Seven Failed Sitcom Pilots Too Weird to Be Believed
What’s that? You’ve never heard of Poochinski, the show starring a murdered cop who is resurrected as a crime-solving bulldog voiced by the great Peter Boyle? Well, perhaps that’s because they only made one episode before some executive thought this brilliant TV series just might not find an audience.
Honestly, when stacked against some of the other bizarre pilots that were never picked up, Poochinski starts to look like a pretty good idea. Who wouldn’t love a police procedural starring a detective dog that’s been resurrected from the dead, anyway? Here’s a look at some of the other pilots that, for better or worse, were just too weird to make into a full series…
‘Stick Around’ (1977)
Before he became the lovable foreign mechanic Latka Gravas on Taxi, Andy Kaufman loaned the “Foreign Man” character from his stand-up act to another potential sitcom. Set in the year 2055, Stick Around was about a run-down servant robot named Andy who sounded and acted a lot like Latka would. Being an older model robot, much of the show’s comedy — or, would-be comedy, as it wasn’t exactly funny — came from Andy malfunctioning and him not understanding how to use his owner’s “antique” 1970s appliances. It was a remarkably bad pilot, and ABC wisely didn’t pick it up. Unfortunately, Kaufman didn’t seem to learn his lesson from Stick Around, as he would go on to play a painfully unfunny robot in the movie Heartbeeps.
‘LAX 2194’ (1994)
Another future-set sitcom with talent that outweighed the material and that starred Ryan Stiles, Kelly Hu and Matthew Perry as futuristic LAX baggage handlers. Much like Kaufman in Stick Around, Stiles played an ambiguously-accented “bumbling” robot while Hu, as far as I can tell, played a sexy, underdressed lady baggage handler! Mercifully, only one minute of this show exists online, which doesn’t even feature Perry, but we know from interviews that Perry played another baggage handler and that he nearly didn’t get cast in Friends because of his commitment to this sci-fi shitshow.
‘Walkin’ Walter’ (1977)
According to IMDb, Walkin’ Walter is about “a free-spirited ex-vaudevillian who moves in with and freeloads off of his long-lost brother’s wife and her two foster children.” However, if you just watch the opening theme song — which is all that seems to still exist of the pilot — the show seems to be about an old guy who walks kinda funny, casually steals from people and leads kids around the park like the pied piper.
According to NPR contributor Danny Deraney’s Instagram, in the mid-1970s, “ABC desperately wanted a Black show.” Naturally, they went to Garry Marshall and the result was Walkin’ Walter. In time, networks would go to actual Black people for Black shows, but that’s just not how things were done in 1977.
‘Where’s Rodney’ (1990)
Rodney Dangerfield may have been a comedy genius, but he wasn’t always the smartest at finding ways to showcase his sense of humor. Case in point: the 1990 sitcom pilot Where’s Rodney?. In it, a 12-year-old boy named Rodney Barnes — who idolizes Rodney Rangerfield — can magically summon the aging comedian at will and ask him for advice. How can he do this? The pilot doesn’t say, but it’s also hard to imagine anyone would care enough to ask.
‘Heat Vision and Jack’ (1999)
Created by Dan Harmon and Rob Schrab and directed by Ben Stiller, Heat Vision and Jack was an insanely funny sci-fi comedy pilot that comes off almost as a brilliant parody of Knight Rider. In it, Jack Black is a former astronaut who gained superintelligence from solar energy, though it only really works during the daytime. Then there’s Heat Vision, Jack’s best pal who just happens to be a talking motorcycle that contains the soul of his dead roommate (played by Owen Wilson). It’s silly and smart in all the right ways.
‘Lookwell’ (1991)
Another genuinely great — but also quite weird — unsold TV pilot is Lookwell, created by Conan O’Brien and Robert Smigel and starring Adam West. In the show, West plays a brilliant self-parody as an out-of-work TV star who once played a beloved TV detective. So popular was the fictional show, Bannigan, that its star, Ty Lookwell (West) received an honorary LAPD police badge. The distinction, however, went to his head, and now he’s constantly pretending to be a real police officer.
This totally should have been a real show, but then Conan may not have been available to host Late Night with Conan O’Brien, and, by extension, Smigel might not have created Triumph the Insult Comic Dog.
‘Poochinkski’ (1990)
To paraphrase — or, entirely mangle — the words of Bernie Sanders, I am once again asking for you to give Poochinski a chance.
Sure the pilot was made 35 years ago, literally no one remembers it and Peter Boyle is very dead, but this can still work. All we need is a bold network executive willing to take a chance on it with a new star well-versed at playing a grizzled cop.
Michael Chiklis, if you’re reading this, American network TV needs you.
