TVSquad

Lee Goldberg blames William Simon for turning him on to YouTube, and now I'm blaming Lee Goldberg for ruining the rest of my work day.

Goldberg has started a new blog, Main Title Heaven. It's a blog filled with clips of the opening titles to various TV shows, both old and new. Not just the most popular, famous ones (though he has stuff like Magnum, P.I., I Dream of Jeannie, and the original Battlestar Galactica), but also little gems you might not think of, like Banacek, Raven, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Man From Atlantis, The Magician, Seaquest, It Takes A Thief, and Mannix. He's gotta get that other version of the Flipper theme up though.

This site will suck up all of your time today and bring back a lot of memories. Hey, remember when TV shows actually had theme songs and openings?

Is it possible for a TV show to jump the shark before its first season is even over? TV writer Lee Goldberg thinks that it may have. The L.A. Times has a story about how a lot of people in the medical profession think that the popular ABC medical drama has already gone way over the top. Specifically, they're talking about the season finale and the plot about an intern getting involved with a patient.

I've never seen the show, so I can't say that it has jumped the shark or not. But I guess my first question is: people are actually still using the term "jumping the shark?" That's soooo 2001.

TVShowsonDVD.com reports that the first season of the long-running Dick Van Dyke series will be released on September 12. It will be a 5 disc set, but will not include the pilot episode of the series, which was actually an episode of Jake and the Fatman. So maybe we'll have to wait for that DVD set to see the pilot ep of Diagnosis Murder.

I really liked this show, actually. It was sort of a male Murder, She Wrote, and it was good to see Vany Dyke on a weekly series again.

During this upfronts week, you'll not only hear about the shows that make the schedule, you'll hear about pilots that didn't make it. But what happens to the pilots that don't make it? The pilots that are never seen by the public (unless they make it to the internet, which couldn't happen years ago), what happens to them? Forbes has an interesting article about failed pilots (and if you'd like to read a great book on failed pilots, try to track down a copy of Lee Goldberg's two books, Unsold Television Pilots I and II.)

Forbe's also lists the Top 10 Failed Pilots, and while it doesn't include Samurai (with Riptide's Joe Penny as a lawyer by day, sword-wielding superhero by night!), it does include Ethel Is An Elephant, about a guy who moves into a NYC apartment with an elephant roommate; Poochinski, with Peter Boyle as a cop who is killed on duty and comes back as a dog; Rewrite For Murder, with George Clooney and Pam Dawber as mystery writers; Wil Wheaton in 13 Thirteenth Avenue, about a kid who moves into a new apartment building and has vampires and werewolves as neighbors (!), and L.A. Confidential, a TV version of the movie, with Kiefer Sutherland! Wow, I actually would have loved to have seen that.

[via TV Tattle]