted only nine episodes, but would later find his groove on the staff of The Simpsons, where he has overseen almost four-hundred episodes as executive producer and written almost two dozen scripts of varying, late-stage Simpsons quality.

Legend (UPN): Like The WB, UPN – which stood for United Paramount Network, revealing its origins as a collaboration between cable conglomerate United Television and content provider Paramount Television – began with a limited schedule, initially operating on Monday and Tuesday nights. The network launched with a double helping of Star Trek: Voyager on Monday January 17^th 1995, with its second hour given over to new comedies Platypus Man and Pig Sty a week later. Its Tuesday line-up began with Hawaiian detective show Marker and The Watcher (more about which in next week’s Telephemera Years), but from April 18^th The Marker switched to 9pm while The Watcher was put on hiatus, the 8pm slot taken by new arrival Legend.

Bill Dial co-created the short-lived Codename: Foxfire and Legmen shows for NBC in the mid-1980s, the latter of which also had an episode scripted by Star Trek: Deep Space Nine creator Michael Piller. The two also worked on Simon & Simon, Sidekicks, and Deep Space Nine, formalising their partnership (although, at that point, they’d never actually written together) by forming Mike and Bill Productions. The new company’s first project was Legend, a science-fiction Western in the vein of Wild Wild West (and the recently departed The Adventures of Bisco County Jr). Legend starred Richard Dean Anderson – TV’s Macgyver – as Ernest Pratt, a gambling, womanizing, hard-drinking novelist in the San Francisco of the 1870s, getting rich and famous on the back of his most successful creation, the heroic Nicodemus Legend.

In the pilot episode, scripted by Dial and Piller, Pratt discovers that a man has been masquerading as Legend and that a warrant has been issued for his arrest. He tracks down the impersonator, eccentric inventor Janos Bartok (John de Lancie, Star Trek: The Next Generation’s Q), who has developed an array of gadgets based on those described by Pratt in his books that can make Legend’s heroic deeds the stuff of reality. Suffering from writer’s block and tempted by the urge to actually do some good with his life, Pratt agrees to become Legend for real, aided by the scientific genius of Bartok – a stand-in for Nikolai Tesla, to the extent that he, too, was an embittered rival of Thomas Edison – and his assistant, Huitzilopochtli Ramos (played by Mark Adair Rios).

Over the course of the first season’s twelve episodes (with a double-length opener), Legend protects immigrant farmers from unscrupulous landowners, thwarts the assassination of US President Ulysses S Grant, helps General Custer expose corruption in the War Department, and finds himself in the middle of a dispute between German hunters and the local Arapaho tribe. With guest stars including Stephanie Beacham, Alex Hyde-White, and Robert Englund, each episode brought some new fantastic case for the team, as well as testing Pratt’s resolve to act like the clean-living, noble Legend. Unfortunately, a change of management at the network resulting from lower-than-expected ratings for the station’s debut line-up resulted in the cancellation of everything other than Star Trek: Voyager, making Legend the stuff of it.

VR.5 (Fox): Although it had been used as early as 1938 to describe French avant-garde theatre, the term “virtual reality” was first used in a science-fiction context in Damien Broderick’s 1982 novel, The Judas Mandala. The concept was used to good effect in the likes of Tron and Christopher Walken starrer Brainstorm, but VR became big news in the late 1980s when VPL Research released the first commercial VR software, and exploded when Cyber God, a movie script inspired by VPL’s innovations, was Frankensteined with a decades-old Stephen King story about a gardening satyr to become Lawnmower Man. Two years later, on the back of the success of The X-Files, Fox entered the virtual reality game with VR.5, a show that would feature a virtual reality environment at the heart of a mysterious organisation known only as The Committee, which sets itself above world governments for – it claims – the good of mankind.

VR.5 was the brainchild of actress and rookie writer Jeannine Renshaw, but the idea went through multiple hands before it finally reached the screen, with the biggest contribution coming from Thania St John, an experienced writer and story editor with credits including Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, and original Fox shows 21 Jump Street and Booker. Former Fame star Lori Singer was cast as central character Sydney Bloom, a telephone operator who inherited a love of computers from her father, a computer scientist who was working on virtual reality before his death in a car accident that also claimed the life of her sister Samantha. David McCallum played Joseph Bloom in flashbacks, with Louise Fletcher – One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’s Nurse Ratched – as Sydney’s mother, Nora.

In tinkering with her computers, Sydney accidentally discovers she can enter a virtual reality world where she can interact with other users. After using her new find to investigate a potential date and discovering that actions in this virtual world have real world repercussions, she is recruited by The Committee, receiving covert assignments from her handler, Frank Morgan (Will Hatton, replaced after four episodes by Anthony Head as Oliver Sampson). But how much does The Committee know about her father’s death and could he and Samantha still be alive somewhere in the virtual reality?

VR.5 debuted on March 10^th 1995 as a mid-season replacement for the cancelled superhero show MANTIS, in a Friday night slot that led into The X-Files. With CBS offering Diagnosis: Murder and NBC in the middle of its eighth season of the Robert Stack presented Unsolved Mysteries, Fox hoped that VR.5 could pick up whatever “cool” audience wasn’t out partying on Friday nights, especially since the virtual reality effects put the cost of each episode at $1.5 million. In the end, the dense plotting lost all but a hardcore of viewers and, although the season ended on a cliffhanger with very little in the way of resolution, VR.5 was amongst those Fox shows not returning for Fall 1995, alongside The Critic, Dream On, and Fortune Hunter.

The Head (MTV): During his time at NYU’s Tisch School of Arts, animator Eric Fogel created Mutilator, Hero of the Wasteland, a short film described by one professor as being “inappropriate due to its violent conduct.” Despite that, Mutilator won the university’s award for Excellence in Animation and soon became a cult favourite as part of the touring Spike and Mike’s Sick and Twisted Festival of Animation. The film earned him a job at the newly established MTV Animation studio, created to produce Beavis and Butthead and develop new projects. One of these was The Head, Fogel’s follow-up to Mutilator, which aired in a segment entitled MTV’s Oddities in December 1994.

The Head revolves around Jim, a college student who wakes up to find his head has grown to gigantic proportions. A week later, a purple alien called Roy emerges and explains that he is using Jim’s head as a place to acclimatise to Earth’s atmosphere after arriving to save the planet from a rival alien named Gork. Roy has to reassemble his Anti-Invasion Machine and enlists Jim, along with a bunch of other people with unusual anomalies – including a landscaper who has a lawnmower blade stuck in his head (Ray), a pretty girl with a tail (Mona), a Russian who has a mouth in his chest (Ivan), a woman who looks like a rat (Raquel), a man with a fishbowl in his mouth (Earl), and a long-limbed former freak show performer named Chin – all led by the irritatingly normal Shane.

Fogel’s college pal Jason Candler voiced both Jim and Roy, with Fogel himself playing Ray and a variety of other Tisch friends and MTV staffers (none of them professional voice actors) filling out the cast. The first season consisted of thirteen fifteen-minute episodes, in which Jim’s crush Madeline is possessed by Gork and Roy gets mistaken for a California Raisin, all building to a climax in the final episode where Jim and Roy have to stop Gork’s invasion of Earth! Two episodes aired each week, with January 30^th’s final episode being a double length affair, and the complete series was collected on a VHS entitled – spoilers! – The Head Saves the Earth.

MTV Oddities in April 1995 with The Maxx, but The Head would have to wait until February 1996 for its sophomore outing, by which time it had been extended to thirty-minutes per episode. After an opener in which the gang appear on a talk show and recap the events of the first season, Jim sells his soul to the Devil and its chaos from thereon in, with subsequent episodes featuring a love triangle between Ray, Raquel, and one of a pair of conjoined twins, Chin kidnapped back to China and forced to compete in an underground fighting ring, and the arrival of Roy’s brother, Mark. The second season missed the narrative momentum of the first and there was little clamour for a third, with Fogel already busy on his next MTV project – Celebrity Deathmatch – for the network’s Cartoon Sushi block.

Next time on The Telephemera Years: More of 1994’s less-remembered efforts, including George Wendt and The Maxx!

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)