Tuesday, March 31, 2015

Some Forgotten TV Shows

15 TV Shows That Were Canceled After Only One Episode  

Link via Neatorama.

5 comments:

Deb said...

I have a fuzzy recollection of reading something somewhere about the show TURN ON: apparently the joke that caused stations to pull the plug en masse was one where a very attractive woman was lined up before a firing squad and the captain of the squad said, "Normally, we ask the prisoners if they have any last requests, but in this case the men have one final request to ask from you."

/The Golden Age of Television, indeed.

Unknown said...

i watched TURN ON. The only joke I remember from the show is a vending machine that had birth-control pills among its various items.

Mike Doran said...

I can't comment on the post at the site, because I'm not on Facebook.

TURN-ON did air on the West Coast, and only a couple of stations yanked the show in mid-airing, mainly because of an extended bit of Tim Conway and another actress mugging suggestively at each other while the word SEX, throbbing and changing colors and fonts, appeared over their heads.
Tim Conway has a tendency to embellish his stories, which is where the "mid-show cancellation" story comes from.

Also:
YOU'RE IN THE PICTURE doesn't really count as a "one-show drop", because Jackie Gleason kept the time slot for the 13 weeks of his deal; after the famous "apology" show (which itself takes this out of the "one-shot" category), he changed the format to an informal talk show. As memory serves, Gleason was pretty good at it - but the sponsor wanted to keep the game show, so the deal ended at 13 shows.

Unknown said...

Thanks for the clarifications, Mike. Now that you mention it, I vaguely remember that Tim Conway bit. I didn't see the Gleason show or the talk show that followed.

Todd Mason said...

QUARTERLIFE makes a bad example as well...it had run in its entirety as a 15-minute/episode web series, and was repackaged into NBC hours during the last writer's strike...since it was new-to-broadcast. And all the subsequent hours as repackaged ran on Bravo, after the first hour's low ratings on NBC.