WKRP: Fastest to a clip show?

[Jophiel]

@DSYoungEsq

Actually, there were some differences that showed up fairly quickly.

IIRC, one of the differences was that the “bullpen” was created; I don’t believe that it was shown at all in the first eight episodes. Which is sad, because had that not changed, we never would have had Les Nessman’s “office door”. The show also stopped just being about silly things that happened in the broadcast, as I recall.

You’ve forced me to defend my honor by finding my cite

From Hugh Wilson, creator and producer:

HUGH WILSON: I think after the sixth or eighth show we were taken off the air and put on hiatus for, quote, “repairs.” That’s what Variety, I believe, reported that CBS said, that they were having a second look at the show and they were “tweaking it.”

Well, in point of fact, I just sat there and waited. I didn’t tweak anything. I went to some meeting where we all agreed that it should be funnier. And then I turned in some scripts that they hadn’t seen, and they thought that they saw in there a reaction from me from that meeting. But they’d been written way before that. I just changed the dates on the drafts, so it would look like they were written after we were taken off the air.

I think, in a way, “Turkeys” saved us from getting cancelled, because it got a lot of talk. Anecdotal, around town kind of talk. Those people, of course, were ruled by necessity by Nielsens, but they also wanted to be involved with something that was thought around town to be good.

[Lamar_Mundane]

@notfrommensa

Not quite the same thing, (although similar) Survivor II (The Outback) had a clip show (and secret scenes) in Episode 9.

For the first few years Survivor was shown on Thursdays and always had a clip show on the first day of the NCAA Basketball Tournament. This was in mid-march, so it was always early in the season.

[terentii]

@ftg

OP here: The Menagerie is definitely not a clip show. Otherwise we’re one step from allowing an episode that got postponed and had a new scene tacked on before airing.

It has to be an episode that’s mostly made up of material from previously aired episodes with a small amount of wrap-around filler material.

Fair enough; “The Cage” had at that time been shown only to NBC executives. However, the whole point of “The Menagerie” was to use footage from “The Cage” as filler to avoid missing an air date.

[D18]

Re: The Menagerie:

From wiki:

A clip show is an episode of a television series that consists primarily of excerpts from previous episodes. Most clip shows feature the format of a frame story in which cast members recall past events from past installments of the show, depicted with a clip of the event presented as a flashback.

1. Episode of a television series - check
2. Primarily of excerpts - check
3. From previous episodes - ok, episode, not episodes
4. Features the format of a frame story - check
5. In which cast members recall past events - check
6. From past installments of the show - ok, installment, not installments
7. Depicted with a clip of the event presented as a flashback - check

Furthermore, from wiki:

Other times, however, clip shows are simply produced for budgetary reasons (i.e. to avoid additional costs from shooting in a certain setting, or from casting actors and actresses to appear in new material)

And from wiki on The Menagerie

Incorporating “The Cage” into the two-part episode, “The Menagerie”, was actually a solution to a large and growing problem with the show’s production. Its special effects, unprecedented for a weekly television production, were causing delays in the completion of each episode. The problem was cumulative, with shows getting delivered to NBC later and later. At its worst, episodes (filmed in Los Angeles) were being delivered to NBC (in New York) only three days before their scheduled Thursday airing. Sensing impending disaster, Roddenberry solved the problem by writing a two-part episode that needed only one week of production.

I stick by my supposition that The Menagerie qualifies as a clip show.

[DSYoungEsq]

@D18

Re: The Menagerie:

From wiki:

1. Episode of a television series - check
2. Primarily of excerpts - check
3. From previous episodes - ok, episode, not episodes
4. Features the format of a frame story - check
5. In which cast members recall past events - check
6. From past installments of the show - ok, installment, not installments
7. Depicted with a clip of the event presented as a flashback - check

Furthermore, from wiki:

And from wiki on The Menagerie

I stick by my supposition that The Menagerie qualifies as a clip show.

This shouldn’t be a serious debate, but because you insist upon making it a debate of some sort,

1. It is not “primarily” of excerpts. While a fair amount of the two-part episode is excerpts, the simple fact that the show grows from a one-hour pilot to two one-hour episodes makes it clear that about half the show consists of the added material. Math is your friend, here.

2. With the exception of Spock, none of the other cast members are recalling anything. They aren’t even present in the pilot.

3. It wasn’t produced to reduce the budget, but rather to avoid the trouble of not having enough scripts ready to produce. Ok, yeah, that’s just being nitpicky…

The reason it’s not a clip show is that it’s not a clip show. All attempts at formal definitions aside, a clip show is a show which is used to avoid budgetary constraints, which adds nothing to the story being told by the show. Thus, in WKRP in Cincinnati, the show “Mama’s Review” adds nothing to the show; it was designed as a way to introduce a new audience to what had already happened, to bring them up to speed, without having to shoot new material in the process. Similarly, MAS*H had clip shows which added nothing to the understanding of the characters or the underlying story line (the obvious one being “The Interview”). The point is that the show’s primary purpose is to fill an episode slot without spending a lot of resources on it, which it accomplishes by simply showing material already shown for the vast majority of the episode.

And “The Menagerie” doesn’t do this at all. It’s clearly not a “bottle episode”, in that the new parts of the episode are set in a number of different sets/locations. It has multiple guest stars/cast members not part of the central cast. It has substantial (almost half) material that is not contained in the flashback scenes. It advances the storyline of the underlying show (we learn about Spock, we get an idea of the interrelationship of Spock and Kirk, etc.). So while it has some aspects of being a clip show, it certainly doesn’t qualify as a true clip show. IMHO. :o

[D18]

Dude, it may be a debate, but it’s certainly not a serious debate!

But if you’re going to rest your argument on this statement:

The reason it’s not a clip show is that it’s not a clip show.

Then you’re firmly in “No true Scotsman” territory. Now, if it makes you feel better, we can say that The Menagerie is to clipshows what The Magic Flute is to singspiels.

[TBG]

Transformers: Car Robots had 3 clipshows in its run. It ran one season. lol Japan.

When it was translated into Robots in Disguise, for America, they threw out those clip shows, but replaced them with new ones.[sup]["]cite] [/sup]

[ftg]

The big fail of The Menagerie is that the clips had not been previously aired. Other points of failure are still valid but this one is the nail in the coffin.

Other points of failure not yet mentioned:

All the “clips” came from one episode.

The clips in toto told a story. Clip show segments might have a theme or other connective concept, but if run on their own don’t complete a story arc.

(OTOH, if The Simpsons ever did a clip show centering around the McBain segments, they’d also have a fairly complete, but very short, story arc. They could also cobble together an incomplete, parody of Citizen Kane from various homages. But this is just hypothetical, right?)

[terentii]

@DSYoungEsq

And “The Menagerie” doesn’t do this at all. It’s clearly not a “bottle episode”, in that the new parts of the episode are set in a number of different sets/locations. It has multiple guest stars/cast members not part of the central cast.

“New” sets: The beam-down site, the corridor outside Pike’s room, Pike’s room, Mendez’s office (but wasn’t it the same set used in “Court Martial”?), the computer center (a redress of Engineering), and the hearing room (a redress of the briefing room). Nothing more than a few flats and some furniture (and lots of recycled stuff). Pike’s room didn’t even have a sliding door!

“New” cast members: Lt Piper, Cdr Mendez, CPO Garrison, Hansen (an extra given some lines to speak on the bridge), the invalid Captain Pike.

Hardly “a number” of new sets or “multiple” guest stars. Most of the “guest” cast had only a couple of lines of dialogue.

[DSYoungEsq]

Yeah, but true “bottle episodes” don’t have any, or only one at most, guest stars and no new sets; that’s why they are “bottle” episodes, because there’s a bottleneck in the funds. “The Menagerie” wasn’t produced because of lack of funding; it ostensibly was produced to reduce the pressure on getting the episodes complete on time, by stretching one week’s worth of work over two weeks.

Star Trek episodes almost never have a proliferation of new sets. This was because the show had an extremely limited budget. I recall David Gerrold, when writing about his original script for “The Trouble With Tribbles” getting told in no uncertain terms by the guy in charge of sets that he needed to cut down the number of new locations in the story. IIRC, his comment was something to the effect that a foot of corridor cost $1,000 to build at the time; for a show shot on a budget of approx. $100,000 per episode, that meant corridors, rooms, etc. got multi-purposed a LOT.

[Carryon]

Ep 12 of Gilligan’s Island had a clips in it. It was the Christmas episode and the castaways thought they were to be rescued. But it also used footage from the unaired pilot, mixed with new footage too.

[Jinx]

My wife loves Eight Is Enough. So far, we bought Seasons 1 & 2 out 5. About half-way through the 2nd season, they had what you call a “clip show”, or I call “flashbacks”. I was surprised they did this in what seemed so early in the progression of things. Maybe there was a writer’s strike back in 1977?

[Kent_Clark]

@Jinx

My wife loves Eight Is Enough. So far, we bought Seasons 1 & 2 out 5. About half-way through the 2nd season, they had what you call a “clip show”, or I call “flashbacks”. I was surprised they did this in what seemed so early in the progression of things. Maybe there was a writer’s strike back in 1977?

Season 2 is when they brought Betty Buckley in to play Abby after the first Mrs. Bradford died (Diana Hyland had died after completing just a handful of Season 1 episodes.) Was the flashback episode tied in with Tom and Abby’s wedding somehow?

[ftg]

@Jinx

My wife loves Eight Is Enough. So far, we bought Seasons 1 & 2 out 5. About half-way through the 2nd season, they had what you call a “clip show”, or I call “flashbacks”. I was surprised they did this in what seemed so early in the progression of things. Maybe there was a writer’s strike back in 1977?

Were these “flashback” scenes newly aired material or taken from previous episodes? Only the latter is part of what makes a clip show.