Supertrain? I would buy it. (1 Viewer)

Up there in the annals of TV history along with My Mother The Car as concensus shows for the worst ever, I for one would love to see it again. I vividly remember watching every ep first run with my mom back in 79 on a little b/w set in my parents kitchen. Probably revisionist history or nostalgia, but I remember liking it and I'd love to check it out again. after all, it had a good hook to it. A cross country train containing various celebrity guest stars and several smaller individual plots. It was made as a type of Love Boat or Fantasy Island on wheels but obviously suffered a very different fate in the ratings. Not really sure why though, for it's time, the acting couldn't possibility have been that much worse than those other two shows and I'm sure the writing on Love Boat and Fantasy was just as corny. That was more a function of that era than any particular show. I mean lets face it, BJ and The Bear and Dukes were hits and there was no way either of those was going to be confused with Shakespere.

I was 10 when I last saw it so I'm very curious what makes this show sooo bad compared to it's contemporaries. Especially after recently watching a first season episode of Different Strokes (a hit show) from the same year. All I can say is WOW. The acting (save Bain) and writing were so horrible, I could barely get through it.

Well most shows of that era were pretty horrible, hits and non-hits alike. What made Supertrain the legendary bomb that it was had to do with how incessantly it was promoted and the massive amount of money that NBC sunk into it. Was it markedly worse than a lot of the other crap around? Probably not but the ratings were bad and you can get away with a successful bad show a lot easier than you can with a bad show that bombs.

Curious what it was up against in the ratings that it got clobbered as bad as it did. As I recall, I believe it was originally run Wednesday or Thursday nights.

Neil Brock said:

Well most shows of that era were pretty horrible, hits and non-hits alike. What made Supertrain the legendary bomb that it was had to do with how incessantly it was promoted and the massive amount of money that NBC sunk into it. Was it markedly worse than a lot of the other crap around? Probably not but the ratings were bad and you can get away with a successful bad show a lot easier than you can with a bad show that bombs.

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1979 segment from Today profiling Supertrain:

In addition to everything that Neil said, I think another thing to consider is that Love Boat and Fantasy Island had one thing that Supertrain didn't - producer Aaron Spelling. Especially at that time, he had enough of a track record with ABC that they seemed willing to trust him with time to find ways to make his shows, whatever their artistic merits, work. (It took Love Boat 3 TV movies with various casts before becoming a series.) And in that era, he managed to work his magic (evil magic? ) and produce hit after hit. According to wiki, NBC was producing the show itself along with Dan (Dark Shadows) Curtis, and none of them seemed to be able to keep costs from getting out of control, which combined with bad ratings resulted in a relatively quick cancellation.

It was a very costly show to produce, so they didn't just want it to be a hit: it had to be to justify the production costs. Their solution to script problems was to throw money at them, and when has that ever worked? And it wasn't just a trainwreck in the figurative sense—but the literal one, too! But they sure tried to get their money's worth with their advertising; that was the biggest problem at pre-Tartikoff-and-Tinker NBC: putting more effort into ad campaigns than into the actual shows. Its fate in history as one of TV's biggest bombs was sealed when Brandon Tartikoff denounced it in his book The Last Great Ride. Even Fred Silverman eventually admitted the concept worked better than the execution, but the idea itself came from Paul Klein, the same Paul Klein who called ABC's audience "kids and dummies" when Silverman-led ABC was #1. Its competition was Eight is Enough and The Incredible Hulk; that alone is probably what sealed its fate, and if that hadn't done it, the presumptuous comparisons to Hitchock would have.

By contrast, Diff'rent Strokes was a Top 30 show and didn't leave huge stains of red ink on NBC's books.* It also attracted controversy that helped draw people to it as they got angry letters from both blacks and whites who opposed the idea of a mixed-race family. And undoubtedly the success of Annie on Broadway enabled a bunch of shows and movies about orphans. And before Gary Coleman, there had never been a more successful black child star except for Michael Jackson, but his fame was mostly limited to music. Okay, at least at first it was. But that show was a gift horse that they could not afford to look in the mouth.


The success of Love Boat and Fantasy Island had less to do with the writing than with the revolving door of Old Hollywood guest stars. BJ and the Bear was a byproduct of the CB radio craze, and Dukes was popular because of the Carter-era in all things Southern.**


But who owns the rights to this show? NBC produced it in-house, so that should put it completely under Universal's control unless Dan Curtis' family still owns a piece of it.

*I once read a book that had a list of what TV shows cost, and it said one episode of this show cost about $168,000 to produce. I can't remember the name of the book, only that it was written around 1980 and had a generic title like Television Statistics or something like that.

**Why else would there have been a show called Carter Country? 1979 wasn't a good year for Bud Yorkin, either. A Silverman-free ABC cancelled that, What's Happening and his new show 13 Queens Blvd all in 1979. He also says Diff'rent Strokes was his idea. In fact, it seems like there were a lot of flop TV shows in 1979.

I have a set of episodes from off-air 1979 NBC airings (yes, someone loved the show that much he recorded it every week!). As much as a soft spot I have for late 70s escapist junk-food TV like "Love Boat" and "Fantasy Island" etc. this show isn't even in the league of those two. The stories are that bad they can't even be enjoyed in a so-fun-it's-bad way. The simple fact is that "Love Boat" and "Fantasy Island" had a basic premise that made it credible for the stories to take place within the setting of the show. But "Supertrain" was always going to be limited to begin with because can you realistically have these storylines play out realistically in the limited setting of a train, which even with all the crazy amenities is not going to be as expansive as what "Love Boat" could offer? (and "Love Boat" would at least have the people get off the boat in the exotic locales!) The answer is no. It was obvious they were struggling for plots so first we got the requisite rip-off of "Strangers On A Train" (Dick Van Dyke as a drifter who hangs around in the station and who seemingly is going to kill Larry Linville's wife Barbara Rhoades for him when he doesn't want him to) and then after that, they gave us a "Prisoner of Zenda" ripoff with Roy Thinnes as a presidential candidate who gets switched with a twin brother that takes absurdity to new levels. You had too many crew members with nothing to do (hence the jettisoning of a number of them at the halfway point with Charlie Brill as the effete hairdresser and Nita Talbot as the nurse to doctor Robert Alda among those who got the axe) and then in the ultimate example of how this show was never sure if they were drama or comedy, they added a laugh track only in the last episode aired!


It's one of those shows I'd get only for the era and some improved quality episodes over the off-air recordings of mine (especially to see Rhoades, who has a bikini scene in her episode!) but it could also use a retrospective documentary of "What were we thinking?" in the presentation.

In retrospect, I had a real affinity for picking rating losers to watch weekly in the years from 76-81, Among the other ones I remember faithfully tuning in every week to were: Holmes and YoYo, Turnabout (never realized till now I must have been quite the John Schuck fan), Struck By Lightning, Mr. Merlin, Eichied, Today's FBI, Brother's and Sisters, Strike Force, Darkroom, and Here's Boomer.

quality stuff, huh? I cite my age as my only excuse. LOL

Here's Boomer I mainly remember because of the theme song and because of the mid-1980s Disney Channel reruns (I managed to tape the Michael J. Fox episode but none of the others, that's probably why it's stuck in my mind). For some reason, it took NBC until 1982 to burn off all the episodes, and there weren't that many.

Supertrain crashed and burned from the start, and as it went along during its short life time and again I heard about shows which were also faltering so bad that a saying came out "The only show that had less viewers than (Insert name of program here) was Supertrain.

They boast in that interview that the train set alone cost $5,000,000 which was an unheard of sum of money in those days. Not sure if they were lying, seeing as how the production costs for each episode were only $168,000, according to Matthew's comment above. IMDB says it costs $1,000,000 (still an ungodly amount of tv money in 1979). Whatever the truth of its costs, it was obviously expensive to do it. And yes, it was overly-hyped. My family sat through the pilot and I think, never watched again. We simply didn't care for it, and this is from a family that watched every episode of Pink Lady & Jeff. We watched that show because we enjoyed laughing at it; there was nothing to laugh at or with on Supertrain.

I read somewhere that the Set was bought by an Amusement Park in Japan and was moved there, I haven't heard anything since.


PS. IIRC Pink Lady & Jeff was one of those shows I mentioned that got tagged "The only show with lower ratings was ST". Interestingly ANOTHER show (or in this case event) that tagged with the same moniker was one of the NBA Playoff games. The NBA was in trouble at the time (Most of the Playoff Games were tape-delayed until 11:30 PM EST), and wasn't until a rather insignificant fellow named Micheal Jordon came on the scene did the NBA stage a comeback.

Ethan Riley said:

Not sure if they were lying, seeing as how the production costs for each episode were only $168,000, according to Matthew's comment above. IMDB says it costs $1,000,000 (still an ungodly amount of tv money in 1979).

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I'm pretty sure the $168 000 figure was for Different Strokes. A million sounds far more likely - that's what Battlestar Galactica cost per episode around the same time.

Oh yeah, I misunderstood that post. Supertrain probably was 1 million per episode. Battlestar was supposedly the most expensive show ever, up to that time. Supertrain had a lot of guests, but the exorbitant costs for the set would have diminished if the show had gone on longer and they'd received more return for their investment.

Did anyone else on this show besides Ilene Graff and Harrison Page ever land a hit series or movie?

I've only seen bits and pieces of "Supertrain", but it's the kind of guilty pleasure schlock i love

from the 70s, with lots of famous guest stars to distract us from the bad plots!