I get a lot of e-mails from people asking me about television shows, made-for-TV movies or miniseries they remember from years or decades past. I try to answer each question as best I can but often recollections are hazy at best and thus impossible to identify, despite my best efforts. Hopefully, by posting these questions here at Television Obscurities for everyone to read someone will come up with the answer. Keep reading for today’s unidentified shows.
I saw a show on PBS once, where Francisco Franco and his wife & daughter made statements addressing the people of the United States. The whole thing may have been 5 minutes long. I haven’t been able to track this footage down on the internet or find anyone else who knows about it. Do you have any ideas? It wouldn’t seem too interesting except that Franco’s eyes and teeth seemed to bulge out, and reminded me enough of Andy Kaufmann’s “Latka” character to think that’s where he got the idea, a testament to the guy’s perverse sense of humor.
Carl
I’ve found PBS programming especially difficult to research due to the fact that programs aired at different times on stations across the country and did not necessarily air on all stations. Any thoughts?
I am hoping you can help me find the title of an old show. I can’t remember any of the words in the title or the names of the actors. All I can remember is a group of bored suburban housewives decide to solve a crime that has occurred in their town and then start a detective agency. I think it was an hour long program on NBC(?) around 1990(?) and it aired once or twice. I don’t know anyone who remembers the show and would appreciate any help you can give.
Steve
This may not have been a weekly television series. It could have been a made-for-TV movie or a miniseries.
I don’t recall the 1990 item specifically, but — it’s the right time frame for that program to have been an installment of NBC’s last incarnation of The Magical World of Disney (as it was called at that point).
If that’s where Steve’s program aired, then there’s a chance that it could have been the Disney film The North Avenue Irregulars, which more or less fits the parameters of the plot he describes. [I’m fairly sure the film aired on at least one incarnation of the Disney series, but couldn’t say at all whether it aired on the 1990 NBC run.]
The answer to Steve’s question- it was definitely a two-hour 1980 unsold pilot for a projected hour-long NBC series {“EVERY WEDNESDAY”} that never was, entitled “The Day the Women Got Even”. There’s more information on it, which I’ll provide soon…
THE DAY THE WOMEN GOT EVEN backdoor pilot aired on December 4, 1980 and garnered an OK 18.2HH/28%…it got whomped by a special primetime edition of ‘NFL Football’ on ABC.
I don’t remember watching it, but I looked it up on IMDB and it had Miss Tina Louise in it, just after her very memorable guest turn on ‘Dallas’.
My only thought about making it easier to find shows from public television is that it’s very important to mention what market the show in question was seen in, since public stations tend to produce more non-news programming than local commercial stations do, and there are a number of regional public networks that produce and/or carry programs that other public stations do not. For example, the now-defunct Eastern Educational Network, for several years, carried reruns of Monty Python’s Flying Circus on several stations in the northeast.
I listened to an audio tape of the 21rst century on CBS. It brought back memories of another show which had the same kind of focus on inventions and innovations of the 21tst century but it looked like a syndicated program. I remembered it came on early prime time on my NBC affiliate ( I live in Philadelphia) just after the local news and before the network’s evening fare. It showed on Channel 3 in Philadelphia. Can someone give me the name and the title? At the end of the program, it had a band playing with electronic instruments during the end credit sequence. They produced the show in the 1970’s