Your favorite show nobody but you remembers.

Cafe Society
401

You might be thinking of NED AND STACEY – with Thomas Haden Church after WINGS, and Debra Messing before WILL AND GRACE.

(Speaking of: since folks have mentioned pilot episodes that only ever got to be TV movies, CHAMELEONS had a pre-WINGS Crystal Bernard as a flighty heiress who plays amateur sleuth with help from her serious-minded cousin the prosecutor – which is how she learns her recently-deceased uncle wasn’t just a rich eccentric with a stately manor, but a gadgeteer superhero with a cape-of-invisibility sidekick who’s almost competent enough to carry on without the big guy.)

(How good a cat burglar is he? Well, if a playful gal with a cute butt and a real knack for making-it-up-as-she-goes-along hijinks would obligingly distract folks by getting their attention, that’s probably all he needs to swipe the incriminating documents. And if he’s trying to interrogate a crook, he’ll get nowhere until she treats it like an improv-comedy bit and really sells the whole schtick. You get the idea.)

402

Two that I watched in fourth grade: Broadside, a clone of McHale’s Navy with WAVES in the South Pacific, and My Living Doll, with Julie Newmar as Rhoda the Robot and Bob Cummings as the scientist responsible for her.

403

Mel [Tillis, country singer] and Susan [Anton, model] Together. Apparently it was created by the same persons responsible for the Donnie and Marie show.

404

Nowadays, being too similar to a popular show is a selling point.

405

Wow! Amazing! I can’t believe you tracked it down. Susan Anton! I kept coming up with Susan Anspach, but I knew that couldn’t be right.

406

I remember liking a little thing called Mission: Impossible. Nothing like the Tom Cruise movies. It didn’t even HAVE Ethan – I wanna say – Frome? And there was a character called Jim Phelps, but he was – get this – the GOOD guy! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! I mean, can you IMAGINE?

407

Joke if you want, but there was an updated version of Mission: Impossible that ran for two seasons in 1988-'90, and it seems to be almost completely forgotten these days. Peter Graves was back as Jim Phelps, but with a new team of operatives. Phil Morris played Grant Collier, the son of Barney Collier from the original series; Barney was played by Phil’s real-life dad, Greg Morris.

408

And every time they redo the theme song it gets worse.

409

… And it was filmed in Australia. Because of a Hollywood writiers’ strike, they also recycled a lot of the original series’ material, usually badly. (John de Lancie (aka “Q”) played the hitman role Robert Conrad had in 1970.)

410

Mysterious Cities of Gold, along with Robotech, was one of the last cartoons I got excited about as a kid. IIRC, MCOG and Belle & Sebastian were the first animated series to be shown on Nickolodeon. I remember rushing home from school to get home before it started. Theshow into, specifically the full-length intro with the spoken narrative (“It is the Sixteenth Century…From all over Europe great ships sail west to conquer the New World, the Americas”…) segueing into the catchy theme song.

Mysterious Cities of Gold was a 39 episode series with a beginning, a middle, and an end, with several story arcs that extended over multiple episodes. MCOG and Robotech were the first shows I remember watching with continuous storylines. Starblazers had that countdown clock, but I remember as being more of an episodic show, where the crew would beat the menace/solve the problem du jour on the way to Iskandar.

BTW, the show was a huge hit in Europe. There was actually a Euro-produced sequel about five years ago that was never translated into English.

411

And for a non-cartoon show, I give you the short-lived Roar. In a time when everyone was cranking out shows in the vein of Hercules and Xena, Roar was set in Ireland in the era of Roman rule in Britain and followed Conor, a young Irish princeling trying to unite the fractious tribes against Roman excursion. Uneven and historically inaccurate to say the least, it had compelling recurring villains and, most importantly, a magnetic teenaged Heath Ledger in his first leading role.

412

Midnight Caller - an overnight talk show DJ listens to people’s problems and solves them. Gary Cole starred. It had a great jazzy theme song.
Switch - Eddie Albert & Robert Wagner as a cop and ex-con who ran a detective agency and solved problems by elaborate cons. Sharon Gless was their secretary and Charlie Callas was a wacky sidekick.

413

British show The Prisoner. Very weird.

414

True, but I don’t think it qualifies as “your favorite show that no one remembers”. Around here, anyway.

415

One of my favorite sitcoms as a kid was called “Arnie.” Arnie worked for a company being run by the son of its late founder. Son gets tired of vice-presidents that want to do things the way they learned in college, instead of the way dad taught him, so, in the pilot episode, promotes Arnie, the loading dock foreman, to VP. Hilarity ensues, as Arnie tries to adjust to his new responsibilites, and to do his job using common sense, and every other VP tells him how that will never work. Quite possibly not as funny as I remember it…

Someone mentioned a show with Lynda Carter and Loni Anderson. The show was called, “Partners in Crime,” IIRC, and they inherited a PI firm (with no employees) from their common late ex-husband. One of the early episodes guest-starred Vaneesa Williams as their client.
Someone else mentioned “The Lone Gunmen.” I thought it was gunman, singular, but, whatever. That was an attempted spin-off from the X-Files, with three of Mulder’s informants/conspiracy-theory buffs publishing a conspiracy theory newspaper. When it didn’t last, it was replaced mid-season, by a show called “Freaky Links.” I liked that show, too, about a guy who travels around filming weird things and posting the videos on his website. Alan Young (Wilbur from Mr. Ed) once guest-starred as the Skunk Ape. It didn’t last very long, either.

Does anyone else remember “Alias Smith and Jones?” It seems anytime I mention “Kid Curry” or “Hannibal Hayes” all I get are blank looks. That was a show about two Old West outlaws who had a deal with the governor of California (?) that they could get a full pardon, if they could go one full year without committing any crimes (they couldn’t).

How about “Operation Petticoat?” John Astin plays the skipper of a World War II submarine tasked with ferrying 5 WAC nurses from point A to point B, but, then, for some reason, is unable to disembark his passengers. It was based on an earlier movie starring Tony Curtis, and, in additon to John Astin, had a young, unkown Jamie Lee Curtis as one of the nurses.

Anyone remember “Longstreet?” IIRC, James Franciscus played a blind insurance investigator, and every episode involved him getting into some situation that a sighted person could handle with ease, but everyone was surprised when he handled it well.

Alos, “VR.5” has been mentioned a couple of times. I liked that show, but it was pretty contrived. Sydney is working on Virtual Reality, 5th generation, after the tradition of her father. In the pilot episode, she discovers that her father somehow managed to trojan a lot of his VR software into the phone company’s computer, and, somehow, if she plugs her computer into a phone modem, her software links to her father’s software, AND pulls the person on the other end of the phone into whatever VR simulation she has running on her computer. How? They never even attempted an explanation for that, but the show was entertaining and thought-provoking, anyway. It also didn’t hurt that the first person who got pulled into her simulation was played by Penn Jillette…

416

Oh, and “Firefly” has been mentioned a couple of times, but only by people who couldn’t remember the name of it. Joss Whedon envisioned a space-western for Fox that featured Nathan Filion, Adam Baldwin, Gina Torres, Alan Tudyk, Sean Maher, Ron Glass, Jewel Staite, and Summer Glau in a future setting, but with a western fell to it, and, yes, they all spoke Chineses, badly, with the idea that the US and the PRC had formed an Alliance because Earth was no longer livable… That TV series didn’t last long, but it did devlop a cult following, and Joss Whedon made a movie from it, with the TV cast, called “Serenity.”

Oh, speaking of Summer Glau, someone mentioned the Sarah Conner Chronicles, which featured Summer Glau as a terminator reprogrammed to protect a teen-age John Conner. That lasted two seasons, although the first season was severly shortened by a writer’s strike, and the second season didn’t continue many of the existing story lines…

417

Yes, great show, nice western with more than a tad of humor, great for fans of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

But it could not survive the death of Pete Duel (Hannibal Heyes / Smith) , even tho his replacement Roger Davis certainly gave it a good try.

418

God, I remember most of these. “Arnie” starred Herschel Bernardi – the original voice of Charlie the Tuna (from Star-Kist commercials) as Arnie Nuvo, a blue-collar worker who got promoted to a white-collar job. Mad did a two-page parody of it.

419

Yep, I was thinking about it just recently, with discussion of the Great Wall of Trump and the definition of the US’s southern border in relation to the Rio Grande. It reminded me of an episode involving two rich ranchers living on opposite sides of the border, and gaining or losing territory from each other as the river shifts. (Some googling showed it to be s1e02, The McCreedy Bust, guest starring Burl Ives and Cesar Romero.)

420

That is what is known as “sarcasm”, because Firefly is very, very, very familiar here (and in geeky venues in general.)