[Favourite of the Month] In Ça tourne mal... à la télé!, his exciting new book, Philippe Lombard visits a turbulent and little known aspect of the history of TV series.
Film and television specialist Philippe Lombard wrote books on The Persuaders, Starsky and Hutch, The Pink Panther, OSS 117, Tintin, Michel Audiard, Louis de Funès, Quentin Tarantino, etc. Published by Éditions La Tengo, Ça tourne mal... à la télé! is a follow-up to his Ça tourne mal! and Ça tourne mal... à Hollywood! (1). The astute idea of this collection is to tell anecdotes about what went wrong, what didn't turned as planned, the glitches behind the scenes. After French cinema and Hollywood movies, TV series get the "Ça tourne mal!" treatment for our greatest enjoyment.
A series can begin with a pilot but most pilots never turn into a series. Ça tourne mal... à la télé! logically starts with the "busted pilots", those which didn't make it and often for obvious reasons (Wishman, Poochinski). U.S. network CBS recycled many of their unsold pilots in a 1987 "anthology" called CBS Summer Playhouse, including a new version of The Saint with a moustachioed Simon Templar in a Lamborghini. Before Quantum Leap, Scott Bakula starred in I-Man (1986) and Infiltrator (1987). With a little luck a pilot can be reshoot for another try and become a hit series (The Big Bang Theory, Game of Thrones). Occasionally, a pilot is made as an episode of an existing series. It's called a backdoor pilot and success is never guaranteed. Ask Huggy Bear from Starsky and Hutch, who briefly opened a detective agency with a friend.
Similarly to pilots, actor come and go. Yvan Chiffre almost played the title role in Thierry La Fronde. Elizabeth Sheperd was Mrs Peel in The Avengers before Diana Rigg. There are the stars who stopped at nothing to leave their shows, such as Steve McQueen or Farrah Fawcett, the stars who came back (Patrick Duffy, John Schneider and Tom Wopat...) and the guest star who never was (Jeanne Moreau in ER). Long before social networks, French television had to face outraged reactions because of the intended ending of Janique Aimée (1963) or a surreal animated programme called Les Shadoks (when launched in 1968). During the 1980s, France answered to Dallas with Chateauvallon and director Jean-Luc Godard was hired by TF1 to make an episode of the collection Série Noire for a surprising result.
Ça tourne mal... à la télé! continues with the animated tribulations of Tintin, Astérix, Grendizer, Il était une fois..., Arnold Schwarzenegger and Rambo. Philippe Lombard also looks at some American and French TV attempts to cash in on known movies: Rosemary's Baby, High Noon, The Dirty Dozen, Indiana Jones, Les spécialistes or the Jean-Paul Belmondo starrer Le Magnifique! The book examines two high-profile projects not spared by failure (SeaQuest DSV and Marseille with Gérard Depardieu), series which reached cult status after cancellation (Police Squad!, Manimal, Profit...) and surprising/weird ideas like the japanese Spider-Man, Astrolab 22 or Duval et Moretti (the French adaptation of Starsky et Hutch). Ça tourne mal... à la télé! concludes with (what else?) the series finales.
Readers will even find a chapter about dubbing and more. Well researched and smartly thought, Ça tourne mal... à la télé! by Philippe Lombard is both interesting and joyful. French illustrator and graphic artist Mr Choubi (real name Patrick Chevalier) is behind the amazing artistic design of the book. Philippe Lombard is a regular collaborator for the magazine Schnock and other publications.
(1) https://boutique.la-tengo.com/home/140-ca-tourne-mal-.html + https://boutique.la-tengo.com/home/147-ca-tourne-mal-a-hollywood-.html
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