THE TELEPHEMERA YEARS: 1996, 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!

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 7^th 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 actually made it to series, though; what about the ones that feel at the final hurdle? This is the story of 1996’s unsold pilots…

Star Command (UPN): Although Star Trek had gone off the air after three seasons in 1969, its mission to boldly go where no man had gone before continued in a series of novels published by Bantam Books and Random House. With the announcement of Star Trek: The Motion Picture in 1978, interest ramped up once more, and Simon & Schuster began publishing a line of Pocket Books that began with the official novelisation of the film and would number over a hundred by the millennium. Published in September 1984 as the nineteenth in a series known as Star Trek: The Original Series, The Tears of the Singers was the debut novel by former law practice worker Melinda M Snodgrass. Although Simon & Schuster had an approved list of authors to work from, Snodgrass was encouraged to submit the novel on spec by fellow writer Victor Milán, and her story – which unusually put Lieutenant Uhura front and centre – was accepted by editor David G Hartwell.

The Tears of the Singers led to Snodgrass signing with the Berkely Publishing Group for the Circuit trilogy, and to a job as a story editor on the second season of Star Trek: The Next Generation, for which she also wrote several scripts. Afterwards, she wrote episodes of LA Law, Canadian sci-fi show Beyond Reality, police procedural Reasonable Doubts, and the rebooted Outer Limits, as well as adapting Arthur C Clarke’s short story Breaking Strain as a TV movie called Trapped in Space. In 1994, a Snodgrass script that told of a battle between the unified and space-borne Democratic Republic of Earth and Cynosura, one of its earliest colony planets, over the possession of a newly discovered inhabitable planet was greenlit as a pilot by Paramount Television in association with German studio UFA Babelsberg.

Star Command centred on the crew of The Surprise, a training ship carrying a class of graduating Star Corps cadets. Led by experienced Commanders Ridnaur (Chad Everett) and Ívarsdóttir (Morgan Fairchild), the cosmopolitan (and, of course, attractive) young crew included Jennifer Bransford, Chris Conrad, German actress Eva Habermann, Kelly Hu, Tembi Locke (fresh off a short run on Beverly Hills, 90210), Ivan Sergei, and The Boy Who Could Fly‘s Jay Underwood. Upon beginning its tour of duty in orbit around the planet Meraz, the Surprise is ambushed by a fleet of Cynosuran ships, barely escaping destruction. From there, the race to save the 25,000 Earth colonists on Meraz is on, with only The Surprise aware of the Cynosurans plan to exterminate them.

Completed by experienced TV director Jim Johnston after original director EW Swackhammer died during filming in December 1994, the resulting pilot sat on the shelf for a year before UPN aired it as a TV movie in March 1996, with the prospect of a full series if the pilot did well enough. Despite a rating on par with re-runs of Star Trek: Voyager, the cost of reassembling the cast and sets proved too much of a hurdle and Star Command never launched again.

Bermuda Triangle (ABC): After the failure of 1977’s The Fantastic Journey, the Bermuda Triangle – first mentioned in print in 1950 and given its name 14 years later in an article in Argosy magazine – all but disappeared from TV drama, despite several movies, documentaries, and Barry Manilow’s 1981 hit single continuing to keep the phenomenon in the public imagination. Still, something clearly lurked at the back of Elizabeth Bradley and Stephen McPherson’s minds when they penned the script for Bermuda Triangle as a pilot for a proposed series that would, as The Fantastic Journey had done before it, explore those trapped inside the titular polygon. McPherson and Bradley last script had been for 1988’s critical and commercial flop Cocoon: The Return, but it’s hard to believe it took them eight years to cook up the concept for Bermuda Triangle, given that it is basically the Swiss Family Robinson with a weird twist.

The family in question here are the Evermans, who charter the Tabula Rasa – literally, “blank slate” – for a Caribbean cruise. Father John (soap opera veteran Sam Behrens) is a neurosurgeon who would rather be working than spend time with his family, while mum Grace (Susanna Thompson), a GP, is much more family oriented. They, their children (Sam and Liane, played by David Gallagher and Lisa Jakub), and the boat’s captain (Michael Reilly Burke) are caught up in a mysterious storm which leaves them shipwrecked on an uncharted island, discovering they are among a group of over sixty people who have suffered similar fates.

The castaways are led by Slick Beaumont (Jerry Hardin, Deep Throat in The X-Files), a US Army pilot who crashed in 1945 and still wears his uniform. Acting as a de facto mayor, he introduces the family to the rest of their new neighbours, including documentarian Amanda (a still mostly unknown Naomi Watts), pregnant couple Calvin (Dennis Neal) and Nora (Sandra Thigpen), and Cuban refugee Roberto. Slick mentions that there are natives on the island, but he hasn’t encountered them in the fifty years he’s been there. No such trouble for young Sam, who befriends native boy Mala, finding that Mala’s people have a cure for the diabetes that – thanks to a dwindling supply of insulin – has been a major plot point.

Liane, too, makes friends, with the island’s dolphins, with whom she swims and explores, and you can’t help but feel that most of the island’s inhabitants are perfectly happy where they are, despite a pretence – led mostly by John Everman, who wants to get back to his vital work – that they need to find a way home. They didn’t, because ABC saw no future in a full series, airing the pilot as Secrets of the Bermuda Triangle in April 1996. Behrens soon popped up in Aaron Spelling’s Sunset Beach, which had its own island subplot, and Gallagher started a long run in another Spelling show, 7^th Heaven, while McPherson became president of ABC in 2004, resigning six years later in a sexual harassment scandal.

Generation X (Fox): With Chris Claremont and John Byrne at the helm, Uncanny X-Men became the biggest comic book of the early 1980s. Only Marv Wolfman and George Perez’s Teen Titans could rival it for sheer quality, drama, and characterisation, with healthy sales driven by such memorable storylines as “Days of Future Past” and the Dark Phoenix saga making the X-Men the coolest thing around. Of course, all this happened in the realm of comic books and comics fandom, with the mainstream at that point in one of its fallow periods when it came to superheroes. The days of Wonder Woman, The Incredible Hulk, and The Amazing Spider-Man on prime-time TV were gone and superheroes were once again the stuff of Saturday morning cartoons.

In 1982, Uncanny X-Men sparked a spin-off title, The New Mutants, focussing on the young students at Charles Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters, and a procession of limited series featuring the X-Men quickly followed, along with a third ongoing mutant title, X-Factor, in 1986. Byrne had long departed the title by this point, but a group of hot, young artists arrived to propel the X-Men into the 1990s, with the Jim Lee-illustrated X-Men companion becoming the best-selling comic book of all time when it debuted in 1991. Over in the junior corner, another of the bright young things, Rob Liefeld, had taken over The New Mutants, transforming it into X-Force and taking its storylines outside the confines of the Westchester Academy.

In 1992, Lee and Liefeld were part of an exodus of talent to form Image Comics, but both X-Men and Uncanny X-Men remained top selling titles and just about the only ones that could compete with Image titles such as Spawn, Gen 13, and Wetworks. In publishing, the best new thing is always the best old thing with a new spin on it and so Marvel took note of the ongoing popularity of their mutant titles and decided to revisit that first spin-off. Rather than use The New Mutants again, they decided to embrace the zeitgeist and borrow a term that beginning to be used to describe the generation of children born to the baby boomers – roughly those born between 1965 and 1980 – and taken from Douglas Coupland’s 1991 novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture. Although Coupland’s timescales were off – he placed Generation X as having been born in the late 1950s and 1960s – the term soon became widespread and Coupland himself became a spokesman for this new group of (mostly) disaffected slackers.

Generation X was created by writer Scott Lobdell (who had taken over Uncanny X-Men when Claremont left Marvel) and artist Chris Bachalo, who assembled a mostly all-new cast of young mutants. Charles Xavier has reoriented his Westchester mansion as the Xavier Institute for Higher learning, with an all-adult student body, and instead entrusts the care of young mutants to reformed villain Emma Frost, a telepath who formerly ran the Massachusetts Academy as the White Queen of the Hellfire Club. Frost is assisted by Sean Cassidy, a former member of the X-Men as Banshee, and their intake includes Jubilation “Jubilee” Lee, a young member of the X-Men created by Claremont and Marc Silvestri in 1989, and Paige Guthrie (Husk), who has the power to shed her skin and reveal a new one underneath made of other organic and inorganic materials, and had been seen before as the sister of former New Mutant Cannonball.

The rest, though, were brand-new. Angelo Espinosa (Skin) was a former gang member who could stretch and form shapes from his malleable dermis, and as Synch, Everett Thomas could copy the powers of those nearby. British mutant Jonothon Starsmore – who called himself Chamber – was able to channel a furnace of psionic energy from his core but unfortunately blew half his face off the first time his powers manifested, while Monet St Croix (M) was a powerful superhuman with increased strength, the ability to fly, and with telepathic and telekinetic abilities. The core team were soon joined by Penance (Nicole and Claudette St Croix, fused into a being with razor sharp and diamond hard skin) and Mondo, a Samoan mutant who can absorb the properties of any material he comes into contact with.

With Lobdell giving them more of what they already liked on X-Men and Bachalo beginning to develop his innovative art style, mutant fans couldn’t get enough of this new team, and Generation X #1 was the seventh best-selling comic book of 1994, second only to X-Men #30 at Marvel. Readership fell off slightly in 1995, but the Age of Apocalypse tie-in Generation Next, which re-imagined the characters in an alternate world, was amongst the best-sellers in that crossover.

Meanwhile, in Hollywood, the late 1980s saw an attempt to bring Marvel Comics characters to film and TV once more. A series of pilots were made in the hopes of rebooting The Incredible Hulk, low-budget theatrical releases starred The Punisher, and Captain America, and Spider-Man was stuck in development hell, the rights having been held by Roger Corman, Cannon Films, and Carolco, where James Cameron did considerable work on bringing the webslinger to the silver screen, only to see it collapse in a mess of litigation. The X-Men, meanwhile, were optioned to Orion Pictures in 1984, with Gerry Conway and Roy Thomas writing a screenplay, but it stalled due to the studio’s financial difficulties. As with Spider-Man, Carolco also had a tilt at the X-Men, with Kathryn Bigelow writing a treatment, but their bankruptcy in 1992 saw the rights revert back to Marvel once more.

Though film was proving a trickier deal to pull off, the X-Men did debut on TV as a Saturday morning cartoon on Fox in 1992. X-Men: The Animated Series drew on the comic book’s expansive lore and was an immediate hit, leading 20^th Century Fox to pick up the rights to the property – and its spin-offs – for future film and TV projects. Work began on bringing the X-Men to the big screen, but the success of Generation X also brought that to the attention of the studio, who partnered with Marvel Films and New World Television to develop a potential TV show.

Having acted as showrunner for the second season of 21 Jump Street, where he also created spin-off Booker, Eric Blakeney was seen as the perfect man to bring Marvel’s latest group of young misfits to the screen. Blakeney saw the parallels between the properties, both featuring young people feeling uncomfortable in their skin, and crafted a script for a pilot which – if successful – would lead to a full series or at least a series of occasional TV movies. Changes had to be made, particularly to characters whose powers would not translate well to the effects available for a TV movie, even one with a considerable budget of $4 million. Chamber, Husk, and Synch were dropped, their powers simply too difficult to reproduce on screen, while Penance’s backstory was too involved for a first appearance. They were replaced by two new characters, Buff (who can make herself, well, buff) and the eyebeam emitting Refrax, with the suggestion that they could be added to the comic book at a later date.

Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge’s Jack Sholder was installed as director and the task of assembling a cast began in earnest, with Max Headroom‘s Matt Frewer an early capture to play Dr Russel Tresh, the villain of the piece (and loosely based on comic book character Bolivar Trask). General Hospital‘s Finola Hughes and Jeremy Ratchford (who voiced Banshee on the Fox cartoon) came in as Emma Frost and Sean Cassidy, and they were joined by Amarilis (Sweet Valley High) as a non-psychic M, Heather McComb as Jubilee (although she was initially written as Dazzler), and Agustin Rodriguez as Skin, whose powers resembled those of The Fantastic Four‘s Reed Richards, but caused him great pain. A Different World‘s Bumper Robinson was Mondo, and Randall Slavin and newcomer Suzanne Davis grabbed the roles of Refrax and Buff, respectively. Filming began in the Vancouver area in mid-1995 and took less than a month; local landmark Hatley Castle was used as Xavier’s School and would subsequently stand in for the Westchester mansion in X2, X-Men: The Last Stand, X-Men: Days of Future Past, Deadpool, X-Men: Apocalypse, and Deadpool 2.

The film’s plot differs from the established comic book continuity, beginning with Jubilee manifesting her powers for the first time at a local arcade and being rescued from her predicament by Frost and Cassidy, who offer her sanctuary at their school, where she can learn to use her powers alongside her fellow mutants. At the school, Jubilee and Skin find their dreams haunted by Tresh, who is obsessed with harnessing the power of dreams and used to work with Frost before being dismissed for his unethical methods. He has invented a machine which will give him enormous psychic power and although Jubilee is able to escape, his hold over Skin pair grows. With the youngsters far from confident in their abilities, the race is on for Banshee to lead the rookie team to free Skin and stop Tresh.

Generation X debuted on Tuesday February 20^th 1996 as part of Fox Night at the Movies, earning a 7.3 rating which was on a par with Fox’s second tier shows and the TV premieres of theatrical movies usually shown in the slot, and 78^th of 108 shows broadcast that week. Fox had been hoping for ratings to match The X-Files, which regularly drew over twenty million viewers, and it was decided that the costs to produce a series would outweigh the potential benefits. The project was briefly resurrected in 1999 as a live-action show along the line of Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers, mentioned in a Fox Kids upfront video sent to affiliates, but nothing more came of it. 2001’s Mutant X followed a similar group of young mutants, although they were not related to any existing Marvel characters.

As played by Kea Wong, Jubilee would make cameo appearances in X-Men, X-2, and X-Men: Apocalypse, and in X-Men: Days of Future Past, this time played by Lara Condor. She was initially supposed to play a bigger part, but her scenes were cut. Emma Frost was originally slated to be played by Sigourney Weaver in the third X-Men film, but after director Bryan Singer left the production, she was not carried over into Last Stand. A character named Emma, with similar abilities, appears in X-Men Origins: Wolverine, played by Tahnya Tozzi, but it would not be until 2011’s X-Men: First Class that a named White Queen – a member of the Hellfire Club – would arrive on screen, with January Jones originally intended to reprise the role in X-Men: Dark Phoenix but later cut from the script. As played by Caleb Landry Jones, Banshee would also appear in First Class, and is mentioned – along with Frost – as one of the mutants captured, experimented on, and killed in Days of Future Past. The rest of Generation X are yet to transfer to the big screen, but some did appear in the 2009 animated TV series Wolverine and the X-Men.

The mid-1990s was a tumultuous time for Marvel Comics, which went through a bankruptcy after several ill-advised moves into other sectors, but the X-Men family of titles remained consistent sellers for the company. Generation X was cancelled with #75 in 2001, its characters dispersed into other titles. Chamber and Husk joined the X-Men, while Jubilee and Skin tried to leave their superhero lives behind and move to Los Angeles. Synch died, and a devastated M returned to Europe to represent the X-Corporation, Xavier’s business arm. The ongoing and convoluted nature of the Marvel universe – and particularly its mutant wing – has subsequently seen Jubilee become both a vampire and an adoptive mother, Synch come back to life, Husk undergo a series of terrible life events, and Emma Frost marry Tony Stark. Even with all that going on, Refrax and Buff never joined the comic book universe.

Hollywood Confidential (UPN): Anthony Yerkovich broke into the screenwriting business in 1977 with two episodes of Starsky & Hutch, and then went on to work on Hart to Hart, emergency services yarn 240-Robert, and Fantasy Island. He landed at Hill Street Blues in 1981 as a story editor, also contributing six scripts for its first season, and then wrote two-thirds of seasons two and three, before being tasked by NBC executive Brandon Tartikoff with creating a show about “MTV cops.” In response, Yerkovich came up with Gold Coast, a pilot script about a pair of cops working the glamorous – but dangerous – streets and beaches of Miami. Later renamed Miami Vice, the show earned a mixed response early on, especially for its mix of violence and glamour, but it nestled into the top forty ratings for the year, second in its timeslot to CBS’s Falcon Crest.

Yerkovich handed control of Miami Vice over to producer Michael Mann after six episodes, and Mann has since become synonymous with the show, all but erasing the creator’s involvement in its development, even if he did win an Emmy for that pilot script. After Miami Vice, Yerkovich created Private Eye for NBC, a detective series set in 1950s LA with Michael Woods in the lead role as ex-cop Jack Cleary, out to solve his brother’s murder with the help of a young street hustler played by Josh Brolin. Despite having (an admittedly past its prime) Miami Vice as a lead-in, and some attractive cinematography and period design, the show struggled to attract an audience, not helped by a TV guide ad that declared it “not for sissies.” It was cancelled after just thirteen episodes and Yerkovich walked away from television for almost a decade.

He returned in 1997 with a script that contrasted the glamour of Tinseltown with its seedy underbelly. Hollywood Confidential starred Edward James Olmos as Stan Navarro, a private eye whose agency caters to the Beverly Hills elite, dealing with situations they’d rather not were made public and thus beyond the remit of regular law enforcement. These unorthodox cases require an unusual approach and Navarro recruits a team of misfits, including Charlize Theron’s struggling actress, a former mob leg man (Rick Aiello), and ex-cops Dexter (Richard T Jones), Teresa (Angela Alvarado), and Mike (Brendan Kelly), the latter of whom was thrown off the force in both Chicago and Las Vegas for being too rough with suspects.

The pilot script saw Navarro and company attempt to aid a director on the rise looking to drop his young mistress and investigate the background of an acting coach before she signs with a studio, but UPN passed on a series, instead showing the pilot as TV movie in April 1997. Yerkovich tried again four years later with Big Apple, starring Ed O’Neill, which was cancelled after six episodes, but was never able to capture that lightning in a bottle again, finishing his career by re-joining Mann to executive produce the 2006 movie reboot of his most famous creation.

Secret Service Guy (Fox): In 1988, Tom Hanks and Judge Reinhold starred in two body swap movies. Hanks grew up fast in big-hearted comedy Big, while Reinhold swapped lives with eleven-year-old Fred Savage in the more peril-filled adventure Vice Versa. The actors had similar résumés and, if anything, Reinhold had slightly more cache, having co-starred alongside Eddie Murphy in two Beverly Hills Cop movies. Big was a huge success, earning almost ten times it’s $18 million budget, but Vice Versa flopped and Reinhold’s career nosedived while Hanks would win consecutive Best Actor Oscars for Philadelphia and Forrest Gump. What’s more, Reinhold’s early success had run away with him. “I was very demanding,” he later said, “(I) had an overblown image of who I was and got a reputation for being difficult. And rightfully so.”

With a series of supporting roles in big-screen films and as the lead in a string of direct-to-video and TV movies, Reinhold slowly rebuilt his reputation in the 1990s, if not his career. In 1994, he appeared as the “close talker” in an episode of Seinfeld, and in 1996 he was given the chance to star in a sitcom of his own for the first time. Secret Service Guy cast Reinhold as Steve Kessler, a security guard at the Lincoln Memorial who accidentally takes a bullet meant for the President and is given his dream job as a secret service agent as a reward. This is Spinal Tap’s Michael McKean played his boss, and support coming from Tremors‘s Finn Carter, Wendy Benson-Landes from gym sitcom soap Muscle, the Crew‘s David Burke, and Keith Diamond.

Secret Service Guy was created by David Silverman, an experienced hand who – with regular writing partner Stephen Sustersic – started his career writing for sitcoms including The Jeffersons, One Day at a Time, and Alice. The pair also wrote for Tom Arnold, Drew Carey, Pee Wee Herman, Roseanne, and Bob Newhart, and worked as story editors on ALF and Aaahh!!! Real Monsters (which laid the groundwork for their later creation of The Wild Thornberrys for the Klasky-Csupo company. In 1995, they co-created Cleghorne! for former Saturday Night Live! cast member Ellen Cleghorne, among the first batch of original programming to appear on The WB network. Although Cleghorne! was cancelled after twelve episodes, Silverman was given the greenlight for Secret Service Guy, this time at Fox.

With a writing team that included George Beckerman, Adam I Lapidus, Tim Schlattman, Eric Shaw, and Rich Tabak, who brought experience of working on Dinosaurs, Head of the Class, and Roseanne to the table, Secret Service Guy was scheduled as a mid-season replacement in January 1997, alongside King of the Hill and Pauly Shore vehicle Pauly. A change of personnel at Fox Entertainment, however, saw an overhaul of their January schedules, and with six episodes already produced, the mid-season slot was withdrawn, and the plug was pulled on the show. Usually, these things reappear in late Summer, but Secret Service Guy was never shown. That wouldn’t have happened to Tom Hanks.

Next time on The Telephemera Years: 1996’s new kids’ shows, including (not) Jay Leno and tiger bait!

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)