By Brian Boone
In the summertime, the weather gets warm, the days get longer, and the TV gets weird and bad. June, July, and August used to be the time of year when the networks dumped onto the whatever weird or untested shows they had laying around. Here are some curious relics of summer television.
Summer Playhouse
Networks decide what will become regular shows based on a sample, or pilot episode. All those unsold and unexpanded pilots cost a lot of money to make, so CBS decided to put those single episodes of shows nobody wanted onto the air. Once a week, in the summers of 1964, 1965, 1987, 1988, and 1989, Summer Playhouse showcased those objectively not very good standalone installments as little TV plays.
The Dean Martin Summer Show
The comedian and “Everybody Loves Somebody” crooner’s The Dean Martin Show was a massive hit, and NBC wanted to keep up interest during the summer. Martin, however, had no interest in working year-round (he only showed up for the regular show on taping days), so in the summer of 1966, NBC produced The Dean Martin Summer Show. It was a standard variety show, and very similar to The Dean Martin Show — it just lacked Martin, despite his name in the title. Dan Rowan and Dick Martin of Laugh-In handled hosting chores.
Game Show Marathon
This seven-episode series from 2006, marketed as an event, took all the fun and simplicity of classic TV game shows and made it all tedious. Over the course of seven weeks, six celebrities played a different show — The Price is Right, Let’s Make a Deal, Beat the Clock, Press Your Luck, Card Sharks, and Match Game — with the lowest scoring star eliminated each week, until the last two standing brought in their non-celebrity relatives to play Family Feud.
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Joey and Dad
With just four episodes produced and aired in the summer of 1975, Joey and Dad is one of the shortest-lived series in TV history. It was a variety show built upon the uneasy interactions and non-chemistry between its two stars: Joey Heatherton, a flirtatious sex symbol best known for her USO shows for troops in the 1960s, and Ray Heatherton — Joey’s dad, who decades earlier hosted the New York kiddie radio program The Ray Heatherton Show.
The Rerun Show
In 2002, NBC assembled a group of sketch comedians to re-create episodes of old sitcoms like The Facts of Life, Bewitched, and The Partridge Family. Original scripts were used, but the actors performed them in a campy, winking, wildly over the top style to suggest ribald subtext not present in the original comedies.
Shields and Yarnell
Variety shows were a big part of the TV schedule in the 1970s, and married performers Robert Shields and Lorene Yarnell regularly traversed the circuit. CBS figured Shields and Yarnell were such a draw that they gave the duo its own variety show, airing in 1977 and then in the winter of 1978. Celebrity guests joined Shields and Yarnell for sketches and bits presented in the pair’s unique style. Shields and Yarnell were mimes, and they specialized in pretending to be robots. That was pretty much the whole thing.
Don’t Change That Channel!
Once in a while, a broadcaster’s unceremonious release of a quirky show on its summer schedule wound up working way better than anyone ever would have predicted. Among the classic and important TV shows that started off in little-watched summer slots: The Wide World of Sports (1961), Hee-Haw (1969), Seinfeld (1989 and 1990), Northern Exposure (1990), Survivor (2000), and American Idol (2002).