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The weather’s turning cooler, the leaves are changing color, and the kids are all back in school. Another fall is just about here. And in the increasingly irrelevant world of broadcast network television, that means it’s time to introduce a cornucopia of new programs vying to catch the audience’s eye.
Well, it’s not so much a cornucopia as it is a handful. Between the five over-the-air networks (ABC, CBS, CW, Fox, NBC), there’s barely a minyan of shows debuting this season. If one was to turn back the pages of time–or, in my case, my 1975 TV Guide Fall Preview issue–you’d find ABC, CBS, and NBC introducing no less than 27 new series 50 Septembers ago. And of those 27, a grand total of five made it to a sophomore year. Let’s return to the era of Pet Rocks and CB radios with a look at 20 of the small-screen hits and misses celebrating their Golden Anniversary this month:
Barbary Coast – Sort of a revamp of The Wild Wild West, ABC’s frontier-flavored action/comedy outing romp was William Shatner’s return to series TV after Star Trek’s cancellation six years earlier. He played a disguise-wearing government agent in 1870s San Francisco who used the Golden Gate gambling hall/saloon of pal Doug McClure as his base of operations. A pre-007 Richard Keil was the bar’s bouncer. The show itself was bounced after the traditional tryout period of 13 episodes.
Beacon Hill – CBS had high hopes that this drama, which followed the lives of a well-to-do post-WWI Boston family and their crew of servants, would echo the success a few years prior of the PBS import Upstairs, Downstairs. Despite a lavish budget, a Marvin Hamlisch theme song, and an ensemble cast that included Edward Hermann, Nancy Marchand, Linda Purl, and Kitty Winn (the upstairs) and Susan Blanchard, George Rose, Beatrice Straight, and Holland Taylor (the downstairs), the show couldn’t maintain its premiere audience. As a result, only 11 of 13 filmed episodes aired. Fun Fact: The following year Blanchard was in an even more infamous flop, co-starring with Pat Morita in Mr. T and Tina, which ran for all of five episodes.
Bronk – No, not Bronco. That was a ’50s western series. Jack Palance made the jump from movie heavy to TV crimefighter in CBS’s one-season drama created by Archie Bunker himself, Carroll O’Connor. Police detective Alex Bronkov was charged with cleaning up a crime-plagued Southern California town. He also cared for his daughter Ellen (Dina Ousley), who was confined to a wheelchair after an accident which killed Bronk’s wife. The show made it through 24 episodes, with the finale being a strange “backdoor pilot” where guest star Vic Morrow is a PI tracking down a vigilante killer.
Doc – Not to be confused with the current Molly Parker drama on Fox or the 2001-04 Billy Ray Cyrus drama on Pax/Ion. Barnard Hughes was the Doc–New York City GP Dr. Joe Bogert, to be precise–in this warm-hearted medical comedy which co-starred Elizabeth Wilson as Mary Wickes. The show was a modest success thanks to a cushy Saturday timeslot between The Jeffersons and The Mary Tyler Moore Show, but cast and premise tinkering and a ratings dip led to CBS pulling the plug five episodes into Season Two.
Doctors’ Hospital – As opposed to Bakers’ Hospital or Plumbers’ Hospital, I suppose. The ficitious Lowell Memorial in L.A. was the title temple of healing in NBC’s short-lived medical drama. George Peppard, post-Banacek and pre-A-Team, was the chief doctor, with a staff that included Zohra Lampert, Victor Campos, and John Laroquette in his first series. Despite encouraging reviews, it wound up in Mortician’s Morgue after 13 installments.
Ellery Queen – Can you figure out why this quirky mystery series, starring Jim Hutton as famed fictional author/amateur detective Ellery Queen and David Wayne as his NYPD inspector father, only lasted 22 episodes? Developed by Columbo creators William Levinson and Richard Link, the show reveled in its post-WWII Big Apple setting. There was even a fourth wall-breaking pause before revealing who done it, with Hutton’s Ellery asking the audience if they’ve deduced who the culprit is. Nine years later, Levinson and Link would revamp the show’s premise, gender-swap the protagonist, and have a hit with Murder, She Wrote.
Fay – A prime example of the right actress at the wrong time. Emmy-winner Lee Grant (Peyton Place) was Fay Stewart, a newly-divorced fortysomething woman who takes a job as a San Francisco law firm secretary and sets out to enjoy life on her own. Creator Susan Harris (The Golden Girls) wanted the series to be a bold and liberating seriocomedy, but NBC gave it a timeslot in the 8:00-9:00 “Family Hour.” As a result, one episode had to have the words “stretch marks” censored for fear of polluting young ears. The network ran only eight episodes in the fall and burned off the remaining two over the summer. Fun Fact: Audra Lindley co-starred as Fay’s unhapply married, sharp-tongued neighbor, a role she would perfect the following year as Mrs. Roper on Three’s Company.
The Family Holvak – Glenn Ford’s second attempt at a TV series (the first was 1971-72’s Cade’s County) saw him cast as Tom Holvak, a small-town Tennessee preacher struggling to help his church and support his family during the Depression. Stage star Julie Harris played his wife. Spinning off of the TV movie The Greatest Gift of All, the NBC drama was meant to draw comparisons to CBS’s hit The Waltons. Those comparions, though, left The Family Holvak wanting and, like Cade’s County before it, it was cancelled after one season.
The Invisible Man – I know, you never saw the show. Ha, ha. Borrowing the title and premise of H.G. Wells’ novel, NBC’s sci-fi adventure starred David McCallum as research scientist Dr. Daniel Westin, whose experiments in teleportation wind up rendering him transparent. Unable to reverse the process on his own, Westin uses his see-through status as a special operative for the corporation who sponsored his work as he tries to find an antidote. 1975 TV audiences apparently preferred their heroes bionic (The Six Million Dollar Man) to invisible, and McCallum appropiately vanished after 12 episodes. Fun Fact: NBC tried the same gimmick the following year with Gemini Man, which lasted one episode less.
Joe Forrester – First introduced in NBC’s 1973- 77 anthology series Police Story, Joe (Lloyd Bridges) was a veteran LAPD plainclothes officer. Fed up with the crime in his old neighborhood, Forrester dons a patrolman’s uniform and returns to walking the mean streets (I have no idea if “by this time his lungs were aching for air”). Eddie Egan, the real-life cop behind The French Connection, played Joe’s boss. The network took Bridges off his beat after 22 episodes.
Matt Helm – Can’t get the rights to do a James Bond show? Move down the cinematic secret agent list to Dean Martin’s womanizing superspy, Matt Helm. Dino himself was busy doing celebrity roasts for NBC, so Tony Franciosa took over as Helm. For this ABC drama, however, Matt was no longer a spy but worked as a private invesigator, and his amorous pursuits were toned down for the small screen. Now just another TV P.I., Matt Helm only hung around for–you guessed it–13 episodes.
McCoy – No, Star Trek’s acerbic chief medical officer didn’t get his own spin-off. A one-season entry in the rotating NBC Sunday Mystery Movie schedule, McCoy starred Tony Curtis (who previously failed on TV alongside Roger Moore in 1971’s The Persuaders!) as a reformed grifter who works with a team of allies to recover stolen money and goods from under the crooks’ noses. One of two 1975 series to use the “con men outfoxing other con men” formula of the hit movie The Sting (see Switch below), this Unreal McCoy only lasted for four episodes beyond its pilot telefilm.
On the Rocks – Many popular ’70s comedies (All in the Family, Three’s Company) were transatlantic adaptations of British programs. So was this not-as-popular ABC series set in Alamesa Minimum Security Prison and based on the BBC’s Porridge. Jose Perez, Hal Williams, and Rick Hurst were among the inmates, with Tom Poston and Mel Stewart as guards and Logan Ramsey as the warden. After 24 episodes, the prisoners were given an early parole.
Phyllis – Following the success of Rhoda the year before, CBS tried to catch lightning in a bottle twice by spinning off Cloris Leachman’s character from The Mary Tyler Moore Show into her own sitcom. After her never-seen husband Lars dies, Phyllis Lindstrom and her teenage daughter Bess (Lisa Gerritsen, my 6th-grade TV crush) move from Minneapolis to San Francisco. They move in with Lars’ mother Audrey (Jane Rose), her husband Jonathan (Henry Jones), and his curmudgeonly mother Sally (Judith Lowry) while Phyllis takes a job working in a photo studio. The comedy finished Number Six in the ratings for 1975-76 (ahead of both MTM and Rhoda), but a sophomore season premise change and health issues for some cast members led to a fall in popularity and the show was shelved.
Saturday Night Live with Howard Cosell – Ever wonder why early Saturday Night Live reruns have the show’s title as NBC’s Saturday Night? It’s because the SNL mantle was first worn by this short-lived series which debuted one month earlier. ABC sports guru Roone Arledge attempted to build a live variety program à la The Ed Sullivan Show around a host even less charistmatic than Ed: motor-mouthed Monday Night Football commentator Cosell. Despite a star-filled debut that included Frank Sinatra, John Denver, The Bay City Rollers, and the cast of Broadway’s The Wiz, SNLWHC failed to attract an audience and the curtain came down after 18 episodes. Fun Fact: the show’s resident comic troupe, The Prime Time Players, included future SNL regulars Brian Doyle-Murray, Christopher Guest, and Bill Murray.
Starsky and Hutch – The 1974 police pictures Busting and The Super Cops led producer William Blinn to craft a TV drama about two hard-nosed, rulebook-tossing undercover detectives. Sergeant David Michael Starsky (Paul Michael Glaser) and Sergeant Kenneth “Hutch” Hutchinson (David Soul) kept the mean streets of fictitious Bay City, California safe in their red-and-white Ford Gran Torino. Each week the maverick pair gave their boss Capt. Dobey (Bernie Hamilton) a new ulcer, while their main informant–the snazzily dressed “Huggy Bear” (Antonio Fargas)–gave them the word on the street. Despite Glaser’s growing dissatisfaction with the scripts, he stayed for the show’s entire four-season run. Fun Fact: the Season Four finale, “Sweet Revenge,” originally had a seriously wounded Starsky dying, but producers decided it would adversely affect reruns in syndication.
Swiss Family Robinson – Producer Irwin Allen borrowed from Johann Wyss’s 1810s novel about a family shipwrecked on an uncharted island for his 1965 sci-fi hit Lost in Space (originally titled Space Family Robinson). A decade later, Allen took a break from disaster movies (The Poseidon Adventure, The Towering Inferno) and adapted the book into this ABC adventure drama. Martin Milner and Pat Delaney were Ma and Pa Robinson, Willie Aames and Eric Olsen their sons, and a teenage Helen Hunt a fellow survivor the Robinsons took in. And Cameron Mitchell was a salty seadog already stranded on the island, filling the “roguish ally” role played by Jonathan Harris on Lost in Space. Up against NBC’s The Wonderful World of Disney (which negelected to run Disney’s 1960 film of the story against the competetion), the series ran for 20 episodes. Like Allen’s other shows of the time, there was no resolution to the castaways’ predicament.
Switch – Eddie Albert and Robert Wagner were a retired policeman and a suave con man, respectively, in creator Glen Larson’s light-hearted CBS drama. “Inspired” by the popularity of 1973’s The Sting, it followed the pair as they launched a detective firm specializing outwitting scam artists and recovering their ill-gotten gains (just like McCoy above). Aiding Albert and Wagner in their operation were Charlie Callas and a pre-Cagney and Lacey Sharon Gless. Switch was able to flimflam its way into the CBS schecule for three seasons.
Welcome Back, Kotter – Or, wouldn’t Blackboard Jungle have made a great comedy? Comedian Gabe Kaplan turned his real-life experiences into a hit ABC sitcom. Joke-telling teacher Gabe Kotter returned to his old Brooklyn high school to try to instruct a rowdy gang of remedial students known as The Sweathogs: Vinnie Barbarino (John Travolta), Juan Epstein (Robert Hegyes), Arnold Horshack (Ron Palillo), and Freddie “Boom Boom” Washington (Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs). The show was a ratings success and spawned dolls, games, comic books, and a Number One theme song by John Sebastian. Travolta’s film work on Saturday Night Fever and Grease led him to miss half of the fourth and final season. A new student, Beau De LaBarre (Stephen Shortridge), was introduced, but viewers took to the Southern transplant as well as they would Coy and Vance Duke on The Dukes of Hazzard four years later.
When Things Were Rotten – Striking big-screen gold with spoofs of Westerns (Blazing Saddles) and horror movies (Young Frankenstein), Mel Brooks returned to TV for the first time since Get Smart with a slapstick send-up of the Robin Hood legend. Dick Gautier starred as Robin, aided by his Merry Men: Bernie Kopell as Alan-a-Dale, Dick Van Patten as Friar Tuck, and David Sabin as Little John. The formula that worked for 90-minute feature films, however, couldn’t sustain a weekly series. Despite critical plaudits, the show was pulled after 13 episodes. Brooks would come back to Nottingham Forest for his 1993 picture Robin Hood: Men in Tights.
Also gone but not forgotten: Big Eddie, Joe and Sons, Kate McShane, Medical Story, Mobile One, The Montefuscos, and Three for the Road.