It Was a Thing on TV: An Anthology on Forgotten Television

In the newest edition of "The Squared Circle Time Machine" Greg and Dane return to an old WWF Coliseum Home Video recently uploaded onto the WWE Vault YouTube channel. Paul Bearer in this VHS tape selects some of his favorite matches while giving us a tour of an old theater where he and The Undertaker hang out. Also, we get Stan Lane and Gorilla Monsoon not giving two f**ks who's watching this tape!

It's the start of our annual Pilot Month and we're starting off with a pilot two of the three of us didn't see much of, so one of us took one for the team.  There's a kids show with a lion puppet and Marcia Gay Harden is involved.  That's about all we cared for.  It was a CBS Summer Playhouse entry, so it was earmarked for failure.  We promise it gets better from here.

It's our fourth annual Hall of Fame class here at "It Was a Thing on TV" and we induct 17 worthy inclusions to our Hall. They include a non-human, a former James Bond, and someone who wants to know what was in that danish.

None of us take responsibility for selecting this show and putting it on our schedule, which must say how bad this show is.  Two ex-cons produce a TV show about protecting people from scams, which makes sense; who'd know more about the scamming business than two reformed ex-cons?  This show's shelf life was very short and for obvious reasons.  At least a young Marg Helgenberger is in this.

The 70s were a heck of a time.  Anybody could get their own variety series and a pretty boy teen idol from earlier in the decade could play a undercover cop?  Keith Partridge himself was the lead in this series, a complete 180 to singing and playing the guitar not 5 years prior.  Ultimately, this cop show was handily defeated by another cop show, one which aired for most of that decade.

As you surely know, the occasional personnel change on a TV show occurs for various reasons, ranging from health issues and death to just going in a different direction.  In 1982, one of television's most popular shows, The Dukes of Hazzard, experienced such a change over salary issues.  Out were the popular Bo and Luke Duke, in were Coy and Vance for a lackluster season, before Bo and Luke returned.

We are a week into the 2025 baseball season.  We chose this very short-lived series from 1983 about minor league baseball as our tribute to America's Pastime.  This series featured an amazing 20 people who appeared on every episode, covering all the bases from the players, the coaches, their partners, and even the mascot.  As one might guess with an entry on this podcast, the series got benched after a brief period of time.

The United Football League kicked off the 2025 season in Houston on Friday as the Houston Roughnecks hosted the St. Louis Battlehawks. In this live show we look at what notable names are in the UFL this season along with some discussion about NCAA March Madness and Opening Day in MLB.

Some shows age like a fine wine.  Others age like bad milk.  This show falls under the latter, a show which would never see the light of day in 2025 but did get 13 episodes in 1988.  Scott Bakula stars in this series as a new hotshot lawyer who has a way with the ladies, a year before Bakula would hit it real big.  In true 1988 "don't give a darn" fashion, there was enough misogyny and quasi-racism to go around.

The 21st century has brought new forms of inspiration for TV shows.  This show is an example of that, taking one social media user's rants about his father as the basis of a comedy series.  In what we believe is beautiful casting, the father is played by William Shatner, whose 94th birthday is coming this Saturday.  With the Shat, you never know what $h*! he may say.

It's Lost in Translation time on the podcast!  To start, we look at the second attempt to Americanize the classic British comedy Fawlty Towers, but with Bea Arthur as the lead.  It followed a stinker of a show.  (Condo, see episode 79.)  However, it also was up against one of the most popular series of the 1980s.  Despite being evicted after 13 episodes, that number is still more than the number of episodes of Fawlty Towers.