Turn-On

For other uses, see Turn On (disambiguation).

Turn-On
Genre	Sketch comedy
Created by	Ed Friendly George Schlatter
Starring	Tim Conway (guest host) Teresa Graves Hamilton Camp Mel Stewart Chuck McCann Bonnie Boland Maxine Greene Ken Greenwald Debbie Macomber Maura McGiveney Robert Staats
Country of origin	United States
No. of episodes	2 (1 episode unaired)
Production
Executive producer(s)	Ed Friendly George Schlatter
Producer(s)	Digby Wolfe
Running time	22–24 minutes
Broadcast
Original channel	ABC
Original airing	February 5, 1969 (1969-02-05)

Turn-On is an American sketch comedy series that aired on ABC in February 1969. Only one episode was shown leaving one episode unaired and the show is considered one of the most infamous flops in TV history.

Turn-On's sole episode was shown on Wednesday, February 5, 1969, at 8:30 p.m. Eastern. Among the cast were Teresa Graves, who would join the Laugh-In cast that autumn, and Chuck McCann, longtime kiddie show host, character actor, and voice artist. The writing staff included a young Albert Brooks. The guest host for the 1st episode was Tim Conway.

Background

The show was created by Ed Friendly and George Schlatter, the producers of Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In. Bristol-Myers contracted with them to develop the show, and provided it to ABC for a projected 13-week run after NBC and CBS rejected it. A CBS official confessed, "It was so fast with the cuts and chops that some of our people actually got physically disturbed by it." Production executive Digby Wolfe described it as a "visual, comedic, sensory assault involving animation, videotape, stop-action film, electronic distortion, computer graphics—even people."^[1]^[2].

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Premise

Turn-On's premise was that it was produced by a computer, though this was not the case. Distinguishing characteristics of the show were its use of the Moog synthesizer and lack of sets, except for a white backdrop. Unlike Laugh-In the show "focused almost exclusively on sex as a comedic subject",^[3] using various rapid-fire jokes and risqué skits but no laugh track. The program was also filmed instead of presented live or on videotape. Several of the jokes were presented with the screen divided into four squares resembling comic strip panels. The production credits of the episode appeared after each commercial break, instead of conventionally at the beginning or end.

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Skits aired on the program

Two policemen say, "Let us spray," before spraying cans of mace at the camera.
A firing squad prepares to shoot an attractive woman when the squad leader says, "Excuse me, miss, but in this case we are the ones with one final request." (This skit was recycled in Schlatter's revival of Laugh-In in 1978, with no complaints.)
A bikini-wearing Teresa Graves lounges on a park bench surrounded by cardboard bushes. She exclaims, "I feel so guilty - I mean, lying here and all." Pause. "I should be out *shopping* somewhere!"
An armed hijacker tells an ersatz Superman: "OK buddy, take me to Cuba."
Chuck McCann, dressed as a cop, prowls around cardboard bushes with his nightstick while singing, "Hello, young lovers, wherever you are ..."
"The Body Politic", shown three times during the episode, featured a buxom, reclining blonde (Maura McGiveney) saying things like "Mr. Nixon, as President, now becomes the titular head of the Republican Party."
McGiveny asks Tim Conway if he loves her. Conway gets offended, telling her that he just met her and, for all he knows, she could be a "a pot-smoking, jaded, wild-eyed, radical dropout." When McGiveny tells him that she's just that, he says, "I love you!"
A sleazy TV pitchman (Robert Staats) promotes a breakfast cereal "soaked in mescaline."
The same pitchman appears in a second spoof commercial selling women's shoes, though he is gradually revealed to be a foot fetishist.
A diagram of a swastika is displayed as a narrator says, "You are now looking at the table at the Paris peace accords agreed to by General Ky."
Several gay-themed messages scrolling across the screen, including "God Save the Queens", "Free Oscar Wilde" and "The Amsterdam Levee is a dike".
A pregnant woman singing "I Got Rhythm" (alluding to the rhythm method of birth control).
A vending machine dispensing the birth control pill, with an anxious young woman putting coins into it and then feverishly shaking the broken machine (some ABC affiliates cut the show off after this sketch).
A draft-dodger holding a sign reading Sweden.
Conway, dressed in a samurai outfit and speaking mock Japanese, is revealed to be university president/politician S.I. Hayakawa.
A black man, face-to-face with a white man, says, "Mom always did like you best!" (an allusion to a popular catchphrase of The Smothers Brothers)
One cop, played by Chuck McCann, asks a second, "You want to take some of this pornographic literature home with you tonight?" The colleague replies, "I don't even have a pornograph!" McCann then rips up a skin magazine and begins eating the pieces.
A commercial spoof shows Conway touting a masculine deodorant while lifting weights and working out. "When I'm all through, I smell like a lady," he concludes and is shown in drag.
In another commercial parody, Conway is shown wearing a tuxedo, and heavy eye mascara.
A sequence (the show's longest) with the word sex flashing on and off in pulsating colors while Conway and Bonnie Boland leer at each other.^[3] Various stock photographs are displayed during the sequence, including one of Pope Paul VI.
Conway as spokesman for "Citizens Action Committee of America," a group with the acronym CACA.
The black programmer shown programming the computer supposedly generating the show says he dreamed he was a duck in Lester Maddox's bathtub. "I migrated," he says.
A young woman in cap and gown is shown lobbing a hand grenade.
Two men (Hamilton Camp and Chuck McCann) are standing at a globe. "Tell me," one says to the other, "where is the capital of South Vietnam?" The second man spins the globe and points, "Mostly over here, in Swiss bank accounts."
A Catholic nun asks a priest, "Father, can I have the car tonight?" The priest replies, "Just as long as you don't get in the habit."
Conway tells Graves, "I was so damned angry when I found out my kids were popping pills, I went out and got drunk."
One message scrolled across the screen: "Israel Uber Alles."
A recurring series of skits with Conway as a marriage counselor in session with an African American husband and an Asian wife. The last state laws against interracial marriages had been struck down only two years earlier.
Two men in Stetson hats defend the principles of Southern womanhood. One then says to the other, "Come on, big beauty," and they hold hands and walk out effeminately.
A white Southern hotel guest phones the main desk about the Gideon Bible which states "'Moses married an Ethiopian woman' ... in the Atlanta Hilton!?!"
A puppet snake says, "Remember, folks, I could have given Eve the apple and the Pill!"

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Reaction

Conway has stated that Turn-On was canceled midway through its only episode, so that the party the cast and crew held for its premiere as the show aired across the United States also marked its cancellation.^[4]^[5]Cleveland, Ohio's WEWS-TV stopped the episode before it finished^[4] (after "11 minutes", according to Conway).^[5] The station sent ABC network management an angry telegram: "If your naughty little boys have to write dirty words on the walls, please don't use our walls. Turn On is turned off, as far as WEWS is concerned."^[6]^[7]^[8]Denver, Colorado's KBTV did not air the episode, stating that after previewing it "We have decided, without hesitation, that it would be offensive to a major segment of the audience";^[6]Portland, Oregon's KATU and Seattle, Washington's KOMO-TV also decided to not show the episode.^[9] Viewers of Little Rock, Arkansas's KATV, which disliked the show but decided to air it, "jam[med] the station's switchboard" with complaints.^[6]

Turn-On was not officially cancelled for several days, but WEWS, KBTV, and KATV told ABC that they would not air the show again,^[6] and Bristol-Myers ordered Schlatter and Friendly to end production. ABC received 369 calls of complaint during the show, compared to 20 supporting it.^[2] Many assumed the show's title was itself an implicit reference to Timothy Leary's pro-drug maxim, "Turn on, tune in, drop out".

Both The New York Times and the Associated Press gave the show poor reviews.^[6] An ABC executive stated that "creatively, Turn-On didn't work". He compared the show negatively to the comedy of Dean Martin, Laugh-In, and the Smothers Brothers, which the executive described as "absolutely beyond belief ... awfully blue", but were popular and less controversial because unlike Turn-On, "they're funny".^[10] After Turn-On's cancellation TV Guide called it "The biggest bomb of the season". It stated that both CBS and NBC had rejected the show due to its perceived lack of quality, and that its sexual content was an important reason why viewers rejected the show.^[11] The magazine quoted a source who lamented Turn-On's lack of a regular host or interlocutor: "(T)here wasn't any sort of identification with the audience -- just a bunch of strangers up there insulting everything you believe in."

Conway said in 2008 that Turn-On was "way ahead of its time. I'm not sure even if you saw it today that maybe that time has also passed."^[4] Bart Andrews, in his 1980 book The Worst TV Shows Ever, stated that Turn-On was actually quite close to the original concept for Laugh-In. "It wasn't that it was a bad show, it was that it was an awkward show," concluded author Harlan Ellison, a fan of counter-cultural comedy and a TV critic for the Los Angeles Free Press in 1969.

The following week's TV Guide published a listing for the scheduled February 12 episode, which would have starred Robert Culp and then-wife France Nuyen as hosts. However, the network announced that the ABC Wednesday Night Movie (The Oscar, screenwritten by Ellison and itself a notorious flop) would start 30 minutes early.^[6]^[1] Apparently, many other skits were filmed for the show including one by The Monkees (minus Peter Tork, who left the group), scheduled for airing on March 12, 1969.^{[citation needed]} The network eventually replaced Turn On with a revival of The King Family Show. The controversy led to a rejection of a television pilot show written by Norman Lear, stating that the lead character was "foul-mouthed, and bigoted", out of fear that it might anger its affiliates again. CBS liked it, picked it up as All in the Family, and began airing it in 1971.^[12]^[13]