THE TELEPHEMERA YEARS: 2004, 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. They hit the schedules alongside established shows, hoping for a long run, but it’s not always to be, and for every Street Hawk there’s two Manimals. But here at STARBURST we celebrate their existence and mourn their departure, drilling down into the new season’s entertainment with equal opportunities square eyes… these are The Telephemera Years!

2004-05

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

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

Jonny Zero (Fox): Like its protagonist, Jonny Zero creators R Scott Gemmill and Ken Sanzel must have felt that the odds were stacked against them. Not only did the Fox network put them in the Friday night death slot, when most young viewers – the target demographic for this “alternative detective” – are out on the town, but they also ran the episodes out of order, resulting in continuity gaffs that reached their apogee when a character died, only to appear alive and well two episodes later. It’s a shame, because their show was dripping with cool, a redemption story for the twenty-first century of a man rightly convicted for a crime he did commit but nevertheless trying to turn his life around.

Sanzel had created Fox show Lawless for former NFL player Brian Bosworth, a show that performed so poorly in the ratings that it was pulled from the air after just one episode. 1998’s The Replacement Killers, which starred Chow Yun Fat and Mira Sorvino, did better, and he was given the chance to direct Stephen Baldwin and Tia Carrere in Scar City the same year. His latest script showed promise and landed at John Wells Productions, but Dodge’s City had failed to get past the pilot stage in 1999 and audiences weren’t exactly clamouring to see Lou Diamond Phillips in 2002’s Lone Hero, so Wells brought in Gemmill, a trusty hand on two other Wells shows, ER and JAG.

Jonny Zero starred Franky G, a Puerto-Rican actor born Frank Gonzales who had made his screen debut in 2002 independent movie Manito. Roles in James Foley’s Confidence and The Italian Job remake followed, and Wells felt he had the charisma to carry his own show, starring as Jonny Calvo, a man released from prison after serving four years in Sing Sing for killing a man. Determined to go straight and prove his worth to his ex-wife (Tawny Cypress) and son, Calvo takes a job at a pirate-themed children’s restaurant. It’s there that he meets Random (rapper GQ) and the two start a private detective agency together, adding former stripper Velvet (Brennan Hesser) to their crew. Jonny is being courted by both his former boss Garrett and an FBI agent wanting him to turn informant; can he stay out of trouble and redeem himself by helping other people?

Jonny Zero debuted as a mid-season replacement in January 2005, already the fifth show in its slot as Fox struggled to compete in a changing television landscape. Gemmill scripted six of the thirteen-episode order, with contributions from Angel writer Mere Smith and 24‘s Virgil Williams, while Deep Impact and Pay It Forward‘s Mimi Leder directed four episodes. Jonny’s caseload involved missing babies, stolen Bar Mitzvah rewards, drive-by shootings of rappers, and solving the murder of his parole officer’s husband, with guest stars including Idris Elba Krysten Ritter, Gina Rodriguez, and Peta Wilson, but the show fared little better than any of the others in the Friday 9pm slot and was replaced by reality show Nanny 911.

Revelations (NBC): David Seltzer had form with the Apocalypse. In 1972, after starting his career as an uncredited scripter on Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, he wrote The Hellstrom Chronicle, a pseudo-documentary that detailed the battle between man and insect for control of the planet presented by fictional scientist Dr Nils Hellstrom. The film won Best Documentary Feature at the 1972 Oscars and ensured Seltzer was the first man producer Harvey Bernhard thought of when he wanted a script featuring the rise of the Antichrist. The Omen took Seltzer a year to write but established the End of Days as a movie trope, a theme he returned to for 1997’s The Eighteenth Angel after winning accolades for his scripts for Lucas, Punchline, and Bird on a Wire, the first two of which he also directed.

In the wake of the Millennium, and what he considered the parlous state of the world, agent turned television producer Gavin Polone, who had scored hits with Curb Your Enthusiasm and Gilmore Girls, wanted a series that dealt with the end of the world as specified in the Biblical Book of Revelation. Polone had recently formed Pariah Television to handle new projects and engaged Seltzer to create what would become Revelations. The aftermath of the Apocalypse had become a hot topic in Christian circles and beyond after the publication of Left Behind in 1995, an apocalyptic novel written by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B Jenkins that turned into a popular series of books, but Revelations trod different territory, looking to forestall something Left Behind -and the Bible itself – saw as inevitable.

Bill Pullman played astrophysicist Dr Richard Massey, grief-stricken after the murder of his daughter at the hands of Satanist Isaiah Haden (Michael Massee), who he hunted down and brought to justice. Meanwhile, nun Josepha Montafiore (Natascha McElhone) is witness to prophecies spoken by a comatose girl that lead her to Massey and is tasked by the wealthy Catholic Elkind Foundation with recruiting him to unravel mysteries that could foretell the end of the world, racing against time to prevent Haden and his followers bringing it about.

Debuting on NBC on April 13^th 2005 in a slot previously occupied by The West Wing, Revelations was billed as a six-episode miniseries, a return to the format made popular in the 1970s and 1980s by such series as Roots and North and South. Fifteen million viewers tuned in to the first episode, down to less than a week later. The finale was viewed by just over eight million and although the Apocalypse had been prevented for now, the series was left very much open for a second season, the Antichrist birthed from a goat and spirited away into the night. Seltzer, though, has always maintained it was intended to be one and done, and it became his last word on the Apolcaypse, with just 2011’s Cinema Verite – a fictionalized account of the production of 1973 proto-reality show An American Family – following before he retired from the business.

Wonder Showzen (MTV2): Quite why USA Network executives agreed to fund a pilot after viewing Vernon Chatman and John Lee’s eight-minute pitch reel for Kid’s Show in 1999 is anyone’s guess, but after just a few minutes viewing the resulting twisted puppet show produced by the pair, they quickly realised it was something that was not in keeping with the channel’s programming style (and this from a network that was airing WWF Raw). Instead, Chatman and Lee found a home at MTV2, the subject of a rebranding by owners Viacom, who were putting together an edgy programming block that would also contain Dirty Sanchez and Jackass spin-off Wildboyz.

Renamed Wonder Showzen, the new show debuted as part of Sic ‘Em Fridays on March 11^th 2005. A satirical look at politics, religion, race, violence, sex, and popular culture, the idea had been distilling since Chatman and Lee were students in San Francisco in the early 1990s. Fond of pranks, the two imagined a show called Kid’s Show which would just be twenty minutes of people singing the show’s name over and over until the final credits rolled. After graduation, the two found themselves in New York, where Chatman was working on The Chris Rock Show and Lee had co-founded the arts collective PFFR with Alyson Levy.

After continuing their pranking ways on the people of New York, they realised that they could take things a step further if the perpetrators of the pranks were innocent, like children or puppets, finding great satisfaction in targeting their least favourite people, the city’s numerous doormen. Amassing some humorous footage, they edited it together into the pitch reel that impressed the USA Network, and when they were greenlit for a pilot, Levy pitched in, borrowing a book from the library on how the Jim Henson Workshop made the sets for The Muppet Show and Sesame Street. The result was presented to USA Network head Barry Diller who, Chatman told The Ringer in 2020, “got a few minutes into the tape, pressed Stop, and said, ‘Not only are we not doing this show, we’re not doing comedy anymore.’”

As the 2000s rolled around, a tape of the pilot circulated amongst fans, landing up on MTV programmer Jesse Ignjatovic’s desk. Ignjatovic took it to Executive Vice-President Tom Calderone, who immediately recognised the spirit of Monty Python and Saturday Night Live in the show and ordered an eight-episode season. But only after changing the name of the show, wary that Kid’s Show would end up being conflated with Dora the Explorer or Sesame Street. Work began in earnest in Fall 2004, with PFFR member Jim Tozzi completing a core four for the show, who all pitched in on the various jobs needed to creative twenty-two minutes of television. Given a budget of $400,000 per episode, Chatman and Lee ensured they not only delivered on budget but also on time, figuring that they could get away with much more on screen if they were easy to deal with off it. Chatman voiced the show’s self-appointed host Chauncey and chief street interviewer Clarence, with Lee giving life to Wordsworth, the worm with an exposed brain, and “meat cretin” Him. Levy voiced lady monster Sthugar, while a gang of kids were corralled into asking adults awkward questions for the camera, sometimes dressed as Adolf Hitler.

The material varied only slightly from Chatman and Lee’s original pranks, putting members of the public on the spot and often earning their ire, with kicks, punches, and even knives being pulled a common response to their affrontery. Regular segments such as “Beat Kids,” “Funny/Not Funny,” “Horse Apples,” and “So Now You Know” appeared alongside the pranks, with special guests including Flavor Flav, Jon Glaser, and Amy Sedaris lining up to read inappropriate tales in “Story Time.”

Even at a cool network like MTV, Wonder Showzen ran up against the standards and practices department, with one sketch featuring the letter W being shot and killed deemed too severe a reaction to the re-election of George W Bush in 2005. The show was given a TV-MA rating, meaning MTV – which recycled its programming frequently during the day – couldn’t show it during family viewing, but it nevertheless attracted a decent following, helped by rave reviews in newspapers and magazines, although The Catholic League was less impressed, and a Southern pastor allegedly devoted a whole sermon to denouncing the show.

A second season, again of eight episodes, arrived in March 2006 with – if anything – things turned up even further on the “what can we get away with?” scale. The first episode alone saw the letter P have liposuction, her unwanted fat gain sentience and fall in love with a pile of faeces, and a cartoon titled “Don’t Mock Gimps,” with successive instalments featuring a dim-witted character named Middle America, an episode-long sketch poking fun at both slavery and the Scopes monkey trial, a war with a bootleg version of the show, and a season finale that saw Clarence realise that compelling television does not exist and commit suicide by throwing himself into the Hudson River. Guests appearing in the second season included David Cross, Judah Friedlander, Zach Galifianakis, Amy Poehler, and alternative music icons Devendra Banhart, Will Oldham, and Corin Tucker.

Despite good DVD sales, Chatman and Lee had always thought a third season was unlikely and so it proved, with Tom Calderone’s sideways move to VH1 robbing them of their biggest advocate at the network. After pondering their next move, the PFFR crew began work on a CGI animated show about the dangers of spirituality called Xavier: Renegade Angel which debuted on [adult swim] in November 2007, also running for two seasons. In recent years they’ve resisted calls to bring back Wonder Showzen but acknowledge that its central themes of anti-capitalism and anti-racism will never go out of fashion. Although Tozzi left PFFR in 2009, the core trio of Chatman, Lee, and Levy continue to work together and most recently produced Teenage Euthanasia and the Ballmastrz: Rubicon special, both for [as].

Kojak (USA Network): Abby Mann won a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar for Judgment at Nuremberg, a 1961 feature that originally aired as a TV movie in 1959. In 1973, Universal Television approached him to write a script based on the 1963 killing of two young women in New York that became known as the Career Girls Murders. Poor police work led to the arrest of a young black man, who confessed under pressure but whose innocence was proved when a separate team of detectives examined the case and found the real culprit, drug addict Richard Robles. Mann’s script was filmed as a TV movie titled The Marcus-Nelson Murders, in which Lieutenant Theo Kojak – played by Telly Savalas – absolves the young black suspect originally arrested for the killing of two white girls and apprehends the real suspect.

The Marcus-Nelson Murders aired on March 8^th 1973 as part of NBC Saturday Night at the Movies and Kojak proved popular with audiences who were lapping up offbeat detectives. With his bald pate, ever present lollipop (to distract him from the temptation of smoking cigarettes), and hip patter, Kojak was as offbeat as they came, and a full series followed in October 1973, revitalising Savalas’s career and turning “who loves ya, baby?” into a proto meme. Kojak solved his final case in March 1978, although he did return for seven TV movies on ABC and CBS between 1985 and 1990 before finally hanging up his fedora.

Nothing stays dead in TV for long and 2005 brought the return of the Greek American detective with the Polish name, this time at the hands of Tony Picirillo, an unlikely candidate having earned rave reviews for his debut play The 24^th Day, a two-hander dealing with the AIDS crisis that was subsequently adapted by Picirillo himself into a movie starring James Marsden and Scott Speedman. Stepping into Savalas’s shoes for the USA Network revival was Ving Rhames, a former Broadway actor who’d made his big screen debut in Wes Craven’s The People Under the Stairs. After a star making turn as gangster Marsellus Wallace in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction in 1994, he spent three seasons on ER before winning a Golden Globe as boxing promoter Don King in the 1998 biopic Don King: Only in America.

Unlike Savalas, Rhames’s Kojak was of mixed Polish and African American heritage but otherwise stayed true to the character, with a smooth skull and a liking for lollipops. His debut outing on March 25^th 2005 saw him hunting down a serial killer who targeted single mother prostitutes, with subsequent cases involving a hostage crisis, a spree killer, and a bomber, assisted by a team including Chuck Shamata, Sybil Temtchine, and Michael Kelly’s Crocker, all overseen by Chazz Palminteri’s Captain Frank McNeil. Despite some nice touches and a charismatic turn by Rhames, the series received a mixed reception, with as many turned off by its grim, twenty-first century violence as appreciative of the contemporary update, and it was cancelled after just nine episodes had aired.

Next time on The Telephemera Years: more of 2004’s less-successful efforts, including small town mysteries and Five-O in Hawaii…

Check out our other Telephemera articles:

The Telephemera Years: pre-1965 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1965 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1966 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1967 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1968 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1969 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1970 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1971 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1972 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

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