The snark and sarcasm in the show were not welcome in Prime Time TV back then. I loved it.
Many have not seen Better Off Ted .
No one else remembers McKeever and the Colonel - Wikipedia.
and I admit I barely do.
My older brother never missed an episode of Jennifer Slept Here, since he had a “thing” for Ann Jillian. (So did I, but the show never fit into my schedule. I only ever saw one episode that he had taped.)
I remember McKeever and the Colonel. I loved it when I was in fourth or fifth grade because I was always playing Army and wanted to go to military school. (No way my parents would have financed that for me. They never contributed a penny to my college education either.)
Here are a few I doubt anyone else remembers:
Clone Master. A scientist clones himself, and the two men devote their lives to wreaking vengeance on the forces of evil. (Or something like that.) Debuted in September 1979 and quickly disappeared.
The Immortal. Starring Christopher George as a man who will live forever because he has a special type of blood. He died in 13 weeks. IIRC, debuted in September 1972 or '73.
The Phoenix. Khan’s navigator (the big blond guy) in ST II as an Ancient Alien eking out an existence in present-day America. This one came on while I was still in college, so probably September 1982.
Not unless she got the surgery immediately after Dirty Dancing because after that she was pretty much in tv shows and movies of the week. I mean, let’s be serious, we are talking Hollywood here. Good looks help peoples careers not tank them. Especially young women.
Would have been a better twist than what we got… In the season finale, which ended up being the last episode ever, they start talking about Gemini, a previously unmentioned government agent who knows details about the conspiracy and the main character needs to find him. Turns out…the main character is Gemini…get it, Gemini… you know, twins…sigh. The plot twist might have worked a little better (a) without the dead giveaway name and (b) if the notion of the Gemini character had been introduced in the 25 hour-long season sometime earlier than 35 minutes before the reveal and (c) Total Recall hadn’t used the same twist a few years earlier.
No way! 
Same here.
How about the New Amsterdam one with the Immortal?
Nope, missed that. 
I remember reading somewhere that Christopher George IRL eventually died from an injury he got while filming The Rat Patrol. IIRC, he took a blow to the chest from a Jeep’s steering wheel that damaged his heart.
Sounds about right
"There aren’t even that many thrills in the sword fight and hand-to-hand combat scenes, which seem unduly tame for the sake of network standards and practices–though, in a running gag, Majors has some fun producing endless numbers of pistols that get consistently kicked out of his hands. "
This was one of the first shows I recall with a web presence - the producer wrote little commentaries discussing each episode and posted them to the web.
Anyone remember “Deadly Games”? A guy designs a videogame with villains based on everyone who was ever mean to him - and lightning (or something) leads the villains to come to life, and threaten him and his ex-wife in reality.
I remember Jennifer…
I remember it, I too liked John Schuck, and “horrorshow” sums it up pretty well.
Yes. He got his name trying to say “You can”. It is definitely one of those shows that in hindsight is too weird for words, like Automan.
Does anyone else remember Strange Luck? DB Sweeney plays a character named “Chance” who is sort of lucky in that he ends up in weird situations where he can use his luck to help people. It didn’t last a full season.
Speaking of luck…
There was a sitcom called Cursed, starring Steven Weber. The premise was that the main character had been cursed by an ex-girlfriend, and as a result he constantly suffered from bad luck no matter what he did.
About 5 or 6 episodes in, they dropped the whole “bad luck” thing suddenly and without explanation, and changed the title to The Weber Show. It limped along as a more ordinary guy-and-his-friends sitcom for the rest of the season, but was cancelled after that.
Even as a fan of Steven Weber, I can’t really recommend it.
Not only did Dick Tracy show up at the beginning and end of those syndicated cartoons (the cartoon was mostly about those odd ethnic deputies), he also appeared throughout an episode of The Famous Adventures of Mr. Magoo
That’s my latest contribution to this thread. After the success of Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol the producers and studio executives immediately thought “Aha! THAT’S what the public wants! More Mr. Magoo!” So they promptly gave it to us. (What the public really wanted was more animated Christmas specials. Magoo’s was the first such – I don’t count those Disney “From all of us to all of you” Christmas episodes, which were basically advertising for their latest movie. It took a couple more years until we got Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer.)
Magoo’s show was dropped after a year, but I watched it all the time. It was a kind of Classics Illustrated version of the classics, with Mr. Magoo shoehorned into every episode somehow (a formula PBS later re-used for Wishbone). Some of these were obvious (of course the big-nosed Magoo was Cyrano de Bergerac), in many cases he was narrator (Ishmael in Moby Dick or Dr. Watson in Sherlock Holmes, and some were just odd (Dr. Frankenstein, or the youthful d’Artagnan, or all seven dwarves in Snow White). Despite the fact that this was an animated series and they could draw whatever they wanted, there was a kind of ensemble/repertory cast feel to the show, because they often re-used the same character designs (and voices) for supporting players.
I’m also going outside the thread topic for this, but it bears on this pint.
There was a Republic Dick Tracy serial in 1937 starring Ralph Byrd. It was so popular that it inspired three sequel serials (pretty unusual), also starring Byrd.
Then RKO made three Dick Tracy films with Morgan Conway in the title role, but people wanted Byrd as Tracy, so RKO cast him in the last two movies (the last of which, Dick Tracy meets Gruesome, featured Boris Karloff as the villain). all told, the serials and movies spanned a decade (although they would be re-released later).
Byrd later repeated the role on TV in the 1950s, which brings us back to the thread topic
I don’t want to focus on one show too much, but the real twist of Nowhere Man was that his life hadn’t been stolen by the conspiracy, his memories were fake. The next season would have presumably focused on figuring out who he actually was, but I thought ending on his stunned realization was appropriately bleak.
When I saw the OP, I thought of two shows from the early 1970s, Hot Dog and The Great American Dream Machine.
Hot Dog ran for 13 episodes on Saturday mornings, and answered kids’ questions about how things were made (like hot dogs, baseballs, toothbrushes, pennies, crayons, etc.), kind of like How It’s Made would do 30 years later.
What made Hot Dog stand out, though, was that before they went to the film showing how the things were actually made, they asked Jonathan Winters, Woody Allen, and Jo Anne Worley, who gave funny improvised answers. Although Worley frankly didn’t add much, Woody and Jonathan were at the height of their powers, and were hilarious.
GADM was produced by WNET, the public TV station in New York, and ran for four 90-minute episodes. It featured a mix of satirical sketches and music, including pieces by Andy Rooney (doing commentaries before going to 60 Minutes), Studs Terkel, Marshall Efron, and others. I believe Chevy Chase made his broadcast TV premiere on the show, doing the singing faces bit he and Ken Shapiro had developed a few years earlier, and would later do on (IIRC) Groove Tube, SNL, and other shows. (See the first clip below for an example.)
As producer Sheila Nevins describes in the clip, GADM was quite innovative for its time. Some of the bits you can find on YouTube don’t seem quite as brilliant today as they did back then, but at the time they were practically revolutionary compared to the dreck that was on the other channels. It really appealed to the 16-year-old me.
Speaking of Chevy Chase, does anyone else remember his train wreck of a talk show in 1993? I just looked it up and was stunned to see it went on for 64 episodes. I thought it had been canceled after a dozen or two.
He was just terrible as a host. I watched night after night to see just how bad it would get. He somehow maintained the same bottom-of-the-barrel standard right to the end.
Yes. It was painfully obvious he didn’t want to be doing it, or at least doing it the way he was doing it. The Doritos ads were good, though.
According to the Yahoo story, he blamed the network execs for not letting him do the kind of show he really wanted to do, but I don’t for a second believe he could have been the next Ernie Kovacs. I think his early success on SNL went to his head and made him an egotist who became increasingly difficult to work with.
I love On The Air. Too bad it didn’t last longer. (I do have the DVDs.)
I vaguely remember liking the sketch show “The New Show” which ran for 9 episodes in 1984.
Some of us do. 