Jay Tarses

Having spent the week writing about the U.S. TV premieres, something has become clear to me that is probably equally clear to you: this is, even by recent standards, a really underwhelming fall season. There’s no Good Wife or Glee or  Modern Family to be anointed as an instant must-watch. Things are so very so-so that there’s a campaign to save the mega-flop Lone Star based solely on the pilot episode; not that it wasn’t a good pilot, but people seem to be rallying around it because there’s not much else, as yet, that creates any excitement. (So the energy that would normally go into supporting shows that have a chance is instead going into a symbolic crusade to save the last hope for cable-on-broadcast TV.) This may change as the season goes on and one or more shows grow on the promise of their pilots.

Here’s a genuine rarity with an all-star writing staff. The Tony Randall Show was his first show after The Odd Couple was canceled. It was produced by MTM, though unlike most of MTM’s other shows, it was on ABC rather than CBS. It followed the same pattern as MTM’s previous hits like Mary Tyler Moore and Bob Newhart: take a star, put him or her in a different city (every MTM show had a different locale; in this show, it was Philadelphia), and go back and forth between the lead character’s home and work lives. Randall’s character was a judge and a widower with two kids, so the show’s two home bases were his house, where he lived with his kids and his wacky, bad-cooking  English housekeeper (the famously troubled Rachel Roberts), and the courthouse, full of wacky co-workers played by terrific character actors like Allyn McLerie and Barney “Seinfeld’s TV Dad” Martin.

This show had a very, very, very short run on ABC; I’ve posted the title song before (which is sort of famous even though the show isn’t). It was the first show created by the team of Tom Patchett and Jay Tarses after they left MTM productions, where they had produced The Bob Newhart Show and created The Tony Randall Show. (I think it was also one of the first shows, if not the first, where Patchett and Tarses’s powerful manager, Bernie Brillstein, gave himself an executive producer credit, paving the way for zillions of similar credits for Hollywood agents on TV shows.) It was similar to the British show Open All Hours, which was also about a guy who runs an all-night supermarket, but it was never formally credited as a remake, and I think this is one of those cases where the producers used a similar idea but changed enough things that they didn’t actually have to bill it as a remake.