THE TELEPHEMERA YEARS: 2001 - PART 1

THE TELEPHEMERA YEARS: 2001 – 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!

2001-02

Although they were still experiencing difficulties finding the right show for their 8.30pm slot, NBC’s Must-See Thursdays continued to dominate the TV ratings in in 2001-02, with Friends and ER occupying two of the top three spots and Will & Grace and Just Shoot Me not far behind. Their chief competition came from CBS, whose CSI: Crime Scene Investigation was entering its second season and threatening to topple Friends from its perch. Monday Night Football was ABC’s sole top-rating show and the Alphabet network also said goodbye to two sitcom stalwarts when both Spin City and Dharma & Greg began their final runs in Fall 2001.

ABC did have JJ Abrams’s Alias and insane dating show The Bachelor on deck for the new season, though just two of a handful of notable new arrivals that also included 24, Scrubs, Six Feet Under, and Star Trek: Enterprise, while Buffy the Vampire Slayer moved from The WB to UPN for its sixth season. Genre fans were well served by new shows in 2001, with Roswell and Smallville coming on board, although The X-Files would reach the end of its conspiracy trail by May 2002. Those are all shows that people remember, though; what about the ones that left less of an impact on the collective memory? This is the story of four of 2001’s less than stellar successes…

The Tick (Fox): Ben Edlund was still in high school when he created The Tick as a mascot character for New England Comics, a shop he frequented in Brockton, Massachusetts. The shop published a newsletter and Edlund progressed to a three-page strip in July 1986, the success of which prompted New England Comics to publish the character in his own, black and white comic in June 1988.

The Tick was an offbeat comedy, its hero an escapee from a mental institution who does as much damage as good, and with a wacky supporting cast that included sidekick Arthur, Man-Eating Cow, Paul the Samurai, and more. Edlund continued to draw The Tick while at college and the comic’s popularity led to an approach by Kiscom, a New Jersey-based licensing company, and Sunbow Entertainment, who were keen to produce an animated series.

That series, also titled The Tick, debuted on Fox in September 1994, running for three seasons with Townsend Coleman voicing the titular hero. Much of The Tick’s supporting cast was deemed inappropriate for a children’s cartoon and so new characters were created for the show, including Die Fledermaus and American Maid. Edlund’s final issue of The Tick was published in May 1993, with the animated series finishing in November 1996, but he wasn’t done with his creation just yet.

In 1999, Sonnenfeld/Josephson Worldwide Entertainment picked up The Tick for development into a live-action sitcom, installing former Seinfeld writer Larry Charles and ex- Simpsons scribe David Sacks as producers. Unlike the animated series, the emphasis was on the characters rather than action, and casting got off to a strong start when Patrick Warburton was given the title role. The supporting cast from the comic book was present, but the characters created for the animated show were now owned by Disney and so new analogues were created for the show, including Batmanuel and Captain Liberty.

With David Burke joining the show as Arthur, The Tick premiered on Fox on November 8^th 2001, with a tweaked origin story and the threat of the Red Scare, a robot programmed in the 1970s to destroy President Jimmy Carter and still hellbent on its mission. Despite episodes written by Charles, Sacks, and Edlund himself, The Tick failed to gather more than a cult following and just nine episodes aired before Fox pulled the plug, the final episode airing in January 2002 and telling the story of The Tick’s battle with 110-year-old villain The Terror.

The series was released on DVD in 2003 and Edlund hoped it might spark a revival, but The Tick lay dormant for another thirteen years until Netflix made a new series in 2016 with Peter Serafinowicz in the starring role. In the intervening period, Edlund had worked on shows such as Angel, Supernatural, Gotham, and Powers. The 2016 Tick lasted for two seasons of eleven episodes each before Netflix cancelled the show and Edlund is no doubt waiting for the right time for The Tick’s cry of “Spoon!” to echo across the airwaves once more.

Jeremiah (Showtime): Loosely based on the 1979 comic book by Belgian cartoonist Hermann Huppen, Jeremiah told the story of a post-apocalyptic near future where most of the adult population of Earth has been wiped out by a virus. After Platinum Studios – which had previously brought comic book properties Cowboys and Aliens and Men in Black to screen – acquired the rights to the book, Babylon 5 creator J Michael Straczynski took the raw nuggets of Huppen’s concept and expanded them into a fully realised world.

Straczynski had gotten his start writing spec scripts for He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, before showrunning The Real Ghostbusters for DIC. A move into live-action children’s TV with Captain Power sparked work for more adult-oriented shows and he spent time writing scripts for The Twilight Zone and working as a producer of Jake and the Fatman and Murder, She Wrote.

Babylon 5 followed in 1991 with a five-season run on PTEN, and Straczynski also moved into the world of comic books, firstly with adaptations of his Babylon 5 stories and then with Rising Stars for Top Cow/Image Comics in 1999. This put him in a perfect place for Platinum to approach him to develop Jeremiah, which the writer envisaged as a “road show.”

Jeremiah took place in 2021, fifteen years after a plague nicknamed The Big Death (or just “Big D”) has swept across the civilised world. Jeremiah, played by former Beverly Hills 90210 heartthrob Luke Perry, had spent the last fifteen years travelling across the USA in search of his father, who he believes may still be alive in a government facility known as the Valhalla Sector. Jeremiah and another young man named Kurdy (Malcolm-Jamal Warner) discover a functioning community named Thunder Mountain, where they help to rebuild society and are sent out on recon missions by its leader, former child prodigy Markus Alexander (Peter Stebbings).

Over the next two seasons, Jeremiah and Kurdy encountered many other survivors, all against a backdrop of the threat of the Western Alliance, an authoritarian group holed up at Valhalla Sector. Straczynski had planned a five-season story but conflicts with Showtime management over the direction of the show led to him taking his name off one of the episodes he wrote and threatening to leave unless he was given certain assurances for season three. As it was, Showtime decided that they were done with science fiction, anyway, and cancelled Jeremiah at the end of its second season. The writing had been on the wall as early as November 2003, when the network scheduled just seven of the fifteen episodes in season two for broadcast, the balance airing from September 2004, ten months after the last new episode.

Stung by the experience, Jeremiah was Straczynski’s last TV project until 2015’s Sense 8, spending the intervening time on comic books (including Amazing Spider-Man and Supreme Power for Marvel) and on writing films, winning awards for Clint Eastwood crime drama Changeling and also working on Thor, Underworld: Awakening, and World War Z.

Wolf Lake (CBS): Werewolves have always been a tricky thing to get right on the screen, at least as sensitive, sexy protagonists. In stark comparison to vampires, their animal nature always seems to override any sense of mystery; not for nothing did the Fashion SWAT department of the Something Awful website declare that “Dracula is a caped sophisticate, but Wolfman is just a guy who can’t hold his shit together.”

John Leekley had already attempted to do sexy vampires with 1996’s Kindred: the Embraced, loosely based on the Vampire: the Masquerade role-playing game, and clearly fancied trying his hand at doing the impossible when he pitched Wolf Lake to CBS in 2001. Before creating Kindred, Leekley had written for shows as diverse as Miami Vice, Nightmare Cafe, and Knight Rider 2010, but clearly found his niche with the supernatural, having just written nine episodes of the Todd McFarlane’s Spawn animated series before creating Wolf Lake.

The eponymous small town was home to Ruby Wilder, the girlfriend of Seattle policeman John Kanin, who proposes marriage as the show begins. She accepts but is then attacked by an unseen assailant and vanishes, leaving only a severed hand behind. Seeking answers, Kanin travels to Wolf Lake but is unprepared for what he finds, a place dominated by a clan of werewolves who live in an estate known as The Hill and make life very difficult for the town’s normal inhabitants.

None of this was in Leekley’s original script, used for a pilot starring Lou Diamond Phillips as a wildlife warden tracking some unusually aggressive wolves and picked up by CBS for a Fall 2001 debut. Somewhere along the line, wholesale changes were made, and Leekley voluntarily left the show, although he retained a creator’s credit. Diamond Phillips was on the fence but agreed to stay for the revamped version of the show, which premiered on September 19^th 2001. The former Young Guns actor was joined in the cast by Mia Kirschner as Ruby, Tim Matheson as Wolf Lake’s Sheriff, and by Graham Greene as Sherman Blackstone, the keeper of the town’s secrets.

With a bunch of attractive teen werewolves also thrown in, CBS were banking on Wolf Lake to become their own Buffy the Vampire Slayer with a dose of The X-Files and Twin Peaks added to the mix, but – despite the changes – the network never seemed completely behind the show, putting it on hiatus after just five episodes had aired. Nine episodes had been completed, though, and UPN stepped in to re-run the first five and air the remaining episodes in March 2002.

There were hopes that UPN might order a second season of the show, but ratings had not been good enough and Wolf Lake was not among the six shows renewed by the network, one of which – ironically – was Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Leekley, who had once written a series bible for a proposed Doctor Who reboot, bowed out of TV shortly afterwards and now writes a food blog with his wife, Rebekah.

Undeclared (Fox): Judd Apatow enjoyed massive critical success with Freak and Geeks, the drama he created with writer Paul Feig that starred Linda Cardellini, James Franco, Seth Rogan, and others as a group of disaffected teens at a small-town High School in 1980s Michigan. Unfortunately, those who loved Freak and Greeks – and those who loved It really loved it – were not enough in number to prevent the show’s cancellation at the end of its first season at the hands of an NBC network who didn’t know what to do with it.

While he was developing Freaks and Geeks, Apatow also created Sick in the Head for Fox, a sitcom starring David Krumholtz, Amy Poehler, and Kevin Corrigan, but Fox passed on the show, allowing Apatow to devote his time to his NBC project. When it came time for Apatow’s next project, he already had an in at Fox and pitched them on Undeclared, a half-hour sitcom starring Freaks and Geeks alumni Rogen, and featuring Jason Segel, and Busy Philipps – as well as Krumholtz and Poehler – as recurring guest stars.

Alongside Rogen in the main roles were Canadian actor Jay Baruchel, Brooklyn newcomer Carla Gallo, Queer as Folk’s Charlie Hunnam, and former Dawson’s Creek guest star Monica Keena, a bunch of sexy, if awkward, young things that could have become ciphers for the usual college stories in less-creative hands. Under Apatow, however, and with scripts written by Rogen, future Into the Spider-Verse writer Rodney Rothman, Beavis and Butthead Do America scribe Kristofor Brown, Nicholas Stoller (who co-wrote 2001’s Muppets reboot with Segel), and by Malcolm & Eddie creator Joel Madison, Undeclared became almost as beloved as Freaks and Geeks.

Unfortunately, something so good cannot be allowed to exist for long; Fox took twenty-five weeks to get through the seventeen-episode first season, with episodes aired out of order and in three different time slots. The network had already clashed with Apatow during the show’s production, insisting on a laugh track, something that Apatow only avoided by threatening to walk.

As the show passed the mid-point of its run, and with ratings less than those demanded by the network, Apatow attempted to repeat a trick he’d tried with Freaks and Geeks, mailing advance copies of upcoming episodes to TV reviewers in the hope that they’d champion the show. The trouble was that critics almost universally loved the show anyway, it was the American public who didn’t see (or couldn’t find) its obvious charms. Again.

Apatow developed two more TV shows – North Hollywood for ABC (with Rogen and Segel once again) and Life on Parole for Fox – but never got past the pilot stage and he turned his attention to movies, producing Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy in 2004 before directing The 40-Year-Old Virgin a year later. The rest, as they say, is history, but it’s somehow comforting that he still finds room for his old friends in his projects, with eight of the Undeclared cast popping up in future projects. Now that’s school spirit!

Next time on The Telephemera Years: More failed shows from 2001, including unwelcome spin-offs and universe controllers!

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)