Katie Couric can breathe a little easier -- to everybody's surprise, America does not want to see female wrestlers in the anchor chair. The Fox reality show Anchorwoman, with WWE wrestling vixen Lauren Jones taking over as anchor at a small East Texas station, has been unceremoniously canceled after a single episode. Despite all the hype for the show -- including several million screechy journalism-is-ruined columns by panicky newspeople -- the premiere episode drew only 2.7 million viewers.
Even in this day of quick network trigger fingers, getting canceled after a single episode is quite an achievement -- it's only happened 10 times before in broadcast network history. My pal Marc Berman at Media Week has thoughtfully compiled a list of these truly brain-dead shows:
ABC
Emily's Reasons Why Not (2006)
Turn-On (1969)
CBS
Co-Ed Fever (1979)
Public Morals (1996)
South of Sunset (1993)
The Will (2005)
You're In the Picture (1961)
Fox
Lawless (1997)
The Rich List (2006)
Who's Your Daddy (2005)
The undisputed champ of this list of video Titanics is Turn-On, a Laugh-In ripoff that so generated so many enraged phone calls from viewers and affiliates that ABC canceled it halfway through the only episode. And You're In The Picture deserves a special mention, too: A game show hosted by Jackie Gleason, it was so appalling that Gleason came on the air the following week and spent a half-hour apologizing for it.
I just picked up at the Paperback Exchange Jackie Gleason's old biography, How Sweet It Is, written by his old drinking buddy and Hollywood scribe, James Bacon.
A fun read, there's a quite a bit of background on You're In the Picture -- apparently Gleason did not want to do Honeymooner sketches anymore, so the network came up with this. He quickly went back to including the sketches in his American Scene show that ran for most of the decade.
Posted by: Lance | August 24, 2007 at 12:49 PM