OK, this is gonna take a while to get to the point but stay with me: There is a YouTube video of the most paused Star Trek moments and the thumbnail is Beverly Crusher and Deanna Troi in leotards doing yoga stretches. Hubby takes one look at it and says, “Nah. Better is when Beverly was on that HBO show with the guy who couldn’t get sex.”
Ah! Dimly remembered memory tells me this show had this guy have sex with different women almost every episode. In fact, I remember this show launching HBO as the channel where you can watch people having sex on sit-coms. Which brings up FOX channel launch. I very much remember a show called Duets. Or maybe just Duet. And another show with Lisa Simpson in the flesh-- this one was called Herman’s Head. I remember watching FOX’s launch and loving it. Ellen Degeneres and the wonderful Alison LaPlaca together on a show. There may have been more.
So here we are at the point. If you are close to being as old as I am you have witnessed more network launches than probably anyone in history ever. Which network launches and their “flagship” shows do you dimly remember?
FOX did a soft-start with The Late Show, Joan Rivers’ attempt at overthrowing The Tonight Show on NBC. Rivers left the show soon after and there were a bunch of guest hosts before the show finally got pulled. FOX had a stronger prime time opening with Married…With Children and The Tracey Ullman Show. From Wiki:
" Fox added one new show per week over the next several weeks, with the drama 21 Jump Street) and comedies Mr. President and Duet completing its Sunday schedule. On July 11, 1987, the network rolled out its Saturday night schedule with the premiere of the supernatural drama series Werewolf , which began with a two-hour pilot movie event. Three other series were added to the Saturday lineup over the next three weeks: comedies The New Adventures of Beans Baxter , Karen’s Song , and Down and Out in Beverly Hills (the latter being an adaptation of the film of the same name). Both Karen’s Song and Down and Out in Beverly Hills were canceled by the start of the 1987–88 television season, the network’s first fall launch, and were replaced by the sitcoms Second Chance and Women in Prison ."
Of all those, I think the only ones I never saw were Karen’s Song and Mr. President, and I was a great fan of Werewolf.
I’m going purely off memory here, but I do remember when Comedy Central launched. I think it was a rebrand/merge situation, but it launched as the channel we see today.
I don’t know its very first show, but Short-Attention Span Theater was the show I most associate with that time. It predated Comedy Central, I think, but was a show I watched at launch. It was hosted Marc Maron at one point, but John Stewart hosted it before that.
I’ve often pointed out that The Daily Show was Jon Stewart’s second show on Comedy Central.
Internet search is your friend! The HBO sitcom with all the sex was named Dream On.. It featured the also very terrific Wendie Malik. But I found it because the star’s name, although not very well known, stuck with me. His last name is Benben.
Wow, I thought I remembered the launch of Fox pretty well, but I have absolutely no recollection of Werewolf, Karen’s Song or Down and Out in Beverly Hills. Admittely, the latter two don’t necessarily sound like they would have especially appealed to me, but I can’t even remember coming across an advertisement and thinking they sounded too lame to bother with. And how did I miss on a show about werewolves? I should’ve been all over that one.
I remember a lot of those failed shows. Duet morphed into something else that launched Ellen Degeneres’ career. IIRC Hermans Head had other voice actors in it beside Yeardley Smith. There were any number of talk shows in that time where the show Talk Soup turned into a hit just snarking on all the talk shows. Then there were all the failed spin-offs, and they will keep happening, Despite all the ones I’ve seen there are plenty more I never watched even one episode of. Sometimes they were gone before I had a chance to see them.
I may have seen all the Fox shows they launched at least once. Mr. President had George C. Scott and only lasted a few weeks. Duet lasted longer, but later spun off into Open House with most of the cast left behind and Ellen Degeneris addes.
Flying Blind was an excellent comedy. What stood out was the extremely long punchlines to the jokes.
What I’m always talking about was the extremely clever Once a Hero, which deconstructed superhero tropes while repecting them.
It was a great show that had Chuck Connors as the Big Bad for most of the series, and the lead (John J. York) went from there to General Hospital, playing “Mac Scorpio” to this day.
actually, on our fox station in Indiana which was a UHF station wxin 59 Saturday was beans Baxter the women in prison show Mr president which had Mr. Drummond from different strokes and mona from whos the boss right before that show started
the two episodes i remember of Mr president was one where the first lady left him and filed a divorce and the next when the mona actress took over as white house hostess (she was supposed to be his sister )
The woman in prison episode i remember is the protagonist prisoner who worked in the warden’s office found a pair of panties in his desk and everyone assumed he was messing with one of the girls and there were shenanigans with everyone trying to find out who … turned out he wasn’t … seems years before he wanted a divorce from his odious wife so he stashed a pair of panties in his car so she’d find them and get the divorce … he kept them as a memento
Then there was a typical episode of the girls finding a map of the sewer system of the prison and trying to dig their way out only for one of the other gangs to steal the map and try to escape … but the map was outdated and they ended up in the guard’s showers …
Beans baxter was goofy nonsense in a parker lewis cant lose way …I remember a lot of the Sunday shows moving to Thursday when the simpsons did… but they had some clunkers … like a show about airline flight crew … and a show i thought was smart funny and stupid all at the same time and thought it wasn’t going to last long … That show was family guy …
Prime Time Entertainment Network started with two shows- Time Trax and Kung Fu: The Legend Continues, both of which I was a fan of. PTEN is also where Babylon 5 got its start, btw.
George C. Scott and Madeline Kahn! I also really enjoyed Duet, which was supposedly a vehicle for Chris Lemmon but Alison LaPlaca is the only thing I remember about it.
I actually worked at a small startup UHF TV station in southeast Iowa at the time, which was one of the early FOX affiliates, so I have fuzzy memories of a lot of these shows like Beans Baxter and the early Simpsons shorts on The Tracey Ullman Show and the disastrous Wilton-North Report. The station also aired syndicated programs like The New Monkees and a barely remembered little show called Star Trek: The New Generation, or Modern Generation, or Next Generation, or something like that, who remembers?
I remember a lot of these… I’m going to see if I can find some episodes or clips on Archive dot org or U-chube (as my Asian side of the family calls it).