Hope Sterling: Okay hi, hello, I have been — I have literally been sitting on this all morning and I need you to know that I almost texted you at like seven a.m.
Finn Brooks: Seven a.m. means it's either really good or really unhinged — which is it?
Hope Sterling: Both? Both. Okay — Tim Curry and Steve Carell were on the same ABC sitcom in 1997. The same show. At the same time. And it aired for literally two weeks.
Finn Brooks: Wait — two weeks? Like, that's not a run, that's a long weekend.
Hope Sterling: Three episodes, October 21st to November 4th, 1997 — done, cancelled, bye. The show was called Over the Top, Annie Potts was also there, and here's the part that is actually melting my brain — ABC had commissioned twelve episodes. Twelve! They filmed them, they produced them, and then they looked at three and went, no, we're good, lock the doors.
Finn Brooks: That's — okay that's like a restaurant that ordered enough food for a full dinner service, cooked everything, and then turned people away after the third table.
Hope Sterling: YES, that is exactly it! And oh my gosh wait, I haven't even gotten to — the producers? Amy Sherman-Palladino and Daniel Palladino. Who then went on to make Gilmore Girls. And The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. So this was not, like, a random crew — this was actual talent just... sitting in a dumpster at ABC in 1997.
Finn Brooks: Okay the Palladinos plus Tim Curry plus pre-Office, pre-Daily Show Steve Carell — that guest list is genuinely unhinged. How is this not a thing people talk about?
Hope Sterling: Okay but wait — I keep saying 'reasonable bet' like ABC made some kind of informed choice, and then I remember we literally have no idea why they cancelled it. Like, no ratings explanation, no memo, no postmortem that anyone has found. Nothing.
Finn Brooks: That's — no, that's the part that won't leave my brain. Because you'd think, twelve episodes produced, Columbia TriStar Television involved, the Palladinos running the room — somebody would have written something down. But the cancellation is just... undocumented. There's no record.
Hope Sterling: Nine episodes of finished television. Just — sitting there.
Finn Brooks: Nine! That's not a ratings problem, that's — wait, actually, I don't know what that is. A ratings problem has a number attached to it. This has nothing. No number, no named executive, no 'creative differences.' ABC just... stopped. And the nine completed episodes never aired in the US. So either someone at the network saw something in those first three that we can't see, or — and I think this is weirder — nobody was paying close enough attention to even bother with an explanation.
Hope Sterling: Mmm, that second one feels right to me actually. Like, ghosted. The show got ghosted.
Finn Brooks: And what makes it even stranger — Tim Curry wasn't just starring in it. He was also a producer on Over the Top. So he had real skin in this. It's not like he showed up, did his scenes, went home. He was invested in the thing existing. And ABC still pulled it in two weeks.
Hope Sterling: Wait, WHAT — he was producing it? That changes everything. Like that's not a casual gig, that's — he believed in it enough to put his name on the production side.
Finn Brooks: Which means when we call this a 'reasonable bet,' we're maybe being generous to ABC's decision-making, because the bet had Tim Curry producing, the Palladinos writing, Steve Carell on screen before anyone knew who he was — and we still can't say why it died. Does that feel like a network that was paying attention to what it had?
Hope Sterling: And that's — wait, that's actually, like, whether ABC was paying attention or not almost doesn't matter now? Because the show didn't need ABC to matter. It just needed Steve Carell to become Steve Carell.
Finn Brooks: Okay say more, because I think I see where you're going but say it out loud.
Hope Sterling: Imagine — it's like, 2007, you are deep in a Steve Carell Wikipedia spiral at midnight because you just binged The Office and your brain is broken, and you scroll down to his early credits and there it is. Over the Top. ABC. 1997. Three episodes. You've never heard of it. You don't know what it is. And you go looking.
Finn Brooks: And that moment — that exact midnight spiral moment — only exists because The Office happened.
Hope Sterling: Completely! Like if Carell stays a working actor who never breaks through, nobody goes looking. The show just... dissolves. It's not pre-fame archaeology, it's just a cancelled sitcom. The archaeological value is entirely borrowed from what he became later.
Finn Brooks: Which is — I mean, that's a weird thing about how careers work, right, because Tim Curry was already the guy. Rocky Horror, It — he's iconic going INTO this thing in 1997. And he's still the one whose fans actually kept the unaired episodes alive, circulating copies online. But the story we tell about the show now? It's Carell's story. The latecomer outran the legend, at least in terms of why anyone googles it.
Hope Sterling: Mmm, that's — wait, that's kind of sad for Tim Curry actually?
Finn Brooks: It's a little bittersweet, yeah. And there's something coming up about those fan copies specifically that — honestly, the way this show survived is weirder than I initially thought. We'll get there. But the point stands: a show's historical importance ends up being shaped by whoever on the cast got famous later. Not by the show itself.
Hope Sterling: Which is like — okay, Annie Potts is also in this, she was already established too, and nobody's framing it as her story. It's Carell's. Because The Office is the biggest thing. The later career is doing ALL the heavy lifting for what we even think this show is.
Finn Brooks: But that framing — 'the show survived' — I want to push on that for a second, because technically Over the Top was never commercially released. No home video, no streaming distributor, nothing official. The only reason you can watch those unaired nine episodes today is because Tim Curry fans were circulating copies. Like, bootleg-adjacent, legally murky, passed-around-online copies. That's not preservation. That's — I mean, it is preservation, but it's accidental preservation.
Hope Sterling: Wait so it's not even, like, properly archived somewhere?
Finn Brooks: No institutional home. At all. Which puts it in this specific category — produced but largely unaired — and that's actually distinct from a show whose physical tapes got destroyed. Those are gone. Over the Top is just... ghosted. By ABC. The network stopped caring and the stuff still exists, floating in legally murky territory because of a fan community obsessive enough to keep sharing it.
Hope Sterling: Okay that is a real difference. Lost versus ghosted. I'm adopting that.
Finn Brooks: And it's not unique — Heat Vision and Jack, Lookwell, there's a whole shadow category of completed work that never reached its audience. But those survived on cult reputation. Over the Top survived specifically because Tim Curry's fans are the kind of fans who make copies and share them and refuse to let something disappear. Without that? Nine episodes of finished television just... cease to exist in any practical sense.
Hope Sterling: Which is — mmm, like, fragile though, right? That's a fragile kind of survival.
Finn Brooks: Completely fragile. No institutional backing, unclear legal ownership, nobody at ABC or Columbia TriStar Television saying 'yes this is authorized.' If Tim Curry had a smaller fanbase, this conversation doesn't exist. The show doesn't exist, practically speaking.
Hope Sterling: So the calibrated take is — it's not a lost show, it's not a saved show, it's a show that got lucky it had the right star with the right fans at the right moment.
Finn Brooks: That's it. That's the defensible version. Fan communities as de facto preservationists — real, it works, but it's operating on vibes and dedication with zero institutional support. The survival of Over the Top is accidental. Not triumphant.
Hope Sterling: Okay fine, fine — 'inconvenient' not 'lost.' That's my concession and I'm making it publicly. But like, that almost makes it worse? Because lost is romantic. Inconvenient is just — it's a show that ABC ghosted and then Tim Curry's fans had to do the archival labor for free.
Finn Brooks: And that's the part that actually keeps me up — because we only know Over the Top exists in this weird half-alive state because Carell became Carell and Curry had obsessive enough fans to circulate copies. We can't quantify how many other shows are in that same gray zone. That's not a gap in the research, that's — the historical record is literally shaped by what ABC and Columbia TriStar Television chose to preserve. The stuff they didn't care about, we don't know we're missing.
Hope Sterling: That's genuinely scary.
Finn Brooks: The scariest part isn't that Over the Top is hard to find. It's that we have no idea what we don't know we're missing.
Hope Sterling: Okay — my detail I'm not over: Steve Carell, on a set with Tim Curry, before The Daily Show, before The Office, before any of it. Just a guy. On a show that lasted two weeks. I love that for him actually. Alright, cheers to the nine unaired episodes floating somewhere online. May they stay inconvenient forever.
