“Beane’s of Boston”

In 1979, Garry Marshall bought the American rights for the BBC show Are You Being Served? and wanted to make it a sitcom for CBS. The pilot had been considered “lost” for years but it has recently resurfaced.

The show starred John Hillerman as Captain Peacock and Charlotte Rae as Mrs. Slocombe.

The pilot was apparently an adaptation of the original show’s German Week episode. 

CBS passed on the show. Both John Hillerman and Charlotte Rae would go on to take the roles that would define their careers. John Hillerman in Magnum, PI and Charlotte Rae in The Facts of Life.

Temporary Layoffs Summer Showcase: The Seinfeld Chronicles

Before it became one of the biggest hits of the 1990's, Seinfeld was yet another unsold pilot, burned off by NBC in the middle of the summer. The show didn't set the world on fire, but critics praised it, surprised that NBC hadn't ordered a full season.




An NBC executive became bullish on the show and convinced the network to let him fund more episodes out of his department's own budget. Only four episodes were ordered, but it was enough. The show would get a second season based on the results- a wise decision.

Temporary Layoffs Summer Showcase: The Life & Times of Barney Miller

U.S. Television Networks commission hundreds of television scripts each year. They pick several of these shows to actually produce a filmed sample- a pilot. The pilots are used to determine which shows to actually place on the Fall schedule. The vast majority of pilots nowadays slip into obscurity, never to be seen again.

It wasn't always this way; pilots have always been expensive to produce. Therefore, up until the late 1980's, the networks would try to recoup some of their investment by burning off the episodes in the summer. Thus ABC had Just For Laughs, a summer anthology series that featured unpurchased pilots. One of which was The Life & Times of Barney Miller.




Despite being originally rejected, the pilot became a sensation. ABC quickly tried to retool and get the show back into production. The only two actors who made it into the New and improved Barney Miller were Hal Linden and Abe Vigoda.