TITANS OF TELEPHEMERA: Aaron Spelling (part 4)

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 thirty years would produce a slew of hit TV shows, including Starsky & Hutch, Charlies Angels, The Love Boat, Fantasy Island, Hart to Hart, Dynasty, TJ Hooker, and Beverly Hills, 90210. As we’ve seen there were also some flops along the way and that’s a pattern that will continue as we move in Spelling’s final decade as a producer…

Heaven Help Us (syndication, 1994): In August 1994, after thirty years of producing shows for other people’s networks, Aaron Spelling launched his own. Sort of. The Spelling Premiere Network was more a brand than a network per se, with its shows being sold to the syndication market as a suggested programming block, but the final destination of those shows being very much up to local programming directors. Having reaped the benefits of a largely female skewed audience throughout the latter part of his career, with the likes of The Love Boat, Dynasty, and Melrose Place all tilting heavily towards a distaff demographic, the Spelling Premiere Network had women in its sights, with its first two shows aimed squarely at the fairer sex. The syndication market was dominated by action shows and sitcoms, but Spelling put his money where his mouth was, financing the production of the shows himself at a cost of $1 million per episode.

The Spelling Premiere Network launched with two shows that reflected much of the producer’s previous output. Robin’s Hoods was a crime show with a heart, while Heaven Help Us added that twist of telefantasy – and a cast member – that made Fantasy Island such a hit. Ricardo Montalbán was the big name returning for Heaven Help Us, ten years after he’d welcomed the last guest to his magical paradise island. Montalbán had been in semi-retirement since a two-season stay on The Colbys had ended in 1987, pain from an old back injury worsening with age and necessitating surgery in 1993 that left him with limited mobility below the waist. Still, he brought a touch of class and flair to the show as Mr Shepherd, an angel attached to a newlywed couple who die in a plane crash as they set off on their honeymoon and who, thanks to a mix up in Heaven, must stay on Earth and earn their place in the afterlife, living in the phantom thirteenth floor of the hotel their plane crashed into.

Joining Montalbán as newlyweds Doug and Lexy Monroe were former Dukes of Hazzard star John Schneider and Melinda Clarke, who made her acting debut on Days of Our Lives alongside her father, John, who spent almost forty years on the show. The trio were the only regular members of the cast as the Monroes were given a mission of the week, beginning with preventing Lexy’s parents from divorcing, Subsequent adventures saw them help a wealthy family with their communication problems, help clear a mechanic of the blame for the crash that claimed their lives, and pose as marriage counsellors to help a woman leave her abusive husband, all in the name of building up karma (or whatever the Christian equivalent is).

Heaven Help Us was created by William Blinn, who had created Starsky & Hutch for Spelling in 1975 and won an Emmy for his work on Roots. Although it bore some similarity to Highway to Heaven, which ran on NBC between 1984 and 1989, Blinn’s pilot script, which launched the show on August 25^th 1994, was more comedic in tone, similar to the 1941 film Here Comes Mr Jordan, which had been remade in 1978 as Heaven Can Wait with Warren Beatty. This continued into the series but some inconsistent writing and the fact that the old Spelling formula of parading familiar guest stars – with a list including Tom Bosley, Soleil Moon Frye, Erin Gray, Dick van Patten, and Efrem Zimbalist Jr – seemed to be growing tired, meant the show never really developed an audience. Schneider and Clarke, despite decent chemistry, also fell someway short of the bar set by Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn (or even Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepherd), and the Monroes never got to reap the rewards of their labours as Heaven Help Us was cancelled after thirteen episodes.

The cancellation was announced on November 21^st, with two episodes left to run. It was accompanied by news that a new show, University Hospital, would pick up where it left off, filling out the remaining nine episodes of the twenty-two-episode order from the Spelling Premiere Network. Given time to get ahead in production, University Hospital debuted on January 16^th and set out its stall early. Created by James L Conway (who worked with Spelling on Matt Houston and Hollywood Beat) and Joel J Feigenbaum, the show sought to mix social relevance with a sexy cast, led by Tony Award winning Broadway star Tonya Pinkins as Mary Jenkins, head nurse at the University Hospital in Seattle, who attempts to guide her students through tough times, both in their chosen career and their chaotic private lives.

Starring as the students were relative newcomers Rebecca Cross as naïve Montana girl Megan and Hilary Danner as runaway gangster’s moll Jamie, former model Hudson Leick (who would later play Callisto on Xena: Warrior Princess) as buxom man-chaser Tracy, and Another World‘s Alexandra Wilson as Sam, the latest in a long line of nurses in her family and struggling to cope with their expectations. In the first episode, Sam has to fight off an attempted date rape and the girls come together to ensure he never does it again, and the show goes off from there, with Jamie framed for stealing drugs, Megan posing nude for a famous painter, and Tracy hooking up with a mortician, the odd mixture of sex appeal and hot button issues never more keenly illustrated than by a scene where the girls discuss sexual harassment while sunbathing around a pool.

University Hospital raced through its nine episodes, looking to mix the medical drama of NBC’s Thursday night smash ER with the beautiful young cast and social issues of 90210 and Melrose Place. There was even something of a crossover with the other Spelling Premier Network show, Robin’s Hoods, as Claire Yarlett’s Mac featured in both shows, but we never got to see the young nurses graduate as there was no second series as University Hospital joined Heaven Help Us on the scrap heap. But what of that other new show…?

Robin’s Hoods (syndication, 1994): Robin’s Hoods was created by Marcia Basichis, Senior Vice-President of Spelling Television, and developed by Spelling himself, along with David Chisholm. Seeking to place an emphasis on strong female characters throughout. The show centred around Brett Robin, a prosecutor whose policeman husband is killed in the line of duty. After his death, she learns he had bought a bar staffed by parolees who wear an alarming amount of denim. Brett’s first instinct is to close the bar and send the staff back to jail, but after they help her solve her husband’s murder, she decides to keep it open, utilising their skills to help solve some of her tougher cases.

Leading woman Linda Purl had worked with Spelling on the unsold Dark Mansions pilot in 1986, shortly before earning a regular role on the first season of Matlock. A short spell on married spies show Under Cover followed in 1991, but despite plenty of pilots there were few regular series on her résumé. Purl fell pregnant shortly after filming began and lapsed into a part-time schedule in the second half of the show’s run, the pregnancy written into the storyline as her carrying her late husband’s child. When Purl’s pregnancy became too advanced, former teen heartthrob singer Rick Springfield was brought in as bar manager Nick Collins in her stead.

The young offenders staffing Robin’s Nest included former Miss Hawaii Jennifer Campbell as burglar Annie, robber Maria (Cuban actress Mayte Vilán), and drug dealer Stacey, played by Julie McCullough, a former Playboy model who spent a season on Growing Pains before being fired after star Kirk Cameron’s conversion to Christianity. They were joined by fraudster Mac (The Colbys‘ Claire Yarlett) and token male Eddie, a nice guy with an aggravated assault conviction played by David Gail, who previously worked with Spelling on The Round Table and came from Beverly Hills, 90210.

Former 92010 story editor Chris Brancato kept the storylines interesting and varied, with Stacey witnessing a shooting in episode two, only to find that the police claim there was no such crime, and the whole gang helping an amnesiac (Married with Children’s David Faustino) piece together his past in their third outing. Baby-snatchers, murder mystery evenings with real murders, and stalkers all featured in subsequent cases, as well as plenty of romantic intrigue between Annie and Eddie, and then Stacey and Eddie, and between Mac and police detective Chris Carpenter (Dark Justice’s Ramy Zada). Thirteen episodes in, Maria was replaced by KT, a tough new parolee with her own shady past, played by Gretchen Palmer. It all came to a head in the season finale, when Nick’s ex-fiancée returned to claim him back at any cost and the love triangle between Stacey, Annie, and Eddie reaching a tragic conclusion. It was all set up for the show to return for a second season in Fall 1995, but that wasn’t to be as the Spelling Premiere Network was put into mothballs, a failed experiment to the tune of $5 million.

. . .

Despite the collapse of the Spelling Premiere Network, there little slowdown at Spelling Television, where a new take on The Mod Squad, one of Spelling’s most successful early productions, was sent to pilot. Crosstown Traffic was crafted by Roderick and Bruce A Taylor, a father and son team responsible for Otherworld and futuristic crimefighting show Super Force, with rapper Tone Loc the star name in charge of a trio of young, undercover cops played by Dalton James (who played Robert Urich’s son in the short-lived series Crossroads), comedian Aries Spears, and Chandra West, the first female lead in a Puppet Master film when she went toe to toe with Andre Toulon in Puppet Master 4 in 1993. Director George Hickenlooper called the pilot – in which the trio must stop a killer targeting real-life punk band The Muffs and which wasn’t picked up – “a dreadful experience,” and that he only took the job to get his Directors Guild card.

November 1995’s The Invaders was a mixed success, a four-hour mini-series shown over two days that sought to reboot the classic 1967 series, which had starred Roy Thinnes as David Vincent, seemingly the only man aware that aliens are slowly taking over the USA. Scott Bakula took lead duties for the mini-series, learning of the conspiracy from Vincent in jail and then trying to prevent the death of a presidential candidate, part of a wider plan to trigger an ecological disaster that might wipe out mankind. The Invaders was clearly intended to cash in on the success of The X-Files, and the mini-series was a taster for a full series, although whether Bakula would have been involved is uncertain. Regardless, Fox passed on a full series.

Spelling still had Beverly Hills, 90210 and Melrose Place on the Fox schedule but there were no new additions for the Fall 1995 schedule. Come January, though, The WB picked up Savannah as a mid-season replacement in a reshuffle of their Sunday night line-up, intending to use the female-centred drama as the lynchpin in their attempt to capture women viewers on a night dominated by movies and Fox’s male-oriented comedy offerings. It had echoes of the pitch for the Spelling Premiere Network, but the veteran producer had high hopes for the new show, calling it a “young Dynasty” and like “Gone with the Wind if it were done in 1996.” Savannah was the first series created by Constance M Burge, who had finally broken into screenwriting after years of trying when she joined the writing team for medical drama Medicine Ball in 1995.

The show began with the return of Lane (Robyn Lively) to Savannah from New York, where she was working as a journalist. Intending to attend the wedding of her friend Reese (Shannon Sturges) to Travis, Lane discovers her inheritance has been stolen by the groom, who is secretly having an affair with another of their friends, the conniving Peyton (Blake Lively). When Travis turns up dead, the show becomes a whodunnit, with further intrigue provided by the reveal that Peyton is Reese’s illegitimate half-sister. Premiering with a two-hour pilot on January 21^st 1996, Savannah became The WB’s most watched show and was renewed for a second season as soon as the first climaxed in April with the arrival of Travis’s identical twin brother.

As important as the show’s renewal for a second season was for Spelling’s extra-90210 fortunes, it also established a relationship between the producer and The WB, something which would reap rich dividends within a few years. Meanwhile, over on NBC, 90210 meets Romeo and Juliet drama Malibu Shores had been picked up in mid-season as JAG was moved to Wednesdays in March. Created by Meg Richman, the show starred Tony Lucca as a wealthy Malibu teen, with Keri Russell as his sweetheart from the wrong side of the tracks, but didn’t return after its ten-episode order was fulfilled. A similar fate met Kindred: The Embraced on Fox, despite it being given 90210 as a lead-in. Loosely based on the popular role-playing game Vampire: The Masquerade, Kindred starred C Thomas Howell as a San Francisco police officer discovering his city is riddled with vampires and aimed for the sexy gothic feel of Interview with the Vampire, 1994’s adaptation of Anne Rice’s seminal novel which starred Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt. Sadly, the fang crowd didn’t turn out in sufficient numbers, and Kindred was cancelled after seven episodes, leaving one unaired.

After the success of Savannah, The WB came back to Spelling Teleivsion for a new show to lead off their debut Monday night line-up. The network had originally launched with programming only on Wednesdays in January 1995, adding Sundays that Fall. Mondays were the new addition for Fall 1996 and The WB looked to start strongly by moving Savannah to the new night and pairing it with another Spelling show. In contrast to the twists and turns down in Georgia, 7^th Heaven was just about as wholesome as it got, the story of Protestant minister Eric Camden (Tales of the Gold Monkey‘s Stephen Collins), his wife Annie (Catherine Hicks from Tucker’s Witch), and their five children in the small California town they call home. The show earned plaudits from the Parents Television Council and others for its strong Christian moral tone, the assorted offspring (later expanded to seven with the arrival of twins in season six) offered family-friendly solutions to the usual teenage woes.

The 7th Heaven–Savannah two’fer did well for The WB through February 1997, when the latter reached the end of its twenty-two-episode second season. Ratings were still good but making the second season had been a troublesome experience and, given its intrinsically sequential nature, re-runs were hard to program, thus making its costs harder to justify. It was replaced in the schedules by a new show based on a 1992 movie starring Kristy Swanson as a vampire hunter, although she did not return for TV, the role instead going to former All My Children star Sarah Michelle Gellar.

Sunset Beach (NBC, 1997): By the time Buffy the Vampire Slayer debuted on The WB, Spelling’s ambitious new project was underway on NBC. Sunset Beach saw Spelling produce a daily soap opera for the first time, forming a daytime subsidiary specially to do so. The new show would be NBC’s first new daytime soap since 1991’s Generations, and the producer turned to experienced hands to develop the concept. Josh Griffith, Robert Guza Jr, and Charles Pratt Jr met when all three worked together on Santa Barbara between 1988 and 1990, with Guza and Pratt reuniting to work with Spelling on both Melrose Place and Models Inc, while Griffith had just finished a five-year stint on One Life to Live. The trio had a remit to attract younger viewers to the show, NBC feeling that older viewers were already entrenched in their daytime viewing habits, and they did so by introducing modern twists like internet romances and heaps of outrageous storylines, at one point stranding the whole cast on “Terror Island,” where they were stalked by a masked killer.

Sunset Beach began with a cast of twenty-one contracted actors, among them British actress Lesley-Anne Down as alcoholic trophy wife Olivia Richards, former General Hospital and Knots Landing regular Sam Behrens as her husband Gregory, and Vanessa Dorman as their daughter, Caitlin (at least until she was replaced by Kam Heskin a year in). Leigh Taylor-Young, who’d made her acting debut on Peyton Place and had just finished up on Picket Fences, was coffee shop owner Elaine Stevens, with former Miss USA Laura Harring as her daughter Paula, who is dating hunky cop Ricardo Torres (ex- model Hank Cheyne), much to the chagrin of Eddie Connors, played by Peter Barton from the Burke’s Law reboot. Kelly Hu, another ex-model, played a young doctor, while newcomers Jason Winston George and Timothy Adams upped the eye-candy quota as the town lifeguard and his pal, another young medic.

At the centre of the show was Meg Cummings, played by Susan Ward (who had worked with Spelling on Malibu Shores and asked to play a “nice girl” role), who arrives from Kansas to find Ben Evans (Clive Robertson), a man she has been talking to over the internet. The course of true love never runs smooth, and Meg and Ben’s romance had to endure interference from Sarah Buxton’s Annie Douglas and Meg’s ex-fiancé Tim (Dax Griffin), the first time they made love being ruined by the fact that Ben thought Meg was his dead wife, being hunted by the murderer on Terror Island (who turned out to be Ben’s twin brother, Derek, who had been impersonating him for some time), and the arrival of Ben’s illegitimate son with Tess Marin (Tracey Melchior), who later teamed with his presumed-dead twin to kidnap almost the entire cast.

If Meg thought she had things bad, then Annie – characterised as a “top heavy scheming vixen” – could compete with her, escaping from the police by hiding in a coffin (which was then sent to the crematorium), stealing a baby, finding herself strapped to a rotating board while men threw knives at her, posting herself in a box to an office, later emerging from the filing cabinet, Hong Kong Phooey-style), and going to actual Hell, although some of her exploits were explained away as fantasy sequences. That baby she stole? It was Olivia’s, although Annie gave it Caitlin after Caitlin miscarried hers, both of them the result of dalliances with jewel thief Cole Deschanel (The Young and the Restless’s Eddie Cibrian), who would later steal a cursed jewel that aged the owners unless they wore them.

As if all that wasn’t bad enough, a voodoo-cursed mole wreaked havoc, half the cast were victims of an earthquake while the others – who were out at sea on a cruise – were hit by the resulting tsunami and underwent a Poseidon Adventure style disaster. A character came back from the dead by jumping out of a cake, another pulled the same trick to catch the bouquet at a wedding, and a turkey baster was employed to secretly impregnate a love rival! All this kicked off on January 6^th 1997, with NBC incentivising local affiliates – who had control of their daytime schedule – to show it in a midday slot. While most acquiesced, some didn’t and a few never showed Sunset Beach at all. The network ordered a full year – 255 episodes – and although the show was the lowest rating of all the daytime soaps, with fewer than a third of The Young and the Restless’s viewers, it was renewed for a second year.

That second year turned into a third, but Sunset Beach never rose above an average of four million viewers, and the axe eventually fell in December 1999 after 755 episodes. Over in the UK, the show became a surprise hit for the new Channel 5 network, debuting in March 1997 as only the second daytime US soap to air on terrestrial TV in the UK (Santa Barbara was the first, bought by ITV in 1987 to compete with the success of Neighbours on the BBC). Channel 5 eventually showed the entire run and even offered to partially fund the costs of keeping the show in production (as they would later do with Neighbours), but NBC demurred. Still, 755 episodes is a good run, and the show will always be remembered for its wilder storylines, if not its production values, which – as with all daytime soaps – were subject to short cuts necessitated by deadlines. Much less successful – although playing to more viewers by dint of its prime-time scheduling, was Pacific Palisades, designed as a vehicle for former Baywatch beauty Erika Eleniak, who subsequently turned it down due to its racy content. With former Neighbours star Kimberley Davies in the lead role as a real estate agent in an upmarket Los Angeles suburb populated by young professionals, it lasted for just thirteen episodes from April to July 1997 on Fox, despite enjoying Beverly Hills, 90210 as a lead-in.

. . .

In Fall 1997, NBC passed on taking Odd Jobs, a neo-noir underworld project about a psychopath written by Quentin Tarantino’s pal Roger Avary and starring Patrick Dempsey, to series after ordering a two-hour pilot. More successful was Spelling’s latest dip into his back catalogue as UPN – like The WB, launched in January 1995 – added Love Boat: The Next Wave to its schedules in April 1998 as part of a Spring refresh for Monday nights. Developed by 7^th Heaven creator Brenda Hampton and one of that show’s senior writers, Catherine LePard, the new show saw passengers board the Sun Princess, captained by Robert Urich’s retired Navy man Jim Kennedy. The crew also included Phil Morris, Corey Parker, Joan Severance, Stacey Travis, and Kyle Howard as Kennedy’s son, Danny, but – as with the original show – the emphasis was placed on the guest stars, with the six-episode run bringing Jessica Alba, Maxwell Caulfield, Shari Headley, Robyn Lively, Danica McKellar, Ricardo Montalban, Marion Ross, and Wil Wheaton on board to have their lives changed in a sexy and romantic way.

Love Boat: The Next Wave returned for a second season in October 1998, and with Beverly Hills, 90210 and Melrose Place on Fox, 7^th Heaven on The WB, and Sunset Beach on NBC, the addition of two new Spelling Television shows to the network schedules resembled something of a return to the producer’s former glories. Buddy Faro, a private eye show with a twist from the pen of David Lynch collaborator Mark Frost, found a home on Friday nights on CBS, something of a free-for-all, viewers-wise, as no network could claim they controlled the dial. With Dennis Farina in the title role as a legendary detective who disappeared twenty years before, only to be brought out of retirement by Frank Whaley’s young hopeful, the show lasted for just eight episodes before low ratings brought about its cancellation with five more sitting on the shelf unaired.

A much better prospect, and another result of the relationship established between Spelling Television and The WB when Savannah hit the air in January 1996, was Charmed, created by Savannah’s Constance M Burge. Like that show, Charmed was centred on three strong female characters, this time sisters known as The Charmed Ones, witches with aa combined “Power of Three,” which they use to protect innocents from evil. Arriving just months after teen witch drama The Craft (with which it shared a theme song, a cover of The Smiths’ “How Soon Is Now?” by Love Spit Love), Charmed starred 90210’s Shannen Doherty, Holly Marie Combs from Picket Fences, and former Who’s the Boss? starlet Alyssa Milano as Prue, Piper, and Phoebe Halliwell, with support from Dorian Gregory and TW King as San Francisco police officers who give the girls assistance.

Naturally compared to Buffy the Vampire Slayer on Fox, the two ended the season on almost identical ratings, and Charmed was renewed for a second outing. Love Boat: The Next Wave’s sophomore season had not gone so well, despite not only featuring guest appearances from wrestler Bill Goldberg, C Thomas Howell, Rue McClanahan, and Jerry Springer (as himself), but also some of the cast of the original show in an episode titled “Reunion.” The reboot never gained the foothold the original had done on ABC, however, and was cancelled – along with three-quarters of UPN’s line-up – in May 1999. It left screens the same month as another Spelling show on The WB; paramedic drama Rescue 77 failed to gain much traction during its eight-episode run, despite the involvement of Highlander creator Gregory Widen.

Still, Spelling Television had the wind in their sails once more and presented two new pilots for Fall 1999. Safe Harbor was taken to series by The WB and placed on Monday nights with 7^th Heaven to make a Spelling block, Furthermore, both shows were created by Brenda Hampton, who hoped to work her magic on the story of John Loring (Gregory Hamilton), a small-town sheriff trying to find out the truth behind his wife’s death and raise their three sons – played by Power Rangers All‘s Christopher Khayman Lee, Jeremy (now Jer Adrienne) Lelliott, and Jamie Williams – and Chyler Leigh’s runaway, with only his eccentric mother (Rue McClanahan) for help. After failing to capitalise on its partnership with 7^th Heaven, Safe Harbor moved to Sundays in late November, but ratings did not improve, and it was cancelled after just eight episodes.

The other Spelling prospect for Fall 1999 didn’t even get as far as a full pilot but became the subject of speculation in the early years of the twenty-first century as a similar show became a smash hit. UPN were interested in Forbidden Island, another Mark Frost creation, assembling a cast that included Once a Thief‘s Victoria Pratt, Days of Our Lives’s Paul Kersey, and Cari Shayne, who enjoyed a five-year run on General Hospital in the first half of the decade, for filming in New Zealand, the results of which have never been seen as anything other than rough “rushes.” The thing that makes Forbidden Island notable, though, is that it is the story of a group of survivors of a plane crash on a mysterious Pacific Island, seemingly filled with supernatural threats.

Officially, Lost was the result of a request from ABC chairman Lloyd Braun for a drama that crossed successful reality shows Castaway and Survivor, and Spelling Television were initially involved in the project, with a Jeffrey Lieber script titled Nowhere the first fruits. Deciding to go in another direction, ABC hired JJ Abrams and Damon Lindelof to rewrite Lieber’s script, but Lieber is credited as a co-creator on Lost. Not so Mark Frost, whose 1999 concept bears a striking resemblance to the later show, with similar visual iconography, the concept of the survivors being selected for a purpose (or being dead in some kind of afterlife), and the island being in no recognisable part of the globe. An interesting coincidence, perhaps, but one to add to Lost’s collection of mystery boxes.

All Souls (UPN, 2001): By the turn of the millennium, Spelling’s fortunes had begun to wane once more. Melrose Place had ended a seven-season run in May 1999, with Sunset Beach following in December, and Beverly Hills, 90210 closing its doors after ten years in May 2000, leaving just two Spelling Television shows – 7^th Heaven and Charmed – on air AT The WB. They were joined, at least for a short while, by Titans on NBC, a heady mix of romance and intrigue that told the story of aviation magnate Richard Williams (Perry King) and his pregnant young wife Heather (Yasmine Bleeth), who has been sleeping with Casper von Dien’s Chandler, unaware that he is Richard’s son (and a pilot to boot). Created by Charles Pratt Jr, one of the trio behind Sunset Beach, it was very much designed to do for prime-time what that show did for daytimes, but NBC pulled the plug after eleven episodes, despite the presence of Dallas’s Victoria Principal as Richard’s ex-wife (and Chandler’s mother).

Three years after they had partnered with the producer to resurrect The Love Boat, UPN could have played host to two new Spelling shows in Spring 2001 but decided against taking Stop at Nothing – which starred Scarlett Chorvat and Deborah Kellner as two beautiful undercover spies – to series, despite showing the pilot as a TV movie in July. They did take paranormal hospital drama All Souls, however, scheduling it on Tuesday nights where they hoped it might find an audience against sitcoms on ABC and NBC and reality shows on CBS, replacing UPN Night at the Movies. Created by Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III and Forbidden Island writer-director Stuart Gillard and Stephen Tolkin (who directed the 1990 Captain America movie that starred Matt Sallinger), All Souls was set in a haunted teaching hospital, where Dr Mitchell Grace (Grayson McCouch, one of the castaways on Forbidden Island), freshly graduated from medical school, begins working in the hopes it might bring him closer to his father, who died while working there as a janitor when he was a boy.

Grace soon becomes aware of the facility’s spooky goings on, encountering both good and evil ghosts as he navigates the hallways, trying to solve that week’s new patient-based mystery, as well as discover just how his father died. Inspired by Lars von Trier’s The Kingdom (later remade in the US as Kingdom Hospital), All Souls makes full use of its various creators’ strengths, with Gillard directing all but one of its six-episode order, Spelling providing a touch of (albeit faded and distorted in places) glamour, and executive producer Mark Frost lending some of the trademark weirdness he developed working with David Lynch. Shot mostly on location in a functioning psychiatric hospital in Montréal, patients were often used as extras, alongside a cast that saw Daniel Cosgrove, Irma Hall, Adam Rodriguez, and Serena Scott Thomas joining McCouch.

All Souls premiered on April 17^th 2001, with reality show Chains of Love (where a man or woman is chained to four members of the opposite sex over four consecutive nights) as a lead-in, it earned almost entirely positive reviews from critics but struggled to attract viewers, with its second episode rating lower than all three of the shows that occupied the slot the previous year, and just two thirds of what UPN Night at the Movies had been averaging. After one more episode, UPN put the show on hiatus, although many media commentators saw the writing on the wall. In late July, UPN re-ran the first three episodes of the show and then finished the run. There was no second season; Gillard concentrated on directing afterwards and Mark Frost didn’t work in TV again until the Twin Peaks reboot in 2017.

All Souls also marked the end of Aaron Spelling’s regular active participation in his shows. A keen pipe smoker for most of his life, he was diagnosed with oral cancer in 2001, and underwent successful surgery and after-treatment, but lessened his involvement at Spelling Entertainment. Company president Jonathan Levin took day-to-day control of the company, while E Duke Vincent – who had worked with Spelling since 1977’s The San Pedro Beach Bums – oversaw television production. Over the next four years, Spelling Television produced six short-lived shows – courtroom comedy drama Queens Supreme and Daniel Cerone’s baseball drama Clubhouse for CBS, Mexican drug trafficker yarn Kingpin for NBC, Summerland for The WB, crime drama Wanted for TNT, and 10-8: Officers on Duty for ABC, the first Spelling show to grace the alphabet network since HeartBeat in 1988 – and eight unsold pilots. In late 2005, the studio was folded into Paramount Television, its small staff moving across to Paramount’s headquarters.

On June 18^th 2006, Aaron Spelling suffered a stroke and died five days later at his estate in west Los Angeles. He had been suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, which was said to have contributed to his death. Two weeks earlier, he had reconciled with daughter Tori, the pair having not spoken for nine months due to a rift over her mother’s friendship with another man, which the pair always maintained was platonic, but Tori believed otherwise, further straining a maternal relationship that had been soured by So NoTORIous, a spoof autobiographical sitcom that starred Tori and cast Loni Anderson as a bitter alcoholic mother figure. After his death, Spelling Television became an in-name only production unit of CBS Studios and CBS owns Spelling’s back catalogue. The Spelling logo last appeared at the end of the credits for the final episode of 7^th Heaven, which was cancelled in September 2007; Charmed finished a year earlier.

In recent years, Beverly Hills, 90210, Charlie’s Angels, Charmed, Dynasty, and Fantasy Island have all been rebooted, while Charlie’s Angels, Fantasy Island, and Starsky & Hutch got the big screen treatment, and The Real Love Boat took the classic show into the realm of scripted reality. Even two decades after his death, Aaron Spelling continues to exert a big influence on TV, a true Titan of Telephemera.

Next time on The Telephemera Years: It’s 1996 and NBC rules the roost to the extent that the other networks have all but given up, but what else is there on offer…

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)

The Telephemera Years: 1975 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)