The It Was a Thing on TV Podcast Network

Our 4th annual Pilot Month concludes with an animated spin-off of a live-action show which ended two years earlier?!  Welcome to a day in the life of Carlton Your Doorman.

A decade before The Paul Lynde Show (see episode 103), a pilot for CBS was done which was reminiscent of the latter show.  Lynde plays the father-in-law to his new son-in-law, the "smartest man in the room though he's actually the dumbest" Howie.

On the surface, Call Her Mom is reminiscent of a certain movie which would be a big hit 6 years later, but with a "den mother" caring for the fraternity.  This wasn't just a ratings hit once, but twice.  How did it not make it as a regular series?

One of the big comics in the mid-to-late 80s was Richard Lewis, known for his neurotic schtick.  Two years before a career-defining role in Anything But Love, Lewis starred in this pilot as a doorman at a New York City apartment building.

In 1977, Andy Kaufman was an up and coming comic.  ABC cast him as a robot servant in the year 2055 with a distinct voice, one which would become associated with Kaufman on another ABC show a year later, Taxi.  Why didn't this work?  We blame the mood synthesizers, AKA the "ass toasters."

Today, May 9th, marks 40 years since David Letterman dedicated an entire day to an assistant sound engineer on his show.  We go back and relive that day with a beer, a BLT, and another beer.

Here's another case of a show working overseas but failing domestically.  The Brit show Red Dwarf has been on the air for a combined quarter century.  Could it have worked here?  Who knows, thanks NBC smegheads.

Spin off your network's most popular show?  Makes sense.  Spin off your network's most popular show with characters who have made only a few appearances, and they weren't memorable?  It's a disaster waiting to happen.  Top of the Heap was the bottom of the barrel material.

There’s an old saying in Hollywood: “Write what you know.” Two Hollywood writers did that & after that didn’t work, they turned it into a family sitcom. That didn’t work either. See what happens when four actors spend 19 weeks… “Going Places”.

We've talked about this for over 3 years.  Now we're finally talking about the extremely short-lived summer series about a detective and three of his ex-wives solving cases.  I Had Three Wives ran for a month before it and CBS went their separate ways.