TV Shows That Don't Exist, Part 1
These shows were expected to be big deals. Instead, barely anyone remembers them.
David Lynch's work on the pilot episode of Twin Peaks has among the best claims to the title of best directing in the history of dramatic television. (Among the few serious challengers: Lynch's work on the eighth episode of Twin Peaks: The Return.) But did you know that Lynch didn't win the directing Emmy that year? Instead, the category saw a rare tie, between Scott Winant for an episode of thirtysomething and Thomas Carter for the pilot of Equal Justice.
If you're a serious enough TV nerd to be reading What's Alan Watching?, odds are you've heard of thirtysomething, even if you're too young to have seen it. If nothing else, the title entered the larger vernacular, and variants are now used to refer to people in various decades of their life. With all due respect to a very fine director in Winant, he shouldn't have beaten Lynch, but thirtysomething was at least a cultural phenomenon at the time, a critical favorite, and a show that won 13 Emmys over its lifespan.
You have to be a really serious TV nerd, though, to know Equal Justice, even if you were alive and a couch potato in 1990. Film critics and podcasters often talk about "movies that don't exist." Not infamous flops, but films that arrived with some level of anticipation, only to leave zero trace in their aftermath. Even their failure was so uninteresting that the whole thing has been memory-holed. Equal Justice is one of many examples of the TV equivalent of that, some of which I'm going to run through today.
