Welcome to the Television Obscurities, home to an ever-expanding collection of oddities, curiosities and relics from television's past and present. Inside these pages you'll find some fifty articles covering subjects like short-lived programs, unsold pilots, lost television promos and much, much more.

With over three hours of streaming audio and video Television Obscurities offers an unique look at forgotten aspects of American broadcast television. If this is your first time visiting us, please take a moment to read our About Us page. And be sure to take a look at our Frequently Asked Questions page.

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Voting for the next article closed on Thursday, September 18th. Look for "TV Programs in 1941" to be published later this week.

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Which article would you like to see next? TV Programs in 1941 52.5% Nielsen "Black Weeks" 35.0% "90 Bristol Court" 12.5% Total votes: 40     Version 2.03

TV Programs in 1941: On July 1st, 1941, commercial television broadcasting officially began. In New York City, three stations (representing CBS, NBC and DuMont) were on the air, but only CBS and NBC were offering weekly series. Read about some of television's earliest shows, including Thrills & Chills Everywhere, Men at Work, Fashion Discoveries in Television and more.

"90 Bristol Court": An umbrella title for three seperate sitcoms (Karen, Harris Against the World and Tom, Dick and Mary), this ninety-minute series debuted on NBC in October of 1964. Broadcast from 7:30-9PM on Mondays, it suffered in the ratings and two of the three installments were soon cancelled. Only Karen finished out the season.

Nielsen "Black Weeks": Until the mid-1970s, the A.C. Nielsen Company (now Nielsen Media Research), which provided the networks with the all-important ratings information, would not release national ratings information four weeks out of the year. During these so-called "black weeks," the networks would fill their schedules with plenty of repeats and the occasional "prestige" program (documentaries, specials, adaptations of classic novels).

Our latest exhibit, Full Issue of 1951 TV News has opened. You can read an entire issue of TV News, "A Weekly TV Program and News Magazine" for the Buffalo and Rochester areas of New York, from June of 1951. Enjoy.

Our article on William Dozier's Unsold Dick Tracy Pilot has been finished. Dozier, the man responsible for ABC's Batman, came very close to having a series based on Chester Gould's Dick Tracy comic strip, on the air, this time on NBC.

Varèse Sarabande has set November 4th, 2008 as the release date for The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. soundtrack. The company welcomes suggestions for other television soundtracks they can look into releasing. Please contact mansfield@varesesarabande.com.

It came out ahead in the polls and now you can read all about "Toma", the hour-long crime drama starring Tony Musante that aired for one season between 1973 and 1974. When Musante declined to return for a second season, the show was cancelled by ABC, but months later it was revived and eventually became Baretta.

Record label Varèse Sarabande is planning to reissue the soundtrack to The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. (see our article about the show here) on CD. They are looking for anyone who might have memorabilia from the series that could be used in the booklet that will accompany the CD.

You voted for it and here it is! Our Midseason 1979 article has been published. It is a bit longer than we anticipated, so we've split it into two parts, although a full version is also available. Make sure to cast your vote for Television Obscurities's next article (see the above poll).

We've opened a new exhibit: The New People Comic Books. Believe it or not, Dell published two comic books based on The New People (which is very popular here at Television Obscurities) and now you can read the first five pages of the first issue and learn about a Mexican edition published in 1971.

Head over to the Video Vault and check out two promotional spots for ABC's The Rookies.

See the above section entitled "Vote For The Next Article" to learn how you can pick the topic for the next article to be seen here at Television Obscurities.

This is it, the big one, the great conversion to Flash Video that turned into a complete overhaul of all our articles to include citations and, in many cases, a total rewrite. We're especially proud of our articles on The New People and The Girl from U.N.C.L.E., which have been expanded considerably with new information from Broadcasting magazine and other sources.

In addition, we've shifted the focus of some of our articles:

• The Batgirl Presentation Short: Retitled Batgirl and the Batman Phenomenon; expanded to include information on Batman's rise and fall.
• The 10 Most Outlandish TV Concepts Ever: Retitled 10 of the Most Outlandish TV Concepts Ever; we've removed our rankings due to the subjective nature of what constitutes the "most outlandish" concept ever.
• The Star Wars Holiday Special: Retitled Star Wars on Network Television; now covers the history of the Star Wars franchise on broadcast television, from 1977 to 2005.
• The Return of Starbuck: Retitled A Tale of Two Galacticas; now looks at the reasons Battlestar Galactica and Galactica 1980 failed.
• NBC Promotional Packet For Star Trek: Retitled Building NBC's 1966-1967 Schedule; expanded to cover all the work that went into crafting the 1966-1967 schedule.
• Forty Years of Star Trek: Retitled A Look At Star Trek; examines Star Trek's scheduling, Nielsen ratings, critical response, demographics and more.

One article, Coin Operated TV: Telemeter, still needs to be rewritten, but our research on the topic is still underway, so we have left it untouched for the moment. Another article, Smallville: The Unaired Pilot, has been removed so we can work them it into a new article: Unaired Pilots.

We've also launched something new called Exhibits, where we will display videos, images and other material that does not or would not fit into a typical article. To start things off, we've converted Famous Faces Do Commercials from an article to an exhibit with twenty-five commercials for your viewing enjoyment. Also converted to an exhibit is our article on Television Promotion.

And finally, check out our new Video Vault for many of the videos that were part of our defunct Video of the Week initiative. More videos will be added in the future.

Here at Television Obscurities, we're excited about future articles and exhibits currently in the works. Sometime next week we'll be putting a poll asking you which article (out of three or four potentials) you'd like to see next. Please Contact Us if you find any broken links or missing images or just have comments or questions on the relaunch.