TV URBAN LEGEND: ABC had to cede some creative control of its new sitcom, Just Our Luck, to the NAACP after the organization rallied the public against the sitcom for being too problematic with regards to its handling of racial issues.
One of the interesting things in television history is the way that time slot battles really had major impact on programming decisions back in the day. It doesn't really come up as often nowadays when the audience is so fractured that people simply stream shows at some other time if two shows that they like air at the same time, but in the pre-DVR days, your time slot was often your battlefield and losing your time slot was often treated with a draconian reaction from the networks. For instance, in 1961, NBC introduced the first regular "Night at the Movies" concept on Saturday nights. They aired against CBS' hit drama, Gunsmoke. In that first season, Gunsmoke was the 3rd rated show in the country. As the decade went on, NBC's Saturday Night at the Movies became more and more popular until it hit the Top 20 in the Nielsen's in 1967, the same year that Gunsmoke slowly but surely fell from 3rd to 10th to 20th to 27th to 30th to out of the top 30 entirely. This was how draconian things were at the time, CBS said, "Okay, I guess Gunsmoke needs to go," so it was canceled. But someone then came up with the idea to simply try Gunsmoke out in a new time slot instead and so it got a reprieve and for its 13th season, it moved to Mondays at 7:30, and wouldn't you know it, it was once again in the top five in the country (#4)! It remained in the top ten for the next SIX seasons (including being #2 overall in its 15th season) before falling off in Season 19 to #15 and then #28 in Season 20 before it was canceled again for good.
I bring this up just to show how freaked out ABC was when The A-Team debuted in early 1983.
Historically, ABC had not been a particularly popular network. They were often treated as a bit of a joke compared to CBS and NBC. Even their own employees felt that they were a joke (like when they tried to counter-program the 1960 Presidential Election coverage with The Bugs Bunny Show!), but by the late 1970s, they had become a force to be reckoned with, especially in the world of sitcoms, through their Tuesday night lineup of Happy Days, Laverne and Shirley and Three's Company. Each of those shows were, at one point or another, the top-rated sitcom on television (with the first two each spending a year as the top-rated show period).
By the early 1980s, though, they were starting to be a bit long in the tooth, with the 1981/82 season ending with Happy Days ranked #18, Laverne and Shirley ranked #20 and Three's Company (the newest of the three shows) ranked #4. However, in January of 1983, NBC aired Super Bowl XVII and when it was over, they used that large audience to showcase the first episode of a new action drama series called The A-Team, which famously featured Mr. T as B.A. Baracus.
The A-Team was a sensation and finished its first season #10 overall, dropping Happy Days and Laverne and Shirley to #28 and #25, respectively (Laverne and Shirley had lost Shirley star, Cindy Williams, for that season). Three's Company held strong at #6. So ABC mercifully ended Laverne and Shirley (basically just Laverne at this point) and decided to move Happy Days to 8:30 (while bringing back stars Erin Moran and Scott Baio, who had left the show for a failed spinoff, Joanie Loves Chachi. The return did not go very well) and introduce a new sitcom designed to compete with The A-Team through a diverse sitcom starring a charming Black guy alongside a White guy. That sitcom was Just Our Luck and...oh boy, did it not work out.
The concept of Just Our Luck was basically updating I Dream of Jeannie, only this time, the genie is a hip young Black guy played by the very talented TK Carter. The late Richard Gilliland played a TV weatherman who acquired the bottle with Carter's genie (Shabu) in it by accidentally cracking it (thus being forced to buy it). When it later broke at his apartment, Shabu was released and the two were sort of now stuck with each other.
ABC was really excited about the show, but as soon as it was announced, it drew criticism from the whole sketchiness of having a Black guy being a "slave" to a White guy "master." Carter tried to defend it at the time, arguing, "Shabu doesn't have a master because he doesn't believe in masters....I made it clear that I won't do that jive routine, acting like some cat in a black El Dorado, drinking a Kool-Aid daiquiri with a hat as big as a house....When Shabu pops out of the bottle, he's wearing a Bill Blass raw silk suit. You're not going to see me wearing a lot of jewelry and stuff."
The NAACP threatened a boycott of the advertisers who sponsored the show, with the head of the Beverly Hills-Hollywood NAACP, Willis Edwards, referring to Shabu as "an embarrassing and degrading portrayal of a black male in the 80s." Ultimately, ABC caved and gave the NAACP some creative control of the series, and among the changes that they made were to make sure that no one uses the term "master" or "slave" and that the show add some Black writers to its writing staff and cast another Black character on the series, with Leonard Simon joining the show as an anchor (with Gilliland's character becoming a roving reporter instead).
The changes were too late, and the show was canceled after 12 episodes (the 13th episode, while produced, never aired). The damage was done to the rest of ABC's Tuesday night schedule, as well, with Happy Days falling to #63, where it was canceled, as well, and Three's Company falling to #33 (rather than canceling it, the network just relaunched it as Three's a Crowd, which then also flopped). The A-Team, by the way, rose to #4 overall (if there's any consolation, The A-Team didn't have a very long run for a show that was in the top ten its first three seasons. It fell to #30 in Season 4 and then moved to Fridays where it fell to #61 and was canceled. It didn't even reach 100 episodes).
The legend is...
STATUS: True
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