From the Television Obscurities YouTube channel, here are closing credits to the February 5th, 1965 episode (“Sam and the Invisible Man”) of one season wonder The Baileys of Balboa (CBS, 1964-1965).
Exploring forgotten TV from the 1920s to today.
Exploring forgotten TV from the 1920s to today.
From the Television Obscurities YouTube channel, here are closing credits to the February 5th, 1965 episode (“Sam and the Invisible Man”) of one season wonder The Baileys of Balboa (CBS, 1964-1965).
One of the production companies behind the show, Richelieu Productions, was owned and run by onetime actor Keefe Brasselle, who was a very close friend of then-CBS programming chief Jim Aubrey.
The three shows produced by Brasselle’s company for CBS in the 1964-65 season, the sitcom “Baileys Of Balboa”, along with “The Cara Williams Show” (also a sitcom) and “The Reporter” (a drama), were all picked-up by the network, despite the fact that no pilot films or even pilot scripts (only outlines of the shows were presents to network executives) were shot for any of these shows.
None of them was a hit; in fact, all three were major ratings flops and lasted one season or less.
Supposedly, “Reporter” wasn’t that bad, but the two sitcoms were roasted by the critics as being among the worst (or even the worst) new shows of the season.
The more-or-less official cause of Aubrey’s firing from CBS in February of 1965 was his alleged mistreatment (sexual assault?) of the teenage daughter of an affiliated station’s manager in Miami while all three were there for a conference of management of affiliated stations.
Even if the alleged sexual assault hadn’t happened, the huge failure of the three Brasselle-produced shows that season probably would have led to Aubrey’s eventually getting canned anyway, but the firing might have been later in the spring.