TVSquad

It's quite ironic that on Sunday night, ABC aired an episode of Boston Legal in the 10 PM time slot and called it a "special time." Most people forget this, but as my brother Rich pointed out in his review of the episode, Sunday at 10 was the show's original time slot, until the network put a new medical show called Grey's Anatomy into that slot in late March 2005.

The intention was to air Grey's in that slot for a few weeks, help it get an audience, then move it to another slot and bring BL back to Sundays at 10. Of course, we all know what happened: Grey's ratings surpassed those of BL, rendering William Shatner and James Spader temporarily homeless. And the audience just kept steadily building until it became the top-rated show on television.

Even though that was less than two years ago, it still amazes me how little fanfare Grey's had when it arrived on the scene, especially compared to the hype many of this fall's pilots got even before one episode aired. There's precedent to this of course, even in this "perform or else" era of program development, a few shows have come out of nowhere to become big hits, despite the fact that they started off slowly or their networks failed to promote them. Here are some other past and present examples of shows that started with little attention and became huge hits:

1. CSI - It's spawned two direct spin-offs and inspired a slew of procedural shows, but viewers forget that this show started on Fridays when it premired on CBS in 2000. According to my fellow Squadder Brett, the Tiffany network was hyping its remake of The Fugitive, with Tim Daly and Mykelti Williamson, which tanked before the season was out. Meanwhile, William Peterson, Marg Helgenberger and company were getting pretty good ratings on what is usually a sleepy TV night. When CBS moved the show to Thursdays at 9 in February 2001 (paired up with Survivor, which was moved from Wednesdays), the show's ratings took off, bettering NBC's once-vaunted "Must-See TV" lineup almost immediately. The show's been at the top of the ratings ever since.

2. M*A*S*H - Most people my age remember the exact time slot M*A*S*H was in: Mondays at 9. It seemed like it occupied that slot on CBS's schedule for its entire run. But it didn't hit that time slot until midway through the sixth season, in 1978; in fact, it moved around a lot, going from Sunday to Saturday to Tuesday to Friday, finally settling back on Tuesday at 9 during its fourth season. That's because the ratings were pretty low up until that time. But once they picked up during season four, they stayed high, culminating in the show's finale, which to this day is the most-watched series episode of all time.

3. Seinfeld - This show was such an oddball idea -- where does a stand-up comedian get his material? -- that the prime-time division didn't even produce the show; through its entire run, NBC classified it as a "late night" show because that's the division that produced it. It started with the pilot, which aired in the summer of 1989; then four episodes aired in the summer of 1990. Then 13 episodes aired starting in January 1991. None of them got great ratings. But NBC was patient with the show; Season Three was the first one to get a full slate of 22 episodes, and it finally started picking up ratings at the end of that season. By the middle of it's fourth season, it had moved from Wednesdays to Thursdays, and it was on its way to becoming legendary.

4. Everybody Loves Raymond - This was another show that CBS decided to inauspiciously debut on Fridays, a night where the only sitcoms that did well were ones that had cute kids (Full House) or people with silly voices (Perfect Strangers, Family Matters). Traditional sitcoms about adults, especially older adults, were not exactly the rage in 1996; the show finished ranked in 82nd place. But the network, prodded by Bill Cosby, decided to stick with the show and moved it to Monday late in its first season, and the ratings slowly picked up, peaking in the sixth season. By the time the show was over, Ray Romano was an Emmy winner and the highest-paid sitcom star on TV. He should pay Cosby a commission.

5. Cheers - If NBC wasn't in such crappy shape when Cheers started in 1982, we may have never seen more than one season of this all-time classic. Its lousy ratings on Thursdays -- it came in 72nd place for the season -- didn't phase the network at all; they knew they had a quality show on their hands and wanted to build a night around the show (eventually, Family Ties and Night Court would move to Thursdays, and we all know what happened when The Cosby Show premiered). Again, this was a show that chugged along, getting increasingly better ratings, until it hit #1 in 1990.

I know there are other shows that started this way. If you have any good candidates, let me know in the comments.