Jordan Hale: Hey — did you have the kind of week where one weird piece of TV history just takes up permanent residence in your brain?
Alex Mercer: I mean, that's basically a job description at this point. What happened?
Jordan Hale: NBC, 1978. Mike Weinblatt — network exec — publicly says, in the New York Times, that their new show is designed to pull in the same viewers watching Happy Days on ABC. That's the stated competitive strategy. And the show he's talking about is Cliffhangers. A serialized anthology with, among other things, a Dracula storyline.
Alex Mercer: Happy Days viewers. With Dracula.
Jordan Hale: Happy Days viewers. With Dracula. And Laverne and Shirley — he mentioned that too, like, we're coming for both of those. And the show did air, which is the part that gets me, because people treat it like a lost pilot. Ten episodes on NBC starting February 1979. It wasn't shelved — it ran, it failed, and then The Curse of Dracula, the vampire segment, was this close to becoming its own standalone series before NBC quietly walked away from the whole thing.
Alex Mercer: The standalone series is the part I find more interesting than the show itself, actually. Because that's where the network's real confidence — or lack of it — becomes visible.
Jordan Hale: Wait, say more — you think the decision not to greenlight The Curse of Dracula as its own hour tells us something the cancellation doesn't?
Alex Mercer: The cancellation after ten episodes just tells you it didn't rate. The decision to not develop the spin-off tells you the network had already decided the format wasn't fixable — they weren't going to double down, even on the piece of it that had some identity.
Jordan Hale: But that's — okay, that makes the Weinblatt quote even weirder to me, because if NBC already sensed the format wasn't fixable, why did he go to the New York Times in 1978 and say the goal was Happy Days viewers? Like, was the strategy ever real?
Alex Mercer: That's the contradiction right there. Think about it this way — imagine a coffee shop losing customers to the McDonald's across the street, and their answer is to roll out a twelve-course tasting menu. Same stated goal: get those McDonald's customers. Completely incompatible product. That's Weinblatt in 1978 telling the Times NBC wants Happy Days' audience, then greenlighting Kenneth Johnson's serialized supernatural anthology.
Jordan Hale: Kenneth Johnson — the Incredible Hulk guy.
Alex Mercer: The Incredible Hulk guy, exactly. Which is — I mean, he wasn't some development gamble. He knew genre television. But Happy Days was five years into its run on ABC by the time Cliffhangers premiered in February 1979. Five years. That's not a trend you're catching early — that's an institution. And Laverne and Shirley right alongside it. The audience NBC was supposedly targeting had been trained, for half a decade, to expect something warm and self-contained on that night.
Jordan Hale: And instead they got — wait, the serialized anthology format means viewers had to come back every week just to follow the plot, right? That's the opposite of what makes a sitcom work.
Alex Mercer: Structurally opposite, yeah. The whole Cliffhangers format — three concurrent storylines, including The Curse of Dracula, each one a cliffhanger that only resolves if you watched last week — that's asking for exactly the kind of commitment a Happy Days viewer had no reason to give. Those shows delivered a complete story every single episode.
Jordan Hale: So did NBC not understand what made Happy Days actually work, or — no, wait, I think that's wrong. Was the Weinblatt strategy just... cover?
Alex Mercer: I think it's possible the demographic framing was post-hoc justification — tell the Times it's counterprogramming so the risk sounds rational. But the product NBC built was never going to execute that strategy. The serialized anthology format and the family sitcom formula are not in the same universe. And I don't think that tension ever got resolved. Which is probably why, ten episodes in, it was gone.
Jordan Hale: So the failure wasn't bad luck with a timeslot — the contradiction was baked in before a single frame aired.
Alex Mercer: But the contradiction being baked in — I want to push that a little further, because I think there's a more specific mechanism. Picture someone flipping channels on a Monday night in 1979. They land on Cliffhangers. Episode six. There are three concurrent serialized storylines running — Stop Susan Williams, The Curse of Dracula, some other arc — and this viewer has no idea who any of these people are or what happened five episodes ago. They have, what, fifteen seconds before they flip back to Happy Days, where they can drop in cold and be laughing inside a minute.
Jordan Hale: Three simultaneous storylines. Not one — three.
Alex Mercer: Three. Each with its own characters, its own ongoing plot. That's the serialized anthology format — you owe every one of them your attention, every week, or you're lost. Happy Days offered a complete story. Self-contained. That's not just a tonal difference, it's a different contract with the viewer.
Jordan Hale: And the New York Times — I mean, the review that came out called it more asinine than its promotions suggested. Which is, you know, a pretty specific kind of brutal. Like, your ads lowered expectations and you still fell short.
Alex Mercer: Ten episodes. That's how long it lasted before NBC pulled it.
Jordan Hale: Okay but wait — could a different night have changed anything? Like, if this wasn't head-to-head with Happy Days, does the format problem still kill it, or was it just... the wrong opponent?
Alex Mercer: I don't think a time slot saves it. The problem isn't Happy Days specifically — it's that 1979 network television was built around casual viewing. You moved the show, you'd find a different casual viewer who still couldn't tell you what happened to Stop Susan Williams last Tuesday.
Jordan Hale: The infrastructure just wasn't there — no DVR, no catch-up, no way to get new viewers back up to speed mid-season. You missed episode three, you're genuinely stranded. And that's — I mean, that's what makes the cancellation almost feel inevitable in retrospect, but there's a piece of this that actually gets worse, and it's coming. What NBC had quietly been developing alongside the show makes this whole story sharper.
Alex Mercer: Yeah. And that part reframes what the failure actually cost.
Jordan Hale: The piece that actually gets worse — because NBC wasn't just running Cliffhangers, they were, like, simultaneously developing The Curse of Dracula as its own standalone one-hour series. For the 1979–1980 schedule. That was a real thing on the table.
Alex Mercer: That's the actual shelved project. When people say Cliffhangers was 'never picked up' — that's imprecise. The anthology aired. The Curse of Dracula spin-off is the ghost.
Jordan Hale: So it was already in development — a full standalone hour — and the ratings collapse just... killed it before it ever had a greenlight meeting.
Alex Mercer: Low ratings from Cliffhangers made that development impossible. Think about what that actually means — the spin-off was trying to escape the failure of the format that produced it, but it couldn't. The ten-episode run dragged it down before it could become its own thing.
Jordan Hale: That's almost — I mean, it's like if a band's first album tanks and the label quietly drops the single they'd already started mixing. The single wasn't the problem.
Alex Mercer: And then NBC's next move is what I find genuinely cold — they re-edited The Curse of Dracula footage into a TV film, The World of Dracula. Re-edited Stop Susan Williams into The Girl Who Saved the World. Salvage operation. Keep the content, gut the format.
Jordan Hale: Cannibalization as mercy — that's the only way I can frame it. Something survives, but not... the thing.
Alex Mercer: The serialized anthology format — that's what defined Cliffhangers as a creative experiment. The re-edits abandoned exactly that. The World of Dracula is footage without the cliffhangers. Basically a different object.
Jordan Hale: So what Kenneth Johnson actually built — the whole interlocking structure — that's just... gone. The films exist, but the experiment doesn't.
Alex Mercer: And that's basically the whole shape of it. Cliffhangers aired — ten episodes, February 1979, real television — and the original vision, the interlocking serialized structure Kenneth Johnson built, was quietly dismantled. The World of Dracula exists. The experiment doesn't.
Jordan Hale: What sits with me is the Dracula spin-off specifically. Like, that's the ghost — not the show, not the re-edits, but the standalone series NBC had on the table and then just... didn't greenlight. That's where the ambition actually died.
Alex Mercer: The format was doomed before episode one. Weinblatt told the Times in 1978 they wanted Happy Days viewers, and the product was structurally incapable of delivering them. The Curse of Dracula spin-off never had a real path after that.
Jordan Hale: Doomed before it aired. That's the quiet thing, isn't it.
Alex Mercer: Yeah. That's where I'll leave it.
