Dave Holmes Revisits The Network TV Lineup Of October 1988, Back When ‘Roseanne’ Originally Premiered

There are no surprises in top 10 shows of this season; you have your Cosby Show and your Cheers, your 60 Minutes and your LA Law. But at #11, we see the show that stops you in your tracks and makes you say: “Hold on: there was a romantic situation comedy on prime time network television starring Richard Lewis and Jamie Lee Curtis?” Well, it’s true, and it gets weirder when you remember that performance artist and Bongwater lead singer Ann Magnuson joined the cast in season 2. It’s possible that the golden age of television started a lot earlier than we’re saying it did.

This show wrapped up its sixth season in the top 20, and I remember it most fondly for the lyrics Dan Harmon gave the theme song on his podcast Harmontown.

So, this show started out as a star vehicle for Valerie Harper, titled simply Valerie, but then she clashed with the show’s producers, who wrote her out of her own show and retitled it Valerie’s Family. And then Sandy Duncan moved in as a wacky but wise aunt, and they renamed it again— this time The Hogan Family— for this, its fourth season. Also, in its sixth and final season, it moved from NBC to CBS. It is a twisting, high-stakes story full of thrills, and it really belongs on a soap opera.

Which brings me to Valerie’s husband on the show, Josh Taylor, who now plays Roman Brady on Days of Our Lives. I love Days of Our Lives (in theory, and from a distance; I will actually watch an episode over my dead body), and this is why: Roman was played by Wayne Northrop, who then got replaced by Drake Hogestyn, but then Wayne Northrup wanted to come back, so they let him, and the story was that the second Roman wasn’t Roman at all, but instead an impostor named John, which shocked the whole town, despite the fact that John has a whole different face, voice and body than the first Roman. And then Northrup left again, and Hogestyn is still John, and now Roman is played by Josh Taylor, who used to play a whole different character in the show before he left to do Valerie. American soap operas, you’re weird and I wish you weren’t dying.

This show starred Gary Cole as a former police detective who gets a new lease on life as a late-night radio talk show host who solves his callers’ mysteries in the daytime. I don’t have much to say about it, but I will tell you this: The breakout star of Blockers, which is a very funny movie, is Gary Cole’s dick, which gets numerous lingering close-ups. Do with this information what you will.

With the current debate over immigration, perhaps no show is in such immediate need of a reboot as this one. Clear your schedules, Bronson Pinchot and Mark Linn-Baker.

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If you were to reboot Mr. Belvedere for 2018, who would be in the title role? Is it a David Hyde Pierce kind of a deal? Do you go shot-on-film dramedy for this one? Also, did Christopher Hewitt actually sit on his testicles at a script reading and subsequently shut down production while he recovered? A lot to think about here.

Day By Day was a spin-off of Family Ties, and it was set in my hometown of St. Louis, so I watched and eagerly listened for mentions of toasted ravioli and frozen custard. (I think they might have mentioned The Arch once.) I remember having a moderate crush on the Michael J. Fox of the show, one Christopher Daniel Barnes, who would go on to play Greg Brady in the ‘90s Brady Bunch movies where Jennifer Elise Cox kind of just did Melanie Hutsell’s Jan. I also remember a pre-Melrose Courtney Thorne Smith, a pre-everything Thora Birch, and a post-SNL Julia Louis-Dreyfus. About the latter, I remember thinking “I hope she catches a break someday.” (She did.)

Meanwhile, Nightingales was an Aaron Spelling nighttime soap about nursing students. Two months into its first season, The American Nurses Association issued a statement that read in part: “Nightingales belittles the profession by portraying the future nurses as little sex kittens. Why don’t they just go ahead and do a show about lingerie models instead?” Aaron Spelling would go on to do pretty much exactly that with 1994’s Models, Inc.

We should absolutely reboot this show, with its original cast, right away. I will leave Glen Gordon Caron to figure out all the details, but while I have you here, I must show you my favorite thing of all time, which is Bruce Willis’ magically soulful porch-jam Seagram’s Golden Wine Cooler commercial. It’s wet, and it’s dry:

A way-ahead of its time comedy/drama featuring John Ritter as a police officer and building manager in San Francisco. This one, along with The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd, inspired television critics to invent the portmanteau “dramedy.” Like a lot of dramedies, it lasted two seasons.

On the commercials tip, what is this show former Tattinger’s star Blythe Danner is doing in her spot for Prolia? It seems to be some kind of one-woman show, with no set whatsoever, where she just keeps making entrances and exits. Is it a TED Talk? If you said “Break a leg” to someone, and that person gave you the look Blythe gives that poor stage manager, would you file a complaint? As ever, Blythe Dinner leaves me with many more questions than answers.

A very short-lived sci-fi show that I don’t remember and don’t care about, so let’s go to the pop charts! This week’s number one single was Phil Collins’ “Groovy Kind of Love,” from his motion picture debut and also swan song Buster. It would be displaced at the top in two weeks by The Beach Boys’ “Kokomo,” which is— I have done the research here— the worst song of all-time. Elsewhere in the top 40, smooth jazz from the likes of Anita Baker, Breathe, and my personal favorite from this particular moment in pop history, Basia.

I played this cassette over and over in my car at this time in history, my senior year of high school, and I had the nerve to wonder why nobody wanted to carpool with me.

A distant ancestor to This Is Us, in which Tim Daly and Eve Gordon play a couple whose story bounces around from the uptight ‘50s, to the ‘60s of the sexual revolution, to the Me Decade that was the ‘70s, and then to whatever we were telling ourselves the ‘80s were while we were still living in them. It didn’t last; One needs the emotional vulnerability of a Mandy Moore and the anachronistically slammin’ body of a Milo Ventimiglia to really make this concept work.

A whimsical sci-fi comedy about a cyborg who has to live as a human being on our planet as punishment for some sort of space crime or whatever. The star was Martin Kove, who we knew and did not like from his role as the sensei of the Cobra Kai in The Karate Kid. It did not last, but it did inspire the catchphrase “Negative outcome. Not good,” which nobody ever really used except to describe this show. It will never get a reboot, but The Karate Kid will, as Cobra Kai hits YouTube Red this May.

This show was itself a reboot of sorts, a reimagining of the Dirty Dancing universe starring The Office‘s Melora Hardin as Baby, who is now the daughter of Max Kellerman, the owner of the summer camp, and the Houseman family has been erased entirely. Here are the opening credits. I have no idea who’s saying the title, or why he’s saying it that way, but I can’t get enough.

Of course, in the 30 years since, Dirty Dancing has been rebooted exactly five million times, as a stage show, a touring concert experience, a TV movie, Havana Nights, Capoeira Nights (really!) and who knows how many Family Guy cutaways and Super Bowl commercials where someone tries and fails to do the lift. No more reboots of this one, please. We have wrung out every last, sweaty drop.

Very little to say about this one-season Guardian Angels-inspired Benjamin Bratt vehicle, except that one of the supporting cast members is named Calvin Levels, so you could say things like “I am satisfied with this show’s Calvin Levels.” (If you were, which you weren’t.)

A show set around a television news program produced in a high school. It’s most notable for bringing us a young Matt LeBlanc, a man whose Calvin Levels have remained scorchingly high over the last 30 years. He’s a beautiful high school student, he’s a gorgeous middle-aged man, he will surely find a way to be hot and elderly. Matt LeBlanc, we salute you. Here he is, getting busy:

Yet another dramedy, this one starring James Naughton (brother of the I’m A Pepper guy!) as a single father, and, making his prime-time debut, a young and crag-free Bryan Cranston as his wacky best friend.

You don’t care. Let us turn our attention to the movies, where this weekend the world would meet Julia Roberts in Mystic Pizza. I saw that movie with three male friends, and on the way back, I said “That movie reminds me of US!” And again, everyone got out of my car.

The lowest-rated show of the week (105th is a newsmagazine, which doesn’t count) was a sweet, sophisticated Fox sitcom about yuppies in love. You could get away with some pretty revolutionary stuff when nobody’s watching.

Duet probably won’t get a reboot, but in a world with Love and You’re The Worst and Casual, it doesn’t need one. Frankly, I don’t know whether Roseanne does, either.

In the meantime, if you need me, I’ll be in my car with Basia.

Dave Holmes is an editor-at-large for Esquire.com, host of the new Earwolf podcast Homophilia, and his memoir Party of One is in stores now.