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The Land That Time Forgot: TV Shows That Haven't Aired In A Long Time

Was-MArsenault

By Was-MArsenault
in Everything Else TV

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Bastet

Bastet

20 minutes ago, Blergh said:

Has anyone seen Policewoman or, for that matter, Cagney and Lacey lately? For such innovative shows re women entering what had been almost exclusively a male profession, it's astounding how difficult they've become to find nowadays! 

As far as I know, the last time Cagney & Lacey was on TV was a few years ago, on a network I don't get, and I'm not sure how long it aired.  I have the whole series - the Loretta Swit pilot, season one with Meg Foster, the Sharon Gless seasons that sometimes get remembered as the entire series (not without reason), and the "menopause years" reunion movies - on DVD; that 30th anniversary boxed set is wonderful, and I recommend it if it's still available (what I have is a limited edition, and I'm not sure what the wide release includes).  I wish it also made more appearances on TV, but it's not the type of show that tends to attract syndication deals or audiences, unfortunately.

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Bastet
Bastet

Any Day Now.  I wish Lifetime, at least (it was their show), would air it again, but that would cut into their line-up of evil women/women in jeopardy shows.  It's often left out when talking abo

Cobb Salad
Cobb Salad

St. Elsewhere. I know it was shown in syndication in a couple of places since it went off the air in 1988 but I haven’t seen it anywhere in ages. Would love to see it again.  

Annber03
Annber03

That's exactly what my big fear has always been about streaming, too. I like having physical copies of the shows I love, it's nice to have a way to watch them again anytime I want. And I hate that tha

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bmasters9

bmasters9

On 7/14/2019 at 2:48 PM, kariyaki said:

A show about some schmo in Alaska? Can't see a lot of people wanting to revisit it. Some do, I'm sure, but I know that I personally would not watch it if it were on. 

Me neither (albeit I have all of the DVD releases [single-sided this time, unlike the doubles of before]); it's set way out in the middle of nowhere, and much as I hate to admit it, I'm more the fan of shows that have a lot of tall buildings (skyscrapers) on display (like The Streets of San Francisco, which was a great source of that).

ratgirlagogo

ratgirlagogo

(edited)
On 8/30/2019 at 4:12 AM, bmasters9 said:
On 7/14/2019 at 2:48 PM, kariyaki said:

A show about some schmo in Alaska? Can't see a lot of people wanting to revisit it. Some do, I'm sure, but I know that I personally would not watch it if it were on. 

Me neither (albeit I have all of the DVD releases [single-sided this time, unlike the doubles of before]); it's set way out in the middle of nowhere, and much as I hate to admit it, I'm more the fan of shows that have a lot of tall buildings (skyscrapers) on display (like The Streets of San Francisco, which was a great source of that).

bmasters, I thought you liked Westerns, as I do? This being a contemporary Western and all.  I liked it for many reasons, but one of the main reasons was that Native people were a big chunk of the cast and contemporary Native life  is a large part of the show ( I also liked Longmire for this reason).  Very unusual on TV.

Edited by ratgirlagogo
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methodwriter85

methodwriter85

Out of curiosity, I've wanted to see the 1981 t.v. remake of Splendor in the Grass starring Melissa Gilbert (and a young pre-fame Michelle Pfeiffer), but other than a short clip, I can't really find it. I heard it doesn't have near the amount of impact that the Natalie Wood movie does, but I'd be interested in seeing what it's like.

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bmasters9

bmasters9

13 hours ago, ratgirlagogo said:

bmasters, I thought you liked Westerns, as I do? This being a contemporary Western and all.  I liked it for many reasons, but one of the main reasons was that Native people were a big chunk of the cast and contemporary Native life  is a large part of the show ( I also liked Longmire for this reason).  Very unusual on TV.

I do like Westerns, but only certain ones (and per what you said, I never knew that Northern Exposure was a Western).

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ratgirlagogo

ratgirlagogo

15 hours ago, methodwriter85 said:

Out of curiosity, I've wanted to see the 1981 t.v. remake of Splendor in the Grass starring Melissa Gilbert (and a young pre-fame Michelle Pfeiffer), but other than a short clip, I can't really find it. I heard it doesn't have near the amount of impact that the Natalie Wood movie does, but I'd be interested in seeing what it's like.

Older TV movies are really one of the hardest media things to find.  Very much in The Land That Time Forgot.   Why?

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KWalkerInc

KWalkerInc

A song I heard tonight made me think of Moonlighting for this topic.  I remember long ago, after Lifetime had stopped airing the show, feeling stupid because I had watched the episodes so many times on ABC, a Canadian channel that aired the episodes the day after the original broadcast, and then Lifetime without bothering to record the shows.  Then just a few days later, I read that Bravo had acquired the rights to the episodes and I was able to record them.  But that has to have been nearly 20 years ago by now. 

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kiddo82

kiddo82

I was thinking today that now that most of the prestige TV is on streaming networks and pay cable services, what is to become of them once they go bye-bye?  I know they can live forever in steaming land but it's not the same as syndication.  I've been on record as saying how much I love syndication but the fun of that is accidentally discovering something I once loved or discovering something new.  I watch episodes of Everybody Loves Raymond in the morning while I get ready for work because I can just parachute into them rather easily.  It's not the type of show that I need to do a complete episode by episode rewatch of and not one that I really need to go out of my way to seek.  I enjoy it, but I only watch it because it's there.  In fact, there are very few shows that I will make a concerted effort to seek out and watch from the beginning, and if I do, it's usually because I stumbled upon them in reruns first.  Unlike movies or comedy specials, TV shows are a commitment so catching a few reruns is a good trial for whether or not I'd be interested in something long term.  Further, with network shows having shorter and shorter of a leash, are we going to start to see fewer shows even make it to syndication?  Also, the shorter seasons need to be taken into account.  The Good Place is ending this year and to date has aired only 39 episodes.  Is the Modern Family/Big Bang/Black-ish generation the beginning of the end for the long running sitcom that finds a home on The CW/basic cable syndication schedule?  

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ratgirlagogo

ratgirlagogo

(edited)
On 9/3/2019 at 5:30 PM, kariyaki said:
On 9/1/2019 at 6:00 AM, bmasters9 said:

I do like Westerns, but only certain ones (and per what you said, I never knew that Northern Exposure was a Western).

It’s not.

It's about a tenderfoot who settles into a frontier town in the  Alaskan wilderness where the settler population has figured out how to live  (mostly) with the Native American population.  How is this NOT a Western?

Edited by ratgirlagogo
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Bort

Bort

6 hours ago, ratgirlagogo said:

It's about a tenderfoot who settles into a frontier town in the  Alaskan wilderness where the settler population has figured out how to live  (mostly) with the Native American population.  How is this NOT a Western?

Westerns are period pieces. With cowboys, saloons, gun fighting… Northern Exposure has none of these things. 

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ratgirlagogo

ratgirlagogo

(edited)
14 hours ago, kariyaki said:

Westerns are period pieces

Except when they're not.  LIke I said, it's a modern Western, like Longmire and Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia are  modern Westerns.  Like Gene Autry's and Roy Rogers' Westerns which take place in a West that has cowboys and horses but also automobiles and airplanes and radio and singing cowboys with radio shows.  There are so many kinds of Westerns.

Edited by ratgirlagogo
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janie jones

janie jones

(edited)
On 9/13/2019 at 12:31 AM, ratgirlagogo said:

It's about a tenderfoot who settles into a frontier town in the  Alaskan wilderness where the settler population has figured out how to live  (mostly) with the Native American population.  How is this NOT a Western?

I've never seen this show, but I don't see how a fish out of water story is a Western just because there are Native Americans. 

FWIW, according to the Wikipedia entry on the matter, contemporary westerns "utilize Old West themes and motifs (a rebellious anti-hero, open plains and desert landscapes, and gunfights)." 

Also FWIW, the Northern page does list Northern Exposure as being in that genre, but the western page calls the Northern/Northwestern a subgenre of westerns.

Edited by janie jones
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ratgirlagogo

ratgirlagogo

(edited)
13 hours ago, janie jones said:

FWIW, according to the Wikipedia entry on the matter, contemporary westerns "utilize Old West themes and motifs (a rebellious anti-hero, open plains and desert landscapes, and gunfights)." 

Wikipedia is often wrong, and I don't agree at all with this.  Frontiersmen and women, homesteading settlers, a wilderness that isn't actually unpopulated are more basic elements to me. People creating communities, maybe with new standards of behavior.   Little House on the Prairie is a Western to me for example.  Gunfights and cattle drives and water fights and bank foreclosures are also common themes but not the only things  you need in a Western.     I don't want this to drag on so I will let this drop.

Edited by ratgirlagogo
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Raja

Raja

On 8/25/2019 at 7:00 PM, Blergh said:

Has anyone seen Policewoman or, for that matter, Cagney and Lacey lately? For such innovative shows re women entering what had been almost exclusively a male profession, it's astounding how difficult they've become to find nowadays! 

Cagney and Lacey is replacing The Profiler on START TV Monday Oct 14th, 2019 at 5 PM

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tribeca

tribeca

On 9/27/2019 at 1:34 AM, Glendenning said:

I'd love to see a "in-character" reunion special for The Torkelsons/Almost Home as it has become a cult classic. While it would be normal for Boarder Hodges to have died by now, I hope they'd give Molly Morgan a better and more dignified fate than her actress.

I loved this show.   What happened to Molly Morgan. Google was no help. 

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MissAlmond

MissAlmond

(edited)

I was looking for an actor's credits on Google/IMDB and after clicking here, there, and TV shows going further back in time, I somehow stumbled on The Awakening Land.  This was another of those TV miniseries, starring Elizabeth Montgomery and Hal Holbrook.  Not only had I totally forgotten about it, I didn't realize one of the actors - Steven Keats - had committed suicide in 1994.  

On 9/1/2019 at 4:58 PM, ratgirlagogo said:

Older TV movies are really one of the hardest media things to find.  Very much in The Land That Time Forgot.   Why?

I have no idea.  Perhaps a technicality on the business side such as who owns the rights all these years later?  

Edited by MissAlmond
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MissAlmond

MissAlmond

14 hours ago, kariyaki said:

Older TV movies may not have been preserved. Quite possible that many of them have rotted away.

But a lot of them can be found on DVD's so it doesn't appear they've rotted away.  It seems more, for whatever reason, they either can't or simply aren't aired anymore on TV.  

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Bort

Bort

8 minutes ago, MissAlmond said:

But a lot of them can be found on DVD's so it doesn't appear they've rotted away.  It seems more, for whatever reason, they either can't or simply aren't aired anymore on TV.  

I would never expect any old TV movies to ever air again. Tv has seemed to evolve past the cheesy movie of the week format — except for Hallmark and Lifetime, they picked up the mantle and ran away with it. 

If you can find them on dvd, great, but I was talking about the ones that you can’t find anywhere: not on dvd, not on streaming, nowhere. Those are the ones that are probably gone forever.

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Blergh

Blergh

19 hours ago, MissAlmond said:

I was looking for an actor's credits on Google/IMDB and after clicking here, there, and TV shows going further back in time, I somehow stumbled on The Awakening Land.  This was another of those TV miniseries, starring Elizabeth Montgomery and Hal Holbrook.  Not only had I totally forgotten about it, I didn't realize one of the actors - Steven Keats - had committed suicide in 1994.  

I have no idea.  Perhaps a technicality on the business side such as who owns the rights all these years later?  

Yeah, and let's not overlook that this series highlighted just what an amazing performer the late Miss Montgomery was (FAR beyond just twitching her nose).  Her character of Sayward went from being a fidgety, teenaged pioneer girl having to watch out for her younger sisters on the wild frontier after their father's abandonment and mother's death to being the late middle-aged matriarch of the most prominent family of a thriving town and there wasn't a false or hammy note in her performance!  It truly blew my mind how great a job she did here- even somewhat overwhelming the redoubtable Mr. Holbrook's role (despite his character being less than fair or faithful to hers).  

Anyway, I wish this were rerun more so more folks could get a chance to see that the late Miss Montgomery's intensity here. Also, it's a fairly good dramatization of what happened with early Midwesterner pioneers, the Native Americans and the land itself that doesn't entirely avoid the shadowsides. 

ratgirlagogo

ratgirlagogo

10 hours ago, kariyaki said:

I would never expect any old TV movies to ever air again. Tv has seemed to evolve past the cheesy movie of the week format — except for Hallmark and Lifetime, they picked up the mantle and ran away with it. 

If you can find them on dvd, great, but I was talking about the ones that you can’t find anywhere: not on dvd, not on streaming, nowhere. Those are the ones that are probably gone forever.

Or they may just be in a vault, unreleased because the market is too small to make it worth clearing the music rights.  This is the case for the PBS American Playhouse films, for example, which aren't cheesy (mostly, LOL).  The only one ever re-released AFAIK was Ursula Le Guin's The Lathe of Heaven after years of SF fans begging.   It's shocking, really, given the caliber of the talent involved, the actors and the playwrights both, that they've never been made commercially available.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0176357/

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MissAlmond

MissAlmond

16 hours ago, ratgirlagogo said:

Or they may just be in a vault, unreleased because the market is too small to make it worth clearing the music rights.

Plus the ownership rights could be so muddled by now, nobody wants to wade through that maze for each and every miniseries.  A look at the corporate history of Star Trek and who owns what and how it got there is a read.  

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Blergh

Blergh

One TV movie I never forgot which I wish would be rerun was the 1978 Perfect Gentlemen starring Lauren Bacall [!], Sandy Dennis and Lisa Pellican as three women of different generations and walks of life who meet up after their respective  husbands wind up imprisoned. Then realize that they each could use fresh starts themselves so they devise a plan to do their best to make sure they'll land on their own feet- and get good help from Miss Pellican's character's mother-in-law played by Ruth Gordon who herself has had experience in putting herself at risk to land on her own feet. It's worth seeking out and see how these women compare to Thelma and Louise.

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callie lee 29

callie lee 29

I know it's been mentioned before but I think even CBS forgot about CSI: NY.  I used to have CBS All Access and they didn't have it (had the other two and even 1 season and done shows) - never got a response the two times I emailed them. Oh well. I cancelled it soon after. 

I also wish WINGS was on somewhere. I got in a half hour long discussion with a bartender at a restaurant I go to regularly. We both understood the awesomeness of WINGS, Joe & Helen, and lamented it not being available anywhere (except CBS All Access).

MissAlmond

MissAlmond

The death of the second of Joan Crawford's twins and Crawford using Georgia Tann's Tennessee Children's Home Society made me think of the miniseries based on Tann.  But while searching IMDB for the title, I realized in my mind, I had actually merged two different TV miniseries into one!  Instead of one miniseries that starred both Mary Tyler Moore and Mare Winningham, there were two separate ones: 

Stolen Babies (1993) with Mary Tyler Moore https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0108225/?ref_=nm_flmg_act_27

Missing Children: A Mother's Story (1982) with Mare Winningham https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084336/?ref_=nm_flmg_act_79

Anyway, I haven't seen either one aired on TV for years (obviously LOL).

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