The It Was a Thing on TV Podcast Network

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.

Star Trek: Voyager was a success for UPN.  So was Moesha.  The powers that be thought, "Why not combine the two?  It'll be a hit!"  Spoiler:  It wasn't.  It did give us The Space Hoopty, for what it's worth.

The start of a new baseball season has arrived and we celebrate by looking back at the TV version of a movie from 3 years prior, about a rag-tag group of underdogs.  The toughest competition for The Bad News Bears didn't come from opponents on the field, but from its competition on other networks.