Pilot Season – Werewolf

    What a strange and fascinating relic of the 80’s I’ve stumbled across. I was actually looking up facts on ‘She Wolf of London’ (stay tuned) when this got caught up in my searches. I can honestly say I’d never heard a single thing about this show before.

I mean, yep, that's a title card all right.

    Back in 1987 the Fox broadcasting network was a fairly different beast than it is now. The rise and rise of Rupert Murdoch and the dread empire he built is far too big a subject to tackle for just this measly show but we can examine a slice for some background. First launched in 1986 The Fox Broadcasting Company was hardly the first attempt at a fourth broadcast network (after NBC, CBS, and ABC) but it was by far the most successful one. It was formed by the gradual takeover of 20^th Century Fox film studio and eventual full ownership of a number of flagships stations reaching roughly 20% of the American market. They then cobbled together enough independent stations to be considered a nationwide network and officially launched in October of 1986.

    Almost everyone is familiar with their first two breakout shows, ‘Married ... with Children’ and ‘The Tracey Ullman Show.’ They gradually rolled out more shows over the following weeks, filling in the rest of their airtime with films and reruns of past shows they’d acquired the rights to. The new shows included such stalwarts as ‘Mr. President’ and ‘Duet’ (and, to be fair, ‘21 Jump Street,’ featuring a then-unknown Peter DeLuise of later ‘Stargate’ fame) as well as a Saturday lineup including ‘The New Adventures of Beans Baxter,’ ‘Karen’s Song,’ and debuting on July 11^th, 1987, ‘Werewolf.’ The network struggled for its first three years of broadcast, becoming something of a joke, before the debut in 1990 of, yes, ‘The Simpsons.’ Thus began its slow march towards cultural dominance.

    ‘Werewolf’ is so of its time it’s fairly close to parody. After a terrible opening monologue by a character later introduced as bounty hunter Joe Rogan we cut to a club with the camera acting as a person’s POV. People nervously get out of their way as they make their way to the bar and order a drink, picking it up with an awkwardly angled hand so the camera can catch the raised symbol in scars on its palm. After a few moments the symbol starts to bleed.

    And the entire time the soundtrack is blaring Mike & the Mechanic’s “Silent Running.” If you’re not familiar with the song I’d take a listen, it’s actually really good, if entirely inappropriate for the opening of a werewolf drama.

    Soon enough a couple is attacked in the parking lot with any werewolves kept off screen. After a quick cut to presumably the next day we’re introduced to our main character, Eric Cord, soon to become our titular werewolf. After making out with his girlfriend poolside we’re treated to a sequence of his driving his soft-top convertible to the timeless classic “The Future’s So Bright I Gotta Wear Shades” by Timbuk 3, a song I will always associate with the show ‘Head of the Class.’ The soundtrack to this show, I swear.

    He gets home and finds his roommate hunched over a gun loading it with what turn out to be silver bullets. When confronted the roommate admits that the recent gruesome murders were done by him in his werewolf form. Our hero is disbelieving but agrees to tie up the roommate and wait until midnight to see what happens. While the roommate is tied up he explains the rules of how werewolves work despite never having been taught them himself, the key part of which is that if you can kill the head of the werewolf line it’ll get rid of the curse. Midnight comes, the roommate transforms, breaks the ropes tying him down, and Eric shoots him dead but not before being bitten.

    This pilot is an entire 82 minutes long and I need to stress to you how much padding it contains. Everything I’ve described above has taken us to the 34 minute mark. From the opening monologue (and don’t worry, we’re not done with that yet) to the poolside make-out session to the roommate telling in painstaking detail how he was attacked by a werewolf everything has an extra five or so minutes tacked on for no storytelling reason whatsoever, especially since none of these elements will be revisited after this pilot.

    Our hero is arrested, charged, and makes bail. This takes another nine minutes of screen time. He attempts to explain to his girlfriend what’s going on and eventually convinces her to lock him a storage locker. That’s another nine minutes. He’s missed his court date (I know it’s only been a couple of nights and court dates are set months in advance, just go with it) so a bounty hunter is set on his trail, the aforementioned Joe Rogan. Eric somehow ‘senses’ the werewolf who turned his roommate, confronts him at a marina, then runs away. Thirteen minutes this time. He gets his girlfriend to tie him up in a motel bathroom only to have the original werewolf show up and kidnap her. He falls and hits his head in the bathtub and some time later is awoken by the bounty hunter who found him somehow and takes him into custody. He wolves out, escapes, rescues his girl, and decides to go on the run, chasing the man who turned him into a werewolf. The end.

    It’s all very ‘Kung Fu’ / ‘The Incredible Hulk’ in that after the pilot the episodes’ plots were Eric making his way from place to place and helping out those he met along the way with his werewolf powers, all the while searching for the one-eyed werewolf (yes the bad guy has an eye-patch). This makes some amount of sense when you look at the talent behind the camera. The show was created by Frank Lupo, who also produced 70’s stalwarts such as ‘Battlestar Galactica,’ ‘The A-Team’ and ‘BJ and the Bear,’ the latter two of which shared a similar picaresque structure. Something else to note is that the episodes of the actual show were only half an hour long and even though it was canceled during its first season it still produced 28 more episodes. I’m not sure if they were going for a more soap-opera style structure or if they were just trying anything in those early days at Fox.  I can’t even tell you if the show is good or bad, it just is.

    The pilot ends as it opens, with Joe Rogan giving that monologue to presumably no one. It’s worth quoting in its entirety: “There are two kinds of people in this world: those who believe in flying saucers and those who don’t. When the world isn’t the same as our minds believe then we are in a nightmare. And nothing is worse than a nightmare except one you can’t wake up from.” Actually I tell a lie, that’s the truncated version from the end, there’s more at the beginning, most of it pointless filler, but I did forget the best line: “Growing up I remember reading the book ‘Alice in Wonderland.’ After Alice went down the rabbit hole a flower talked to her. She was surprised. You don’t need to be a psychiatrist to know if a flower ever spoke to a man that man would know terror.”

    And then BAM! “Can you hear me … can you hear me running?” God I love the 80’s. 

"Can you hear me running, can you hear me calling you?"