Five Classic Sitcoms That Had a Forgotten TV Movie Follow-up
Malcolm in the Middle and King of the Hill will soon experience a resurrection. These are just two of the many recent examples of long-dead sitcoms returning for new episodes. While this might seem like a relatively recent phenomenon, it’s not that far away from a much older TV tradition: the sitcom reunion special. These typically one-hour specials would drop in on the beloved star characters and see how they’re doing years later.
In fact, sometimes a reunion special was exactly what a show needed to tie up loose ends after the series was unexpectedly canceled; for example, in a Gilligan’s Island reunion, all the castaways were rescued. Other times, however, the whole thing comes off as forced and dated.
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Here are five such examples of TV reunion specials with varying levels of success…
The Odd Couple
In the final episode of The Odd Couple, after five years of living with his messy pal Oscar Madison (Jack Klugman), the fastidious Felix Unger (Tony Randall) gets remarried to his ex-wife and moves out of Oscar’s apartment. That was in 1975 and then, in 1993, CBS made a 90-minute TV movie called The Odd Couple Together Again.
In this story, Felix was temporarily kicked out of his home while his wife and daughter planned the daughter’s wedding. Felix then moves in with Oscar for two weeks as Oscar is recovering from throat surgery (in real life, Klugman really did recently battle throat cancer and the severe change in his voice needed addressing in the story).
While Randall and Klugman were always wonderful together — and in real life, the very best of friends — The Odd Couple Together Again is generally seen as a reunion that no one needed. Its long runtime and heavy material made it less fun than the tightly-written half-hour episodes of the original series. Much better reunions between the actors took place on theater stages where they re-teamed several times to perform the play version of The Odd Couple and Neil Simon’s other classic, The Sunshine Boys.
The Bob Newhart Show
Famously, at the end of Bob Newhart’s 1980s sitcom Newhart, his character goes unconscious after taking a hit on the head and, upon waking up, realizes the entire series was a dream of the character he played in his previous show from the 1970s, The Bob Newhart Show. While the segment with The Bob Newhart Show’s Bob Hartley lasted just two minutes, that’s all it took to make it one of the best-ever sitcom finales.
That finale was in 1990 and, a year later, still riding high off the surprise finale, CBS aired The Bob Newhart Show: The 19th Anniversary Special. The 60-minute special picked up where Newhart left off, right after Bob’s crazy dream, and the plot revolves around Bob coming to terms with the dream.
The special is another great example of an unnecessary reunion as it took a truly wonderful two-minute joke and stretched it out over 60 minutes. The only bit that’s somewhat inspired comes at the very end, when after consulting with all his friends, Bob eventually accepts that it was just a dream. Then, as he’s about to get onto an elevator, he finds it’s being repaired by the craziest of all of Newhart’s crazy characters: the three woodsmen Larry, Darryl and Darryl. Still, a solid final joke hardly justified the one-hour slog.
ALF
In comparison to the previous two examples, Project: ALF was pretty good. Or, it was less unnecessary than the others. In reality, ALF was a cheap, crappy show about an ugly puppet, yet, somehow, it captured the zeitgeist at just the right time in the late 1980s and enjoyed a four-year run, two animated spin-offs and tons of ALF merchandise. Despite its success, ALF was suddenly canceled in 1990 at the end of Season Four to make way for new NBC shows like The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.
The cancellation caused the show to end on a cliffhanger where ALF, an alien, is captured by the Air Force’s Alien Task Force. The show wouldn’t get a proper finale until six years later with Project: ALF, in which ALF breaks out of the Air Force headquarters with the aid of a few Air Force scientists, and after a whole bunch of idiotic hijinks, ALF becomes an official ambassador to Earth.
None of the original cast of ALF returned for this 95-minute special, likely because everyone hated being on the original show, especially the dad, Max Wright, who clashed with ALF performer/creator Paul Fusco. As a result, many ALF fans rejected Project: ALF. Still, if any show needs a reunion, it should be one that never had a proper finale. Plus, ALF was a crap show, so having a crappy TV movie follow-up is exactly what it deserved.
Gilligan’s Island
Again, Gilligan’s Island, another show that was unexpectedly canceled, is a perfect example of a sitcom that needed a reunion movie — although it didn’t need three reunion movies. The original show ended in 1967 with the castaways still on the island, and 11 years later, we got the 95-minute TV movie Rescue from Gilligan’s Island in which — you guessed it — everyone was rescued — at least momentarily.
After returning to civilization following 15 years stranded on a desert island, the castaways go through a culture shock and decide to spend Christmas together aboard the Skipper’s new boat, the S.S. Minnow II. However, during the holiday cruise, a storm breaks out and they end up stranded again on the same island.
Most fans found Rescue from Gilligan’s Island to be a worthy, if not quite as good, successor to the original series. It also did quite well in the ratings for NBC, which, of course, resulted in the network’s attempt to squeeze even more out of Gilligan’s Island I.P.
The Castaways on Gilligan’s Island aired the very next year. Everyone is rescued again, but they decide to go back to the island voluntarily to turn it into a resort. The Castaways on Gilligan’s Island was pretty unwatchable and fewer people watched it. However, it did well enough to convince some executive that they needed another sequel two years later, the title of which should make your eyes roll: The Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan’s Island. The less said about this one the better. So, with that: Globetrotters and the castaways team up to fight robots — really.
The Brady Bunch
Like Gilligan’s Island, the various reunions of The Brady Bunch are a textbook case of diminishing returns. The original show ended in 1974, and by 1976, ABC launched The Brady Bunch Hour, which saw the family, in character, host a variety series. While the premiere of The Brady Bunch Hour made for good ratings, because of the show’s sporadic schedule, it ended up with uneven results and was canceled after nine episodes.
Then came The Brady Girls Get Married, during which Marcia Brady and Jan Brady have a double wedding. While intended to be a TV movie, NBC broke it up into three episodes — and then expanded it into its own spin-off show called The Brady Brides. All told, the mediocre Brady Brides was canceled after 10 episodes.
The Brady Brides aired in 1981, but by 1988 there was enough juice back in the Brady tank for CBS to greenlight A Very Brady Christmas. Incredibly, it was the highest-rated TV film that year. Never content to leave money on the table — even if it’s what’s best for a show’s legacy — CBS greenlit the series The Bradys, which was more dramatic in tone and had hour-long episodes. Yes, that series was a flop (it lasted just six episodes).
While there have been several cast reunions since, The Bradys is the last “canon” visit to the original Brady-verse. However, Susan Olsen, who played Cindy Brady, the youngest Brady girl, claimed that another sequel series was recently in development; it supposedly followed the Brady kids as adults, but, because of her right-wing political views, it was allegedly abandoned.
That’s probably for the best.
