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!
1996-97
It was mostly business as usual at the top of the television ratings in 1996, with NBC continuing their domination, especially on Thursday nights where their Must See TV block accounted for six of the top eight shows, including debuts for the Brooke Shields-starring Suddenly Susan, The Naked Truth, Fired Up, and The Single Guy. Only ABC’s Monday Night Football spoiled a clean sweep, but there was more competition on other days, with Home Improvement and new arrival Spin City on Tuesdays giving ABC some non-sportsball success, and Sundays looking good for CBS with 60 Minutes and Touched by An Angel coming in at number eleven and twelve, respectively.
Other new shows making their bows on the Fall 1996 schedule included Cosby, Everybody Loves Raymond, Touched by An Angel spin-off Promised Land, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, and Early Edition and Dark Skies, two new genre shows making premiering on CBS and NBC, illustrating the impact The X-Files was having on the US TV market. The year would also see debuts for 7th Heaven, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, King of the Hill, Lexx, Millennium, and Mystery Science Theater 3000, but also see Family Matters, Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, Roseanne, Wings, and Renegade begin their final seasons. Those were all shows that left their mark on the wider TV viewing public, but what about those who didn’t stick around? This is the story of four fleeting fancies…
Dark Skies (NBC): The effect that The X-Files had on mainstream TV cannot be overestimated. Almost overnight, networks scrambled to find their own version of the Fox show, focussing on the paranormal and conspiratorial elements of Chris Carter’s creation and too often neglecting to find charismatic leads with compelling chemistry. UPN were first out of the blocks with Nowhere Man in August 1995, the story of a man whose past has been erased as part of a massive conspiracy, with American Gothic following on CBS a month later, concentrating more on the supernatural side of things. UPN also had The Sentinel from March 1996, which at least brought a Mulder and Scully-like partnership to the table.
The inspiration for Dark Skies, which arrived as part of NBC’s Fall 1996 line-up, was obvious. Created by B-movie scripter Brent Friedman and Bryce Zabel, a former CNN correspondent who broke into screenwriting with Kay O’Brien, a short-lived medical drama on CBS in 1986, Dark Skies leaned heavily into both the conspiracy and paranormal angles that The X-Files made its stock in trade, but turned the dial up to eleven from the off. Set in the 1960s, the show starred Eric Close as John Loengard, an idealistic young Congressional aide who is assigned to Project Blue Book, the code name for a study of unidentified flying objects by the US air force. Project Blue Book was an actual thing, although the veracity of its findings – from either side of the “UFOs are real” debate – is up for debate. In Dark Skies, the agency behind Project Blue Book is Majestic 12, a shadowy cabal of scientists, US military, and politicians, and quickly Loengard – and his girlfriend Kim Sayers (Megan Ward) – are drawn deeper into the conspiracy to keep the existence of aliens a secret from the American people.
Although both leads were not exactly newcomers, neither had any kind of TV success behind them, perfect to play the everyman and everywoman that become the last vanguard against the machinations of The Hive, a parasitic race of aliens who are secretly taking over our planet by controlling host bodies in positions of power and influence. Each episode jumps forward in time to match significant events in 1960s history and match them to Majestic 12 and The Hive’s machinations, such as episode two’s assassination of John F Kennedy and episode three’s use of music by The Beatles to carry subliminal messages. Friedman and Zabel planned the show to run for five seasons, covering 1960-1969, 1970 to 1976, 1977 to 1986, 1987 to 1999, and a grand finale which – by the time it aired – would take place in the present day.
Friedman and Zabel pitched the show to all three major networks, avoiding Fox because of the similarity to The X-Files, and hand-delivered series bibles wrapped in plain blown wrapping that came with a warning that, if opened, the contents were subject to the highest level of US government classification. Both CBS and NBC were interested, and NBC made the pair an offer, funding the show to the tune of $2 million per episode, necessary not only for the special effects required but also to ensure the period details were on point. Because the show was built around real events and real people, one quirk of the production process was Friedman and Zabel having to meet regularly with NBC’s lawyers to explain to them what was fictional and what they were presenting as fact.
Real-life figures woven into the story included JFK and his family, FBI director J Edgar Hoover, LSD enthusiast Timothy Leary, Marilyn Monroe, Jim Morrison of The Doors, Colin Powell (then a Captain in the US Army), Gubernatorial hopeful Ronald Reagan, Nelson Rockefeller, space scientist Carl Sagan, and TV host Ed Sullivan, all either part of or subject to the overarching conspiracy. The show’s creators even claimed that they’d been approached by mysterious Men in Black, who had already seen the then-unaired pilot and asked them to include several details in the show.
NBC scheduled the show for 8pm on Saturdays, opposite the debuting Second Noah on ABC, CBS’s Dr Quinn, Medicine Woman on CBS, and COPS on Fox, but also up against people going out to the cinema or sporting events. Probably the most-family friendly spot on the schedules, it was an ill-fit for a cerebral show with a touch of body horror, and it struggled for ratings from the outset. A late attempt to boost male interest by bringing in former Miss Illinois Jeri Ryan as a Soviet agent on loan to Majestic 12 and posing as Loengard’s partner Juliet Stuart didn’t pay off, and the series was cancelled after nineteen episodes, its story stranded in 1967 with Loengard still no closer to finding Kim or their child, born while she had been brainwashed by The Hive two years (and three episodes) earlier.
Dark Skies was the lowest rating of all NBC shows for 1996-97, but it had been subject to a series of pre-emptions, including nationally for the World Series and locally for college basketball and a Billy Graham revival, and those episodes were not repeated. In the end, its similarity to The X-Files – the major factor in it being greenlit in the first place – may have been its undoing, with viewers tuning in to find it was very much not that show, but unwilling to stick around and find out what it actually was. The show was a success overseas, perhaps with more sympathetic scheduling, but NBC paid the bills and NBC cancelled the show. Zabel took to the nascent internet to try and build support for bringing the show back, encouraging fans to write to network executives, but – as is possibly the case with the show itself – such a campaign was ahead of its time. There has always been a cult fanbase for the show, and a DVD of the full series – with a slew of extras, including a never-before-seen pitch reel for the second season – was released by Shout Factory in 2011.
Party Girl (Fox): A splash when it was shown as part of the Sundance Film Festival in January 1995, Daisy von Scherler Meyer’s Party Girl later became the first film with a scheduled American theatre release to premiere online, albeit with a limited, black and white only, broadcast to several hundred people on June 3rd that year. Starring Parker Posey and the director’s mother, Sasha von Scherler, Party Girl told the story of a woman who is arrested for organising an underground rave and who is bailed out by her librarian godmother, a condition of which is that she has to work at her godmother’s library to pay back the money. Co-written by Meyer and Harry Birckmayer (whose experience of the 90s gay club scene in New York proved invaluable when reconstructing those clubs for the film), Party Girl earned three-times its $150,000 budget on theatrical release and the film immediately became a cult classic among librarians, who saw themselves on screen without the traditional stereotypes for the first time.
A year later, a TV adaptation of Party Girl was announced as part of Fox’s line-up for Fall 1996, developed by Efrem Seeger, who’d earned his chops as a writer and producer on the likes of Dear John USA, Hangin’ with Mr Cooper, and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. Birckmayer and von Scherler Meyer weighed in on the pilot script and took executive producer credits alongside Seeger, with day-to-day production duties handed off to Jan Siegelman, who’d done the same job on short-lived Bronson Pinchot and Courtney Cox sitcom The Trouble with Larry. The writing team included Duet co=-creator Susan Seeger and a young Matthew Weiner, who would go on to create Mad Men.
The show followed the same premise, with Christine Taylor, who had just played Marcia in The Brady Bunch Movie, as free-spirited party girl Mary, and Swoosie Kurtz – fresh off six seasons of sororal drama Sisters – coming to her rescue as godmother Judy. Taylor’s Mary is selfish and irresponsible, almost a different character to Posey’s wilfully naïve young thing using partying to fill a gap in her life left by the premature death of her mother, but this is a twenty-two-minute sitcom rather than an independent film, which also explains why Judy’s library is full of shushing clerks that can’t relate to their customers until Mary’s unorthodox manner brings a breakthrough.
With theme music written by Carole Bayer Sager and Oliver Lieber, and a strong supporting cast that included Merrin Dungey – later in King of Queens – as Judy’s uptight assistant, Wanda, and John Cameron Mitchel, who would go on to write, direct, and star in Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Party Girl debuted on September 9th 1996, paired with fellow newcomer Lush Life on Monday nights. Although the first episode did well, ratings were a disaster, losing almost half of lead-in Melrose Place’s audience, and both Party Girl and Lush Life were cancelled after just four episodes had aired, with two more produced but left on the shelf.
Perversions of Science (HBO): Tales from the Crypt, which adapted stories from the heyday of notorious 1950s publisher EC Comics, ran for seven seasons and a total of ninety-three episodes on premium cable channel HBO. Finishing its run in June 1996, the show eventually adapted stories from not only Tales from the Crypt but other EC titles including The Haunt of Fear, The Vault of Horror, and Shock SuspenStories, with each episode introduce by The Cryptkeeper, one of three EC comics hosts alongside The Old Witch and The Vaultkeeper. Although Tales from the Crypt had run its course, there was still an appetite at HBO for more of the same, and they tasked Gilbert Adler, who had produced not only the earlier EC adaptation but also Freddy’s Nightmares in syndication, with developing a new show based on EC’s science fiction library.
Two years earlier, Adler had worked with EC’s William Gaines on WEIRD World, an unsold pilot set at the Wilson Emory Institute for Research and Development, where experiments involving time travel, robotics, and other future science took place. This time, Gaines and Adler drew from stories published in EC’s Weird Fantasy, Weird Science, and Incredible Science Fiction comics, all introduced by a sweet Danny Elfman theme and by Chrome, a sexy robot who, with a press of her nipple, invites us to watch the episode through a portal in her right breast. Those are certainly words which I just typed.
As well as the EC Comics library, Perversions of Science drew on a cadre of renowned directors, with Walter Hill helming the first episode and the likes of William Shatner, Russel Mulcahy, Tobe Hooper, and even actor Sean Astin signing on for subsequent episodes, along with acting talent like Re-Animator‘s Jeffrey Combs, scream queen Heather Langenkamp, and Jason Lee. Stories featured included a man (Keith Carradine) who finds himself in another dream every time he awakens, another (Jeremy London) repeatedly driven to kill, only to be stopped by a bearded stranger each time, and a woman (Yancy Butler) who shapes her body into perfection before time travelling into the past. In traditional O Henry style, each fable comes with a twist ending that may seem obvious but is no less satisfying once it arrives, before Chrome again makes a sexy quip to send us home happy.
Debuting on June 7th 1997 with a three-episode blast, Perversions of Science ran for ten episodes, and HBO paid for advertising in Playboy and elsewhere, but it’s possible that the final season of Tales from the Crypt – which had been produced in England on a lower budget than previous seasons – left a sour impression on its potential audience, damaging potential ratings. When it came to decide which of HBO’s big budget original programming would come back for 1998, the channel opted to go with Oz, which had debuted as Perversions of Science was coming to the end of its run, and which was critically lauded in a way a science fiction anthology could never hope to be.
The Cape (syndication): On September 16th 1996, the Space Shuttle Atlantis set off on its seventeenth mission, the seventy-ninth overall, to carry supplies, equipment, and a change of crew to the space station Mir as part of the co-operative deal between NASA and the Russian Space Agency. The mission was a success, with astronaut Shannon Lucid swapping places with John Blaha for the return journey, returning to Cape Kennedy ten days after they left. One week before the Atlantis departed, a new show premiered in syndication, aiming to tell the stories of these brave men and women who ventured beyond our atmosphere, albeit in a heavily fictionalised manner.
The Cape was a co-production of MTM Enterprises and ZM Productions, a company formed in 1982 by George Zaloom and Les Mayfield, two UCLA film school pals who broke into the business by producing a documentary short demonstrating some of the techniques used to film 2010: The Year We Make Contact in 1984. With Zaloom leaning more towards production and Mayfield directing, their first feature hit was 1992’s Encino Man, also co-scripted by Mayfield, with Mayfield subsequently hired to direct Miracle on 34th Street. The Cape would be ZM’s first TV production, created by Zaloom and ZM’s head of TV development, Kary Antholis, and developed by Paris Qualles, who’d been nominated for an Emmy for his script for the HBO special The Tuskegee Airmen in 1995.
Set at the Kennedy Space Center, The Cape focussed on the professional and private lives of a select group of astronauts training for – and executing – space shuttle missions. Leading the cast was Corbin Bernsen as Colonel Henry J “Bull” Eckert, the centre’s Director of Astronaut Training, and things get off to a hot start when he has to prepare his charges for a mission to prevent a spy satellite from de-orbiting. Support for Bernsen came from Adam Baldwin, former gridiron professional Bobby Hosea, and Murder One‘s Bobbie Phillips, and over the next few episodes the drama is ramped up, with accidents causing death and injury to those in the program, personal issues leak into space business, and Bull is considered for the position of Space Station Commander.
Storylines were, for the most part, as grounded as you could expect in a series about NASA astronauts (and Buzz Adlrin acted as a consultant), but there were occasional shifts into science fiction territory, such as the discovery of a thirty-year-old secret Soviet moon launch and vague hints of extra-terrestrial interference. The Cape debuted in syndication on September 9th 1996, with a feature length premiere leading to a two-part finale in May 1997, and won plaudits for its cinematography, effects, and music, the latter of which saw composers John Debney and Louis Febre win an Emmy Award in September 1997 for Outstanding Music Composition for a Series (Dramatic Underscore), and Debney nominated for Outstanding Main Title Theme Music. By that point, though, the show had been cancelled, a result of lower-than-expected ratings for a show which cost around $1 million an episode.
Next time on The Telephemera Years: more of 1996’s lesser-known efforts, including a Christian-tinged pandemic yarn!
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 1, 2, 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, 2, 3, 4, 5)
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 1, 2, 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, 2, 3, 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