Transcript: Lessons of 'Lenny & Squiggy'

Paramount buried the pilot after a focus group. But Rob Long says it didn't have to be that way

This is Rob Long with Martini Shot for The Ankler.

Somewhere in the vaults of Paramount Studios exists a copy of the never-aired pilot episode of Lenny & Squiggy, a mid-1970s attempt to create a spin-off series from the smash hit, Laverne & Shirley.

By many accounts, it is the worst half-hour of television ever produced. Worse than Small Wonder (a straight-to-syndication series about a little girl who is a robot) and worse than your average episode of Webster. So bad, in fact, that it was shelved immediately.

But you have to give the then-president of Paramount Studios, Michael Eisner, credit. It was worth a try. Laverne & Shirley was an instant success, and Lenny & Squiggy, the two doofus neighbors—the original Kramers, the ur-Chandler and Joeys, depending on how old you are—they were audience favorites.

That was the rule in the television business back then. If you had a successful show with a couple of breakout characters, you were under a fiduciary obligation to squeeze those opportunities dry. The rumor was that the spinoff pilot was ordered at 6 a.m. after the ratings were in for the Laverne & Shirley premiere the night before. And that the spinoff pilot was shelved and buried after the first cut was delivered to the focus group facility and it was soundly rejected by 20 statistically representative Americans.

Laverne & Shirley was itself a spin-off of the 1970s-era juggernaut Happy Days, and while the Lenny & Squiggy project never saw an audience, Happy Days gave us Mork & Mindy and, for a brief moment, Joanie Loves Chachi. Think how bad that Lenny & Squiggy show must have been. They went ahead with Joanie Loves Chachi.

Back then, the industry lingo was frank and downscale. Happy Days was a “franchise” show that created successful “spin-offs.”

These days, show business argot has gotten fancy. Happy Days, executives would say on earnings calls and Wall Street Journal interviews today, “is a piece of intellectual property that is at the center of the Happy Days Cinematic Universe.”

I was at Paramount Studios for nearly 15 years, and I spent way too much time trying to find a copy of this pilot. I had assistants and PAs looking for it and searching through videotape libraries. Mostly because a friend of mine was in that pilot as a young actor and would turn white with panic whenever I said I was going to find it, so it must be really good. I mean, really bad. But you know what I mean. 

There’s an old reporter’s saying that they use when a story or rumor perfectly illustrates the point the reporter is trying to make but is probably not true.

A story that good, goes the saying, is “too good to check.” 

If you try to verify the details you might find out that the story is untrue, or that you’ve got it backwards, or that it happened to other people in a very different way. Which means you can’t use it, no matter how well it fits into your larger story.

And who wants that?

So with that disclaimer out of the way, here’s a story I heard a few years ago that’s too good to check: