And I thought I was the only one who remembered Captain Nice and Mr. Terrific, summer fill-ins. And Arnie - loved the episode where “the boss” is in trouble for purchasing a yacht with company money.
A Touch of Grace with Shirley Booth. I remember it as a dumb sitcom that sometimes broke through to a realistic portrayal of he concerns of the elderly.
I thought United States was a great show but I understood that most people would not. It was funny at times but it was also quiet, subtle and introspective, i.e. not generally palatable as regular fare to many Americans.
I’ve never met anyone in real life since shortly after the shows aired that had ever even heard of the show.
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I thought Out of the Blue had a lot of promise but it was up against 60 Minutes and never given a chance.
Didn’t he also work at a variety of odd jobs to raise money so he could help his sister get through college?
I remember ‘Arnie’. Typical idiot show, blue collar schlub promoted at work, married to an inexplicably hot wife. The boss was a clueless rich moron who wanted a caviar bagel ‘from one of those little caviar bagel shops’.
No – he was putting himself through college. But he was supporting his sister (they were orphans)
I watched this one, too. Arnie Nuvo was played by Herschel Bernardi, best known as the original voice of “Charlie the Tuna” for Star Kist. He was also one of the many who took over the role of Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof after Zero Mostel left during its original Broadway run.
There were quite a few syndicated action-adventure series on at around the same time as Hercules & Xena, but that didn’t do quite as well. I remember:
The Adventures of Sinbad, which was actually mentioned on an episode of Hercules.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World. They made sure to get Doyle’s name in the title, probably to avoid legal action from Michael Crichton and/or Steven Spielberg related to the Jurassic Park sequel. One of the actors ended up doing the voiceovers in those Outback Steakhouse commercials.
Relic Hunter, starring Tia Carrere, a fairly blatant rip-off of the Tomb Raider video game franchise.
And his boss was played by Roger Bowen, Maj. Henry Blake in the movie version of MASH
The Spirit of '76, a kid’s show about the American Revolution that ran in 1976. (Maybe a year before or after.) A guy played the guitar and sang songs from that era, and narrated stories about battles, the Sons of Liberty, Molly Pitcher, etc. While he spoke, illustrations of what he was talking about showed on screen. It ran on Saturdays (I think) at noon. I’ve asked about this before on the Straight Dope, and nobody then remembered it. I couldn’t find anything about it online. I can still sing the theme! “You know the high road to freedom was a hard road to travel. Plenty of times we ran up in a fix. But we kept on a growing. What kept us going? The Spirit of '76!”
I think that was the show that featured Basketball Head. A teenaged character sneaks out of his room one night, leaving behind a hastily-constructed dummy in his bed with a basketball for a head. When his mom pulls back the bedclothes, she sees the basketball and screams in horror. The ongoing mystery of Basketball Head lasted for at least a couple of episodes.
I also liked Strange Report.
Another good show was Night Heat. It was produced in Canada but was about graveyard shift detectives and an intrepid reporter in an unnamed northeastern U.S. city.
Damn, I even remember the theme song!
(From memory)
“I’m a good guy, hey you’re another one too!
Like a brother, each to the other one true blue!
When there’s trouble we’re a double
something something double tight chin?
but when our ship comes in we’re gonna be back, locked in,
even if it’s just by the teeth of our skin
hmmm, hmmmm, something something
you might have read about
very few are gonna have faith in you
and I do because you’re a good guy too!”
For family reasons, I used to hitchhike often from St Paul to Milwaukee and back. I remember falling asleep to this show in the TV lounge at a truck stop outside Madison. I did that several times, and no one ever questioned my presence. (It should have been obvious that I wasn’t a truck driver).
In the fall of 1963, ihere was an hour-long show on CBS called The Great Adventure. It dramatized events in American history. Very Kennedy-era, very Civil War Centenary. Its mid-season replacement on the schedule was (Wait for it!) …
The Wild, Wild West.
It too had a great theme, by Richard Rogers no less:
In the fall of 1964, World War I marked the fiftieth anniversary of the titular conflict. Unquestionably one of the greatest documentary series ever. The theme music still gives me chills:
Holy hell. I saw that site once and have been wondering “What was that extensive website devoted to a nonexistent cheesy cop show” for years. Thank you.
I watched Night Heat on late night TV when I was living in Czechoslovakia (1991–92). It was overdubbed so you could still hear the actors speaking English, which the authorities were encouraging everyone to learn instead of Russian. It was part of a package of shows Czech TV ordered from CBS that included Leg Work with Margaret Colin (who is a dead ringer for an old girlfriend of mine 
)
Currently (or at least recently) being shown on the “Comet” network.
http://www.oscarbrand.com/bio.htm
(mentioned here)
In my old person’s world, Herschel Bernardi was best-known as Lt. Jacoby on Peter Gunn.
Speaking of well-known theme songs…Henry Mancini strikes again!
Not surprising; it was apparently last updated in April 2001. The weird formatting and lack of CSS hallmarks it as something from the last century.
Just so no one is confused, the link is a parody website to a fabricated show aired on the equally fictional UBC network but containing an amalgam of the tropes of ‘Seventies and early ‘Eighties detective shows and in the overly adoring style of fannish websites that it seems like a plausible series. When I first came across it I assumed it was actually an early attempt at a viral campaign for a movie about fans of the made up character, akin to a cop show version of Galaxy Quest but nothing ever seems to have come from it, so I guess it was just someone with an overactive imagination and too much time on their hands, which frankly describes about 97% of the pre-broadband Internet and in particular Usenet groups and GeoCities pages.
Stranger
Jesus what a horrorshow that was. I remember wanting it to be good because I liked John Schuck on McMillan and Wife, but…just no.
I seem to recall a sitcom in the late '80s that featured a kid who was a huge fan of Rodney Dangerfield - knew all his routines, had his bedroom walls covered in posters of Dangerfield’s movies - and developed the power to magically summon Dangerfield whenever he needed advice on something. It may only have been a pilot, as I remember seeing it just once. Really bizarre.
Also, am I the only one who remembers a somewhat gritty reboot of the Brady Bunch that aired in the early 90s? It featured the original cast, but now the family was dealing with real world problems like divorce, infidelity, money troubles, etc.