Ghost Town (1988)

 

Pilot Season – She-Wolf of London

    While having an admittedly great title (possibly stolen from a 1946 film) this show has to have one of the most tortuous production histories I’ve ever seen. This show was a product of the Hollywood Premiere Network (HPN) which was formed in 1989, itself rising from the ashes of the Premier Program Service (PPS), an attempt by Paramount Domestic Television (‘War of the Worlds’) and MCA TV (the record label, which through various acquisitions had bought both a half-interest in the USA Network, the other half belonging to Paramount, and also purchased WWOR-TV in New York City, one of the largest independent tv stations in the country) to cobble together it s own “fourth network” in competition with the then-struggling Fox network. After the demise of PPS HPN was formed by partnering WWOR-TV with KCOP-TV in Los Angeles to form a kind of bifurcated national platform. It shopped around to other independent stations a two-night package (including ‘Star Trek: The Next Generation’ as part of the package, remember Paramount owned Star Trek) consisting of ‘Shades of L.A.,’ a supernatural neo-noir starring a detective who could communicate with ghosts, ‘They Came from Outer Space,’ a sci-fi comedy featuring twin aliens from the planet Crouton which was created by Tom McLoughlin who also created the third show ‘She-Wolf of London,’ a US/UK co-production. All three series would be canceled within a year and the network disbanded.

The opening credits make the ones for Sylvester McCoy's Doctor look sensible.

    The production troubles don’t end there for ‘She-Wolf of London.’ The UK half of the production was done by Harlech Television (HTV) which was licensed to service the West Country and Wales region of the UK. Among the original board of directors was Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor (this has nothing to do with the show, it’s just interesting). They were best known for their work producing children’s television and were the first British broadcaster to air ‘Sesame Street’ (again just interesting). After the first fourteen episodes were shot in England HTV pulled its funding from the show and it relocated to LA, cutting both the budget and the cast and drastically retooling the show. Now re-branded as ‘Love & Curses’ only six LA episodes were produced before the show ended entirely.

    Shooting a television show in England under the auspices of a foreign production company while being based out of Los Angeles apparently caused its own set of problems. As the FCC isn’t a thing in the UK several episodes contained nudity which needed to be edited out of the US broadcast versions. About the only in-depth look at the series I’ve been able to find is the video essay by YouTube critic Allison Pregler and according to her research miscommunication was a frequent problem.

    So let’s finally get to the pilot itself. Creators of the show were Mick Garris and Tom McLoughlin, frequent mainstays in the lower echelons of horror film and tv. The only relatively known cast member was Kate Hodge who had previously starred in ‘Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III’ and would go on to find steady television work. No one else involved went on to anything of much note.

    The episode opens on an airplane with our hero Randi Wallace flying over to study under Professor Ian Matheson. After something of a labored meet-cute on the first day of class the two get to talking about his work. It’s at this point I need to mention the dialogue which is both belabored and so on-point as to be genuinely embarrassing. Like how the word ‘randy’ means ‘horny’ in British idiom? There’s a whole minute spent on that. They also spout genuinely nonsensical academic terms at each other about their research into the supernatural to fool the audience into thinking they’re smart. At no point do the characters in this show act like people.

    She mentions she’s having problems with her housing, he mentions his parents run a B&B, and just like that we have a sitcom premise. Over dinner with a set of British stereotypes she mentions she’s going “ghost hunting on the moors” which everyone who’s read the title for the show can translate as “will be attacked and turned into a werewolf.” The family natters on about possible future plot points and relatives while we’re all waiting for the werewolf attack. Later that night the professor gets what should come across as inappropriate as she’s getting ready for bed but the show treats it as no big deal, so sure.

    Cut directly to a tent presumably on the moors where Randi is typing on perhaps the bulkiest laptop I’ve ever seen, even for 1990. Cue werewolf POV cam and a severely edited attack on her tent. She wakes up in the hospital with a doctor and the professor standing over her, which is I’m sure how the NHS works. The editing goes nuts for several minutes as it cuts between hospital stuff and flashbacks to the same few seconds of werewolf attack and I can’t tell if it was originally shot this way or it was cobbled together back in the US from what footage they had. Eventually she ends up back at the B&B with more British nattering.

    One of the selling points of HPN was the reduced budget of their shows and the presumably lowered licensing cost to the independent stations and it’s here that the lack of resources start to show. The episode starts flinging itself from scene to scene without the most basic of establishing shots or connecting dialogue, the audience just has to try to keep up. She’s in a library, cut to Ian reading in his office, then she’s in a laboratory with test animals, cut to Ian, cut to her wolfing out, cut to Ian who is apparently the only person left on the entire campus and who hears her transforming and so wanders out to investigate. He find the cages holding the test animals torn apart and is suddenly frightened by an awkward insert shot of a werewolf head. He gets chased to the library where we get a couple of shots of the werewolf costume in all its un-glory (and random slo-mo shots, I’m starting to feel bad for whoever had to edit this nonsense).

    Eventually the werewolf corners him in a closet and then just ... goes away for no discernible reason. Suddenly it’s the next day and Ian is talking with the police among the destroyed cages about Randi’s disappearance. They suspect her of some crime, it’s unclear of what kind or why and then the scene is over. Randi wakes up while taking a shower in a men’s locker room, which is at least interesting, and then we cut to the police leaving Ian’s office after having questioned her, which thanks show, glad that aborted subplot went nowhere and will never come up again. Also glad she’s still naked from the shower and wrapped in a blanket, that seems right. She instantly tells Ian she was the werewolf, which he doesn’t believe. She asks for his help in figuring out what happened which he instantly agrees to.

    This episode is increasingly spinning into incoherence. Cut to B&B, she’s reading. Cut to hypnosis session back in Ian’s office, she remembers the attack scene we’ve already witnessed. Cut to them both on the moors, climbing stuff. Now they’re picnicking, including two bottles of wine, where she was attacked. I think they’re flirting but it’s hard to tell. Now they’re chasing each other over rocks for some reason, and still flirting? She literally steps on a clue, a ring they instantly identify as having burst off someone’s finger and now they’re driving home and it’s all about the ring that was established mere seconds before. They come across a “traveling Gypsy carnival” because of course they do, they pull over for no established reason and Randi decides to talk to them. Ian objects even though he was the one driving and pulled over in the first place. Off-screen dialogue indicates that Randi’s “instinct’ is directing her to a fortune-telling Gypsy woman complete with crystal ball.

    She dismisses them until Randi shows her the ring which, again, she literally stepped on just minutes ago and is now claiming must have come from the werewolf that attacked her. She tells them to leave and they are instantly arguing several layers deep about werewolf mythology, how she was cursed, how to break the bloodline, I need to remind you that this caravan was introduced literally less than 90 seconds of screen-time ago. She senses another member of the caravan is the werewolf and now they’re in a car chase after him. After several jumbled shots of cars on dirt roads the werewolf they’re chasing pulls a literal Toonces moment and drives right off a cliff. The two of them teleport down the cliff where the werewolf is still alive, screaming in the wreckage of the car which then instantly catches fire and explodes. The caravan has disappeared, Ian believes her now, and with the most awkward ‘we ran out of footage’ cut I think I’ve ever seen they’re back at the B&B for more British nattering. They now have a makeshift dungeon in the basement of the B&B which, fine. There’s an awkwardly inserted shot of a newspaper ad for ‘occult researchers’ and then the show slaps us upside the head with the end credits.

I mean, sure.

    I am in something like awe of this episode of television. It plays like someone shot a bunch of footage in vague approximation of a written script then shipped it halfway around the world to be assembled by a completely different set of people into something as close to broadcastable as possible. From everything I’ve looked at this seems to have been at least possible given the production history. The thrown-together nature of the funding and distribution network behind this show somehow seems to have filtered down into the finished product. It’s the first tv show (and I’m including ‘Sleepwalkers’ in this) I’ve seen in some time to be so deeply confused at both a production and narrative level. 1990 was not a great year for television by any means but it did give us ‘Northern Exposure’ and ‘Law & Order’ so competence was at least possible. If you can track down episodes of this show its worth checking out for the bewildering set of circumstances that led to such a thing actually being produced. When I mentioned way back in my review of the pilot episode of ‘Friday the 13^th: The Series' that “some truly weird shows were produced more or less outside of what we would now think of as the standard top-down managed model” I had no idea the rabbit hole went down quite this far.