The Fantastic Journey

In our most recent podcast we discussed some of the context behind the production of The Fantastic Journey, and particularly focused on the role of Fred Silverman who after his early garlanded career at CBS, was widely perceived as single-handedly making ABC – known in the early 1970s as “the Poland of Broadcasting” - the dominant network in the United States by 1976. The sudden elevation of ABC sent the other networks CBS and NBC into a spiral of panic, and they cancelled series on a whim and created mid-season replacements, such as The Fantastic Journey, at such a ridiculously short turnaround time that the results were patchy, incoherent, and invariably dead on delivery.

Despite this being just prior to the release of Star Wars in the summer of 1977, the networks were desperately keen on developing a successful sci-fi series, probably because ABC was doing so well with The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman. And so leaving aside The Fantastic Journey, in the space of a couple of years NBC tried and failed with The Invisible Man, The Gemini Man (who was another invisible man), and The Man from Atlantis who was visible but largely underwater. CBS also had a go with Logan’s Run, which was almost identical to The Fantastic Journey, with Logan and pals meeting a different community each week until he was finally terminated after his allotted 13 episodes.

It's safe to say then, that this was not US network tv’s finest hour, and originality at the time was not highly prized. Everyone was always looking for the safest bet. Even at ABC where everything was coming up roses, spin-offs from successful series filled a lot of the schedules, so as well as Happy Days, there was Laverne and Shirley and Mork and Mindy. Three’s Company (the US version of Man About the House), like the original UK series spawned The Ropers/George and Mildred, and eventually Three’s a Crowd/Robin’s Nest.

This trick of replicating the success of a sitcom by spinning off some of the characters into a new show was perfected by the producer Norman Lear, who had earlier in the 1970s created an All in the Family extended universe across several different series. Of course, All in the Family was based on the BBC’s series Till Death Us Do Part, and it’s possible that Lear’s interest in UK television might have led him to notice that LWT were spinning off several sitcoms (Please Sir! being an obvious example) in the late 1960s. This leads to the inescapable conclusion that Frank Muir and Barry Took, former Heads of Comedy at London Weekend Television, were ultimately responsible for the many extended sitcom universes that littered US television schedules in the 1970s and 1980s.

To many people’s surprise, despite his great success at ABC, Fred Silverman decided to move on to NBC, either because he wanted the challenge of dragging that network from third place to first, or simply because he was a terrible egotist who was “trying for the hat trick”. He announced that he was leaving ABC in January 1978, but crucially he had to wait until June before he could start work at NBC and was effectively put on gardening leave. This paralysed NBC executives because any new series they lined up for the launch of the new season in the autumn of 1978 would likely to be dismissed by Silverman as soon as he started his new job. That meant that the 1978 new season on NBC was a zombie lineup of programmes which indeed Silverman effectively scrapped and then put all of his efforts into the mid-season replacements which would represent a “true launch” to his NBC tenure. The boot was on the other foot. Now Silverman was having to scramble to turnaround shows, he needed at least one solid gold hit, and in the end, he bet the ranch on Supertrain.

So what was Supertrain? In brief, it featured a massive nuclear-powered train which had ample leisure facilities for its well-heeled passengers, and each episode featured two or three intertwined narratives generally focused on the love lives of those on board. It’s basically The Love Boat on a train. It’s also reminiscent of a 1976 film called The Big Bus which featured…wait for it…a nuclear-powered bus with ample leisure facilities. But The Big Bus was a comedy that parodied disaster movies and paved the way for Airplane! Exactly why Silverman and NBC thought that was a good model for a successful drama series is anyone’s guess. Nevertheless, Silverman insisted that the series had to be developed in six months – usually 12 months would be the norm - for transmission at the start of 1979.

This impossible schedule had several ramifications. The three model supertrains cost $10 million, kept crashing off the tracks, and the continuing problems meant that the first shots of the train in motion were made only two days before the show’s premiere. Equally seriously, the last-minute nature of the production was such that when it came to casting, most big-name stars were already committed to other jobs, so the main guest roles went to performers who were barely recognisable to their own parents. During all this chaos the scripts were dealt with as the lowest priority and dashed off as first drafts at best, with baffling and incomprehensible results. One minor benefit of the late delivery of the pilot episode was that the television critics didn’t get an early copy to review, but that just delayed the inevitable for a few days. The series was castigated by everyone – “the premiere offered about as much excitement as an evening reading railroad timetables” - and the audience figures plummeted. Despite his earlier success at CBS and ABC, Silverman’s reputation never really recovered again after the Supertrain debacle.

Supertrain was never shown in the UK, but if British viewers had a narrow escape the BBC certainly didn’t. In early 1979, TV executives from around the world gathered in Los Angeles to view the forthcoming mid-season shows and haggle for the ones they wanted to show in their local territories. Leslie Halliwell was there on behalf of ITV with some colleagues such as David Plowright, Philip Jones and Charles Denton. Bill Cotton and Gunnar Rugheimer were there for the BBC. Both channels were interested in Supertrain, but were understandably cautious because the programme was still unfinished and nobody had seen it. Eventually, the BBC bought in on the strength of seeing a few scenes, and basked in the mild grumpiness from ITV at being pipped to the post.

Several months later, Supertrain had tanked in the US and the BBC were left with an embarrassment on its hands. In June, Paul Connew of the Daily Mirror squawked “Incredibly, BBC bosses bought the show before it was screened in America. To forestall interested commercial companies, they agreed to pay out a record £15,000 an episode and plan to screen Supertrain…in their autumn schedule.” In the end, only nine episodes the series were made but that still means the BBC laid out £135,000 for something that it has never shown. Unless the channel is still waiting for the perfect moment to slip it into the schedule?

Anyway, naturally enough, World of Telly will be covering Supertrain in a few weeks’ time, along with an even more obscure sort of copy-cat series from CBS in the same year called Time Express. The latter is Fantasy Island set on a time-travelling train. Both series can be found in varying states of watchability on various video platforms. Let’s just say that the IP holders don’t seem to be policing these particular properties too carefully. Go ahead and watch if you dare and be sure to pass on your comments so we can include them on the forthcoming podcast.  

Sources in chronological order:

Peter Fiddick, Let the Supertrain Take the Strain, The Guardian, 24 February 1979

Paul Connew, Top of the Flops!, Daily Mirror, 23 June 1979

Sally Bedell, Up the Tube: Prime-Time TV and the Silverman Years, Viking, 1981