Harry O - the pilot episodes (1973 and 1974)

The Fugitive made David Janssen a very big star. His career was a bit up-and-down after that. In 1973 he starred in a feature-length pilot for a proposed private eye series called Harry O. The pilot was Such Dust As Dreams Are Made On and it failed and the series was not picked up. A year later a second pilot, Smile Jenny, You're Dead, was made and this time Harry O was picked up by ABC.

The series was however destined to have a troubled history. The first 13 episodes were set in San Diego. Ratings were not all that great and the network decided the series was too unconventional. They demanded that it be transformed into a much more orthodox  private eye series, to be set in Los Angeles. So the second half of the first season was almost a different series. It was renewed for a second season, ratings were reasonable but ABC felt the series was still too intelligent and had worrying traces of originality. Harry O was cancelled in favour of Charlie’s Angels, a series dumb enough that even TV network executives could understand it.

It’s not difficult to see why Such Dust As Dreams Are Made On did not please the networks. It’s not so much that it’s rather dark. It’s more the character of Harry O (he’s actually Harry Orwell). He’s about as cheerful as you would expect a guy to be with a bullet lodged in his spine because when he was a cop some punk shot him during a robbery and now he’s in constant pain. And he’s  a very fallible private detective. He makes mistakes that put people in danger and he makes one really big, and costly, mistake. He chases women but most of the time he’s barely civil with his girlfriends. His sense of humour, such as it is, is pretty bleak. Harry Orwell isn’t loveable. He’s cynical. He doesn’t lack guts but he has no great interest in being a conventional hero. He’s not a white knight who rescues damsels in distress or helps out widows and orphans. He isn’t overly fond of people. He’s the sort of lead character who would make a network executive very nervous.

That’s not to say that he lacks charisma. It’s just that it’s a weird downbeat charisma. He’s actually a fascinating character. You want to find out more about him. But he’s not a conventional hero and network television likes conventional heroes.

I intensely disliked The Fugitive but that had nothing to do with David Janssen. I hated the concept of the Fugitive and I hated the scripts. Harry Orwell is a much more interesting character and David Janssen is perfect in the rôle. He gives a very low-key performance, in fact almost minimalist, but he doesn’t make Harry bland. Not at all. A really good actor in the right rôle can be low-key but still make a character fascinating and that’s what Janssen does.

Harry O - Such Dust As Dreams Are Made On

The plot has an intriguing premise. A guy breaks into his house and at gunpoint tries to force Harry to accept a large amount of money. The guy is Harlan Garrison (Martin Sheen) and he explains that he’s the guy who shot Harry four years ago. Now he wants Harry's help because the other guy involved in that robbery is trying to kill him.

Such Dust As Dreams Are Made On is smart and quirky and fascinating. No wonder the network executives hated it.

Now my guess is that Harry O creator Howard Rodman, who had been around the TV industry for a long time, knew that his idea for a slightly offbeat private eye series about a very offbeat private eye was a very good idea. But words like unconventional and offbeat make network executives break out in a cold sweat. So he decided that the only way to sell his idea to a network was to give the impression that Harry O was going to be an utterly conventional private eye series. Once he had persuaded a network to pick up the series he could always do his best to make it the offbeat series he’d always intended it to be. So when he wrote the script for the second pilot, Smile Jenny, You're Dead, he made it absolutely conventional. Five minutes into it you not only know every single thing that is going to happen, you know how it is going to happen. And sure enough that’s exactly how it happens.

It starts off with a model named Jennifer who wants a divorce so she can marry her new boyfriend. But there’s this photographer guy who’s obsessed with Jennifer and he decides he has to kill any man that Jennifer is involved with.

Harry of course falls for Jennifer. It’s difficult to understand why anyone would want anything to do with Jennifer - even by the standards of airhead fashion models she’s selfish, shallow and not very bright. But the detective has to fall in love with the woman who’s in danger. Anything else would be vaguely original and Smile Jenny, You're Dead avoids originality like poison.

Not surprisingly the ABC network executives absolutely loved it and Harry O was picked up as a series.

David Janssen and Jodie Foster in Smile Jenny, You're Dead

It’s soul-crushingly unoriginal but it is well-made, Harry Orwell is a good character and David Janssen is very good. Of course Harry Orwell was a much more interesting character, and David Janssen’s performance was much better, in the first pilot. The first pilot was also much less afflicted by sentimentality.

The sub-plot with Jodie Foster is quite amusing but like everything else about Smile Jenny, You're Dead it was a wasted opportunity - both Jodie Foster and David Janssen were capable of doing a lot more with that sub-plot.

It’s perfectly understandable that Smile Jenny, You're Dead is the way it is. There is nothing that warms the heart of a TV network executive more than that combination of predictability, maudlin sentimentality and unoriginality. If you want to get to make a TV series you have to make the network execs think that you’re going to give them something absolutely safe. Once you’ve persuaded them to give you the green light you can try to make your actual series witty and intelligent and original. You might even get away with it for the first season. That seems to have been the trajectory followed by Harry O - a quirky and incredibly interesting first two-thirds of season one before the network lowered the boom and insisted on the removal of disturbing original ideas.

Even with the network pushing the series in the direction of risk-averse conventionality the first season of Harry O is still surprisingly good and I’ll be having much more to say about it in the near future.

In the meantime Such Dust As Dreams Are Made On (which is included in the season one boxed set) is very highly recommended while Smile Jenny, You're Dead (released separately) is reasonably entertaining.

failed pilots - Genesis II (1973)

Gene Roddenberry came up with a pretty good idea when he created Star Trek. The execution of the idea was sometimes brilliant and sometimes terrible but Star Trek still deserves its legendary status among TV sci-fi series.

Naturally enough after Star Trek was canceled Roddenberry tried to come up with another great TV science fiction idea. He tried really really hard but never quite succeeded. Genesis II was one of several failed pilots for which he was responsible in the 70s. Interestingly enough he made no less than three failed pilots at the time all utilising the same basic idea.

The basic idea is in fact a direct rip-off of Buck Rogers. In 1979 scientist Dylan Hunt (Alex Cord)  is experimenting on suspended animation, with himself as the test subject. He expects to be asleep for a few days. What he doesn’t know is that the secret research facility under Carlsbad Mountain is about to be buried by an earthquake. He wakes up in the year 2133.

He is brought back to life by the beautiful Lyra-a (Mariette Hartley), who is half-human and half-Tyranian. She has two hearts which of course means that she has two navels (no I have no idea why that’s supposed to make sense either except that it’s an excuse for her to take most of her clothes off).

There had been a nuclear war many years earlier and now there are a number of competing societies. There’s PAX, apparently descended from the scientists of the 20th century and since they worship Science! they’re naturally the good guys. Then there are the Tyranians. They’re rich and evil and cruel and they keep humans as slaves. They dress like ancient Romans so we know they’re bad guys.

The Tyranians are apparently mutants (or at least I think they're supposed to be mutants although I must admit that I was a little bit confused on this point). Lyra-a is therefore half-human and half-mutant, a very Gene Roddenberry concept.

Some 20th century high technology still survives in the world of 2133. Nuclear power plants are still functioning, as are the ultra high speed underground railways. The trouble is that nobody now knows how the technology works so they can’t fix it if it breaks down.

The really bad news is that some nuclear warheads and some missiles still survive as well.

Lyra-a works for PAX but she’s actually a Tyranian spy. She’s beautiful but because she’s half-Tyranian she’s cruel and emotionless but because she’s half-human she’s not completely cruel and emotionless and of course she’s going to fall in love with Dylan Hunt.

Both PAX and the Tyranians want Dylan Hunt because he actually understands the high-tech stuff. The Tyranians want him to repair their nuclear power plant.

Dylan gets himself mixed up in a PAX conspiracy to start a slave revolt but he doesn’t know what to do about Lyra-a. He knows he shouldn't trust her but she’s really hot so he wants to trust her.

The major weakness is that the PAX people come across as irritating smarmy do-gooders with a passionate devotion to art, science and everything virtuous. They’re socially progressive atheists who know that science is the answer and that if we try we can all learn to get along. They’re a typical Gene Roddenberry idea of a utopia which actually strikes me as being a holier-than-thou nightmare society.

If the PAX people suffer from being too annoyingly virtuous the Tyranians suffer from being too obviously and too completely evil.

Alex Cord makes a decent enough hero but with perhaps not quite enough charisma.

Mariette Hartley is excellent. Ted Cassidy (best known as Lurch in The Addams Family) plays an Apache chief working for PAX. Which kind of works because at least it adds an offbeat touch.

The subterranean shuttles are quite cool although they’re also stolen from Buck Rogers. It’s almost as if all the good ideas here have been borrowed from elsewhere while the bad ideas are Roddenberry’s.

The costumes are as cringe-inducing as those featured in the worst episodes of Star Trek. The sets are not too bad.

It’s easy to see why network executives who saw this pilot had serious misgivings. There’s just not enough action and we have to wait a long time for any action at all. There’s too much talking. The dialogue is awful. It has too much of the feel of a Star Trek episode, but without starships and proton torpedoes and without the excitement that Star Trek provided (at least some of the time).

This might be giving you the impression that I hated Genesis II but I didn’t really. It does have all the faults you’d expect from Gene Roddenberry but it also has some of his strengths - and some of the strengths of Star Trek. This is a future world of many competing societies without any one dominant power so it’s a setup with plenty of potential. The idea of a world with high technology that is slowly failing because nobody knows how it works is extremely good. And it is a lot more interesting than most post-apocalyptic science fiction.

Genesis II has been released on DVD in the Warner Archive series and it looks terrific. The lack of extras is disappointing - it would have been great to get some insights into the directions a series might have taken.

Genesis II was not entirely lacking in promise and despite its flaws it’s worth a look. Star Trek had most of the same flaws but it still worked.

The Time Tunnel (2002 pilot episode)

In 2002 somebody at Fox decided it would be cool to reboot Irwin Allen’s 1966 series The Time Tunnel. A pilot was made but never made it to air and that was the end of that idea. In 2006 this pilot was included as an extra in the DVD release of the 1966 Time Tunnel series.

Quite a few changes were made to the original series concept, some of the changes being positive and some being disastrous. Most of the changes were predictable. In 2002 you could not possibly have two male heroes, so Dr Tony Newman becomes female scientist Dr Toni Newman.

Another predictable change is that the reboot takes itself very very seriously. All races of fun have been banished.

The acting is a major problem. If the series takes itself very seriously these actors take themselves even more seriously. They have that amazing ability that modern actors have to be both intense and dull at the same time. The biggest problem is Andrea Roth as Dr Toni Newman. She’s so irritating that her performance on its own would have been enough to persuade me not to watch any further episodes. And she’s by no means the least obnoxious of the characters. In fact within ten minutes I decided that I hated all these people and wanted them all to die.

The one positive change is that the reboot does have a slightly more serious science fictional concept at its core, which is that an attempt to develop atomic fusion has unleashed a time storm that is changing both the past and the present. Only the personnel at the time tunnel complex know what the world was like before the changes occurred. It’s not an original idea and it’s not all that interesting but it is at least an idea.

In actual fact I preferred the approach of Irwin Allen’s original series, in which no matter how hard you tried you could not change history - somehow any attempt to do so would always end in failure.

Doug Phillips (David Conrad) is an ex-Marine who works for some security outfit. Now he finds himself forcibly recruited by the government for a mysterious mission. For some reason the fact that he’s a bit of an expert of the 1944 Battle of Huertgen Forest is important. He discovers that whether he likes it or not he’s now part of a team that is going to travel back to 1944 through the time tunnel to try to repair the damage done by an interloper from the year 1546.

It’s now that one of the worst features of the reboot becomes apparent. The time travellers are going to disguise themselves as 1944 American soldiers. The problem is that two members of the team are female. It’s been made clear that the number one priority is not to change anything or interact with anyone unnecessarily. It’s vital not to attract attention. Having two women dressed up as  soldiers is obviously going to make it absolutely impossible to blend in. Trying to shoehorn political correctness into the world of 1944 effectively destroys any semblance of believability.

The basic concept is not dissimilar to that of Sapphire and Steel - trying to prevent any tampering with the established timeline. The difference is that Sapphire and Steel dealt with the subject in a much more intelligent and much more interesting manner and with some actual subtlety.

There is one single solitary attempt at humour and it’s feeble and it’s out of place.

Visually it’s very disappointing. It looks like a bad video game. The special effects look more modern than those in the 1966 series but that doesn’t mean they look better. In fact the effects are very unimaginative and uninteresting. The time tunnel complex is boring and looks cheap and shoddy compared to that in the Irwin Allen series. There’s no real sense of style. Whatever else you may say of Irwin Allen his series always had style.

This is a reboot that was doomed from the start. A series needs characters that the audience can care about. Nobody is going to care about these walking clichés. A science fiction series needs to have some kind of visual signature. This pilot looks like a TV car commercial. There is an idea here with some potential but time travel is a concept has been pretty much done to death.

The one good thing about the 2002 version of The Time Tunnel is that it’s included as an extra in the Irwin Allen Time Tunnel DVD boxed set so I didn’t have to pay money for it. And it is an extra that I guess is worthwhile if only because it makes Irwin Allen’s 1966 series look so much better. It’s one of several interesting extras in this DVD set, the other notable one being the 1976 pilot Time Travelers which was an earlier attempt (by Irwin Allen) at a reboot. And a much more successful attempt than the 2002 effort.