TITANS OF TELEPHEMERA: Aaron Spelling (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. Dedicated miners of this fecund seam begin to notice the same names cropping up, again and again, as if their whole career was based on a principle of throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks. What’s more, it isn’t all one-season failures and unsold pilots, there’s genuine gold to be found amongst their hoards; these men are surely the Titans of Telephemera!

Aaron Spelling

For many people, Aaron Spelling’s legacy begins and ends with Dynasty. If that were all he achieved, he could still rest on his laurels as one of US TV’s moguls, bringing glitz and glamour into the homes of millions in a decade when Capitalism took a firm hold on the world, a hold it has since refused to relinquish. Perhaps other might remember him for Beverly Hills, 90210 or recall that he was the man who shepherded Charlie’s Angels into the world, but that’s to ignore a five-decade career in television – as an actor, a scriptwriter, and producer – which turned a frail Jewish boy from Dallas, Texas, into a name synonymous with American television.

Spelling’s TV career began as an actor in I Led Three Lives and Dragnet in 1953, but he never rose above small guest roles and switched to scriptwriting in 1956, selling his first script to The Jane Wyman Show. That same year, he produced a pilot for a TV show based on the popular radio series Box 13, and began working for Four Star Television as producer for western series Zane Grey Theater and Johnny Ringo in 1959, the latter of which he also created. While at Four Star, he enjoyed his first big hit when he created Burke’s Law, starring Gene Barry as a millionaire police captain, establishing the star guest formula he’d employ on many of his later shows, in this case forming a list of suspects for Burke to narrow down.

In 1965, Spelling signed a deal with United Artists Television to form his own production company – Aaron Spelling Productions – and over the next decade he would produce over seventy-five short-lived shows and TV movies, sometimes in association with comedian Danny Thomas or Screen Gems TV boss Leonard Goldberg. Many of his shows lasted for just a single season and, with the notable exceptions of 1968’s The Mod Squad and 1972’s The Rookies, Spelling’s record as a producer began to resemble a laundry list of failed pilots and cancelled shows. All that changed in April 1975 when a Spelling-Goldberg Production named Starsky & Hutch debuted on ABC, bringing a new type of cop show for a new decade as the long sixties faded away. Created by William Blinn, David Starsky and Ken Hutchinson were two brotherly beacons of hope in a savage city, Lalo Schifrin’s theme music and the squealing tyres of Starsky’s Ford Gran Torino announcing their arrival.

Starsky & Hutch was quickly followed by Charlie’s Angels in 1976 as women everywhere got the chance to do some vicarious ass-kicking through Ivan Goff and Ben Roberts’s show, while men got to admire the shapely figures and lustrous locks of Tom Bosley’s charges. A year later, The Love Boat embarked, turning Jeraldine Saunders’s tell-all book about her time as cruise hostess into a nine-year voyage full of star guest appearances and a weekly dose of romance and intrigue. It wasn’t all smooth sailing, though, and this is what happened next…

The San Pedro Beach Bums (ABC, 1977): After three pilot movies, The Love Boat finally set sail on Saturday nights on ABC in September 1977, taking the number of Aaron Spelling productions on the network to five. Starsky & Hutch, Charlie’s Angels, and Family had already established themselves, and there were great hopes that The Love Boat would do the same, and that another new show – The San Pedro Beach Bums – might strike a chord with a younger crowd looking for a hip, new sitcom to brighten their Monday evenings. As The San Pedro Bums, a feature-length pilot had aired on ABC in May 1977 and did well enough that the network greenlit a full series and scheduled it as the lead-in to Monday Night Football, considering the two a good fit.

Created by former Blue Angel pilot E Duke Vincent, who’d cut his producing teeth on Gomer Pyle, USMD and The Jim Nabors Hour before joining Spelling Productions, The San Pedro Beach Bums – Beach was added to the title after the pilot for fear that people might confuse it with a show about hobos – featured five young men who discover an abandoned houseboat in San Pedro, California. Renaming it Our Boat, they move in and use it as a base for their adventures, ridding the harbour of a gang of toughs and inveigling some local girls into their schemes. Vincent handed over producing duties to Earl Barrett and Simon Muntner for the series, and they landed a coup for the premiere in the form of a crossover with Charlie’s Angels as Kate Jackson, Cheryl Ladd, and Jacyln Smith appear as themselves to judge the Miss Harbor beauty contest.

A week later, former New York Giant Frank Gifford guest starred as the boys decided to teach a cheating football team how to play fair, as a tie-in with that night’s Cleveland Browns versus New England Patriots NFL game, and the hijinks continued from there, taking in stints as private eyes, lovelorn Soviet sailors, hidden thoroughbred horses, and more. The bums were largely newcomers to TV, led by Christopher Murney as Buddy, with Chris DeRose (a future International Peace Award winner for his work in animal rights) taking over the role of Boychick from the pilot’s Jeff Druce. Stuart Pankin as Stuf, Darryl McCullagh as Moose, and John Mark Robinson – who would go on to direct the video for The Pretender’s “Brass in Pocket,” “Redemption Song” by Bob Marley, and Tina Turner’s “What’s Love Got to Do with It?” – as Dancer.

Despite the tie-ins and the solid scheduling, The San Pedro Beach Bums failed to attract much of an audience, especially in the face of competition from Little House on the Prairie on NBC. After just ten episodes, ABC pulled the plug, with an eleventh episode in the can remaining unaired. None of the cast went on to do much else in TV, save for Kristoff St John – the gang’s pal Ralphie – who spent twenty-eight years on The Young and the Restless until his death in 2019.

Friends (ABC, 1979): Despite the failure of Kate Bliss and the Ticker Tape Kid – from William Bowers and Burt Kennedy, the team who made Support Your Local Sheriff!, and starring Suzanne Pleshette and Don Meredith – Aaron Spelling Productions did bring a new show to air in the 1978-79 season, although they had to settle for a mid-season replacement slot for Friends, created by writer Dan Wakefield. Wakefield, whose 1973 novel Starting Over had just been turned into a movie starring Burt Reynolds and Jill Clayburgh, had been involved with a previous TV production, James at 15, as creator and story editor, but had walked over a dispute about the character losing his virginity to a Swedish exchange student.

Wakefield’s involvement in Friends ended at writing the original screenplay, which was used for the pilot (subsequently slotted in as the series’ second episode). The set-up was innovative, a look at the lives of ordinary Americans through the eyes of three eleven-year-olds in southern California. Nancy (The Love Boat‘s Jill Whelan, whose poster adorned many a fifth grader’s wall), Pete (newcomer Charlie Aiken), and Randy (Jarrod Johnson, from Sid and Marty Krofft’s The Lost Saucer and fish-out-of-water sitcom Szysznyk) are schoolfriends who come from different social and ethnic backgrounds, allowing the show to explore not only the trials and tribulations of adolescence, but also issues surrounding race and class in modern America.

Peer pressure, the generation gap, the nature of friendship, and school problems are touched on as the show slotted into a difficult Sunday night spot that had already been vacated by The Hardy Boys and The Osmond Family Hour as 60 Minutes and the Wonderful World of Disney hoovered up most of the available viewers. The show featured a strong supporting cast, with Janet MacLachlan, Karen Morrow, Dennis Redfield, Roger Robinson, and Andy Romano as the kids’ parents, and guest roles from Charles Lampkin, Anne Schedeen (later to star as Kate on ALF), and The Best of Everything‘s Patty McCormack. A smart, mature show about pre-teens was way ahead of its time, though, and ABC pulled it from the schedules after just five episodes were aired, using the slot for the remaining episodes of The Osmond Family Hour before trying again in the Fall with Mork & Mindy spin-off Out of the Blue.

The failure of Friends (although didn’t that title pop up a few years later?) and the departure of Starsky & Hutch from the schedules after five seasons still left Aaron Spelling Productions with five primetime shows on the Alphabet Network – Fantasy Island and Vegas having debuted the year before – and they had five pilots in contention for the Fall 1979 season. In the end, after the failure of Beach Patrol, The Power Within, and The Return of the Mod Squad, only Hart to Hart made it onto the new season roster, settling into a five-season run on Tuesday nights with Robert Wagner – who had invested in Charlie’s Angels four years earlier – and Stephanie Powers as its blockbuster stars.

BAD Cats (ABC, 1980): One of five new Aaron Spelling Productions pilots for the Fall 1979 season, BAD Cats failed to make the cut for a September start but wasn’t jettisoned altogether. Created by Los Angeles Times reporter Al Martinez, whose years on the crime beat informed his TV writing, breaking in with a script for a 1975 pilot, They Only Come Out at Night, which starred Jack Warden as a middle-aged homicide detective investigating a series of murders of elderly women. The pilot was based on Martinez’s book Jigsaw John, about John St John, an LAPD homicide detective who became the “caretaker” of the infamous Black Dahlia case and claimed to have solved sixty percent of the one-thousand cases he worked. They Only Come Out at Night was greenlit as Jigsaw John, a mid-season replacement in February 1976, but Martinez wasn’t involved in the subsequent series.

Martinez continued his day job at the LA Times, writing scripts for Bronk and Hawaii Five-O. He also began working up another pilot script, this time based on a police unit he’d encountered during his research for Jigsaw John. Titled BAD Cats, the unit dealt with car theft, the title an acronym reportedly standing for “Burglary Auto Detail, Commercial Auto Thefts,” which Martinez claimed was police slang for the actual unit, whose acronym was presumably less exciting. The script for BAD Cats landed on Aaron Spelling’s desk and Martinez was invited to a meeting at the producer’s Bel Air mansion which eventually led to the producer taking the script to pilot.

With Spelling’s involvement, ABC was the natural destination for the show and BAD Cats was given a thirteen-episode order as a mid-season replacement. In column written for LA Times in 2006, Martinez wrote, “we kept waiting for ‘Spelling’s magic,’ the twist and turns he gave otherwise mediocre ideas and inadequate scripts to bring them up to the quality of, say, Fantasy Island. What he did in my script was to delete all of the humour and humanity I had included and turn it into ninety minutes of car chases. It was without a doubt the worst project I had ever been involved in.” BAD Cats was placed in the hands of veteran producer Everett Chambers, who had worked on John Cassavetes short-lived Johnny Staccato series in the 1950s, with Asher Brauner (fresh off a stint on General Hospital) and newcomer Steve Hanks cast as Nick Donovan and Ocee James, two former race car drivers headhunted to join the BAD CATs squad by Vic Morrow’s Captain Eugene Nathan.

The spin – sometimes literally – was that they would use their superior driving skills to chase and apprehend car thieves, although their slaphappy style often meant forcing their prey off the road in spectacular fashion rather than bringing speedy chases to an orthodox climax. Their captain would publicly chastise them for their roughshod antics, but privately encourage them to keep getting results. They were occasionally joined by a third officer, Sam Jensen, played by another newcomer in Michelle Pfeiffer, a former Miss Orange County who made her acting debut two years before in an episode of Fantasy Island. The cast was rounded out by Sandford and Son‘s LaWanda Page as the owner of a bar the cops frequented, and Jimmie “Good Times” Walker as Rodney, a car thief trying to go straight who helps the boys with their cases.

BAD Cats debuted on January 4^th 1980, in an 8pm Friday slot vacated by Fantasy Island, which moved to Saturday nights to replace Hart to Hart, which moved to Tuesdays in place of the cancelled Lazarus Syndrome! The first episode, which had also served as the pilot, saw Nick and Ocee try to stop a gang smuggling gold out of the country, while their sophomore outing had them case a massage parlour suspected of being a front for a kidnapping ring. Episode three finally brought a car-based crime to investigate as Sam poses as a prostitute to catch a thief who stealing cars from sex workers, and she’s undercover again in episode four as a beauty pageant contestant after Nick – judging an earlier contest – is framed for possession of drugs.

By this point it was clear that whatever the show was supposed to be – The Dukes of Hazzard but with the cool kids as cops instead of outlaws? – just wasn’t working, and production of new episodes was halted. Two more episodes aired – criminals using big rig trucks and a threat to Sam’s life – before the show was pulled from the schedules, replaced by construction site comedy When the Whistle Blows (itself lasting just ten episodes). Four unaired episodes were left in the can, with one of them featuring Sam undercover again – this time as a cheerleader – because men. The cancellation came as welcome to news to those LAPD officers assigned to work security on the show, with reports that the actors would often “borrow” their work cars and pull over unsuspecting motorists between scenes.

Al Martinez continued to submit scripts to TV, more from a sense of wanting to master something he found difficult rather than any real desire to move beyond his regular gig at the LA Times. He sold his last script – a former football player turns cop – to Fred Silverman, who used it for an episode of Jake and the Fatman – and stayed with the Times until new management fired him in 2007 after thirty-eight years on staff, although public outcry led to him being rehired as a columnist before being finally let go in 2009. Of those who starred in BAD Cats, Brauner continued to act in small roles until quitting for good in 1992, Hanks quit in 1984 before re-emerging in 2012 and appearing in a host of small budget and Christian movies, while Morrow was killed while filming Twilight Zone: The Movie in 1982. And Pfeiffer? Well, more TV led to Grease 2 and Scarface, and eventually The Witches of Eastwick and major stardom. Those demeaning undercover jobs finally paid off.

. . .

Although Hart to Hart became an instant sensation, the failure of BAD Cats and the cancellation of Family – together with both Charlie’s Angels and Vega$ experiencing a drop in ratings during the 1979-80 season – left Aaron Spelling needed a new hit for Fall 1980. He had one in waiting in Dynasty, designed as a competitor for Dallas on CBS and originally titled Oil. The concept was brought to Spelling by Richard and Esther Shapiro, a husband-and-wife scriptwriting team with credits stretching back to 1962. Taking I, Claudius as their inspiration, they envisaged a multi-generational family drama, full of power, sin, lust, and backstabbing, but ultimately driven by love.

Delayed by the 1980 writers’ strike, and by the recasting of the lead role of Blake Carrington when George Peppard failed to get to grips with the character, Dynasty debuted on January 12^th 1981 and immediately set tongues wagging. It was particularly popular among middle-aged women, who saw glamorous representations of themselves on screen, in stark contrast to Dallas’s too-often JR-centred storylines. The first season of fifteen episodes crashed into the top thirty Nielsen ratings at number twenty-eight, tying with Dallas spin-off Knots Landing, and gave Spelling four shows in that list, on par with 1979-80.

Apart from Dynasty, Spelling lined up four other pilots for ABC to choose from, with Waikiki starring Dack Rambo and Steve Marachuk as two private detectives operating out of a discotheque in Waikiki. Although ABC passed on a series, Tanya Roberts impressed Spelling enough that she was subsequently cast as Julie Rogers in Charlie’s Angels as a replacement for Shelley Hack’s departing Tiffany Welles. Casino was created by veteran scriptwriter Richard Carr, who came into Spelling’s orbit when he wrote two episodes for the third season of Charlie’s Angels. Inspired by Blake Edwards’s 1959 show Mr Lucky, Mike Connors – the former Mannix – starred as the owner of a floating casino and pleasure palace, its maiden voyage under attack from saboteurs in the pilot. It was imagined that Casino might have the same star guest of the week flavour as Love Boat and Fantasy Island, but it ultimately failed to leave port.

As it happened, the Fall 1980 season came with no new show from Aaron Spelling Productions on the schedules, although Charlie’s Angels, Fantasy Island, Hart to Hart, The Love Boat, and Vega$ accounted for almost a quarter of ABC’s primetime line-up. Come February and the network was looking to freshen up its Wednesday night programming, which had started the year with Eight is Enough, Taxi, and Soap leading into Vega$. Eight is Enough would move to Saturdays, with Taxi switching to Thursdays, and Soap eventually to Mondays, with Stephen J Cannell’s The Greatest American Hero leading off the new line-up, followed by Spelling’s Aloha Paradise, another of the four pilots presented to the network the previous year.

If the term didn’t have saucy connotations in certain parts of the world, Aloha Paradise could have been called The Love Hotel, so close did its premise shadow Spelling’s perennial leviathan. Created by Tom Greene, who had helped bring The Six Million Dollar Man to the screen in 1973, Aloha Paradise starred Hollywood legend Debbie Reynolds as Sydney Chase, the manager of the Paradise Village resort in Kona, Hawaii, who would welcome each week’s guest stars to the island paradise in hope of helping them find love. Those guests included Red Buttons, Joan Fontaine, Lorne Greene, Van Johnson, Pat Morita, Connie Stevens, and Jonathan Winters, but in the face of opposition from Diff’rent Strokes and The Facts of Life, it was cancelled after just eight episodes, with Reynolds scathing about both the quality of the scripts and the network’s commitment to the show.

By the end of the 1980-81 season, the axe did indeed fall on both Charlie’s Angels and Vega$, bowing out after five and three seasons, respectively. That left Spelling with just three shows on the air, but he bounced back with three more prospective pilots for ABC, of which only one– Sizzle, starring Loni Anderson in a prohibition era drama – failed to impress network schedulers. Of the other three, the standout candidate was The Protecors, a reworking of The Rookies, a Spelling Goldberg Production that aired on ABC between 1972 and 1976. Created by Rick Husky, who’d worked on The Rookies, it featured William Shatner as the mentor of a team of police academy graduates, three years – it must be noted – before Police Academy burst onto the big screen.

The Protectors impressed enough to be taken to series but was reworked to place more emphasis on Shatner’s character, with the show named TJ Hooker to reflect the change. Hooker was a Vietnam veteran turned plain clothes detective, who returns to uniform after his partner is killed in an attempt to make a real difference at street level. Premiering in March 1982, a short first season of five episodes worked out the kinks, with a full series following in September and bringing in Heather Locklear to star alongside Adrian Zmed as Hooker’s rookies.

Strike Force (ABC, 1981): By the time TJ Hooker reached screens, the other Spelling pilot taken to series was five months into its run. Having debuted in November 1981, Strike Force starred Robert Stack as Detective Captain Frank Murphy, the head of the SCPD’s special Strike Force unit. From 1959 to 1963, Stack starred as Eliot Ness in The Untouchables, but found difficulty securing a regular role afterwards, making a series of films in Europe before returning to US TV as Dan Farrell, one of three rotating leads (alongside Gene Barry and Tony Franciosa) in experimental wheel series The Name of the Game. A lawsuit brought against CBS in 1971 for misrepresenting his views on the Vietnam War in the documentary The Selling of the Pentagon didn’t help his career opportunities, but he landed the lead role in Most Wanted in 1976, a one-season series that saw him head a team of special investigators, echoing his role in The Untouchables.

Frank Murphy, too, had a touch of Eliot Ness to him, but the tone of Strike Force was altogether more hard-hitting, immediately sparking controversy with its liberal doses of on-screen violence. Creator Lane Slate, who had a string of TV movies and series credits – as well as short-lived CBS show The American Girls – on his résumé, sought to combine the violence with humour, and with a dose of humanity, exploring the personal lives of Murphy and his team. They included Dorian Harewood from Roots as Detective Sergeant Paul Strobber, the only married man on the team and Australian teen singing star Trisha Noble as Detective Sergeant Rosie Johnson, a curvaceous lady who joined the team after her husband went missing in Vietnam. Although he doesn’t notice it, Johnson is crazy about Richard Romanus’s Detective Lieutenant Charlie Gunzer, the team’s ladies’ man, whereas the rookie of the squad – Detective Sergeant Mark Osborne (Michael Goodwin) – would do anything to get a date with her. Their immediate superior, and Murphy’s close friend, is Deputy Police Commissioner Herbert Klein, played by Big John Little John‘s Herb Edelman.

Another Writers Guild of America strike – this time a dispute over pay TV and home video rates, and lasting from April to July 1981 – delayed the start of much of the new season’s offerings to November, and Strike Force made its bow on Friday nights on November 13^th 1981, enjoying the unfortunate pleasure of first clashing with Dallas, and then with splashy new arrival Falcon Crest (which had Dallas as its lead-in). The pilot that had impressed ABC bosses (and had actually been shown in April 1981 as a standalone TV movie) was scheduled as its first episode to get viewers up to speed.

At one point called the second most violent show on American TV by pressure group the National Coalition on Television Violence (The Fall Guy was first), the adverse publicity actually worked in its favour at first, but the novelty soon wore off and few viewers stuck around for what was under the shock value. This was despite the series running the gamut of crimes, including murders (oh, so many murders), kidnappings, rapes, drugs, bombings, and mob violence throughout its run. Alongside the pilot, nineteen episodes were produced for the show’s first – and it turned out – only season. Of 105 shows that aired during the 1981-82 season, Strike Force came in at number seventy-five, well below the threshold for renewal. There was positive news for Aaron Spelling Productions, however, as TJ Hooker finished thirtieth, one place above Fantasy Island. Hart to Hart and The Love Boat were the fifteenth and sixteenth best-rated shows for the year, with Dynasty earning the number twenty spot, an average of over twenty-million households tuning in to see the latest squabbles between the Carringtons and the Colbys, no doubt boosted by the arrival of Joan Collins as the scheming Alexis Carrington. There was trouble on the horizon, though, as the Spelling Productions well of new hit shows appeared to be running dry…

Next time on Titans of Telephemera: More of Aaron Spelling’s lesser-known attempts at finding a new Dynasty!

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)