Universal Television
The last week of March between 1959 and 2009 didn’t have any new series debuts for the first two decades of our countdown, but 1979-2009 saw the launch of several long-running series that have gone on to be classics, still watched by long-time fans today while picking up a whole new audience in the process. There were also more than a few misses, but this week in March will be remembered more for the classics that were launched into TV history. Let’s take a look!
1959
- No new series premiered this week in 1959.
1969
- No new series premiered this week in 1969.
1979
- March 24 — The TV adaptation of the hit 1976 movie The Bad News Bears debuts on CBS (the movie had two sequels in 1977 & 1978). The series, like the movie, centered around a junior high baseball team comprised of the school’s misfits and bumblers. Jack Warden took over the role played by Walter Matthau in the movies, Coach Buttermaker. The cast also featured Catherine Hicks, Sparky Marcus, Meeno Peluce, Billy Jayne, Corey Feldman and Kristoff St. John. CBS originally scheduled the series for Saturdays at 8:00 PM during the first 12-episode season. The show was renewed and returned in September at 8:30 PM. Four episodes into the second season, the show was cancelled due to low ratings and pulled from the schedule after the October 6 airing. CBS burned off the remaining 10 episodes beginning June 7 in the original 8:00 PM time slot. In July, CBS moved the show again to 8:30 but audiences lost track of the time changes and the last episode aired July 26, 1980. 26 episodes were produced but the last three remained unaired until the series showed up on Nick at Nite in the late 1980s, and again on Comedy Central in the early 1990s.
- March 28 — Mystery series Dear Detective premieres on CBS. The series starred Brenda Vaccaro as police detective Kate Hudson, and the series focused on both her professional and personal life which included a new boyfriend and her children. The series kicked off with a two-hour TV movies followed by three one-hour episodes before the series was cancelled. The cast included Arlen Dean Snyder and Ron Silver. The pilot movie had been released on VHS at one point, but the remaining three episodes are considered lost and largely forgotten.
- March 28 — Sitcom Miss Winslow and Son debuts as the lead-in for Dear Detective. The series starred Darleen Carr as Susan Winslow, an art designer who learns she’s pregnant but is not interested in marrying the father (a bold move in 1979). This decision estranges her from her parents but she has a neighbor, Harold (Roscoe Lee Browne), to lean on as she copes with single motherhood. The series, based on the UK comedy Miss Jones and Son, ran for six episodes, ending on May 2, 1979.
- March 29 — Western mini-series The Chisholms premieres on CBS. Robert Preston starred at the family patriarch who moved his family from Virginia to Wyoming after they were defrauded of their land, encountering difficult travel, hostile Indians and family struggles along the way. Rosemary Harris co-starred as his wife Minerva. Also in the cast were Ben Murphy, Brian Kerwin, James Van Patten, Glynnis O’Connor, Stacy Nelkin and Susan Swift as the youngest Chisholm who is killed by Indians. The mini-series consisted of four chapters and concluded on April 19, 1979, but returned to the airwaves on January 19, 1980 as a weekly series with Brett Cullen replacing Kerwin, Delta Burke replacing Nelkin, and Swift returning as a new character (Preston’s character was also killed off midway through the season). Mitchell Ryan also joined the cast of the series. Other notables in the mini-series included Anthony Zerbe, Brian Keith, Donald Moffat and Leslie Nielsen, but none of them carried over to the series. The weekly series ran for nine episodes and ended on March 15, 1980.
1989
- March 26 — Sci-fi classic Quantum Leap debuts on NBC. Scott Bakula starred as Dr. Sam Beckett, a physicist who leaps through spacetime and temporarily takes the place of other people to correct historical mistakes, always appearing as that person to others around them, but Sam can always see himself in mirrors. Dean Stockwell co-starred as Al, his cigar-smoking companion and best friend who appeared to Sam as a hologram. The series ran for five seasons and 97 episodes with the series finale airing on May 5, 1993. In the finale, Sam learned that he could control the leaps and return home at any time. He makes a leap to visit Al’s wife while Al was a prisoner of war to assure her that he would be home again, and Sam continued leaping, never returning home. The series won several technical Emmy awards, with Dean Stockwell earning a Golden Globe for Supportin Actor in 1990, and Scott Bakula winning a Globe for Best Actor in a Dramatic TV series in 1992. The series spawned several novels and a comic book series, and the Sci-Fi Channel had announced development of a TV movie continuation of the series which would serve as a pilot for a possible series relaunch. That never came to pass. At Comic-Con in 2010. Bakula revealed producer Donald Ballisario was working on a script for a feature film, and in 2017 Bellisario confirmed he had finished the script, but there has been no mention so far of a film actually being produced.
- March 27 — Soap opera Generations premieres on NBC, the first to feature an African-American family. The half-hour serial was promoted as the first fully integrated daytime soap. The cast featured Taurean Blacque, Debbi Morgan, Patricia Crowley, Dorothy Lyman, Elinor Donahue, Vivica A. Fox, Ron Harper, Joan Pringle, Barbara Rhodes, Richard Roundtree, Kelly Rutherford, and Kristoff St. John who was nominated for a Daytime Emmy Award for Best Supporting Actor in 1990, and Outstanding Younger Actor in 1991. The series ended on January 25, 1991 after 475 episodes.
1999
- March 24 — Sitcom It’s Like, You Know… premieres on ABC. The series lampooned upper class live in Los Angeles as seen through the eyes of New Yorker Arthur Garment (Chris Eigeman), a fish out of water among Hollywood’s idle rich. Arthur finds himself torn between his East Coast contempt for the West Coast and the growing enchantment with the relaxed whimsey swirling around him. The series was notable for featuring Jennifer Grey playing a version of herself as a running joke related to her real-life rhinoplasty. The cast also included Steven Eckholdt, Evan Handler and A.J. Langer. The first season consisted of eight episodes, with the original pilot remaining unaired (a second pilot aired as the first episode). Season 2 consisted of 18 episodes, but only 12 of those aired. Ratings for the series were never great due to ABC giving much of its primetime schedule to Who Wants To Be a Millionaire. The final episode aired on January 5, 2000, with the unaired episodes seeing broadcast in Argentina and Australia.
- March 28 — Animated sitcom Futurama debuts on the Fox network. From The Simpsons creator Matt Groening, the series follows the adventures of modern day slacker Philip J. Fry who is accidentally cryogenically frozen seconds into the year 2000, is revived in the year 2999, and becomes a delivery boy for the Planet Express Company, where he befriends a wide cast of human and alien characters including cyclops Leela, robot Bender, humans Professor Farnsworth, Amy Wong and Hermes Conrad, and the crustacean-like Dr. Zoidberg. The voice cast included Billy West, Katey Sagal (the only main cast member to voice a single character), John DiMaggio, Phil LaMarr, Lauren Tom, Tress MacNeille, Maurice LaMarche and David Herman. Frank Welker and Kath Soucie also contributed to the series, with recurring guests Dawnn Lewis, Tom Kenny, Dan Castellaneta, Al Gore and George Takei. During the series run, many famous actors, musicians, bands, and scientists guest voiced as themselves. Fox was never supportive of the series, refusing to air it after The Simpsons as Groening had wanted, instead placing it on Tuesdays. Fox did move the series to Sunday at 8:30 for the second season, but by mid-season had moved it again to 7:00 where it was often pre-empted due to sports overruns, making it impossible for viewers to know when a new episode would air. Due to the erratic schedule, Fox did not air several third and fourth season episodes, holding them for a fifth season. Fox never officially cancelled the series, but stopped ordering episodes midway through production of the fourth season. The series ended on Fox August 10, 2003. Cartoon Network picked up the rerun rights and aired the show from 2003 to 2007, and four direct-to-video films were released between 2007 and 2009, which were then edited into 16 episodes and aired as a fifth season on Comedy Central. In 2009, Comedy Central ordered 26 new episodes which aired in 2010 and 2011, and then 26 more episodes for a seventh and final season airing in 2012 and 2013. The final episode aired September 4, 2013 with a total of 140 episodes for the series. Groening still believes there is life in the series and continues to explore options to revive it once again. The 26th season of The Simpsons featured a crossover episode, ‘Simpsorama’, on November 9, 2014, a year after the series finale aired on Comedy Central.
- March 30 — The Late Late Show with Craig Kilborn premieres on CBS, with Kilborn taking over the series from original host Tom Snyder (1995-1999). The series was produced by David Letterman’s Worldwide Pants via his new CBS contract which allowed him to produce the show immediately following his. With Kilborn taking over, the show was revamped from a straight talk show to a format closer to Letterman’s new CBS show. Kilborn’s show had no band and Kilborn’s voice was modulated to act as the announcer. Aside from the ‘Desk Chat’ with Kilborn’s guests, the series featured various segments including ‘In the News’, a humorous overview of the day’s news, ‘What Up?’, a Friday segment with Kilborn and three panelists joking about the news, ‘Five Questions’ in which a guest had to fill in the blank with a word related to that guest, ‘Tuesdays with Buddy’ featuring Buddy Hackett, ‘Yambo’, an elimination game between two guests, and ‘The Weather with Petra Nemcova’, a weather report with model Petra Nemcova. Kilborn surprised CBS executives and Worldwide Pants after several weeks of negotiations that he would not be seeking a new contract and exited the show two weeks later on August 27, 2004. In a 2010 interview he said he left the series because the late night field was too crowded for him to succeed. CBS continued the show with a series of guests hosts which was designed to act as an on air audition with a replacement expected to be announced that October. The process extended to December. Drew Carey was the first guest host. The field was whittled down to four contenders: Craig Ferguson, D. L. Hughley, Damien Fahey, and Michael Ian Black, with Ferguson announced as the new host on December 7, 2004, with guest hosts continuing until the end of the year.
2009
- March 26 — Sitcom In the Motherhood debuts on ABC, based on the popular online webseries. The show focused on Rosemary, Jane and Emily, loosely inspired by real-life moms. Frequently married Rosemary is now a single mom with a teenaged son who is more responsible than his mother. Her best friend Jane is a recently divorced, working mother of two girls who hires a ‘manny’ to help around the house. Janes’ sister Emily is a stay-at-home, perfectionist supermom with two young children and a husband, Jason. The webisodes starred Leah Remini, Jenny McCarthy and Chelsea Handler, with Handler to be the only of the leads to transition to the series. However, Handler decided to drop out due to committments to her E! talk show Chelsea Lately and Megan Mullalley, Cheryl Hines and Jessica St. Clair were cast as the mothers. Horatio Sanz appeared as the manny Horatio. ABC hoped to use the show to weaken NBC’s dominance on Thursday nights, but the show failed to attract new viewers or fans of the webseries and critical reaction was poor. After four episodes, ABC pulled the series, replacing it with the return of Ugly Betty, and scheduled the remaining episodes for burn off over the summer. However after one airing on June 25, 2009, ABC pulled the show altogether with two episodes remaining unaired which are now available to stream.
- March 30 — AMTV premieres on MTV, the network’s primary source of music video programming after the channel had gone without any music video programming for the first few months of 2009. The programming block combined music videos, news updates, interviews and live music performances. The block was discontinued as of November 6, 2017.
Do you remember any of these shows? Share your thoughts with us in the comments section below!
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