The It Was a Thing on TV Podcast Network

UPN tried throwing almost anything on their schedule in the late 90s.  Shasta McNasty is no exception.  It was so bad that the title was cut in half to just Shasta during the show's run.  Even cross-promotions with WWF Smackdown couldn't lure viewers. This was basically the most 1999 TV show that ever 1999'd.

In episode 61, we talked about the season when NBC owned and operated stations had primetime starting at 7:30.  We talked about one of those 5 shows, We Got it Made, in episode 66.  Another show from that experiment is this show's focus.  Marblehead Manor follows the antics of a wealthy family and their staff at their palatial residence.

In anticipation of the upcoming Amazon Prime series, this episode takes a look at the "blink and you'll miss it" television version of one of the breakout movie hits of 1992.  A League of Their Own had a handful of characters reprising their roles in one-off appearances and its TV fate may have been set in stone by a certain organization.

Norman Lear's 100th birthday celebration continues with possibly his most obscure series, airing for just 5 episodes in 1977.  A Year at the Top followed the Faustian formula of selling one's soul to the devil for instant success.  Audiences gave it a month at the bottom of the ratings.

This week, we're celebrating Norman Lear's 100th birthday by looking at two of his less successful shows.  We start with Lear's adaptation of a play about a seedy hotel with even seedier residents, Hot l Baltimore.  Most of the players were relative newcomers, and three went on to much greater success in the decades that followed.

We're giving you two shows for the price of one this episode.  These shows premiered on the same day, the shows aired consecutively on NBC, and both looked technologically amazing for late 1976.  Alas, technology couldn't save the pair, as their final shows aired on the last day of the year.

What if Merlin the Magician lived in the 20th Century instead of during Arthurian times?  In 1981, CBS gave us an answer to that question when Merlin lived in San Francisco and owned an auto repair shop.  It appears CBS had faith in the series, but it went up against difficult competition from the start.

We previously talked about the 1990 MLB All-Star Game, with its long rain delay.  Now, we're talking about what happened during that delay.  CBS fired up an episode of its freshman hit Rescue 911.  It was a bit of an odd selection, maybe more so because this episode had a gruesome event, during a jovial event (The All-Star Game.)

Our journey to this year's All-Star festivities continues with the 1990 edition, one with great pitching, first appearances by several baseball legends, and a lengthy rain delay.  We'll continue talking about the rain delay on Thursday.

We're rounding the halfway mark in the baseball season and we have three special episodes lined up for the occasion.  First, we watch dozens of legends participate in an old timers game whose participants span almost 50 years of Major League Baseball, the oldest of whom pulls off the highly improbable.