Here's another blast from my past. The other day here, I mentioned writing for a situation comedy that was produced by Monty Hall's company. It was The McLean Stevenson Show and it was one of those shows — there are always a couple in production — that everyone knows will be stillborn. Even before this one went on the air, the network was unhappy with it, the producers were unhappy with it..and Mr. Stevenson was wishing he really had been in that helicopter that got shot down on the way home from Korea.
Several episodes were taped and everyone involved knew the thing wasn't working so new producers and writers were brought in. My then-partner Dennis Palumbo and I were among the new arrivals, working with producers who'd been there a day or two longer than us and who admittedly weren't sure what, if anything, the show was now about. A decision had been made to try and "bury" the shows already taped…meaning that they'd reinvent the series and try to come up with something better, and the new episodes would air first. Then if those shows drew any kind of audience, they'd follow them with the ones which everyone thought were so unairable. It sounded rather lemming-like to us but we were new in the business. What did we know?
Dennis and I came up with a plot idea everyone liked…and right now, if you offered me every cent that the Federal Bailout will cost, I couldn't tell you what it was about. We then wrote the outline and everyone hated it — and I do recall that while they all thought it wouldn't do they all had different, mutually-irreconcilable reasons as to why it wouldn't do. But then they all had different ideas about how to fix the show anyway. One that I heard and liked was that they should ditch the whole premise of the home life of a guy who ran a hardware store and just videotape the meetings where McLean and Monty yelled at each other over which of them knew more about comedy.
The same week everyone hated our outline, Dennis and I were offered a staff job at Welcome Back, Kotter so we got the heck outta The McLean Stevenson Show…and as I recall, McLean wasn't far behind us. An experienced TV writer named Lloyd Garver, who I never met, turned the vaguest aspects of our premise into the script that was taped and it was chillingly selected as the first McLean Stevenson Show to be broadcast.
Since it was the first episode aired of a new series, a lot of folks wrongly assumed it was the pilot. And since we received screen credit and were mentioned in many reviews, a few of those people also wrongly assumed that Evanier and Palumbo had been involved in the show's creation. Not at all the case. It was the sixth or seventh installment taped (of thirteen) and almost nothing of our outline made it to air. Still, that was our first credit, which is kind of like your first kiss. It doesn't have to be good. It just has to happen. Then the night after, we got our second screen credit on an episode of Kotter. It was a good week for family members who like to see a relative's name on the screen.
I do not have a copy of that installment of The McLean Stevenson Show but someone who does posted an edited version of it to YouTube…and they did something which probably improved it an awful lot. They cut out the episode. It's just the opening titles, commercials and closing titles, totaling about five minutes. I have no idea why they did this but I'm grateful because I get to see my first screen credit for the first time since 1976 and don't have to watch the show it adorned. If you click below (and I'm not suggesting you do), forget that and enjoy the too-bouncy theme song by Paul Williams, plus somewhere in there, there's a pretty good Doritos commercial with Avery Schreiber. The series should have been half that funny.