Classic Television

Turn-On

Original channel

ABC

Original airing

February 5, 1969

Starring

Tim Conway (guest host)

Teresa Graves

Hamilton Camp

Mel Stewart

Chuck McCann

Bonnie Boland

Maxine Greene

Ken Greenwald

Debbie Macomber

Maura McGiveney

Robert Staats

Turn-On is an American sketch comedy series that aired on ABC in February 1969. Only one episode was shown leaving one episode unaired and the show is considered one of the most infamous flops in TV history.

Turn-On's sole episode was shown on Wednesday, February 5, 1969, at 8:30 p.m. Eastern. Among the cast were Teresa Graves, who would join the Laugh-In cast that autumn, and Chuck McCann, longtime kiddie show host, character actor, and voice artist. The writing staff included a young Albert Brooks. The guest host for the 1st episode was Tim Conway.

The show was created by Ed Friendly and George Schlatter, the producers of Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In. Bristol-Myers contracted with them to develop the show, and provided it to ABC for a projected 13-week run after NBC and CBS rejected it. A CBS official confessed, "It was so fast with the cuts and chops that some of our people actually got physically disturbed by it." Production executive Digby Wolfe described it as a "visual, comedic, sensory assault involving animation, videotape, stop-action film, electronic distortion, computer graphics—even people."

Turn-On's premise was that it was produced by a computer. Distinguishing characteristics of the show were its use of the Moog synthesizer and lack of sets, except for a white backdrop. Unlike Laugh-In the show "focused almost exclusively on sex as a comedic subject", using various rapid-fire jokes and risqué skits but no laugh track. The program was also filmed instead of presented live or on videotape. Several of the jokes were presented with the screen divided into four squares resembling comic strip panels. The production credits of the episode appeared after each commercial break, instead of conventionally at the beginning or end.

Conway has stated that Turn-On was canceled midway through its only episode, so that the party the cast and crew held for its premiere as the show aired across the United States also marked its cancellation. Cleveland, Ohio's WEWS-TV stopped the episode before it finished (after "11 minutes", according to Conway). The station sent ABC network management an angry telegram: "If your naughty little boys have to write dirty words on the walls, please don't use our walls. Turn-On is turned off, as far as WEWS is concerned." Denver, Colorado's KBTV did not air the episode, stating that after previewing it "We have decided, without hesitation, that it would be offensive to a major segment of the audience"; Portland, Oregon's KATU and Seattle, Washington's KOMO-TV also decided to not show the episode. Viewers of Little Rock, Arkansas's KATV, which disliked the show but decided to air it, "jam[med] the station's switchboard" with complaints.

Turn-On was not officially cancelled for several days, but WEWS, KBTV, and KATV told ABC that they would not air the show again, and Bristol-Myers ordered Schlatter and Friendly to end production. ABC received 369 calls of complaint during the show, compared to 20 supporting it. Many assumed the show's title was itself an implicit reference to Timothy Leary's pro-drug maxim, "Turn on, tune in, drop out".

Both The New York Times and the Associated Press gave the show poor reviews. An ABC executive stated that "creatively, Turn-On didn't work". He compared the show negatively to the comedy of Dean Martin, Laugh-In, and the Smothers Brothers, which the executive described as "absolutely beyond belief ... awfully blue", but were popular and less controversial because unlike Turn-On, "they're funny". After Turn-On's cancellation TV Guide called it "The biggest bomb of the season". It stated that both CBS and NBC had rejected the show due to its perceived lack of quality, and that its sexual content was an important reason why viewers rejected the show. The magazine quoted a source who lamented Turn-On's lack of a regular host or interlocutor: "(T)here wasn't any sort of identification with the audience -- just a bunch of strangers up there insulting everything you believe in."

Conway said in 2008 that Turn-On was "way ahead of its time. I'm not sure even if you saw it today that maybe that time has also passed." Bart Andrews, in his 1980 book The Worst TV Shows Ever, stated that Turn-On was actually quite close to the original concept for Laugh-In. "It wasn't that it was a bad show, it was that it was an awkward show," concluded author Harlan Ellison, a fan of counter-cultural comedy and a TV critic for the Los Angeles Free Press in 1969.

The following week's TV Guide published a listing for the scheduled February 12 episode, which would have starred Robert Culp and then-wife France Nuyen as hosts. However, the network announced that the ABC Wednesday Night Movie (The Oscar, screenwritten by Ellison and itself a notorious flop) would start 30 minutes early. The network eventually replaced Turn On with a revival of The King Family Show. The controversy led to a rejection of a television pilot show written by Norman Lear, stating that the lead character was "foul-mouthed, and bigoted", out of fear that it might anger its affiliates again. CBS liked it, picked it up as All in the Family, and began airing it in 1971.

In 2002, Turn-On was ranked number 27 on TV Guide's 50 Worst TV Shows of All Time. What Were They Thinking?: The 100 Dumbest Events in Television History ranked it at number 25.