THE TELEPHEMERA YEARS: 2004, 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!

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 secured a spot on the TV schedules, though; what about the ones that that failed at the final hurdle? This is the story of 2004’s unsold pilots…

Mister Ed (Fox): Drake Sather was a comedian’s comedian. As usual, this means that his act – beloved by fellow stand-ups and true connoisseurs of the form – did not carry over into mainstream success. Luckily, Sather also had a flair for writing jokes and got a job on Saturday Night Live for the 1992-93 season, also contributing to The Dennis Miller Show, a perfect fit for his acerbic wit. In 1994, he was nominated for an Emmy Award for his work on The Larry Sanders Show and two years later, as well joining the writing team for the second season of Newradio, he created the character of Derek Zoolander for Ben Stiller. First seen in a skit at the VH1 Fashion Awards, the name was a play on top model Mark Vanderloo, and the reaction to the first short film was enough that a second, set at the Zoolander University for models, was produced.

In 2000, with David Spade, Sather co-created Sammy, an animated sitcom for NBC. Despite character designs by Everett “Duckman“ Peck, and a cast that included Andy Dick, Janeane Garofalo, and Bob Odenkirk, the show was cancelled after just two of its thirteen episodes had aired, but Sather was busy working on a feature film starring Zoolander, released in November 2001. Initially, neither he nor Stiller were attached to the project, but common sense prevailed, and the movie was a critical success that also doubled its budget at the box office. It should have set Sather up for future success, but future projects stalled and a spell as a writer and producer on the Tom Cavanagh show Ed lasted for just one season.

In 2004, Sather was hired by Neal H Moritz’s Original Film to write and produce a reboot of Mister Ed, the talking horse sitcom that ran for six seasons from October 1961. In the thirty-eight years that passed between the end of the original series and the revival, Allan Lane – the voice of Mister Ed – had died, and although Alan Young, who starred as Ed’s human pal Wilbur Post, was still working, he was eighty-five-years-old and probably past carrying a series. In their place came The Jeffersons’ Sherman Hemsley as Ed and David Alan Basche (from short-lived sitcoms Oh Grow Up! and Three Sisters) as Wilbur Pope, reverting back to the name used in the original 1961 pilot, which was titled Wilbur Pope and Mister Ed. Sherilyn Fenn completed the core cast as Wilbur’s wife, Carol.

The new pilot featured Ed and Wilbur’s first meeting, and a subplot about Wilbur’s daughter’s horrible boyfriend, but it was thin gruel. Sather told friends he was unhappy in his work and was only doing it for the money, which – alongside difficulties he was having in his marriage – probably led to his suicide by gunshot in March 2004. A comedian to the end, he apparently left joke-filled Post-It notes leading the way to his body. The project was cancelled in the wake of Sather’s suicide and Mister Ed has been silent silence.

Dark Shadows (The WB): After the failed revival of gothic soap opera Dark Shadows in 1991, creator Dan Curtis primarily worked as a director for hire with credits including 1992 sci-fi mini-series Intruders, a sequel to his 1975 horror anthology TV movie Trilogy of Terror, and romantic fantasy drama The Love Letter, which he completed just after his seventieth birthday. His most famous creation lived on in re-runs, with the Sci-Fi Channel re-running the entire show from 1992, its cult status only increasing year on year. In November 2003, TV Guide reported that Warner Bros had secured the rights to Dark Shadows, which had recently been the subject of a stage play written by Jamison Selby, the son of original series actor David. Selby’s play was turned into an audio drama, starring his father and released by MPI Home Video as Return to Collinwood, sparking a series of audio dramas from Big Finish, a company who built their name on doing the same for Doctor Who during its absence from TV (and carrying on after its revival).

That wasn’t the only revival of the series underway, though. Warner Bros tasked John Wells – showrunner on the first six seasons of ER, amongst other work – with producing a pilot for a Dark Shadows revival, with Wells working alongside Curtis to develop the show. With a budget of $6 million, Muriel’s Wedding director PJ Hogan was brought in to helm the project after original choice Rob Bowman dropped out late on, while Mark Verheiden – who’d made his name as a comic book writer in the 1980s before switching to TV, where he created Timecop and helped bring Smallville to the screen in 2001 – was on script duty.

Verheiden’s story kept the same beats as the original (and the 1991 revival), with Victoria Winters (The Sandlot‘s Marley Shelton) arriving at Collinswood to act as governess to troubled young David Collins (Alexander Gould, later the voice of clownfish Nemo). The family’s handyman, Willie Loomis (Matt Czuchry) accidentally revives the vampiric Barnabas Collins from the family’s tomb, who presents himself as a distant relative from England and begins to charm Victoria, who resembles his old love Josette. Played by Scottish actor Alec Newman (known primarily in the US for his turn as Paul Atreides in Sci-Fi’s Dune adaptations), Barnabas is bloodthirsty and haunted by his curse.

With a cast that also included Jessica Chastain, Martin Donovan, Kelly Hu, and Ivana Miličević as evil sorceress Angelique, the pilot crammed a season’s worth of intrigue into its one hour running time, but WB executives were unimpressed. Some reports have them cancelling Angel in anticipation of greenlighting Dark Shadows for the 2004-05 season, not wanting to have two vampire shows on the air at the same time, and the blame apparently fell on Hogan, whose direction did not make the most of Verheiden’s script. The pilot was later screened at the 2005 Dark Shadows Festival in Los Angeles and Dark Shadows would eventually return in movie form from Tim Burton in 2012.

Anonymous Rex (Fox): Eric Garcia majored in Film and Creative Writing at the University of Southern California with his sights clearly set on Hollywood. In 1999, he published his debut novel, Anonymous Rex, riding a wave of dinosaur fever that had begun with Steven Spielberg’s first Jurassic Park movie in 1993 and saw a sequel – The Lost World – arrive four years later. Anonymous Rex was a hard-boiled detective story with a twist: its protagonist, PI Vincent Rubio, is descended from a race of velociraptors that evolved into humanoid form over the millions of years since the dinosaurs escaped their extinction at the hands of that blasted meteor. Using hologram technology (which replaced previous forms of disguise such as rubber masks), Rubio blends into human society, working a beat alongside his partner Ernie, an evolved triceratops.

Two years after Anonymous Rex, Garcia published a prequel – Casual Rex – which confused some fans, the fact that it was set before the first book (and featured some characters who met their end in that story, including Ernie, whose murder Vincent solves in the first book) not made clear by the novel’s trade dressing. A third book – Hot and Sweaty Rex – would arrive in 2004, but by that time Garcia was already making waves in Hollywood, the rights to his third novel, 2002’s Matchstick Men, having been snapped up by Warner Brothers before it was even published. The resulting film, directed by Ridley Scott and starring Nicholas Cage, didn’t set the box office alight, but did well with the critics.

Amid all this, Fox optioned Garcia’s dinosaur detective series, ordering a pilot based on Casual Rex but keeping the Anonymous Rex name. Scriptwriter Joe Menosky, with a ton of experience on Hunter, Star Trek: The Next Generation, and Star Trek: Voyager, was given the job of bringing the novel to screen, with English director Julian Jarrold, a veteran of Coronation Street, given his first US engagement behind the camera. Vincent (Sam Trammell, last seen in Showtime’s Going to California) and Ernie (Homicide: Life on the Street‘s Daniel Baldwin) investigate the death of Ernie’s ex-girlfriend’s brother, which they soon realise is tied to a cult, the Voice of Progress. Going undercover, they join the cult and Vincent becomes intrigued by their message that the time for dinosaurs to stop hiding has arrived; unfortunately, the cult plans to accelerate this by unleashing feral dinosaurs on the human populace and taking control.

With support from Tamara Gorski, Isaac Hayes, and Faye Dunaway as a key figure in the dinosaur underground, the pilot skips along, with Trammel showing glimpses of the charisma True Blood fans would come to love as the conflicted Vincent, but reaction was tepid, and Fox passed on a series. Normally that’s the end of the story, but the Sci-Fi Channel showed the pilot in November 2004, with hopes that it could lead to a series there. It didn’t and the world of Anonymous Rex has been unexplored since, although Garcia recently scored a hit with Kaleidoscope for Netflix.

Dead Lawyers (Sci-Fi): Moving to Hollywood from Houston, Texas, to pursue a career in screenwriting, Sean Patrick Flanery was supporting himself by working at a TGI Fridays when he was spotted acting in a play and was cast in commercials. He made his film debut in A Tiger’s Tale in 1987 and scored his first big break as the titular hero in The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, which ran for two seasons on ABC in 1992 and 1993. Further movie success in Powder and The Boondock Saints followed, with Flanery also taking time out of his acting schedule to compete in the Toyota Pro/Celebrity Race in Long Beach.

The turn of the millennium saw Flannery try to secure another regular TV role, but The Strip – where he starred as a former Los Vegas police detective turned Sin City casino troubleshooter – lasted just ten episodes before cancellation in 2000, and a pilot based on Wilbur Smith’s 1971 novel The Diamond Hunters failed to gain traction with syndication buyers. In 2002, Flanery appeared as politician Greg Stillson in a TV adaptation of Stephen King’s The Dead Zone, a role he’d return to periodically during the show’s six-season run, but 2004 saw him take the lead role in Dead Lawyers, a pilot for the Sci-Fi network written by Christopher Murphey, whose only previous work was 2001’s The Unsaid, a straight-to-DVD movie he wrote the story for.

Originally a DreamWorks production, but transferred to The Zanuck Company, formed as Zanuck/Brown in 1972 by Richard D Zanuck and David Brown (and responsible for such blockbusters as Jaws, The Sting, Cocoon, and Driving Miss Daisy), Dead Lawyers saw Flannery step into the shoes of Jimmy Quinn, an arrogant lawyer to the rich and famous who – in something of an echo of a trope from later isekai anime series – is hit by a bus. Upon reaching the afterlife, he is swiftly returned to Earth where he must atone for his past sins at a firm of similarly repentant attorneys headed by F Murray Abraham’s Thomas Whitelaw. Take enough pro bono cases for those who really need the help, and Jimmy might just make it back to Heaven…

Despite its good intentions (and the plus of having former music video director turned safe TV drama hand Paris Barclay behind the camera), Sci-Fi passed on the pilot and Flanery returned to earning an honest living starring in direct-to-video films, TV movies, and guest appearances and runs on the likes of The Bay and The Young and the Restless. Like Jimmy Quinn, though, Dead Lawyers was given another chance to live when Sony announced they were developing a pilot based on the concept in 2011, with a fresh script from Justified producers Graham Yost and Fred Golan, and Full House ‘s John Stamos attached to the starring role. It would have been Stamos’s first regular turn since leaving ER in 2009, but nothing more was heard after an initial blaze of publicity surrounding the project and he next turned in Glee.

Next time on The Telephemera Years: what 2004’s kids were settling down to watch, including super robot monkeys and future Phils…

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)