Cyrus Reed: Iris, hey — tell me you had a better week than I did, because I have been stuck on a number and it is not letting me go.
Cyrus Reed: Two hundred thousand dollars. Per episode. That's what Johnny Carson's production company was losing on a Fox sitcom — and wait, here's the part that actually broke my brain — Carson wasn't even in it. Not once. He's executive producer, it's his company, his money, and he never appears on screen.
Iris Holm: Mr. President.
Cyrus Reed: Mr. President, yeah — George C. Scott playing a sitting president, Madeline Kahn alongside him, Gene Reynolds and Ed Weinberger producing, like the entire M*A*S*H and Taxi pedigree in one room, and still, two hundred thousand dollars gone every single week.
Iris Holm: And then there's the other one. Something Wilder. Gene Wilder, NBC, 1994. Eighteen episodes. Three of which never even aired.
Cyrus Reed: And when Wilder died in 2016, Vulture's headline was basically — wait, I have to get this right — 'Just Barely Remembering Something Wilder.' That's the whole obituary for the show. 'Barely.' A comedy legend and that's the cultural footprint it left.
Iris Holm: So what actually happened? That's the question. Not why did they fail — but why did they try to do the thing that was guaranteed to not fit them.
Cyrus Reed: But here's what I keep getting stuck on — Carson's whole genius was that he could feel a joke landing wrong on Tuesday and fix it by Thursday. Five nights a week, live room, constant calibration. A sitcom is the opposite of that. You lock the scripts weeks in advance, you shoot the same beats over and over, and if the rhythm's off — wait, you can't just riff past it. That's not his operating system.
Iris Holm: Which is why he didn't put himself in it.
Cyrus Reed: Exactly — he recruited George C. Scott instead. Oscar winner, theatrical royalty. And then the production team around Scott is Reynolds and Weinberger, M*A*S*H, Taxi, the whole machine. So on paper this should work. But Scott's instinct is dramatic precision, right? And what Carson's team apparently built was a gag infrastructure. Shtick. Scott said so himself.
Iris Holm: 'The Casual Assassination of Mr. President.' April 3rd, 1988. He published that in the LA Times while Fox was already airing reruns.
Cyrus Reed: While they were airing reruns — so the show is already dead and he's writing its autopsy in public. That's not disillusionment, that's — no, actually that's a man who watched his instrument get handed the wrong piece of music and played wrong anyway.
Iris Holm: And Wilder's version of that same mismatch — what is it exactly? Because Something Wilder cast him as Gene Bergman, a former ad executive, raising twin boys in rural New England. That's not Willy Wonka. That's not remotely the anarchic persona anyone associated with him.
Cyrus Reed: Right — and that's not even his first attempt at this. Eligible Dentist, a sitcom pilot, failed before Something Wilder ever happened. So this wasn't a one-off miscalculation. It was the second time he tried to fit into the weekly production volume format and — wait, the format kept winning. His brilliance is cinematic, it's precision character work, it's a two-hour container. Not eighteen episodes of suburban family comedy with Hillary B. Smith playing his wife.
Iris Holm: So pedigree doesn't protect you from format mismatch. Reynolds and Weinberger couldn't fix Scott's collision with gag culture. The M*A*S*H infrastructure couldn't fix the wrong container.
Cyrus Reed: And nobody stopped to ask whether the container was the problem in the first place.
Iris Holm: And nobody even got to weigh in. That's the part. The container failed first — before the audience could.
Cyrus Reed: Right — okay, so imagine you're in suburban Columbus, October 1994, kids are in bed, you flip to NBC at 8 p.m. and Something Wilder is just... there. Gene Wilder, Saturday night, premiere October 1st. You watch it. You think — wait, actually this is kind of good? Howard Rosenberg at the LA Times called it 'a pleasing, upbeat little NBC comedy that has the potential to grow creatively.' So you're not wrong to like it. But four episodes in, NBC pulls it. Just — gone. You haven't even told a friend about it yet.
Iris Holm: So the audience never actually decided.
Cyrus Reed: The network decided. The accountants decided. And then — wait, it gets stranger — NBC relaunches it, it limps to 18 total episodes, three of which never air at all. Cancelled 1995. The audience didn't reject it. The slot rejected it.
Iris Holm: Saturday 8 p.m. is where NBC parked shows it had already stopped believing in.
Cyrus Reed: And Mr. President had the same structural ceiling, just — no, actually the economics hit faster. By December 25th, 1987, it's public: Carson Productions losing $200,000 per episode. Fox wants to keep going. Carson says no. An investment banking firm literally takes the series off his hands. And then — this is the part that reframes everything — Scott's heart attack happens in January 1988, but Carson's team had already halted production before that. The health crisis didn't kill Mr. President. The ledger did.
Iris Holm: And Carson Productions then announces it's exiting the TV series business entirely. That's not a show failing. That's a man concluding the format is structurally incompatible with how he makes money.
Cyrus Reed: Which — yeah, and that's before we even get to what critics actually wrote at the time versus how both shows get described now. Because that gap is its own thing, and honestly it might be the more unsettling part of this whole story.
Iris Holm: Invisibility did the labeling. Not the work.
Cyrus Reed: But that's — wait, that's the mechanism nobody names cleanly. Because Howard Rosenberg in spring 1987 calls Mr. President 'more softcom than sitcom, a half hour that amuses without being silly.' That's a qualified positive. Not a rave, sure, but nobody's writing 'disaster' either. And then Scott publishes 'The Casual Assassination' four months later, and suddenly the show has a dark side. It's got 'Hollywood ambition' and shadows and — no, actually the show didn't change. The framing did. The wreckage did the rewriting.
Iris Holm: And Vulture's 2016 headline does the same thing to Something Wilder. 'Just Barely Remembering.' That's not a review. That's a verdict built on twenty-two years of inaccessibility.
Cyrus Reed: Three episodes that never aired. Think about that — if you watched every episode Something Wilder ever broadcast, you still saw an incomplete show. The object itself is broken by what NBC withheld.
Iris Holm: So inaccessibility becomes the evidence for 'bizarre.' The thing can't defend itself.
Cyrus Reed: Right — and I'm genuinely uncomfortable here, because like, imagine some archivist in 2031 finds those three unaired episodes and they're... fine. Pleasant. 'Pleasing and upbeat' — Rosenberg's own words from October 1st, 1994. Does the 'bizarre failure' label just quietly evaporate? Or is it load-bearing by then, impossible to dislodge?
Iris Holm: It's load-bearing. Scott's account says production conflict. The financial reporting says economic triage. Neither of those is 'failure' — but 'failure' is the only word that survived, because the shows didn't.
Cyrus Reed: No syndication, no home video, no streaming. The show literally cannot correct the record.
Iris Holm: And that's the actual stakes here. What we call failure is sometimes just — what ran out of shelf space. The quality assessment is retrospective, it's built on absence, and nobody interrogates it because who goes back to check a show nobody can watch?
Cyrus Reed: Which means Carson Productions exiting TV production, Scott's heart attack in January 1988 — all of it gets folded into 'dark side of Hollywood ambition,' this ominous arc, when at the time the critics just wrote... modest comedy, has potential, move along. The ominous version is written from the rubble.
Iris Holm: Which puts me back at that $200,000 number. Not as evidence of failure — as evidence of Carson believing in something enough to bleed for it. He drove to Scott's house in Connecticut in the summer of 1986 to pitch this personally. A half-hour comedy about a man who 'just happened to be the President.' That's not a memo. That's a man with something to prove.
Cyrus Reed: And it's — wait, that's the image that keeps surfacing for me. Johnny Carson, late night's untouchable king, drives to Connecticut to knock on George C. Scott's door. The show vanishes inside two years. Carson Productions exits television series production entirely. And now both shows — Mr. President, Something Wilder — they're technically preserved somewhere. In an archive. Just... not accessible. Not streamable, not on home video, not anywhere a person could find them tonight if they wanted to. Archived and invisible. That's functionally the same as lost.
Iris Holm: And the label 'bizarre failure' fills the vacuum. Because there's nothing else to fill it.
