THE TELEPHEMERA YEARS: 2004, 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!

2004-05

After finishing the 2003-04 season with just one show – perennial favourite Monday Night Football – in the top twenty rating shows, ABC hit back in Fall 2004 with a slate of new arrivals that took the US by storm. Crashing into the top ten were both Desperate Housewives and Grey’s Anatomy, while the buzz created by mystery box classic Lost saw twenty million viewers tune in for its finale. CBS still ruled the roost, however, with the juggernaut that was CSI: Crime Scene Investigation showing no signs of slowing down, backed by spin-off CSI: Miami, another police procedural in Without a Trace, and reality show Survivor. American Idol secured two places in the top three for Fox, while NBC continued to struggle, the days of Must See TV fading fast in the wake of Friends and Seinfeld ending; ER, its highest rating show, could claim only the number twelve spot.

There were plenty of new arrivals to keep the ABC blockbuster trio company, though, with Boston Legal doing well on ABC, CSI: New York joining the CBS CSI family, and Family Guy spin-off American Dad debuting on Fox. NBC tried out a spin-off of their own in Joey, which didn’t do well, but Medium and The Office were more successful. Offbeat detective action could be found on UPN as Veronica Mars sought to solve the mystery of her murdered classmate, HBO premiered both Deadwood and Entourage, and genre fans were well-catered for with The 4400 on the USA Network and Stargate Atlantis on Sci-Fi. Those were all shows that made a lasting impression on viewers but what about those that came and went? This is the story of four more misses from the 2004-05 season…

Point Pleasant (Fox): In October 2003, Eliza Dushku had earned enough cachet playing rogue slayer Faith in Buffy the Vampire Slayer to be given her own show. That show was Tru Calling on Fox, a supernatural drama that saw medical student Tru Davies discover she can talk to the recently deceased and can relive their final day in an attempt to change the events that got them killed. Created by former Wonder Years and Dawson’s Creek scripter Jon Harmon Feldman, Tru Calling initially did encouraging ratings, especially given it aired opposite Survivor on ABC and the final season of Friends, and a second season was ordered, with production beginning in late Spring 2004. However, ratings tailed off alarmingly towards the end of its run and production was halted with just six episodes completed in October 2004.

Three days after the plug was pulled on Tru Calling, Fox greenlit another Original Films show, Point Pleasant, created by John McLaughlin and Buffy producer Marti Nixon. Although none of the cast carried over, Point Pleasant began filming with much of the same crew that had worked on Tru Calling and was centred around the mystery of Christina, a young girl washed up on the shore at Point Pleasant, New Jersey, during a violent storm. Played by All My Children‘s Elisabeth Harnois, Christina is taken in by the local doctor (Richard Burgi) and becomes fast friends with his daughter, Judy (Guiding Light‘s Aubrey Dollar), but her arrival in Point Pleasant begins to have an affect on its populace, with tensions rising, emotions simmering, and strange accidents befalling anyone who crosses the teenager.

It seemed that Christina is the Antichrist and a battle for her soul breaks out between mysterious stranger (and half-demon) Lucas Boyd (Grant Show from Melrose Place) and the hunky lifeguard who first found her, Jesse Parker (Sam Page). Replacing cancelled Hawaiian hotel drama North Shore on Friday nights, with new sensation The OC as a lead-in, Point Pleasant debuted a day early on January 19^th 2005 with over eleven million viewers drawn in by press describing the show as a cross between Peyton Place and The Omen, and by American Idol – shown immediately before it – airing in almost one in four American homes. Twenty-four hours later in its regular slot, episode two shed half that number and it settled down at around four million viewers, way below what Fox were hoping for.

After episode nine was pre-empted for the delayed results of the American Idol final on March 24^th, Martin Nixon took to the show’s official message board to announce that Point Pleasant had been cancelled, with five episodes left in the can. Ironically, it would be replaced in the schedules by the unaired Tru Calling season two, but the final two episodes of the show did air in October 2005 to bring the story to something of a close, although it still ended with the town engulfed in an apocalyptic holocaust as Christina moved on. All thirteen episodes were later released on DVD.

Father of the Pride (NBC): Distracted from the spectacle unfolding in front of him as Siegfried & Roy preformed their famous big cat show at The Mirage in Las Vegas, Dreamworks co-founder Jeffrey Katzenberg wondered what life might be like for the lions featured in the show. “What must life be like from their point of view?” he told TV Guide. “Living in Las Vegas, trying to raise a family and earn a living. In animation, we look for those things — a way to look at our lives through a fantasy world. It allows us to take on subjects that are too difficult to do with real people.”

The result was Father of the Pride, a big budget animated sitcom for NBC that starred Larry, a clumsy yet good-natured overweight lion at the Bronx Zoo who, due to an accident of fortune, becomes the star of Siegfried & Roy’s show. Voiced by John Goodman, Larry is joined in Las Vegas by wife Kate (Cheryl Hines), teenage daughter Sierra (Danielle Harris), and son Hunter (Daryl Sabara), with an added complication that the lion he is replacing in the show is Kate’s father, Sarmoti (Carl Reiner). With a budget of $2 million per episode, the show was made with the full co-operation of Siegfried & Roy, who also appear in the show (albeit voiced by Julian Holloway and David Herman, respectively).

With co-creator Jonathan Goff heading up a writing team that included South Park‘s David R Goodman and Glasgow Phillips, Catdog‘s John Ross, and Jean Yu, the show went into development in Fall 2002 but was almost cancelled a year later when Roy Horn was attacked and almost killed by one of his tigers during a performance at The Mirage on October 3^rd 2009, Horn’s fifty-ninth birthday. Katzenberg announced that the project would be abandoned if Horn did not survive but the performer recovered from his injuries in time for NBC to announce Father of the Pride as the centrepiece of its Fall 2004 line-up.

Early reviews were savage, with one describing the show as “too blue for kids, too dumb for grown-ups,” but it performed well on its debut on August 31^st 2004, winning its timeslot. Audience reaction was generally positive, but advertisers were concerned about the adult nature of the show, which struck a tone nearer to South Park than the usual animated family fare, even that of cheeky Dreamworks hit Shrek. It didn’t help that NBC overpromoted the show, that it was frequently interrupted for updates on the 2004 Presidential election, and that episodes were aired out of order, but in the end, it was viewer apathy that did for Father of the Pride, one of the most expensive flops in TV history. After seven episodes, the show disappeared from the NBC line-up and didn’t return until late December, with four episodes shown in two weeks, and Katzenberg publicly said a second season was unlikely. In the end, NBC didn’t even air the entirety of the first, although all fifteen episodes were shown overseas.

Video Mods (MTV): Tony Shiff is a music video producer who, among thousands of promo clips, was the man behind that “cutting edge” computer animation in Def Leppard’s “Let’s Get Rocked.” He also did stuff that wasn’t rubbish, including full motion video capture work for Electronic Arts, and in 1998 he hooked up with MTV Head of Programming Alex Coletti, the man who steered Unplugged after its initial launch, earning three Emmy Award nominations in the process. The result was Revue, a sit-down interview show that featured the likes of Tori Amos, Lauryn Hill, and Ice Cube.

Three years later, Shiff met Kris Renkewitz, a former comic book artist at both Marvel and DC, and a designer on video games including Diablo II and 007: Tomorrow Never Dies. The pair began working on a videogame extension to Revue where the player could direct a music video for licensed artists; called DIReCTOR, it was picked up by Atari but became a victim of Atari’s acquisition by Infogrames. Their next project met a similar fate. GAMERS was a sitcom starring videogame characters, centred on their lives after “work,” and found a home with Kent Alterman at Comedy Central before he left to join New Line and the show was dropped.

Recalling his success with Coletti, Shiff pitched the show to MTV, showing the producer a video of characters from the BloodRayne videogame performing System of a Down’s “Chop Suey.” Shiff pointed out that studios were spending millions of dollars producing these games, only to do nothing with the characters afterwards, and Coletti was sold on the idea. Shiff and Coletti took the idea to MTV2 General Manager David Cohn, who bought the show – now reduced purely to music videos starring video game characters – as VideoMods. Electronic Arts sponsored a pilot, providing characters from Need for Speed, SSX3 and The Sims Bustin’ Out to go with songs from Outkast and Missy Elliott. Renkewitz completed the pilot in three weeks, working out of his garage studio, and it was enough of a success to earn the show a four-episode order.

Characters from NBA Street, Medal of Honor, Silent Hill, and Star Wars: Episode III appeared in new videos for songs by Beastie Boys, Blink 182, My Chemical Romance, and more, and although MTV were happy enough with the end results, Shiff felt their newly established Big Bear Entertainment studio needed a better deal to produce more, retaining a lawyer to renegotiate their deal. It turned out that MTV hated that lawyer and hired IBC Entertainment – headed up by former MTV staffer Frank Drucker – to produce a second season of three episodes, but ratings weren’t great and uncertainty over where to take the project once the novelty wore off led to just two being produced. In recent years, Shiff and Renkewitz have returned to the idea for two new games, Flashmobs and Supergroup, with the TikTok generation in mind, but there’s still a fond nostalgia for those Video Mods promos, even if – legally – they’re in rights limbo.

Hawaii (NBC): Originally titled Pearl City, named for a district of Honolulu, Hawaii hit screens on September 1^st 2004 as one of NBC’s bright new hopes for the Fall 2004 season. Shot on location in the fiftieth state, it beat Lost – also shot in Hawaii – to air by three weeks, ensuring viewers would have plenty of opportunities to take in the verdant island paradise, although the show’s both being scheduled for Wednesdays at 8pm meant a choice between police procedural and whatever the hell Lost was for fans of the Aloha State.

Hawaii was created by Jeff Eastin, a former journalism student who got his break when Zalman King bought his script for Shadow Dancer. Although it was never made, it led to more work, with I Know What You Did Last Summer’s Neal H Moritz producing not only the Jamie Foxx-starring Held Up in 1999, but also selling Shasta McNasty – starring Jake Busey, Carmine Giovinazzo, and Dale Godboldo as the three members of the titular rap rock band – to UPN, which debuted in Fall 1999. Suddenly hot, Eastin wrote an early draft of Rush Hour 3 and was picked by James Cameron to write the script for True Lies 2, but the sequel was never made amid the changing world after 9/11 and star Arnold Schwarzenegger’s election as Governor of California.

Shasta McNasty was cancelled after one season, and a pilot for Shotgun Love Dolls wasn’t picked up to series, but that freed Eastin up to create Hawaii. Sold as a partial remake of Hawaii Five-O, it was the first project of the newly formed Jeff Eastin Productions, with Eastin working alongside experienced hands Terri Kopp and Wendy West as the show went into production. Cameron regular Michael Biehn stepped into Jack Lord’s shoes as Sean Harrison, a veteran detective on the Honolulu Metro Police Department partnered with a new arrival from Chicago played by ER’s Sherif Atkins. The pair worked on cases described as “uniquely Hawaiian” alongside a crew that also included Eric Balfour, Christopher Gains, Ivan Sergei, Aya Sumika, and Peter Navy Tuiasosopo, under the direction of Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa’s Captain Harada.

“Hawaiian Justice” – the debut episode which saw Harrison and company race to discover the culprit behind a series of bizarre decapitations – did a 7.2 rating, winning its timeslot over a re-run of My Wife and Kids on ABC and the Latin Grammy Awards on CBS. It was down to third a week later but bounced back in week three to top the charts. Unfortunately, September 22^nd brought Lost to ABC, destroying the competition, and Hawaii never recovered. After episode seven aired on October 6^th, and with NBC having fallen to fourth place in the ratings in what was usually a three-horse race, Hawaii was put on hiatus, only to be officially cancelled two days later. An eighth episode had been completed but went unaired. Eastin later created White Collar and Graceland for the USA Network and is currently producing Britt Tobin’s streaming series Garbage People.

Next time on The Telephemera Years: 2004’s unsold pilots, including talking horses and humanoid dinosaurs…

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: 1972 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1973 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)