List Your Favorite SUMMER REPLACEMENT Shows! (1 Viewer)

[Ron1973]

Possibly the most successful summer replacement show in terms of the number of seasons was Hee Haw. It started life as a 13 episode order to replace The Smothers Brothers on CBS in the summer of 1969. I read that Roy Clark had reservations about the show hurting his career and his agent told him that no one would watch it! Hee Haw got the ax from CBS in 1971 during their infamous "rural purge" but it was picked up in first run syndication where it went until 1993!

 

[AndyMcKinney]

Possibly the most successful summer replacement show in terms of the number of seasons was Hee Haw. It started life as a 13 episode order to replace The Smothers Brothers on CBS in the summer of 1969. I read that Roy Clark had reservations about the show hurting his career and his agent told him that no one would watch it! Hee Haw got the ax from CBS in 1971 during their infamous "rural purge" but it was picked up in first run syndication where it went until 1993!

OF course, only the first two of Hee Haw's seasons would have been as a summer replacement show, then, so as a "summer replacement", it wasn't very successful, but it became so once it went into first-run syndication.

 

[Ron1973]

OF course, only the first two of Hee Haw's seasons would have been as a summer replacement show, then, so as a "summer replacement", it wasn't very successful, but it became so once it went into first-run syndication.

Technically 3 (if you want to be technical lol) as the first 13 episodes are counted as Season 1. They actually had to do some fancy figures during the last season to make it be "25" seasons. The first 13 episodes are considered a season unto themselves and then the 1992 debacle of changing to being "The Hee Haw Show" is considered Season 24 with the season of re-runs, titled "Hee Haw Silver" being Season 25. And it is true that technically the first run syndication doesn't count but without it being a summer replacement to begin with, it wouldn't have ever been around to be a first run syndication success.

 

[ThatDonGuy]

Originally Posted by Garysb
The one hour specials that Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz did as a continuation of I Love Lucy were packaged with new openings and called the Lucy - Desi Comedy Hour on CBS in the summer of 1962. These shows ran as a summer replacement series in prime time from 1962 to 1967 except for 1966 when it did not air.
CBS also ran a summer replacement program called Vacation Playhouse which consisted of failed pilots . If they had something like that today we might have been able to see the Wonder Woman pilot.

CBS has had a number of these - I think they had one in the 1990s. There was also one starring George Burns, but that looked to be a combination of pilots (one of which actually got sold, as Leo & Liz in Beverly Hills) and one-off stories.
ABC also did this one year in the 1970s, with a combination of unsold pilots and burn-offs of cancelled series.

It seems to me that a lot of semi popular pop groups had short summer variety type series.

The Jackson 5 also had a four-week series on CBS one summer.

Originally Posted by JoeDoakes
Me too. Generally, I cannot remember which shows were summer replacements and which weren't. There are two exceptions to that. First, one summer I remember watching Bob Crane's show in which he played a teacher.

Was it The Bob Crane Show? I don't think he was a teacher, or if he was, he quit his job in the first episode - the plot had Crane leaving his job to go back to college (it may have been med school). I vaguely remember an interview he had with Dinah Shore, where he said that the original idea for the title was "Second Start."

Originally Posted by Charles Ellis
Does anyone (besides myself) remember 3 Girls 3 starring Debbie Allen, Mimi Kennedy, and Ellen Foley? This ran for two summers on NBC in the late 70s.

I remember it, but I don't remember a second season.