Gather ‘round the campfire, young ‘uns.  Unfortunately for you, Grandpa Jeff is feeling a might nostalgic about days gone by, and rather than reprint the penis enlargement spam Stan Lee’s been sending me (“Now you too will have a reason to holler, ‘Excelsior!’”), I wanted to talk to you about this most special and sacred time of year:  the start of the fall TV season.

Yes, it’s September, the time when the new TV shows start premiering, and it’s all the talk on the infotainment channels, plus a good chunk of the Net that isn’t still taken up by advertising or fanfic.  Plus. ABC is in a god-forsaken bind on their hit show 8 Simple Rules… now their main star, John Ritter, has checked out (and RIP, Mr. Ritter.  I’ll miss you popping up unexpectedly in Stephen King miniseries, I have to admit).  ABC, which had anchored a new line-up of family sitcoms around their rare hit, has little choice but to retool the show to continue despite the absence of the show’s biggest star/central character. 

(And I’m sure somebody else has commented on this, but 8 Simple Rules… is based on a book by W. Bruce Cameron, taken from his web columns.  Similarly, that show my parents made my brothers and I watch when we’d done something wrong, Eight Is Enough, based on the book by Thomas Braden and taken from his newspaper columns, had a similar dilemma when the mother on that show (Diana Hyland, I think) kicked the bucket.  A little bit different since that was an hour long show about the triumph of bad hairstyles over common sense, and Ritter’s sitcom was all about Ritter, but I think a simple lesson can be gleaned from these two examples and I pray ABC learns it:  never make a TV show based on a book, or people will die.  (I’m sort of hoping Katey Sagal’s character will find new love with Betty Buckley but I’m sure I’m absolutely the only one…))

What I’ve noticed, though, about this season’s shows are they’re all at a big disadvantage to TV shows when I was growing up:  mainly that, if I want to, I can actually watch them.

You see, I grew up out in the woods, far from decent TV reception and much, much farther from cable.  We got two and a half channels, the half being PBS, which we could only get during the daylight hours.  (This means my public television education never went past Zoom—I never developed the true geek’s ability to recite Monty Python routines by heart, thus rendering me incapable of scoring with Ren Faire chicks in college.  To this day, I’m still not sure whether I’m sorry about that or not…)

I guess to torture me, my parents had a subscription to TV Guide—it’s not like you really need the damn thing when all you get is ABC and CBS—and I read the thing religiously, cover to cover.  Those of you who grew up here in San Francisco—man, did I envy you.  A Tarzan movie ever Saturday morning, and a Godzilla movie every Saturday afternoon?  Meanwhile, the local stations where I grew up showed nothing more exciting than Gunsmoke or—if we were very lucky—Marcus Welby reruns.

I read that TV Guide (after every comic had been read three or four times) and memorized what was on every channel at every time.  The problem was, a lot of the shows were ones I’d never seen, and since they were in syndication, TV Guide never wrote about.  At least, I could imagine Cliffhangers somewhat accurately even if I could never watch it.

But a lot of other showers I could only read the two sentence summary and guess what they were about.  I’d have theories, based on other things I read, or titles I also knew, and then I’d suture together my own idea of the show.  To continue in the grand Onomatopoeia tradition of humiliating myself as much as possible, I thought I’d share with you some of my insanely off-base theories about these unseen shows.  Please keep in mind, many of these theories were developed when I was very young, and quickly shed some of these assumptions, some of them as early as the age of eighteen or nineteen.

In any event:

The Avengers:  Clearly, this was based on the comic book since they had the same name.  But I couldn’t find any reference in my comics to either “Steed” or “Mrs. Peel” always mentioned by the TV Guide.  My conclusion?  Mrs. Peel was the woman who worked in the kitchen of Avengers Mansion (because of her name, I always imagined her with a potato in one hand) while Steed was a superhero who could turn into a horse.  So Mrs. Peel and Steed (who I imagined to be like Mr. Ed, which I guess I somehow had seen) would foil spy rings and the types of things the rest of the Avengers couldn’t be bothered with.  Looking back, I’m shocked Roy Thomas, with his similar compulsive disorder of linking everything together, didn’t do something similar in the book, or at least namedrop the characters repeatedly.

The Invaders:  You’d think a similar problem might have occurred here, but luckily I’d been reading the Guide for several years before the comic book came along.  However, The Invaders threw me because one of the laws of TV shows seemed to be, you named them after your heroes.  SWAT was, after all, not named Crooks.  Therefore, The Invaders had to be told from the perspective of a bunch of people from Earth invading another planet.  This seemed like a pretty cool idea for a show to me, although I couldn’t quite figure out how the character described in the summaries fit into it, since it talked about him constantly trying to expose the Invaders.  Obviously, he was the bad guy, the Earthman who defected, and the heroes had to stop him before he revealed their secrets.  Writing this now, I realize this sounds a little bit like City on the Edge of Forever, which may or may not be coincidental.  (By the way, only an old Mad Magazine parody kept me from making the same mistakes about Land of the Giants.)

Garrison’s Gorillas:  This was a show I learned about through the ‘70s version of the Internet:  bubble gum trading cards.  The show was mentioned several times on the back of the Planet of the Apes trading cards in Ron Harper’s profile—I guess the writers thought they were being clever.  It just went on to confuse me, though:  I came to the conclusion that Garrison’s Gorillas, which was set during World War II, was a war show about a Sergeant in charge of a military squad of actual gorillas, trained in the fine art of Nazi-fighting.  I still think this would be a great idea for a show or movie, despite a nagging suspicion that gorillas probably freak out when you lob heavy artillery at them.

Adam-12:  We actually got this TV show, and yes, I was profoundly disappointed the first time I watched it and Adam-12 turned out to be radio handle for the squad car, and not one of the cops, who was a crime-fighting robot.  I actually held this theory for more than one episode just because the two actors, Martin Milner and Kent McCord, both played their characters like they were robots.  I’m convinced the guy who wrote Robocop thought the same thing, and later figured out a way to turn his youthful confusion into cold hard cash.

Car 54, Where Are You?:  Reading adaptations of Twilight Zone episodes probably led to my most profound misunderstanding about by what I’ve since learned is an affable, formulaic comedy.  I can’t even read the title now without getting a stab of existential loneliness.  My version of Car 54 was about two cops in a police car who’ve become lost in time, and drive across various historical epochs trying to find the portal that will get them back home.  Of course, along the way, they have to solve crimes, and use their superior firepower to stave off invading hordes, and like that, but mainly I just imagined these two beat cops in their police car, driving across an endless desert while a faint voice could be heard on the radio through dashes of static:  “Car 54, where are you?  Car 54, where are you?”

So, to sum up:  as a child, I was insane.  And yet, to be fair, was I really more insane than the people who made TV shows?  After all, my horrifying literal-mindedness worked perfectly fine when applied to shows like Lost In Space or The Flying Nun or My Favorite Martian or My Mother, The Car (which nonetheless creeped me out at some deep Freudian level I have no wish to examine) and shows like the utterly unbalanced Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, which somehow managed to put werewolves and leprechauns on a submarine, even transcended the powers of my overheated imagination to distort and exaggerate.  The people retooling 8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter… (a title that, like My Mother, The Car, sends off Freudian sirens and “woo-woo, don’t look in the closet” alarms) should consider such concepts as viable options, if you ask me.  Put John Ritter’s voice over a shot of an alarmed looking car which Katey Sagal could have the occasional earnest heart-to-heart with, and your show will never die, at least in the memories of lunatics like me, the types who believe, to paraphrase Emily Dickenson, television is all we need of heaven and all we know of hell.