Notes by Whitecaps:
I’ve mentioned here the controversial and short lived T.V show called Turn-On before. It was arguably the first television show to be cancelled after a single episode. There are some claims it was cancelled during its first airing because many west coast affiliates wouldn’t air it, but I think that is mostly ahistorical as it was only one or two stations.
Anyway, George Schlatter the producer of the show made it available on You Tube 8 months ago and I just noticed.
This is episode one:
While only one episode aired, much of the program much of episode two had already been filmed:
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Scoop’s notes:
Tim Conway was the star of the ill-fated show, which was supposed to be sort of a Laugh-In for grown-ups, although it seemed like the real target market might have been people on LSD. Conway ruminated about the show some years ago. He pointed out that the show aired in the Eastern time zone in its entirety on all affiliates, but as it crossed the country, it was cut shorter and shorter. An affiliate in the Central time zone cut it halfway through, and some affiliates on the West Coast never aired it at all.
This may not be the record for the fastest cancellation, depending on your definition. Jackie Gleason once hosted a game show called You’re in the Picture. In week two, the time slot featured Jackie apologizing for week one. He just sat in a chair on a single camera and expressed his contrition for being involved in “the biggest bomb in the history of television.”
Gleason went on to explain in some detail just how bad the show was. His apology show was actually pretty interesting, as it was filled with Gleason’s old-time showbiz anecdotes, and he was a skilled raconteur
(Here’s part two of the apology show.)
Here is the actual first (and last) episode of the game. Gleason got more and more annoyed with the show as it progressed. Toward the end of the episode, he was dumping on the premise of the game, the ineptness of the celebrity panelists, and even his own performance.
How sweet it wasn’t.
Who’s Whose from 1951
This is “arguably” the first television show cancelled after one episode.
From IMDB:
I bought a dvd of You’re In the Picture probably about 15 years ago now. I actually didn’t think the game was that bad, mainly because most of the celebrity contestants were likeable, especially Pat Harrington who was later on One Day at a Time. It was just slow paced.
There is a treasure trove of info about Who’s Whose here. The article lists many reasons why the show failed. My favorite reason involves this anecdote:
They probably should not have been surprised by some ADD from ol’ Diz’. It’s not like his nickname was Focused Dean.
Wrong era for me–I was born at the tail end of the decade–but I didn’t recognize any of the “celebrity” panelists’ names, so for kicks and giggles I looked them up. Davenport was a literary critic, Ford was a TV host, and Kimbrough was an author. (I’m sure most of have read her 1942 best-seller Our Hearts Were Young and Gay.) Robin Chandler was, basically, everything: a fashion model, journalist, TV news anchor and reporter (she covered JFK’s wedding), broker, public relations VP for Pepsi, abortion-rights activist, and US Ambassador to Norway. She died just a few years at age 92.
I meant “a few years ago.” 2021, to be precise. And yet for all her accomplishments, she ranks below the woman who can balance a champagne glass on her huge behind on the Celebrity Fame-O-Meter.
My mom and I watched the first broadcast of You’re in the Picture and the apology show. I can’t recall our reaction to the first show, but we obviously must have liked it enough to give it a second shot. I suppose we just figured that there were many good shows with bad first episodes, and that their team would eventually iron out the wrinkles.
We were shocked to see the second show begin with Gleason sitting in a chair on an undecorated stage. We were not the only ones in the dark about what the second broadcast would be like. Nobody knew. Gleason never even told the celebrity panelists, who showed up on the set expecting to play the game again! They have talked about the fact that they just stood backstage with nothing to do while Gleason rambled on.
I can one up that with one from Australia (Australia’s Naughtiest Home Videos) that didn’t come back after an ad break.
That’s another one that varied by time zone. According to the link you provided, it never aired in Perth at all.
This is the full episode, including the parts that never aired:
This is what some viewers saw:
Watched the 1st episode of “Turn On” live until it was turned off. 😮 There was a big promotion before the airing IIRC. It was a Laugh-In wannabe that didn’t. 😛 carry on …
I watched the first 20 minutes of Turn On, but I am now ready to turn it off. Parts were mildly amusing, but not enough that I want to watch more, and especially not that I consider its early cancellation to be any great loss.
Obviously those seeing the visuals of the show now (including me) presumably won’t understand the context of how experimental or off putting that was depending on the person’s perspective, but mentioned at the time in the reviews as well was that aside from the experimental visuals, the verbal part of the show was one bad pun after another. Of course, because of that, I liked it.
However, I think any show that referenced S.I Hayakawa deserved to be seen in full.
I’m a fan of dated political humor. That’s one of the reasons I enjoy watching (the early seasons of) Laugh-In, as well as SNL episodes from the 70s and 80s. While political humor alone would probably give you a pretty warped view of history, I think it can be helpful in understanding public attitudes. My parents had a record album of political satirist David Frye’s 1969 album, I Am The President. What I found particularly interesting about that record was that it was all pre-Watergate Nixon humor. I was 6-years-old when Nixon resigned, and just about every joke I heard about Richard Nixon while I was growing up was about Watergate and/or Nixon being a crook. The portrayal of Spiro Agnew was also interesting because, in comparison, Dan Quayle would be a genius. I remember reading in John Dean’s book that early in the Nixon administration, people would joke that Agnew was assassination insurance. However, once the Watergate scandal broke, they started looking at Agnew seriously as impeachment insurance. That made me wonder if Agnew hadn’t been forced to resign because of his own corruption scandal, would the House have been prepared to impeach Nixon? Most likely, yes, but I think the fact that Gerald Ford would be the one replacing Nixon made it a lot easier for at least some members of Congress to favor impeachment.
If anyone would like to listen to that David Frye record, it’s available on YouTube.
There is actually at least one more “Turn-On” episode that was uploaded to Youtube about 4 months ago. Search for “Turn-On the Lost Episode”. If I’m not mistaken, the whole series (6 episodes) is stored at the Paley Center in NYC, with the first two digitized for public viewing and the rest filed away on videotape.
Here it is:
If you search Youtube enough times you can find a lot of great lost stuff. In addition to this Turn-On, somebody posted a remastered original Columbo from 1960 which aired as part of the anthology Chevy Mystery Show. Columbo was played by Bert Freed (who got third billing) in an episode entitled Enough Rope. The show was only one hour long and it formed the basis of the (first) Columbo pilot (with Peter Falk) renamed Prescription Murder. As far as I can tell much of the dialogue is the exact same, The problem with this episode is, as was sometimes the case with Columbo, it’s hard to see exactly why Columbo suspects this murderer, and in this 1 hour episode. It has a rather abrupt conclusion.
I’ve seen previously both the awful David E. Kelley Wonder Woman and the Cathy Lee Crosby Wonder Woman, though I’m not sure either were on YouTube. I don’t know if either are still available. The Cathy Lee Crosby Wonder Woman is also a kind of interesting historical footnote because she had no super powers. Apparently in the comic book version at the same time, Wonder Woman had given up her Super Powers.
Ricardo Montalbaln played the rather conflicted villain who exclaims after being caught at the end by Wonder Woman “I love you, Wonder Woman!”
The only I think I can remember that I’ve long wanted to see and can’t find is the Christopher Lloyd television show called The Dictator where he plays a deposed South American dictator who opens a laundromat in Miami. The show actually got good reviews and was advertised in T.V guide but before the first episode aired it was cancelled as a result of the writer’s strike at the time.
There have been at least one television special of the worst t.v show pilots of all time and as far as I know it’s impossible to find those pilots, but that show is worth checking out itself.
Well, there are a couple other shows, but I didn’t actually want to watch them.
1.Fame L.A. A remake of Fame. I saw a couple episodes when it first aired and it was pretty bad cliche ridden. However, it starred the stunning Heidi (Noelle) Lenhart who frequently wore skimpy outfits.
2.Class of ’96. This was another show I had no interest in watching but it starred the lovely (and nudity dodging 🙁 ) Megan Ward. At the time I tried recording it but I was had a (milder) version of OCD at the time and I was unable to flip though it without insisting to myself that I watch it. So, I had to abandon ever seeing an episode. At the time I thought I might have missed Megan Ward wearing a bikini (because she played a college student) but clips of the show were posted on YouTube and the show was set in a college in cold New England.
Anyway, I searched on Youtube prior to posting this, and while Fame L.A is still not around except for some short clips, at least several episodes of the sshort lived Class of 96 has been on Youtube for a year.
I doubt anybody cares, but I guess there’s no harm in posting this correction. Christopher Lloyd in The Dictator was exiled from a Caribbean Country not South America (could any non Latino American tell the difference? – not that I could.) And he was exiled to Queens, New York and not Miami.
BTW, apropos of nothing, but since I mentioned the Caribbean. The Bermuda Triangle is a virtually complete myth, it turns out that less ships sink in the Bermuda Triangle than elsewhere.
You might think that’s because ship captains try to avoid the Bermuda Triangle, but absolutely not. It is true that the origins of The Bermuda Triangle, the U.S military aircraft going missing is real, and there are little understood but prosaic reasons for this and other ships and planes that go missing suddenly, but this is true virtually anyway everywhere in the ocean world.
I don’t know if the same little understood but prosaic reasons are the same the world over or if there are different reasons in different parts of the oceanic world, but the Bermuda Triangle is nothing special.
However, at least there is some truth to this, unlike pyramid power. I have a friend who’s obsessed with the visual esthetics of sub stations. So, I joke to him that ‘of course it’s silly that the pyramids are power stations. Everybody who knows about this knows that the Sphinx was the power station. The pyramids were sub-stations.”
In 2024, it’s very hard to believe the “Israel über alles” banner around the midway point didn’t have anything to do with the cancellation.