THE TELEPHEMERA YEARS: 1994 - PART 3

THE TELEPHEMERA YEARS: 1994 – 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!

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 it to air, though: what about those that fell at the final hurdle? This is the story of 1994’s unsold pilots…

Bionic Breakdown (CBS): After thrilling viewers for much of the mid-1970s, both The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman came to an end in Spring 1978, with Steve Austin teaming with Soviet agent Andreia to stop a terrorist stealing nuclear missiles, and Jaime Sommers on the run from her own government in a series of events resembling The Prisoner. Ratings for both shows had declined during their final seasons, and Lee Majors soon popped up as Colt Seavers on The Fall Guy. Lindsay Wagner didn’t fare quite as well, filming a number of pilots and the short-lived police drama Jessie, but both put their career-defining roles firmly behind them.

In 1986, Majors was vacationing with former Six Million Dollar Man colleague Richard Anderson (Oscar Goldman in both series) and a playfully improvised scene, reprising their old characters, led Anderson to contact Universal president Sidney Sheinberg, who greenlit a reunion movie, 1987’s The Return of the Six Million Dollar Man, which centred around Austin’s estranged son, Michael (Tom Schanley), who undergoes bionic enhancements of his own, and brought back Majors, Wagner, and Anderson to the bionic world. The film was supposed to kick off a series for Michael Austin, but the network declined going any further with it, as they did with 1989’s Bionic Showdown, which did the same for another newly enhanced character, Sandra Bullock’s Kate Mason.

In 1994 it was time to try again, and this time – rather than use the TV movie as a pilot for a show starring a new bionic character – it was decided that there was still mileage in the old ones. Titled Bionic Breakdown during production, the story centred around the failure of Jaime’s bionics, first noticed when she meets Steve, now her fiancé, to discuss their upcoming wedding. Once again, Majors, Wagner, and Anderson returned for the movie, but there was no sign of either Bullock (who had just starred in Speed) or Schanley (last seen in the less salubrious Hart to Hart Returns in 1993). Instead, Wings star Farrah Forke appeared as OSI agent Kimberley Harrison, who begs Sommers for help getting out of the agency, and Martin E Brooks reprised his role as Dr Rudy Wells, trying to get to the bottom of Jaime’s failing bionics.

During production, it became clear that CBS, who had reluctantly agreed to back the pilot after the success of the first two reunion pilots as standalone TV movies, were not interested in taking it to series again. Thus, Bionic Breakdown became Bionic Ever After?, a fitting finale for the characters of The Six Million Dollar Man and Bionic Woman universe. Aired as CBS Tuesday Movie in November 1994, Bionic Ever After? was the 29^th best rated show that week, with over eighteen million viewers, even up against Home Improvement and Frasier. That was the last the world saw of the Bionic pair, save for a 2011 comic book series from Dynamite, which saw Kevin Smith re-use a script he’d had in development with Universal in 1995.

Island City (PTEN): Founded in 1969 by real estate developers Merv Adelson, Irwin Molasky, and television producer Lee Rich, Lorimar Television earned its first big hit with a 1971 TV movie based on Earl Hamner Jr’s The Homecoming. Aired on CBS over Christmas, the film acted as a pilot for the company’s first series, The Waltons, establishing Lorimar as a player on the TV production scene. The rest of the 1970s saw the company grow with Eight is Enough, Dallas, and Knots Landing all Lorimar productions, and the 1980s were no different, bringing Falcon Crest, Hunter, ALF, Valerie, Perfect Strangers, and People’s Court to screens.

Rich left the company in 1986 and two years later it was purchased by Warner Communications. Lorimar’s distribution arm was folded into Warner Bros Domestic Television Production, but the company continued to produce television until 1993, when it was absorbed into Warner Bros Television. Lorimar’s final three productions were all short-lived, with Time Trax, Getting By, and It Had To Be You all cancelled by the end of the 1994 season. Its final, final production, though, was a pilot for a proposed series for the newly established The WB network.

Island City was created by Jonathan Glassner, a screenwriter who had cut his teeth on episodes of Ohara, The Wizard, and Alfred Hitchock Presents, moving onto 21 Jump Street (where he also acted as producer) and Lorimar’s own Time Trax. Glassner’s script was set in a future where scientists develop a “fountain of youth” drug, only to find that when most people take it, they turn into barbaric mutants. The minority that is immune to this side-effect are huddled together in a walled city, while the rest roam the wasteland outside its gates. In an attempt to find out what went wrong and possibly reverse the drug’s effects, teams of soldiers and scientists venture out into the wasteland to bring back mutated subjects for testing.

It’s one of these missions going wrong that serves as the plot for the pilot and the spark for the series that would have followed it. Leading the expedition was Colonel Tom Valdoon, played by Kevin Conroy, best known then – and now – as the voice of Batman/Bruce Wayne in Batman: The Animated Series. Alongside Conroy, future Desperate Housewife Brenda Strong and Eric “Will and Grace“ McCormack featured, all under the direction of Jorge Montesi, another Jump Street émigré. With Lorimar winding down, the pilot fell through the cracks but was picked up by the Prime Time Entertainment Network, a joint venture between Warner Bros and Chris-Craft Industries, a boat manufacturer that had become involved in TV distribution in the 1970s. Shown as a TV movie in March 1994, it polarised viewers who were either intrigued by its premise and mix of politics, science, and action, or turned off by the low budget effects and Montesi’s over-earnest direction. Lorimar went quietly into the night, but Glassner rebounded to bring Stargate SG1 to television in 1997, and latterly acted as executive producer on The Outpost.

LAX 2194 (ABC): Matthew Perry became a household name almost overnight when he was chosen to be one of the six Friends in NBC’s new Thursday night sitcom in September 1994. By the time the show finished its ten-season run in May 2004, Perry was on a staggering $1 million per episode, and was thought to have earned almost one hundred times that during his time on the show. It all could have been so very different, though, if a pilot he’d made for ABC had been picked up for series instead. That pilot, which also starred comedian Ryan Stiles and former model Kelly Hu, was one of the network’s big hopes for 1994 during a time they were enjoying so much success they could afford to take chances. And LAX 2194 was nothing if not a dice roll…

LAX 2194 was created by writer and producer Ken Estin, who won Emmys for his work on Taxi and The Tracy Ullman Show, the latter of which he co-created with the titular star. He also co-created the short-lived Leslie Nielsen sitcom Shaping Up with Sam Simon, had his hands all over Cheers spin-off The Tortellis, and wrote the screenplay for Beverly Hills Cop. His latest concept was a workplace comedy about baggage handlers at Los Angeles International Airport, with the twist that it was set in the future, where aliens were as likely to be the problematic passengers as human beings.

Perry would later admit on Late Night with Seth Myers that he took the role because he had “no money,” and had told his agent, “You’ve got to get me a job, any job you can.” That job turned out to be LAX 2194, where he and Hu starred as baggage handlers, with Stiles cast as a robot customs agent, who struggles with human conventions and is at odds with his co-workers. Perry told Myers, “So I was wearing a futuristic shirt, and little people played the aliens. I had to sort out the aliens’ luggage and that was basically the show.” A pilot was shot, of which only a 54-second clip has ever surfaced, probably because an executive reportedly said that LAX 2194 was “the worst thing we’ve ever seen in our lives.”

This was fortunate for Perry, because a script for a show called Friends Like Us had been garnering huge amounts of buzz around Hollywood and, upon reading it, the actor realised he was perfect for the part of the wisecracking Chandler Bing. By the time he managed to get an audition, he’d read the script so many times he had it memorised, impressing producer Marta Kauffman enough to grab the final uncast role in the show, which soon dropped the Like Us from its title. Stiles was also fortunate, beginning a nine-year run on The Drew Carey Show a year later, while Hu went through a short stint on Sunset Beach before finding fame in Sammo Hung show Martial Law in 1998. LAX 2194, meanwhile, is lost to time.

Galaxy Beat (CBS): If LAX 2194 hadn’t been a pile of burning trash, it might have been joined in the Fall 1994 season by another sci-fi sitcom, one created by former Sledge Hammer! creator Alan Spencer after a string of unsold pilots made in the wake of his wacky cop show’s cancellation in 1988. Spencer – who had begun his TV writing career at just fifteen-years-old, and was only twenty-six when he created Sledge Hammer! for ABC – developed The Ghost Writer, starring Psycho’s Anthony Perkins a writer of horror novels which remained unsold, co-created The Nutt House with Mel Brooks (six of its eleven episodes aired on NBC before cancellation), and wrote and directed dark date comedy Hexed, which did well enough at the box office in a limited run but was panned by critics.

Returning to TV, Spencer was detailed by CBS to make an offbeat comedy, in the style of his earlier hit. Spencer was wary, given CBS had a record of not actually showing that kind of show, but came up with Galaxy Beat, a sitcom with former Trapper John, MD and Falcon Crest star Gregory Harrison as Dack Steelbrow, one of the best starship captains in the universe who has been assigned to the worst sector in the galaxy to fight evil aliens rather when he should have been given a promotion. On the verge of quitting, Steelbrow is persuaded by his new rag-tag crew to stay and do the job as the best way of showing his superiors what they’ve overlooked.

Among the crew were ex-model Tracy Scoggins – formerly of The Colbys and who had just finished as Cat Grant in season one of Los and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman – as Sheila Fleckstein, Alex Désert (TV 101, The Flash, and The Heights)’s Larry Longspan, and fishlike alien Corporal Cod, voiced by former Planet of the Apes star Roddy McDowell, who this time left the long hours in the make-up chair to former NHL goaltender Don McLeod, who physically played the character. The thirty-minute pilot was directed by Star Trek: The Next Generation veteran Les Landau and cost $1.7 million to make, laden with special effects that wouldn’t have looked out of place in Landau’s alma mater.

The pilot tested well but, as Spencer feared, just wasn’t what CBS were looking for at the time. He reported that then head of the network, Peter Tortorici, said, “We’re really glad we made this pilot, but it’s just not for us.” Both Scoggins and Spencer stayed with sci-fi after Galaxy Beat wasn’t picked up to series, with the former starring in Babylon 5 and Spencer working up another pilot, this time with a more dramatic bent. Starring Julian Sands, The Tomorrow Man also failed to impress CBS, with Tortorici apparently asking for more jokes despite passing on a sci-fi comedy the year before. Its failure led Spencer to step away from TV and film production for a full decade, returning in 2007 with Crime Team!, co-created with Jim Abrahams.

Next time on The Telephemera Years: Tattooed teenagers and skeleton warriors? Must be 1994’s new kids’ shows!

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)