 This is the SF Productions Podcast Network. That wonderful TV here, 1994, goes on. From the Pop Culture Bunker, I'm Mindy. And I'm Mark. You can check out our audio podcast, How I Got My Wife 3 Comics on iTunes, or on our website, sfpodcastnetwork.com. Well, we didn't get through all of those shows from the 1994 TV Guide Fall preview issue, so let's jump right back into that. On Thursday, we had My So-Called Life on ABC, The Poster Child, along with Firefly, for Cancel Too Soon, and a show that made Claire Danes a star. She plays Angela, a moody adolescent, finding her way through life. While there are adults on the show, that's Armstrong plays her mother, it's all about Angela and her relationships. Jared Leto plays her on-off boyfriend in his first regular role. Wilson Cruz plays another friend, a gay character. You may know him as The New Doctor on Star Trek Discovery. The series took subjects that would normally fall under the very special episode. Moniker, alcoholism, homelessness, school violence, and made them part of a continuing storyline. It got and continues to get grey reviews and won a Golden Globe for Danes. Unfortunately, it was scheduled against NBC's Thursday Night lineup as well as Martin and Living Single on Fox. As a result, ratings were poor. An online fan campaign, the first time the worldwide web was used for this purpose, pushed the network to renew the show. But when Danes asked me to let go, that was the last straw. The show ran all of 19 episodes. Do South on CBS is a fanciful crime-dramedy from Paul Haguez who would go on to co-create Walker, Texas Ranger and write and produce the Oscar-winning Million Dollar Baby and Crash. Paul Gross plays a member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, who is assigned to the Canadian Consulate in Chicago, assigned to work with a police detective played by David Marciano. The show was actually shot in Toronto. This was part of a growing trend to reduce show costs. The show won a ton of Geminis, Canada's Emmys, and its cult status created fan conventions a la Star Trek. CBS canceled the series after a single season, but international success, the highest-rated Canadian series ever, resulted in three more seasons abroad, with a few episodes returning to CBS later. Now here's a show you might have heard of, Friends NBC. As we noted in a recent episode, test audiences of the pilot found the characters smug, superficial and self-absorbed, the focus on Gen X characters too narrow, and the show not very entertaining, clever or original. They found the coffee house setting to be confusing. Despite all that, NBC gave the show a shot. It would go on to run for ten seasons in the top ten for all of them. The final episode in 2003 was watched by 52 million viewers, the fifth highest finale in history, and the most watched episode of the 2000s. It made the six main characters, multi-millionaires, each get two percent of the one billion dollar annual syndication revenues. One of them, Aniston, a movie star, another, a director, swimmer, and the other's TV stars of various success. The show also had a seismic impact, writing the will-day or won't-they trope into sitcom DNA and moving Gen X characters into the spotlight. The show has become comfort food in the pandemic, so it was a good call for HBO Max to pay a nine-figure sum to wrestle streaming rights from Netflix. McKenna ABC, Chad Everett returns to TV in a drama about an outfitting business. His son, Brick, era close, later of Without a Trace and Nashville, takes over after his brother's death. Brick's sister, Cass, Jennifer Love-Hewitt, comes in to help. The show never caught on, CBS gave it three weeks, then burned off two more the next summer with eight never aired in the U.S. New York undercover on Fox, technically a part of Dick Wolf's Law and Order Universe, although being a Fox series, it's hard to tell. It also dealt more with the personal lives of the cops involved. There was a lot of cast turnover during the fourth seasons of the series. Jesse L. Martin and Ice-T both played criminals on this series before going on to long runs on the main Law and Order franchise. Over the last two years, there has been talk of a reboot currently gestating at Peacock. Matt Man of the People, NBC, Dabney Coleman takes a third swing at the sitcom star you love to hate concept. This time he plays an outspoken columnist, now working for his daughter Cynthia Gibb, as she tries to freshen up the paper's image. The show actually did very well, number 12 in the ratings, but it lost a lot of audience from its lead-in which was Seinfeld, which then also impacted the numbers for ER which followed it. As a result, NBC candid after one season. It was replaced by another series moving over to Thursday called Friends. The LA Times called Man-Man one of the fall season's least likable new comedies. Chicago Hope on CBS, one of two medical series that premiered against each other. We'll get to the other one in a moment. Created by David E. Kelly and set in a private hospital with a large cast. Mandy Patankin, Hector Elizondo, Adam Arkin, Peter Berg, Jane Brooke, Peter McNichol and Christine Lottie just to name a few. During six seasons, there was quite a lot of cross-pollination within the show's characters appearing on Picket Fences, Homicide and Early Edition. Several actors went on to CBS's NCIS and Patankin to Criminal Minds. The show has the honor of broadcasting the first regular series episode of any series in HD in 1998. It won seven Emmys and a Golden Globe but fell under the shadows of… ER and NBC also set at a Chicago hospital. It was the longest running medical series on US TV fifteen seasons until Grey's Anatomy came along. There's a huge cast with Noah Wiley, Laura Inns, Maura Tierney, Goren Viznick, Anthony Edwards and Eric Lissalle in more than half the episodes as well as runs by Alex Kingston, Sherry Stringfield, Juliana Margolies, Linda Cardellini, Ming Na-Wen, Gloria Rubin, John Stamos, Kelly Martin, William H. Basie and Angela Bassett. Oh, and this was the series that made George Clooney a superstar. Ironically, Clooney's first regular TV role was on a sitcom called ER. This series was based on a Michael Crichton screenplay from the 70s, which only turned up after Jurassic Park made him a hot commodity. ER was in the top ten ratings almost immediately and number one for three of them and stayed there for ten of the fifteen seasons. In a prescient move, all episodes were shot in widescreen, despite not being broadcast in HD until Season 7. It would go on to win 22 Emmys out of 124 nominations. It would take until 2018 and Game of Thrones to surpass that nomination total. Moving on to Friday, Mantis on Fox, a sci-fi superhero series about a black scientist Carl Lumley who was shot by a police sniper while trying to rescue a child, leaving him in a wheelchair. After losing a lawsuit against the police department, why does that sound familiar? He built an exoskeleton and body armor, becoming a vigilante. By the way, Mantis is an acronym for Mechanically Augmented Neurotransmitter Interception System. He's even got an underwater lab and a flying car slash submarine called the Chrysalis. Sam Raimi produced the series, which included multiple African-American actors in the pilot, including Gina Torres. But the network recast the series with mostly white actors apart from Lumley. Roger Rees was brought in as his cue. The show didn't do well, and a lot more fantasy elements were added to no avail. The series lasted a season, with the title character sacrificing himself in a near future. This sounds like a good choice for a reboot. Yes, yes. Under suspicion on CBS, considered to be an Americanized prime suspect, the show starred Karen Sillis as the only female detective in a Portland, Oregon police squad. Despite good reviews and praise for Sillis' performance, the show only lasted a season. Sillis went on to TV movies and a few films not getting another regular role into 2005's Wanted. So let's recap. In 1994, out of 28 new series, there were six hits which were defining as lasting more than one season. 35, Touched by an Angel, Friends, New York Undercover, Chicago Hope and ER, and 22 misses for a 21% success rate. You know, I'm going to just say right now, I preferred Chicago Hope to ER. I watched Chicago Hope when it was on. I had to go back and rewatch ER later. I don't know if you remember that. I think I do. Yeah. I think my friend Janet said ER was good, so I went back and watched it after Chicago Hope wasn't on anymore. That's what, hey, what's that? Yep. You can do that. And now you can watch almost all of them somewhere. Yeah. Except you can't watch the Dick Wolf stuff. Yeah. This is annoying. Yes. Dick Wolf, we should have his own streaming service. Well, that's what Peacock is going to be. They ever get around to it. Yeah. So while you're waiting for Dick Wolf to start streaming, you can check out our audio podcast, How I Got My Wife to Read Comics on iTunes, or on our website, sfpodcastnetwork.com. From the Pop Culture Bunker, I'm Mindy. And I'm Mark. Thanks for watching.