The It Was a Thing on TV Podcast Network

One of the more successful imports in the 60s and 70s was The Avengers.  An American version was bound to happen, and it did from the genius that was Quinn Martin.  The leads were played by a name mentioned on this podcast a bit the last few weeks, Granville Van Dusen, and Morgan Fairchild.  CBS took a pass, but the Avengers franchise (non-MCU version) lives on to this day.

25 years after The Saint with Roger Moore first appeared on television, an attempt at a revival was made.  As you might imagine since this is pilot month, the reboot was unsuccessful.  It was the first pilot ever shown on CBS's Summer Playhouse series.  Despite not making past the pilot stage, the show received an overwhelmingly positive review from the home audience.

Pilot month resumes with this entry about a lawyer who has a habit of having panic attacks while litigating cases.  The cast was loaded.  It had potential.  Unfortunately, beyond panic attacks, this show had an identity crisis and did not make NBC's fall schedule in 2010.

The 70s were a heck of a time.  Anybody could get their own variety series and a pretty boy teen idol from earlier in the decade could play a undercover cop?  Keith Partridge himself was the lead in this series, a complete 180 to singing and playing the guitar not 5 years prior.  Ultimately, this cop show was handily defeated by another cop show, one which aired for most of that decade.

We are a week into the 2025 baseball season.  We chose this very short-lived series from 1983 about minor league baseball as our tribute to America's Pastime.  This series featured an amazing 20 people who appeared on every episode, covering all the bases from the players, the coaches, their partners, and even the mascot.  As one might guess with an entry on this podcast, the series got benched after a brief period of time.

As a belated tribute to Robert Wagner's 85th birthday, this installment covers a show which ran for a short period of time on ABC, and later shown in full on Lifetime.  Beyond the regular struggles involving viewership, Lime Street also suffered a tragedy involving one of the cast members before debuting, unrelated to the show itself.  

Chico's birthday is coming up and he chose this as his Money in the Bank.  In 1982, NBC had an upstart sci-fi drama starring David Hasselhoff and a talking car.  Fast forward 15 years and the franchise now had quintuple the vehicles, with quintuple the drivers.  Do more talking cars mean more success?  (We're covering it.  There's your answer.)

As listeners may know, we love our Quinn Martin-produced shows.  In this episode, we go back to one of his earliest crime drama efforts, with a lead who would be the biggest movie star by the end of the 1970s.  Dan August had all the hallmarks of a great series, but there was one key item missing--viewership.  Come for Burt Reynolds and non-comedic Norman Fell, stay for an astounding number of quality guest stars.

James Bond was probably at its most popular in the late 1970s.  NBC, seeing an opportunity to right the ship after many unsuccessful shows to end the decade, jumped on the Bondian spy bandwagon with A Man Called Sloane which, like the Bond movies, had numerous attractive females, working both for the good guys and the bad ones.  What had promise quickly bottomed out in the ratings, making this a 3-month wonder.

Over the years, we have talked about revivals and sequels, which are almost never as successful or popular as the original.  This is another case of that.  Update a beloved franchise without any of its original cast and give that show an undesirable time slot, and it is bound to fail quickly.  After less than a dozen episodes, this update of Kojak enjoyed its last lollipop, quickly going to dustbin of bad TV updates.