THE TELEPHEMERA YEARS: 1994 - PART 2

THE TELEPHEMERA YEARS: 1994 – PART 2

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 more shows from 1994 that didn’t hang around…

The George Wendt Show (CBS): The Second City Theatre on North Wells Street in Chicago, Illinois, is one of the most influential buildings in US TV. Since its inception in 1959, the improvised comedy troupe that calls the building home has produced a stunning amount of graduates, including Alan Alda, Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi, John Candy, Steve Carell, Stephen Colbert, Chris Farley, Tina Fey, Eugene Levy, Bill Murray, Mike Myers, Jordan Peele, Amy Poehler, Gilda Radner, and Harold Ramis. The Class of 1980 included Chicago native George Wendt, a man who’d turned up at the theatre one day hoping to join, only to be given a broom to sweep the stage. He eventually became a solid part of the ensemble, meeting his future wife Bernadette Birkett there.

Wendt headed to Hollywood to try and break into movies and TV, securing guest roles in episodes of Soap, Hart to Hart, and Taxi, and was cast in his first main role as Phys Ed teacher Gus Bertoia in school sitcom Making the Grade. Although Making the Grade was cancelled after just six episodes, Wendt caught the eye of James Burrows, Glen Charles, and Les Charles, who gave him the role of barfly Norm Peterson in their new Boston-set sitcom Cheers when it started its run in September 1982. Wendt spent eleven seasons occupying his bar-side seat (with Birkett supplying the voice of Norm’s never-seen wife, Vera), even making appearances on spin-offs The Tortellis and Frasier, but didn’t secure a regular role after the show ended in May 1993.

That made him available for producers Lew Schneider and Peter Tolan when they needed a star for a sitcom they’d created based on popular NPR call-in show Car Talk. Starting on local Boston radio in 1977, Car Talk featured real-life brother mechanics Ray and Tom Magliozzi, giving advice to listeners with an infectious warmth and humour. Schneider and Tolan saw potential in a sitcom based on the brothers’ personalities and cast Wendt as Madison, Wisconsin, mechanic George Coleman in a show named to capitalise on Wendt’s post-Cheers cachet. Newcomer Pat Finn was recruited from Second City to play George’s younger brother Dan, and the set-up for the show saw the brothers operate their garage and host a radio call-in show titled Points and Plugs. Completing the cast were Fear of a Black Hat’s Mark Christopher Lawrence, former She-Wolf of London Kate Hodge, and Brian Doyle-Murray, brother of Bill and an alumnus of Saturday Night Live in his own right.

The George Wendt Show debuted on CBS in March 1995 in a Wednesday night slot CBS had been having trouble filling, although such was ABC’s domination of Wednesday nights that it really didn’t matter what the Tiffany network put up against it. Car Talk ran for thirty-five years, only ending when ill health forced the Magliozzi brothers into retirement, but Wendt and the Colemans were not so fortunate and just eight episodes of The George Wendt Show aired before CBS pulled the plug, leaving two completed episodes in the can.

The Maxx (MTV): In 1992, seven prominent Marvel Comics artists left the company to establish their own publishing house, Image Comics. Offering creative freedom and, more importantly, ownership of their work that Marvel and rival DC Comics did not, the seven soon tempted others to make the jump, resulting in a wave of predominantly artist-led books. Michigan artist Sam Kieth, who enjoyed a rapid rise to fame in the early 1990s as an in-demand cover artist for Marvel Comics Presents, was one of the second wave of creators to take the Image offer, wisely recruiting scripter William Messner-Loebs (with whom he’d worked on the graphic novel Epicurus the Sage) to assist with plotting and dialogue.

The Maxx was based on one of Kieth’s earliest ideas for a comic of his own but progressed far beyond the 1980 concept for a killer rabbit named Max into a multi-layered story set across two worlds. In the regular world, which resembles our own, The Maxx was a homeless man but in the fantasy world of The Outback he is its greatest power, a huge humanoid rabbit who protects the Jungle Queen. In our world, the Jungle Queen is Julie, a social worker who frequently bails Maxx out of jail. We eventually learn that The Outback is a personalised environment created by trauma victims and a man named Mr Gone is able to access other people’s Outbacks, using his power to his own, twisted ends.

The Maxx lasted for thirty-five issues, published over a five-year period between March 1993 and August 1998, and one of its early fans was producer Abby Terkuhle, who had recently founded MTV Animation to handle production of the station’s runaway hit Beavis and Butt-Head. Securing the rights to adapt Kieth’s comic, Terkuhle planned to have it debut as one of two features in a new thirty-minute block entitled MTV’s Oddities, alongside Eric Fogel’s The Head. Each show would have one fifteen-minute episode per show, but it was decided to split the shows to enable The Maxx, in particular, to exist in its own space. The Head subsequently launched in thirty-minute bites in December 1994, with The Maxx following in April 1995.

Kieth and Messner-Loebs both participated in the adaptation, and – despite a limited budget – the cartoon stayed true to the spirit of the comic book, even if certain aspects were toned down for the anticipated adolescent audience. With each episode roughly adapting an issue of the comic book, the show soon burned through the available source material and although Keith was able to give them direction, certain important plots had yet to appear in the comic and so a somewhat ambivalent season conclusion was concocted, lest the network not commission a second. This turned out to be good planning since thirteen episodes was all The Maxx got, and although the comic book reached a different denouement in 1998, Kieth publicly declared his satisfaction with the cartoon’s ending, declaring that it allowed viewers to interpret their own fates for his characters.

The Watcher (UPN): It’s probably fair to say that, as a brand-new network, UPN hadn’t totally decided what it wanted to be when it arrived on TV screens in January 1995, despite a considerable number of man-hours and dollars spent on pre-launch branding and research. Thus, its opening line-up contained a variety of shows that seemingly sought to appeal to a wide range of viewers and tastes in a “throw shit at the wall and see what sticks” manner, but possibly – Star Trek: Voyager, which had a ready-made audience, aside – wound up falling dramatically between stools. This can surely be the only explanation for The Watcher, an anthology drama show set in Las Vegas that featured rump-enthusiast rapper Sir Mix-a-Lot as its titular, omniscient host.

Born Anthony L Ray, Sir Mix-a-Lot began rapping as a teenager in Seattle, releasing records on the Nastymix label he co-founded with local DJ Nasty Nes and businessman Ed Locke, occasionally gaining some success outside his home area but no big chart hits. In 1992, after signing with Def American Records, he released his third album Mack Daddy, and its lead single – a paean to the larger posteriored lady called “Baby Got Back” – went double platinum. Follow-up success eluded him, with “Sleepin’ Wit My Fonk” – the third single from the Chief Boot Knocka album that was released in 1994 – failing to chart, and so his presence as the all-seeing Watcher must have been a surprise to many, but clearly made sense to series creator Christopher Crowe.

Crowe was a graphic designer turned writer who cut his teeth on Baretta, The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries, and BJ and the Bear, which he co-created with Glen A Larson. He based The Watcher in the Riviera Hotel, a cylindrical landmark building on the Las Vegas Strip that opened in 1955, backed by a consortium that included Harpo and Gummo Marx, as well as several renowned local gangsters. By 1993, the hotel was in financial trouble and a restructure of its ownership group sought to bring in new funds, licensing the name to The Watcher.

Other than Sir Mix-a-Lot, the only regular cast member was newcomer Bobbie Phillips as limo driver Lori Danforth, but the anthology formula allowed for plenty of guest appearances, even if the budget was somewhat lower than The Love Boat in its prime. The likes of Kathy Ireland, a young Freddie Prinze Jr, former ALF star Max Wright, and the band Cheap Trick – whose logo Crowe had designed while working for his father’s company out of college – all lined for The Watcher’s attentions, in episodes featuring gigolos, poisoners, and an Elvis lookalike competition. UPN launched on just Monday and Tuesday nights, with The Watcher given a 9pm slot (opposite Home Improvement and Frasier), but nothing the network did seemed to stick in its first year. Ahead of the Fall 1995 season, all UPN programming save for Star Trek: Voyager was cancelled, replaced by an all-new line-up that leaned more towards an African-American audience, although sadly without Sir Mix-a-Lot.

Earth 2 (NBC): Considering its origins as a top-down instruction from Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment to create, as writer Michael Duggan put it, “a Wagon Train in outer space,” there’s little about Earth 2 that is groundbreaking, except for the one thing it may never be remembered for. Not to be confused with Earth II (an unsold pilot from 1971), DC Comics alternative reality Earth-2, or the second album by Seattle drone kings Earth, Earth 2 was co-created from Amblin’s instructions by Duggan, Carol Flint, Mark Levin, and Billy Ray, writer-producers with credits between them that included LA Law, Miami Vice, The Wonder Years, and Bruce Willis thriller The Color of Night.

Seven years before the Eden Project opened the doors to its biodome, that name was also used for the central mission behind Earth 2’s concept: an expedition to find a suitable planet to house the remnants of humanity after our own Earth becomes uninhabitable. Although humanity is safely ensconced in orbiting space stations, a mysterious new disease referred to as “the syndrome” is affecting their children, apparently due to their lack of contact with Earth or an Earth-like planet. Despite the governing Council refusing to even acknowledge its existence, billionaire Devon Adair launches a mission to a planet labelled G889, twenty-two light years away in order to save eight-year-old son, Ulysses, who is stricken with the syndrome.

It’s here where Earth 2 differed from any other spacebound show before it in that Devon Adair – the de facto commander of the mission – is a woman. Earth 2 debuted two months before Star Trek: Voyager, but you’ll really see Adair listed ahead of Kathryn Janeway, a shame for former Hooperman star Debrah Farentino. Of course, even led by a woman, the mission goes awry almost immediately, sabotaged by conflicting interests in the Council, and the show becomes a story of a struggle to survive on the new planet, whose native occupants the Terrians are vital to its continued existence. Farentino is ably backed in the cast by Highlander’s Clancy Brown, Rebecca Gayheart, and Jessica Steen, with the likes of Tim Curry, Roy Dotrice, and Terry O’Quinn popping up in guest roles.

Earth 2 debuted with a double-length episode on Sunday November 6^th 1994, paired with seaQuest DSV, another Amblin show entering its second season. Across its twenty-one episodes, the crew faced all manner of threats, from the sinister alien Grendlers, the deadly Kobas, what was left of an abandoned penal colony, and from within their own ranks, and there were plans laid for the show’s second season that saw a cured Ulysses begin to develop abilities similar to those possessed by the Terrians, which may have been part of the Council’s plan all along. Sadly, these threads were never picked up as NBC followed a move to replace Duggan as supervising producer with Gil Grant, who favoured some wholesale changes, by cancelling the show outright, citing lower than expected ratings. Despite a vocal fan campaign, Adair and company never did find New Pacifica.

Get Smart (Fox): Created by Mel Brooks and The Graduate co-writer Buck Henry, Get Smart rode the wave of the 1960s spy craze when it debuted in September 1965, three months before the fourth James Bond movie hit screens. Starring jobbing comedian Don Adams as Maxwell Smart, designated Agent 86 of CONTROL, a government agency dedicated to counterterrorism and, in particular, thwarting the schemes of KAOS. Adams’s Smart was clumsy and accident prone, yet he always managed to get the job done, helped by some equally inept enemy agents and an assortment of allies, including the beautiful Agent 99 (former model Barbara Feldon), all under the command of The Chief (Edward Platt). Get Smart lasted for five seasons on NBC (and latterly CBS), inspiring a movie return for Adams as Smart in 1980’s The Nude Bomb.

In 1989, Adams, Feldon, and several of the original series cast returned in ABC’s Get Smart, Again! In the made for TV movie, CONTROL had long been disbanded and Smart is working as a protocol officer. When KAOS threatens the world, he is reactivated as an agent and joins Agent 13, Hymie the Robot, and Agent 99 – now his wife – to thwart the KAOS plan to control the weather and keep people indoors. The reception garnered by the TV movie inspired plans for a series return for the Get Smart property, one which took five years to reach production, optioned by Fox. This made it the first TV show to air on all four major networks, although several shows had managed the earlier “big four” of ABC, CBS, NBC, and the DuMont Network.

The reboot centred around Zachary Smart, CONTROL’s new star agent and the son of Maxwell Smart – now head of the agency – and Agent 99, now a congresswoman. The twin children of Smart and 99 had been introduced in the fifth season of the original show, although Zach’s twin does not appear in the reboot. Zach – played by comedian (and Second City graduate) Andy Dick – was a chip off the old block, as accident-prone and bumbling as his father, and he is assigned Agent 66 (model turned actress Elaine Hendrix) as a partner to help him through his endeavours. Joining the pair are Heather Morgan as Trudy, CONTROL’s dim-witted secretary, and Gabrielle Boni as master of disguise Agent 9.

The new series was overseen by writer/producers Michael J Di Gateano and Lawrence Gay, who’d worked together previously on the TV version of Ferris Bueller and redneck legal comedy Flesh ‘n’ Blood, as well as scripting Sinbad vehicle Houseguest. Debuting on Sunday nights on Fox in January 1995, as a lead-in for The Simpsons, the show was expected to score big with the nostalgia crowd and the slackers of Generation X, who were drawn to the simpler pop culture of the past in an ironic style. Whoever it reached, it wasn’t enough, and with just five million viewers per episode, Fox cancelled Get Smart after just seven episodes, by which time Dick was already filming NewsRadio.

Next time on The Telephemera Years: 1994’s unsold pilots, including a bionic wedding and spacebound cops!

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)