Curses! The Kickoff Curse has struck again!
Chalk up “Grown Ups,” the UPN sitcom starring Jaleel White in his first post-Urkel showcase, as the latest victim of this overwhelmingly accurate predictor of failure. As the first new show out of the starting blocks last fall, “Grown Ups” was all but assured of being denied a return ticket to the forthcoming fall schedule.
Basically, the Kickoff Curse predicts that whichever new fall series is the first to premiere will not survive its freshman year. It’s almost like being first in line for the guillotine.
And, sure enough, when UPN released its fall schedule last month, “Grown Ups” was gone.
UPN unveiled “Grown Ups” on Aug. 23, 1999, a full month before the traditional start of the TV season. The early start was justified by the same reasoning used by some network every year–UPN wanted to give the show an early jump on the competition, a chance to stand out from the pack before there is a pack.
The logic seems sound, and the success last summer of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire,” and the encouraging launch of this year’s summer series “Survivor,” prove that large audiences can be gathered for the right show long before September.
Yet when it comes to taking shows from the fall schedule and giving them a head start, the results are so reliably dismal that I long ago identified it, and began tracking it as TV’s Kickoff Curse.
In the 24 years since the networks have been maneuvering to get an early jump on the competition, the Kickoff Curse has claimed its victim 21 times, including the last eight years in a row. Among the victims: “My So-Called Life” with Clare Danes in 1994.
In fact, only one series per decade has been able to shake the curse.
CBS started the head-start program successfully in 1976 with “Alice,” the Linda Lavin sitcom version of the movie “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Any More.” It took 13 years for the next early starter, ABC’s “PrimeTime Live” newsmagazine, to survive its first year — and that was only after a disastrous 1989 premiere installment (remember the live report of a dying tree?). Then there was “Roc,” the 1991 Fox sitcom starring Charles S. Dutton, which lasted several seasons — one of them live.
But that’s it: one survivor each from the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s.
I’m well aware of the arguments against taking the Kickoff Curse seriously. More networks mean more competition than ever (there were three commercial networks when the Curse began, and now there are six), and most new shows fail anyway. Also, many of the new shows positioned with early premieres are presented that way precisely because the networks consider them vulnerable or unusual.
Even so, to all those skeptics I throw down this gauntlet: Show me any other statistical indicator that can predict prime-time failure with such a high degree of accuracy. Right now, the Kickoff Curse is right 87 percent of the time, and hasn’t been wrong since 1991.
That doesn’t mean some individual performers can’t survive the Curse and go on to greater glory.
Both Craig T. Nelson and Elisabeth Shue bounced back from the excellent but underrated 1984 ABC period drama series “Call to Glory,” about a family living through the changing times of the early ’60s. He starred in “Coach”; she carved out a movie career. So did Danes, the young star of ABC’s equally ambitious “My So-Called Life.”
More recently, Trey Parker of “South Park” fame survived a Kickoff Curse experience: He was Rapper 1, one of the rap-spouting Hull High Devils on NBC’s 1990 musical drama floperoo, “Hull High.” And Jane Kaczmarek, the leading lady of a 1985 CBS “Big Chill” ripoff called “Hometown,” thrived this past season as the frazzled mom on the Fox midseason hit sitcom, “Malcolm in the Middle.”
Yes, the Kickoff Curse has claimed some quality shows as victims: “The Betty White Show,” “Best of the West,” “Call to Glory” and “My So-Called Life” all deserved longer runs.
Yet when the same curse so effectively torpedoes such sinking ships as “Dick Clark’s Live Wednesday,” “We Got It Made” and “Front Page,” perhaps a name change is in order.
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Perhaps, to viewers, it’s really the Kickoff Blessing.