Don't Always Disagree

The first episode of ‘The Endgame’ aired February 21, 2022, at 10:00pm Eastern on the NBC network.   It was developed by Jake Coburn and Nicholas Wootton, who also wrote the pilot, and was directed by Justin Lin.   It starred Morena Baccarin as Elena Fedorova and Ryan Michelle Bathe as Val Fitzgerald.   Its overnight ratings were around 3.3 million viewers with a .46 share in the 18-49 demographic.   It ranked fourth overall for broadcast television for the night.   It was a production of Universal Television LLC, a direct subsidiary of NBCUniversal, as well as My So-Called Company productions, know for ‘The Vampire Diaries’ and ‘Roswell,’ and Perfect Storm Entertainment, which is associated with Justin Lin. Not gonna criticize a temp title for the pilot.               The involvement of Julie Piec and Justin Lin as executive producers is interesting, but this entire show is the brainchild of Cob...

  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-ni...

  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 marke...

  Pilot Season – War of the Worlds (1988)      What an odd duck of a television show. There have been numerous adaptations of the source material over the years, the two most famous at the time this was produced being the infamous 1938 radio broadcast and the 1953 movie adaptation. Normally a first-run syndication show such as this would be a loose adaptation or sequel to the original book which would presumably be cheaper. Interestingly due to various copyright extensions the rights to the book had not yet entered the public domain. Instead t his is in fact a direct sequel to the film version to the point where footage from the original is actually incorporated into the episodes themselves, an oddly ambitious move.      The questions over rights issues begin to resolve themselves when you realize that the effort behind this series originated with that film’s producer George Pal and one of the involved production companies was Paramount D...

  Pilot Season – American Gothic      Shaun Cassidy may have some problems with women.      I vaguely remembered ‘American Gothic’ as being one of Sam Raimi’s side projects and I was almost entirely wrong. He was certainly involved but only through his production company, Renaissance Pictures. 1995 was a big year for them, it was the same year that ‘Hercules: The Legendary Journeys’ and “Xena: Warrior Princess” debuted, so his attention may have been a bit elsewhere. He did lend the show composer Joseph LoDuca, an associate of theirs, and some of the camera work in the pilot is reminiscent of Raimi’s signature mobile camera style, and that seems to be about it.      Instead the driving force of the series was former pop star Shaun Cassidy who was transition ing into television writing and production at the time . This was the first show he spearheaded and would go on to be involved in some fairly interesting shows such a...