TITANS OF TELEPHEMERA: Aaron Spelling (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. 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 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 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, turning 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 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 in Burke’s Law, which starred Gene Barry as a millionaire police captain and established the star guest formula he’d employ on many of his later shows.

In 1965, Spelling signed a deal with United Artists Television to form his own production company – Aaron Spelling Productions, and over the next twenty years Spelling would dozens of hit shows, finally hitting the number one spot with the glitz and glamour of Dynasty at the end of the 1984-85 season. While Dynasty spin-off The Colbys failed to set pulses racing when it debuted with a splash in November 1985, Spelling still had a good slice of the ABC prime-time line-up on his books, but could he adapt to a changing television market..?

Hollywood Beat (ABC, 1985): While The Colbys did well, but probably as well as hoped for, Aaron Spelling had one other new show debut in Fall 1985, one which attempted to show another side of Los Angeles, far away from the celebrity guest-filled fare and high-powered glamour he’d been peddling of late. Created by Henry Rosenbaum, whose credits included The Mod Squad and Sandra Dee-starring HP Lovecraft adaptation The Dunwich Horror, Hollywood Beat starred Jay Acovone and Jack Scalia as two undercover LAPD detectives working in a seedy part of town, their often oddball cases necessitating unusual disguises. With a theme song performed by Natalie Cole, Hollywood Beat premiered on September 21^st 1985, leading off a new look Saturday night line-up for ABC that also included new Robert Wagner vehicle Lime Street.

Joining vietual newcomer Acovone and former professional baseball player Scalia in the cast were M*A*S*H‘s Edward Winter as their boss, Captain Biddle, and former NFL star John Matuszak, who’d gone into acting after winning his second Super Bowl with the Oakland Raiders in 1981. Now best remembered as Sloth in The Goonies, Matuszak played a former linebacker who is openly gay and willing to use his massive bulk to deter anyone who might have a problem with that. Also part of a network of offbeat friends and informants that helped the pair with their work were Ann Turkel’s bar owner Lita, newsstand operator Billy Night Eyes (Michael Horse), and Barbara Cason as a bag lady whose lowly status allowed her to go unnoticed by criminals.

Hollywood Beat was an obvious attempt to cash in on the success of Miami Vice, which had begun on NBC a year earlier, with cinematic direction and dramatic music. Scenes were soundtracked by recent pop hits, and directors working on multiple episodes of the show included Hangar 18’s James L Conway, Spelling regular Charles Picerni, and veteran British director Don Chaffey. In the 1960s, Chaffey helmed episodes of The Prisoner and The Avengers for Lew Grade, and directed Raquel Welch in One Million Years BC, before moving to the US, where he worked for Disney on Pete’s Dragon before falling in with Spelling, directing over fifty episodes on various productions between 1978 and 1985.

While the crimes featured on Hollywood Beat – murders of street people and prostitutes, drug deals gone wrong, armed robberies – were grim and gritty, the show was also full of offbeat humour and an almost kitsch appeal, a blend which sometimes worked but often didn’t, a style clash that resulted in an uneven finished product which feel between stools. After just fourteen episodes, Hollywood Beat was cancelled, replaced by The Fall Guy, which itself was flailing in its final season. It would not be the final casualty of a disappointing year for Spelling, with both TJ Hooker and The Love Boat – which had sought to spice things up with a troupe of dancers called The Mermaids that included a young Teri Hatcher – both put out to pasture at the end of the season.

Life With Lucy (ABC, 1986): Aaron Spelling Productions carried just three shows over to the Fall 1986 TV season, their lowest contribution to the ABC line-up for some time. From its position as number one show in the 1984-85 ratings, Dynasty fell to sixth, losing three ratings points as a strong raft of NBC sitcoms stormed the top ten. The Colbys did not make the impact Spelling had hoped for, languishing in the mid-thirties, while Hotel also lost ground and viewers for its third season. To replenish his crop, Spelling produced three new pilots for ABC, a trio that recalled past hits (and not only from the producer’s own back catalogue). The inspiration behind Dark Mansions was obvious from its name, invoking Dan Curtis’s long-running supernatural soap opera Dark Shadows, but also bringing in some of the glitz and glamour of Dynasty. Linda Purl, best known as Fonzie’s girlfriend Ashley Pfister in season ten of Happy Days, played Shellane Victor, a writer who arrives at the Drake family’s sprawling Oregon estate, where she plans to interview matriarch Margaret (Joan Fontaine).

The Drake family – which also includes Michael York, Melissa Sue Anderson, Nicolette Sheridan, and Lois Chiles – immediately notice her resemblance to their deceased relative Yvette, who fell off a cliff in mysterious circumstances, and believe they are being haunted by her ghost. Written by Robert McCullough and husband-and-wife team Anthony and Nancy Lawrence, the pilot was shown as a TV movie in August 1986, but ABC passed on a series. That was also the fate met by Mr and Mrs Ryan, created by another husband-and-wife team, Bill and Jo La Mond, who produced Hotel for Spelling and wrote twenty episodes of Hart to Hart. It was the latter that provided the inspiration for this new show, with Robert Desiderio’s police detective falling in love with and marrying a wealthy socialite (an early role for Sharon Stone) who likes to “help” him with his cases, with often disastrous – and humorous – results as she proves something of a magnet for trouble.

The third Spelling pilot was more of a certain thing from the outset, featuring as it did the return of a beloved TV icon to the airwaves, twelve years after the end of her last weekly show. Lucille Ball had spent two decades treading the boards off and on Broadway, and endured several false starts in Hollywood, before landing a starring role as a wacky wife in CBS Radio’s My Favorite Husband in 1948. My Favorite Husband was a success on the radio and CBS wanted to make the transfer to TV, but Ball insisted that her real-life husband Desi Arnaz, a Cuban bandleader she’d met and married on the set of her RKO musical Too Many Girls in 1940. Ball and Arnaz formed Desilu Productions to develop the show for TV, but CBS passed on their pilot, thinking US audiences would not readily accept an interracial relationship between a redheaded white woman and a dark-skinned Latino.

Instead, Ball and Arnaz took their show on the road, with Ball playing a wacky housewife who wants to join her husband’s band, playing to packed houses all over the US. Chastened, CBS commissioned the show, now named I Love Lucy, which made its debut in October 1951 and was the third highest rating show that year. I Love Lucy hit number one in the ratings the following year, a position it occupied for four of the six seasons it was on the air, and it ended in May 1957 not because of declining ratings, but because the cast and crew were exhausted. They remained together to present occasional hour-long special under the umbrella of The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour until 1960, when Ball and Arnaz’s marriage ended.

In 1962, after she’d bought out Arnaz’s half of Desilu Productions (which also produced The Untouchables amongst other shows), Ball returned to CBS with The Lucy Show, a weekly sitcom in which she played Lucy Carmichael, a widow with teenage children, who is also live-in landlord to tenant – and best friend – Viv (Vivian Vance, Ethel Mertz on I Love Lucy) and her young son. Created by Ball and a team of I Love Lucy writers including Bob Carroll Jr and Madelyn Davis, and scoring high ratings from the off, The Lucy Show remained a top ten show through to the 1965-66 season, when the format was first retooled and then completely abandoned to position Lucy Carmichael as a single woman working at a Los Angeles bank frequented by Hollywood stars, allowing for plenty of guests from Ball’s considerable rolodex to make appearances on the show. After six seasons, Ball felt she had enough episodes in the bank for syndication and decided to end the show, then only second in the ratings to The Andy Griffith Show. This power allowed her to call her shots for her next project when she insisted her teenage children – Lucie Arnaz and Desi Arnaz Jr – star alongside her in Here’s Lucy, together with longtime comedy partner Gale Gordon.

This time, Ball was Lucy Carter, another widow and mother to two teenage children (played by you know who), working for her brother-in-law (Gordon) at Carter’s Unique Talent Agency. The show was created by Bob O’Brien and Milt Josefsberg, and – while it wasn’t the instant success story of her earlier outings – scored well for CBS in its Monday night slot, even opposite number one show Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In. By the end of the 1972-73 season, it slipped out of the top ten for the first time, possibly a result of Ball spending the entire season in a wheelchair, the result of breaking her leg in a skiing accident between seasons. The evergreen Lucy had finally been brought down to earth and with ratings dropping, she filmed a series finale for the end of season five. CBS president Fred Silverman, however, convinced Ball to return for a sixth season, although ratings further declined, and it was announced in February 1974 that Here’s Lucy would end a month later.

After devoting almost twenty-five years to TV, Ball made a movie, Mame, where she played a free-spirited aunt to an orphaned young boy in a decades-spanning bitter-sweet yarn. It wasn’t the success she hoped for, however, and she was tempted back to CBS for a series of TV specials, including 1975’s Lucy Gets Lucky and Lucy Calls the President in 1977. In 1980, after Silverman had moved to NBC, Ball signed a deal with the network to produce a series of sitcoms, the partnership cemented by a TV movie – Lucy Moves to NBC – in February 1980, which starred Gary Imhof as Silverman. In the end, only Bungle Abbey – a sitcom set in a monastery which she directed, and with Gale Gordon as one of the monks, alongside Charlie Callas and Anthony Alda – got even as far as the pilot stage. Subsequent attempts to engineer a return to TV were no more successful.

In the 1985-86 US TV ratings, Aaron Spelling’s Dynasty had been knocked off the number one spot by The Cosby Show, sparking a trend for shows that revitalised the careers of older stars that also brought Bea Arthur back to prominence in The Golden Girls and Angela Lansbury on Murder, She Wrote. ABC wanted a piece of the pie and turned to Spelling, who’d been trying to tempt Ball back to TV himself for some time. Working with Bob Carroll Jr and Madelyn Davis, they devised Life with Lucy, a familiar-sounding conceit that saw Ball star as Lucy Barker, a widow who inherits her late husband’s hardware store and must learn to get along with his business partner (played, of course, by Gale Gordon). What’s more, her daughter Margot (Jaws 2‘s Ann Dusenberry) is married to his son Ted (Larry Anderson, the original Knight Rider), and they all live together in one big house along with Margot and Ted’s children, Kevin and Becky, the latter played by future indie pop singer Jenny Lewis.

Debuting on Saturday nights in September 1986, Life with Lucy went up against The Facts of Life on NBC, with CBS opting to go with crime drama Downtown. Although the debut episode finished in the top third of shows aired that week, ratings declined sharply as viewers just didn’t take to Lucy Barker as they had Lucy Carter, Lucy Carmichael, and Lucy Ricardo, with Spelling opining that perhaps they were more worried for Ball’s health when she did her usual pratfalls rather than laughing. In the days leading up to the filming of the show’s thirteenth episode, NBC decided to cancel the show, but opted to wait until filming had concluded before breaking the news to Ball. Devastated at the failure, Ball never made another series, her TV appearances reduced to occasional game shows, awards ceremonies, or tributes. In May 1988, she suffered a heart attack and was often in poor health afterwards; less than a year later, she was hospitalised with chest pains and passed away on April 26^th 1989 at seventy-seven-years-old.

. . .

Not only did Aaron Spelling Productions have to contend with the failure of Life with Lucy, but in March 1987, the plug was also pulled on The Colbys. From a disappointing 16.0 rating in its first season, the show’s sophomore outing lost another four points, tumbling to sixth-fourth in the final Nielsen rankings for the year. It wasn’t alone, as Hotel lost almost twenty percent of its viewership, and flagship show Dynasty again shed almost nine million viewers, with ABC falling well behind its rivals, especially NBC, which had five of the top seven shows, all sitcoms. Still, Spelling renewed his deal with ABC in August 1987 for another three years, although a non-exclusivity clause came into play, allowing the producer to sell shows to other networks as well as those made as part of his ABC deal.

As usual, Spelling prepared new shows for ABC, four of them for Fall 1987, but just one – drama HeartBeat, starring Laura Johnson, Kate Mulgrew, and Gail Strickland as the founders of a women’s medical clinic – made it through the pilot stage to appear on the schedules. Going unsold were Harry’s Hong Kong (featuring David Soul as an American private eye investigating the death of an old friend in the British colony), The Hope Division (Dorian Harewood’s black cop teams up with Mimi Kuzyk’s white cop to hunt a serial killer), and Free Spirit, a supernatural thriller which saw a newly widowed woman haunted by the ghost of her dead husband, who wants her to solve his murder.

HeartBeat ended the year as ABC’s fourteenth most popular show, nudging into the top fifty shows across all networks. In forty-first place was Dynasty, again losing viewers and falling behind Dallas-spin-off Knots Landing for the first time. Doing even worse was Hotel, which just scraped into the top one-hundred shows and was put out of its misery, the doors of the St Gregory locked after five seasons. More successful for ABC had been the switch to sitcoms in imitation of NBC’s domination of the ratings from the middle of the decade. Friday nights were now the network’s anchor night for comedies (which would be branded as TGIF – Thank God It’s Funny – from September 1989), and one of just two new Spelling pilots offered to ABC for Fall 1988 was intended to slot into that seam.

Divided We Stand starred Dempsey and Makepiece’s Michael Brandon and Kerrie Keane as divorced parents sharing parenting responsibilities for their young son (Seth Green), but ABC declined to take it to series. They also passed on The Loner, a project uniting Spelling with a most unlikely collaborator in The Driller Killer’s Abel Ferrara, who had directed two episodes of Miami Vice for Michael Mann in 1985, and the pilot for Mann’s follow-up show Crime Story a year later. Created by Larry Gross (who wrote both 48hrs and Streets of Fire for Walter Hill), The Loner starred John Terry – fresh off filming Full Metal Jacket – as an eccentric, wealthy cop who teams with Vanessa Bell Calloway to solve a jewel theft.

The failure of both pilots left Spelling with just two shows on ABC, something which hadn’t been seen since 1973, and worse still was to come. At the end of the 1988-89 season, both Dynasty and HeartBeat were cancelled as new Head of Entertainment, Bob Iger, wanted to refresh the network’s schedules. Hooperman, Moonlighting, and the Police Story reboot also fell before Iger’s axe, but the non-exclusivity clause in Spelling’s contract did at least allow him to sell a pilot to CBS – The Pretenders, starring Amanda Pays as an FBI agent teaming with the twin brother of her dead husband to solve his murder, later shown as part of CBS Summer Playhouse – and convince NBC to take Nightingales, a medical drama featuring Suzanne Pleshette as the supervisor of a group of student nurses.

With Roxann Dawson, Kristy Swanson, and Susan Walters among the young cast, Nightingales debuted as a mid-season replacement in January 1989, but lasted for just thirteen episodes, leaving Aaron Spelling with no shows on air for the first time since striking out on his own in 1965. TV movie Day One, telling the story of the Manhattan Project, was a critical and ratings success when it aired in March 1989, winning an Emmy for Outstanding Drama/Comedy Special, but neither Spelling Productions new shows for Fall 1989 were picked up, with ABC passing on San Berdoo – a detective show set in Palm Springs – and NBC declining to take Just Temporary to series.

Just Temporary, though, would enjoy another life. The pilot was written by Robin Schiff, based on Ladies Room, a play she wrote and performed in as part of a comedy troupe known as The Groundlings. Ladies Room starred Christie Mellor and Lisa Kudrow, two other members of The Groundlings, as Romy and Michelle, two roommates who think with one – mostly empty – mind. Mellor and Kudrow were brought in for the pilot, although they were renamed Torie and Nicole, and although NBC passed on the show, someone at Touchstone Pictures happened across Ladies Room and thought it could be the female version of Wayne’s World they were looking for. Schiff was initially reluctant to turn Ladies Room into a film, fearing it would be an ill fit, but later came up with the idea of her characters attending their high-school reunion, and Kudrow – by now one of the cast of Friends – reprised her role of Michelle alongside Mira Sorvino’s Romy in 1997’s Romy and Michelle’s High-School Reunion.

. . .

Back at Spelling Productions, there was a flurry of activity as Spelling Films International was formed to finance and distribute feature films, and two TV movies were produced, one of which was intended to serve as the final voyage of The Love Boat. Two new pilots were produced, one for ABC as part of Spelling’s contract with the network (which would not be renewed after its August 1990 expiration), and another for Fox. The ABC pilot, Just Life, featured former Dallas star Victoria Principal as a divorced mother of a teenage daughter trying to balance family life with her job as an investigator with the DA’s office, establishing its premise from the off as she sought to prove a young man innocent of the crime the police arrested him for.

ABC passed, but Fox were far more interested in Spelling’s other pilot for a show called Doing Time in Beverly Hills, later renamed to Class of Beverly Hills. Class of Beverly Hills was created by Darren Star, who wrote 1988’s wacky comedy Doin’ Time on Planet Earth, a film which has the distinction of making just $30,000 from a budget of $27 million, one of the last films produced by The Cannon Group. Star based his pilot script on his own experiences as a teenager in Maryland, transplanting them to Beverly Hills at the request of Spelling, who still sought glitz and glamour for his shows. The move was a key part to the show’s success as it allowed for the everyman characters of Brandon and Brenda Walsh (Jason Priestly and Shannon Doherty), two ordinary teens from Minnesota transplanted to a Beverly Hills high school full of rich kids, one of whom – after she auditioned under a false name – was played by Spelling’s daughter, Tori.

Class of Beverly Hills debuted on October 4^th 1990 under another new name: Beverly Hills, 90210. The show was part of Fox’s first ever Thursday night line-up, the network having previously only aired on weekends. Fox put in an order for the unusual amount of thirty episodes from Spelling, which proved to be the making of the show when, after struggling for ratings during the regular season, the extra episodes were shown in the Summer of 1991. Usually a dead time for TV viewing, the special “Summer season” of Beverly Hills, 90210 proved a ratings success, especially with teen viewers who would help elevate the show to a pop culture phenomenon and make stars of Priestly, Doherty, Luke Perry, and the rest. The show was such a success for Fox – cracking the top fifty alongside Married… with Children and The Simpsons – that they ordered a spin-off from Spelling, which he duly delivered as a mid-season replacement in July 1992, aiming at that new Summer viewing audience once more.

Melrose Place was another Darren Star creation, centred around the lives of twentysomethings living in a Los Angeles apartment complex. One of their number, Jake, had been introduced as a love interest for 90210’s Kelly, with Jennie Garth making several appearances in the new show to establish the continuity between the two. Although it was nowhere near the sensation of its parent show, Melrose Place earned a regular spot in the Thursday night schedules alongside 90210 and, while their horizons were perhaps a little lower than the heyday of Dynasty at number one in the ratings (and Spelling Productions delivering a quarter of ABC’s primetime line-up), Aaron Spelling had dragged himself back from the brink.

. . .

Although they now enjoyed two hit shows on the Fox network, Spelling Productions did not rest on their laurels ahead of the Fall 1992 season. Free of their commitment to produce content for ABC, they produced two new pilots for NBC, one of which – Back to the Streets of San Francisco – was a reboot of a popular 1970s show. Despite luring original series star Karl Malden back to solve the murder of his former partner (Michael Douglas was busy being flashed by Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct) and setting up a new status quo with Debrah Farentino and Conor O’Farrell as their successors on the SFPD homicide beat, NBC passed, feeling that the nostalgia for the old series couldn’t carry a new one.

NBC were interested in The Round Table, though, with David Bowie’s “Young Americans” chosen to underscore a show about a group of, well, young Americans who frequent the titular bar. All the main characters were involved in some aspect of the criminal process, whether as FBI agents, cops, or lawyers, and twentysomething viewers were expected to take to Stacy Haiduk, Erik King, Roxanne Biggs, and Tom Bresnahan as they had to Andrew Shue, Courtney Thorne Smith, Vanessa A Williams, and the rest on Melrose Place. Unfortunately, they didn’t, and The Round Table was pulled after five episodes, with another two left on the shelf.

On the back of Melrose Place and Beverly Hills, 90210, Fox were happy to accept another offering from Spelling and The Heights duly debuted on August 27^th 1992 in a tough Thursday spot opposite the final season of Cheers and top thirty show Wings. Created by Erik Roth (whose Hearts are Wild was a short-lived mid-season replacement on CBS in January) and Tony Spiridakis, The Heights told the story of a fictional band – also called The Heights – led by singer-songwriter Alex (real-life actor-musician Jamie Walters, who also sang the theme song, “How Do You Talk to An Angel?”). Completing the band were singer JT (newcomer Shawn David Thompson), bassist Stan (TV 101’s Alex Désert), keyboard player Lenny (Zachary “Cop Rock” Throne), guitarist Hope (Charlotte Ross from Days of Our Lives), drummer Dizzy (Ken Marito), and saxophonist Rita (Alien Nation‘s Cheryl Pollak).

The show centred as much around the personal and family lives of the band members as their musical exploits, but it was hoped that the show might launch the septet as recording artists in their own right, with “How Do You Talk to An Angel?” released as a single and actually making it to number one in the Billboard Hot 100 on November 14^th 1992. Unfortunately, TV ratings didn’t match record sales and follow-up single “I’m Still on Your Side” was pulled from the release schedules as Fox cancelled the show. Within two years, Roth would become one of Hollywood’s most in-demand scriptwriters after adapting Forrest Gump for Robert Zemeckis, while songwriter Steve Tyrell would do the same job for NBC’s Saturday morning live-action show California Dreams, which featured a similar premise.

2000 Malibu Road (CBS, 1992): On August 23^rd 1992, an Aaron Spelling show premiered on CBS for the first time since The Smothers Brothers Show went off the air in April 1966. In truth, 2000 Malibu Road was a late-Summer burn-off, its six episodes intended to be the first of a long-running, weekly soap opera aimed at nineties women, with a big name cast and some bigger names involved behind the cameras, only for a dispute over rights between Spelling Productions and the Tiffany network to scupper the project in its infancy.

2000 Malibu Road was created by Terry Louise Fisher, a Chicago native who spent a decade as a lawyer in Los Angeles before quitting to pursue screenwriting. Fisher got her first break as a writer and producer on Cagney & Lacey in 1983, staying with the show until 1986, latterly as a creative consultant. By that point she had co-created her first hit, LA Law, with Steven Bochco, a mix of legal procedural, soap opera, and comedy that was unafraid to touch on hot button topics in its storylines. By the end of its second season, LA Law was the number thirteen show, a rare non-sitcom hit for NBC, but Fisher had found herself barred from the set when negotiations to take over Bochco’s Executive producer role failed and set in motion a lengthy legal battle.

Fisher and Bochco had also co-created Hooperman for ABC and Fisher had signed a three-year development deal with Walt Disney Entertainment, but the legal issues – which were settled in February 1988 – delayed further projects until two unsold pilots for NBC in 1990: Blue Bayou (starring Alfre Woodward as an LA district attorney who moves to New Orleans to be close to her son’s father, played by Mario van Peebles) and Bar Girls (Joanna Cassidy and Marcy Walker as a pair of mismatched lawyers struggling to keep their practice afloat). That gave Fisher the time to concoct 2000 Malibu Road, eagerly snapped up by Spelling Television, with Aaron Spelling acting as executive producer alongside Fisher, The Lost Boys director Joel Schumacher, and Spelling’s long-time collaborator E Duke Vincent.

Schumacher was so taken by Fisher’s pilot script that he signed on to direct the show, and his presence was helpful in attracting Jennifer Beals, Drew Barrymore, Lisa Hartman, and Tuesday Knight to star as the four women who live together in a beach house at the titular address. Okay, so Beals’s career hadn’t exactly soared since she got her break as steelworker turned dancer Alex in Flashdance, and Knight was hardly a household name, but Barrymore was beginning her transition from child star in ET and Firestarter to bankable adult actor, and Hartman spent four years on Dallas spin-off Knots Landing, during which time she also released four albums. Hartman’s Jade O’Keefe was a former prostitute trying to escape that life and taking in lodgers to ensure she can afford to keep living in her beach house. Perry Quinn (Beals) was a young lawyer, eager to start a new life away from her past (a murdered fiancé and a drinking problem), while Lindsay Rule (Barrymore) was an aspiring actress looking for the right part, smothered by her manipulative sister Joy (Knight), who also acts as her agent.

The double-length pilot began with Jade breaking the news that she is quitting the call girl business to her best client, Hal (Robert Foxworth, the man who turned down the part of JR in Dallas), who reacts by trying to drown her. He is stopped by passing neighbour Eric (As the World Turns‘s Brian Bloom), but Jade decides to take one last client, anyway. After he arrives with a mystery woman and tries to kill her, Jade shoots him in the hand and then decides to take in roommates for safety, although you’d imagine she didn’t describe the last few hours to them as part of their induction. The girls arrive and Perry wastes no time reacquainting herself with an old friend, Roger (Michael T Weiss from Days of Our Lives), who is accused of rape, while Lindsay bumps into Eric, whose family are in showbiz and offer her a part in their latest production, much to Joy’s annoyance. Then Jade is arrested for a murder we know she didn’t commit, Eric quits his family’s show, Lindsay gets fired from it, Perry can’t find Roger, and Joy gets annoyed again.

It’s all heady stuff and Schumacher’s direction keeps it barrelling along at a breakneck pace, never letting up until the end of the sixth episode, a cliffhanger which leaves Perry raped and beaten in a stairwell by Roger, Hal (the only man who give Jade an alibi) shot dead by gangsters, and Joy struck by lightning after she finds out Lindsay and Eric are sleeping together. By that time, the project had come off the rails, the various production companies and CBS unable to come to an agreement over the show’s considerable costs and who would own the rights to what. With six episodes in the can, CBS decided to air the show as a stopgap before the new Fall 1992 season line-up debuted, with the two-hour pilot premiering on a Sunday night before the rest of the episodes aired on Wednesdays.

With few viewers ready for brand-new shows in late August, those who found it delighted in its kitsch pleasures and outrageous storylines, and perhaps if it had been a ratings smash, CBS may have been persuaded to get the band back together for more episodes. However, a quarter of the audience for the pilot didn’t return for subsequent episodes and 2000 Malibu Road was marked down as a very expensive flop. While Barrymore and Schumacher rebounded from the failure, Fisher wrote just two Cagney & Lacey reunion movies and saw Daughters of Eve – branded as the first international prime-time soap opera by star Sophia Loren and sponsored by Proctor & Gamble – fall at the pilot stage, despite an offer for Elizabeth Taylor to join the cast if it were greenlit.

. . .

Although Beverly Hills, 90210 continued to score good ratings for the Fox network, Melrose Place struggled a little in its first season, but was nevertheless renewed for a second outing by the network, with Heather Locklear promoted to series regular as her character Amanda Woodward bought and moved into the apartment building. Spelling Productions produced a pilot for another Fox show that Summer, but the network passed on Gulf City, a show about two undercover cops living in a Florida beach house with one of the cops’ sister. CBS, though, were much more receptive to a reboot of Burke’s Law, the show that made Spelling’s name back in the 1960s. Gene Barry was back as millionaire cop Amos Burke, now promoted to Deputy Police Chief, with The Young and the Restless and The Powers of Matthew Star‘s Peter Barton starring as his son, Peter, and doing the lion’s share of the actual crime-fighting.

The revival acknowledged the original’s 1960s roots with a wink, many of the guest stars having starred in similar shows from that time, with the likes of John Astin, Peter Graves, and Patrick Macnee lining up as suspects to be eliminated from the Burkes’ enquiries. Anne Francis reprised her Honey West character from another of Spelling’s 1960s shows, although she was referred to as Honey Best for rights reasons, and the regular cast also featured Dom DeLuise, Danny Kamekona, and Bever-Leigh Banfield. Arriving as a mid-season replacement in January 1994, Burke’s Law did well enough that it was renewed for a sconed half-season, but ratings for that – which aired between March and May 1995 – were disappointing and it was cancelled.

In March 1994, NBC took the number of Spelling shows on the air up to four when they added Winnetka Road to the schedules while Sisters – which was set in Winnetka, Illinois, but was otherwise unconnected to the new show – took a break. Created by former Sesame Street writer John Byrum (whose script for the 1976 film Harry and Walter Go to New York was sold for a then-record amount), Winnetka Road had an ensemble cast led by Ed Begley Jr, Josh Brolin, Kristen Cloke, and Meg Tilly. They played a group of strangely interconnected people in a small Illinois town, but just five of the six episodes produced were aired before Sisters returned, the sixth remaining unshown. NBC also ordered a pilot for Love on the Run, Jim Cruickshank and James Orr’s show about a mercenary (Anthony Addabbo) who marries an heiress (Noelle Beck) and sets up an adventure travel business, but passed on a full series for Fall 1994.

That was the fate that also met Spelling’s next Fox prospect, with Green Dolphin Beat – written by former Hill Street Blues and Miami Vice scripter Robert Ward – remaining unsold, despite a pilot directed by Tommy Lee Wallace and starring John Wesley Shipp and Jeffrey D Sams as two cops fighting for their jobs while trying to solve the murder of a prostitute in a northwestern city.

Madman of the People (1994): Spelling productions did have two new shows on the Fall 1994 schedules, with Fox giving Melrose Place spin-off Models Inc an early debut in June in an attempt to echo the success of the Summer experiment that rocketed Beverly Hills, 90210 to one of Fox’s biggest shows. Starring Dallas’s Linda Gray as the head of an LA modelling agency (and also the mother of Heather Locklear’s Melrose Place character), it was hoped that the glitz and glamour of Spelling’s Dynasty heyday would mesh seamlessly with his successful 1990s efforts. Unfortunately, despite having 90210 as a lead-in, Models Inc failed to capture enough of an audience and was cancelled after a single, twenty-nine-episode season.

Spelling’s other new offering for 1994 was Madman of the People, a rare sitcom production that was slotted into the Must See TV block, as NBC had branded its popular Thursday night since Fall 1993. Space was made by moving Frasier and Wings to Tuesdays, and their spots were filled by a new show called Friends and Spelling’s new show, a vehicle for veteran character actor Dabney Coleman. Coleman had started acting after flunking out of law school in the 1950s and was soon contracted to Universal Television as a perennial guest star, finally landing his first regular role, as Marlo Thomas’s next-door neighbour in That Girl.

Coleman’s star rose considerably when he played sexist boss Franklin Hart Jr in 9 to 5, establishing him as go-to comedic villain, a role he played in Tootsie, The Muppets Take Manhattan, and the 1987 movie version of Dragnet. Madman of the People found him as Jack “Madman” Buckner, an outspoken columnist for the fictional Your Times magazine. His column, sharing a name with the show, comes under threat when the magazine’s owners hire someone to bring Your Times into the 1990s – Buckner’s daughter, Meg (Cynthia Gibb)! Created by a team including Cheers creator James Burrows, veteran director Jim Drake, and actor John Ratzenberger, Madman of the People had a good pedigree, the show’s writing team having come from Night Court and Mad About You, with Burrows, Drake, Ratzenberger, and Roseanne’s Phillip Charles Mackenzie behind the camera.

Fitting well into the Thursday night line-up, it averaged twenty-two million viewers; the November 3^rd episode was even a crossover of sorts with that evening’s Mad About You and Friends, with all three shows dealing with the after-effects of a blackout in New York. However, despite being NBC’s fifth highest-rating show (all of them on Thursday evenings), and the twelfth best rating show across all networks, Madman of the People was cancelled in January 1995 after just fourteen episodes, with another two episodes shelved until June. NBC cited the loss of over five million viewers from lead-in show Seinfeld and believed that was hampering ER at 10pm. They chose to shuffle their pack, moving Friends to 9.30pm and debuting Hope & Gloria at 8.30pm, leaving Madman of the People as one of the highest rating shows ever to be cancelled for ratings reasons.

Next time on Titans of Telephemera: The debut of the Spelling Premier Network and what Y2K has in store for Aaron Spelling…

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)