Following the anniversary of Star Trek: Voyager I looked up what else started the launch lineup of the United Paramount Network. Two hours a night, two nights a week, and everything else was cancelled after thirteen episodes and I’d never heard of any of them before looking this up.
Marker, a Stephen J. Cannell case-of-the-week light adventure show putting Richard Grieco in Hawaii (with Gates McFadden as Higgins to his Magnum) as the estranged son of a billionaire who discovers his father gave markers to people who had helped him or he thought might need help, like a cosy Equalizer.
The Watcher, an anthology crime show hosted by Sir Mix-A-Lot as a guy with surveillance cameras everywhere in Las Vegas. Nothing creepy there...
Platypus Man, a semi-autobiographical sitcom about a TV presenter.
Pig Sty, a sitcom about five single guys in a New York apartment and their superintendent.
Cannell was a safe pair of hands, and the geographical variety was a good call, but they were all untried ideas, and with a Star Trek show as your flagship maybe you needed to go a little more geeky...
By comparison, The WB launched five days earlier with a variety of sitcoms and youth-oriented programming and some ran for years as it added dramas and became the station Buffy was on...
My only personal experience of something like this was the launch of the then Channel 5 in 1997, which was most of a day every day, and offhand all I can remember was The Jack Docherty Show and I think Hercules: The Legendary Journeys started pretty soon.
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