TV Legends Revealed #13
This is the thirteenth in a series of examinations of legends about television and the people involved in TV and whether they are true or false. Click here to view an archive of the previous twelve.
This week is a special theme week - all legends related to Remington Steele!
Let’s begin!
TV LEGEND: Before NBC got involved, Remington Steele was not going to exist…for real!
STATUS: True and False
Remington Steele was the brainchild of Robert Butler.
As Glenn Gordon Caron once said (I’m paraphrasing here), Robert Butler is not just a part of television history, Bob Butler essentially IS television history!
Born in 1927, Butler began his career in television as a stage manager and then as an assistant director. Eventually, he worked his way up to director of a number of popular shows during the 1960s, including the Dick Van Dyke Show and the Twilight Zone.
Butler had a very unique style of directing, and while he worked on a variety of television programs (he also directed a number of films for Disney in the late 60s/early 70s, including the films that first made Kurt Russell a star, The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes and The Barefoot Executive), he soon became known as the go-to guy when you wanted your pilot directed, because he would give you the best shot of getting picked up.
He directed the original pilot for Star Trek. He directed the pilot for Batman. He directed the pilot for Hogan’s Heroes. He directed the pilot for Blue Knight (now forgotten, but at the time, Butler won an Emmy for his directing).
Later, he directed the pilot for Moonlighting, Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, Sisters and The Division (the show that launched Jon Hamm’s career).
However, he was not just a director. In the late 1970s/early 1980s, he was developing a story idea for a TV series when he was approached by MTM Enterprises to direct the pilot of Hill Street Blues.
He did and he continued to be involved with that show for the first season or so (he won a second Emmy for his direction of the pilot episode - he was nominated for an Emmy the next year for a Season 2 episode).
At the time, the story idea he had should sound quite familiar - it was about a female detective who is not getting enough clients, so she decides to invent a super masculine sounding male boss who she only “works” for, thus giving clients the security they want in hiring her.
That’s Remington Steele, basically, right?
Heck, if you recall the first season of the series, Laura Holt (played by Stephanie Zimbalist) would even introduce the show as:
Try this for a deep, dark secret: the great detective, Remington Steele? He doesn’t exist. I invented him. Follow. I always loved excitement, so I studied, and apprenticed, and put my name on an office. But absolutely nobody knocked down my door. A female private investigator seemed so… feminine. So I invented a superior. A decidedly MASCULINE superior. Suddenly there were cases around the block. It was working like a charm… until the day HE walked in, with his blue eyes and mysterious past. And before I knew it, he assumed Remington Steele’s identity. Now I do the work, and he takes the bows. It’s a dangerous way to live, but as long as people buy it, I can get the job done. We never mix business with pleasure. Well, almost never. I don’t even know his real name!
However, in Butler’s idea of the show, there not only was not a REAL Remington Steele, there was no Remington Steele at ALL. In his concept of the show, Holt would solve cases basically by herself, and her boss would never be seen.
That was the idea he pitched to MTM Enterprises, and while they liked it in general, they suggested that he work with another writer to develop the idea.
Enter Michael Gleason, who suggests the (now obvious) idea - what if Remington Steele suddenly shows up?
Butler was hesitant at first, but he soon came over to Gleason’s point of view, and they pitched the new idea to MTM, who picked it up and sold it to NBC who debuted the show in 1982 (Butler, of course, directed the pilot episode).
Notably, at the beginning of the series, Holt was intended to be a more central character, but the actor they cast as Remington Steele, Pierce Brosnan, soon took off in a big way and the show became much more of a duo show than originally envisioned (and MUCH more than really originally envisioned).
The “false” I mentioned at the beginning is the part about how it was the NETWORK who suggested the change. That’s not the case. The change was done before a pilot was even produced (this is why Gleason is the co-creator of Remington Steele).
Thanks to Douglas Snauffer’s Crime Television 
TV LEGEND: Pierce Brosnan had to turn down the role of James Bond because of his role on Remington Steele.
STATUS: True and False
This story is an interesting one, because the BASIC gist of the story is true, but there’s enough incorrect information thrown out there about this situation that I think it’s fair to say that most of the takes on the story are false.
Well, false enough to fairly say “false,” at least.
Okay, first things first, look at Pierce Brosnan on Remington Steele…
Come on now, it’s hard to get more “James Bond” than that!
That’s what lots of fans thought at the time, and that’s also what producer Albert “Cubby” Broccoli was thinking in 1986 when two things happened.
1. Broccoli’s first choice, Timothy Dalton (who also was pretty darn Bond-like at the time)…
couldn’t do the movie because he was tied up with the film Brenda Starr…
and
2. Remington Steele had just been canceled after its fourth season, leaving Brosnan free to take the role.
So Broccoli offered the role to Brosnan and Brosnan accepted.
A funny thing happened on the way to the Aston Martin, however.
You see, while NBC was canceled with the show, so everything seemed free and clear, what Brosnan did not know was that MTM Enterprises had, in the fine print in his contract, the right to re-sell the show within X days after the cancellation of the program.
And amidst all the publicity over Brosnan first being considered and then actually being OFFERED the job, the interest in Remington Steele was suddenly bigger than it had been in years and ratings for the re-runs of the series in the summer of 1986 were suddenly pretty high.
So MTM offered to sell the show to NBC again, and here is the tricky part, and its the part that (I guess because it is tricky) always seems to get glossed over.
NBC did NOT want to keep Brosnan from playing James Bond. On the contrary, they WANTED him to play James Bond. Him playing James Bond was what made the series popular enough for NBC to want to bring the show back again. They were totally fine about tooling the show around his filming schedule for the Bond film.
Brosnan, also, was fine with doing both.
No, the problem came not from NBC, but from Broccoli, who famously cried, “James Bond will not be Remington Steele and Remington Steele will not be James Bond,” as Broccoli did not want an actor who was involved in a television series.
Calling Broccoli’s bluff, NBC agreed to terms with MTM and the fifth season of Remington Steele began filming (seen below is Brosnan and Zimbalist as well as supporting cast member, Doris Roberts, who played their secretary for Seasons 2-5), and NBC DID have a relaxed filming schedule, as the fifth season was produced as a series of two-hour TV movies rather than a regular series.
Broccoli was true to his word, though, and he rescinded Brosnan’s offer and went looking for a replacement. Eventually, enough time passed that Dalton was free to do the role, and in 1987, Dalton took over the role of James Bond for the The Living Daylights.
Brosnan eventually would, of course, get the chance to play James Bond, in four popular films, beginning with 1995’s GoldenEye…
A lesser known “casualty” of NBC’s renewal of Remington Steele was Stephanie Zimbalist. She had landed the lead female role in the film, RoboCop, but had to give it up when the show was renewed (NBC had no interest in shooting around HER schedule).
The role eventually went to Nancy Allen.
Of course, adding insult to injury, Remington Steele only lasted the one more season, and the show was canceled before The Living Daylights was even released.
TV LEGEND: The DVD collection of the first season of Remington Steele had an embarrassing oversight.
STATUS: True
It has long been said about Remington Steele that Stephanie Zimbalist and Pierce Brosnan did not get along. Brosnan has done his best to dispel these rumors, but he has never been all that convincing (however, it’s certainly not so obvious that I could state it as a fact, but if I ever had to bet on whether the pair liked each other, I would bet on “not”) and Doris Roberts claims that they did not (Zimbalist has been silent on the subject).
If Zimbalist DID have a problem with Brosnan, it likely had to do with the fact that the show was initially intended as a starring vehicle for her, while it eventually became a dual starring show, and by the end of the program, as we saw above, Brosnan was the driving force. In fact, as we also saw in the story above, I doubt Zimbalist was too pleased about missing out on a major motion picture role because of her Remington Steele co-star.
None of this, however, likely prepared her for the embarrassment of the initial release of the Remington Steele Season 1 DVD.
Fox (who purchased all of MTM Enterprises’ shows years ago) decided to play up Pierce Brosnan’s stardom with the release of Season 1 of Remington Steele (which they decided to do in two separate volumes for some reason).
That’s fair enough.
However, what’s NOT fair enough is HOW they decided to do it.
Check out the covers…
Yep, that’s right, not only does Stephanie Zimbalist not appear on the cover of the volume, her NAME does not even appear on the cover!!
After complaints, Fox addressed the issue by (this is awesome)…putting a sticker on the package “Also starring Stephanie Zimbalist”
How awesomely lame is that?
When they later combined both volumes into one, they did, at least, add her name to the cover, even if they did not put her picture on it.
Thankfully, they did put her on Season 2’s set…
And she’s appeared on the cover of the all the other sets - she even did a commentary for a Season 3 episode (after being quite absent for the first two volumes)!
Fox’s excuse at the time was that there were no good stock photos of the two of them from Season 1, and that’s why they went with Brosnan solo, but that sounds unlikely at best.
So anyhow, with this sort of treatment on a show meant to star her, I guess I can’t blame her too much if she WAS a bit ornery!
Okay, that’s it for this week!
Feel free (heck, I implore you!) to write in with your suggestions for future installments! My e-mail address is bcronin@legendsrevealed.com
[...] and sports, which you can check out here, at legendsrevealed.com. I’d especially recommend this week’s TV Legends Revealed, for more legends about Remington Steele than you ever thought possible (and I still have one saved [...]
[...] TV Legends Revealed #13 [...]
Actually the story I’d always heard was that NBC was eager and Broccoli balked. But I’m not surprised it got twisted around.
Near the end of the pilot, there is a scene when the mystery man who posed as Steele for a while says his good-byes to Laura Holt and leaves. This is followed by one more brief scene when Laura finds him in her office suite the next morning, again playing Steele, and she goes along with the pose, in part due to the presence of a client. It gives every appearance of being tacked on, as if NBC execs viewed the pilot and ordered the producers to keep the guy on, too, if they wanted it bought. A quote attributed to Zimbalist among the reports of animosity between the two (”He came in and took my show from me,” IIRC; that’s extremely close at worst) is as compatible with your version as that.
The Bond situation: As was reported at the time in no uncertain terms, NBC announced cancellation, then (due as you say to the publicity, such as “Remington Steele is new 007″) simply reversed themselves just before their option on the series ran out (some of those reports saying within a few hours), forcing Brosnan to back out of the Bond movie. I am not disputing that NBC tried to allow that to happen, mind you. I AM saying that the subsequent six-hour story arc for the fifth season was the result of the network having already committed to a fall ‘86 schedule without the series on it.
These were great articles and I liked how you cleared up the whole NBC/ Bond/ Brosnan issue.
Call me cynical, but something just doesn’t sit right with this story. Your reporting is excellent as always, but to me, the facts don’t add up.
Let’s see:
The big breaking news at the time is that Roger Moore is leaving as James Bond. This would be as big a deal as when Sean Connery left. So, whomever the producers picked to be the next Bond would get a huge boost in his career.
They approach Pierce Brosnan and *no one* notices that his Remington Steele contract could maybe, possibly be renewed? Um, isn’t that what you pay attorneys and business managers to do: read all the fine print in your contract? And then NBC conveniently decides to renew the show immediately after the announcement that Brosnan is to become James Bond?
Like I said, call me cynical, but I get the feeling that Brosnan (or his manager) knew there was this option in the show’s contract and gambled that he could take on two jobs, especially if the network was willing to work around his movie schedule. This would then double-boost his career and boost the show’s ratings (or at least bring it back to life).
But, like you said in the article, the Bond producers didn’t want “James Bond” on a TV show at the same time.
I get what you’re saying, John, but why I think the possibility is for real is because it wasn’t an NBC option. It’s often told in stories as an NBC option, but it was rather an MTM option.
It’s reasonable to expect a guy to know that the network has an option to hold him over for X amount of years, but I don’t know if it is as reasonable for him to know that once the network cancels the show, that the production company could ALSO bind him over to the rest of his contract.
So while it’s certainly feasible that Brosnan was just rolling the dice, I think he honestly felt that once NBC canceled the show, he was in the clear, not knowing that MTM still had the option of re-selling the show (which they did - just back to NBC rather than another network).
I reepeat: Media reports of the time had NBC reversing their announced cancallation just before their option expired. I find such to be the most credible sources. For example, on his audio commentary for the DVD release of his “Incredible Hulk” TV series pilot/movie (nearly thirty years after the filming), Kenneth Johnson said that Richard Kiel tested for the title role. However, while the show was still running on CBS, it was reported to have been another real-life giant with whom Kiel was often confused (and vice versa), Ted Cassidy. Furthermore, Cassidy did the opening-title-sequence narration tracks heard on the second pilot and on the weekly series episodes, and also the Hulk’s growls and roars for the pilots and the first season; he WAS around–and contributing to–the project. Add into that the fact that DVD commentaries are done off the top of one’s head while the film (or whatever) runs on a screen in front of one, and which giant do you really think tested?
Re: The Ted Cassidy/Richard Kiel thing… I think that sounds like a good legend to investigate. I’ve always heard Kiel, but if there are credible sources that only mention Cassidy, there might be a good story there.
[...] #13 - Before NBC got involved, Remington Steele was not going to exist…for real! [...]
I just read Brian’s July 10th response to John in depth. Let me make this clear. NBC, with everybody signed to the usual five-year deals, cancelled “Remington Steele” after its fourth season. Big announcement of the new fall season’s schedule, and the usual lists of cancellations alongside. Nobody else was showing any interest in picking it up, so ALL involved saw the program as dead, the options left in the contracts–with cancellation announced, the five-year aspect of the contracts was reduced to the true end of the current season–as merely technicalities that were going to be allowed to expire. This was the status of every series cancelled at that time that was not at the end of its original five-year contract or a subsequent one if it had passed five years (and at any other season’s end). Everybody started looking for alternative work. Zimbalist got connected to “Robocop” and Brosnan signed to be the new James Bond. As usual with that franchise, this was big news, and the coverage repeatedly referred to the TV series that Brosnan had JUST done. The publicity was so great that NBC decided there was life left in the show and, with their ORIGINAL license with MTM for it not quite expired, they reversed themselves and revived it for a mid-season run while they STILL had the option to do so. I don’t dispute your claim that NBC wanted Brosnan to do both projects and the film producers did not, but there was NO second sale to NBC. The fact that some sources reported that NBC had a very few hours left to be able to “uncancel” proves that they were not simply assuming the simplest scenario, because making up such a detail was not only completely unnecessary, it would have been a gross violation of journalistic ethics.
“It’s reasonable to expect a guy to know that the network has an option to hold him over for X amount of years, but I don’t know if it is as reasonable for him to know that once the network cancels the show, that the production company could ALSO bind him over to the rest of his contract.”
Brian, what you’re saying doesn’t make a lick of sense. (I say that with much love for the site.)
The production company makes the show and employs the actors. The networks buy the show and distribute it. They certainly have all sorts of input, and they likely have specific contracts with certain actors (almost certainly including Brosnan, as the star of one of their shows), but MTM is the one who employs Brosnan and pays him. So that would be the primary contract that his agent, manager, and lawyers would’ve been concerned with.
That said, I think it makes sense that nobody would’ve allowed that clause to stop them from finding other work, since the clause was essentially worthless until Brosnan happened to find the one job that would make it worth something.
Exactly. When I said, “…with everybody signed to the usual five-year deals….” I meant that the talent was under contract to MTM that way. The network’s deal leaves them with the option to cancel at any point; NBC’s three-year total committment to Sheldon Leonard’s “I Spy” and two-year ditto to Steven
Spielberg’s “Amazing Stories” are extremely rare exceptions. Only the production company had contracts with the actors, and they were not with the studio in general (as was the practice at Warner Bros. and elsewhere in the “77 Sunset Strip” days) but strictly for that series. Whenever a network cancels a series at some point other than at the end of the (from the involved entities’ perspective) current agreement, the potential for this situation ALWAYS exists; the network legally has the option of reversing themselves, but they almost never do it and the talent, with their contracts with the studio just as dead–no more, no less–as the studio’s with the network, start looking for work immediately instead of waiting out the network’s new, shorter time limit brought into play by the cancellation announcement. NBC did not rebuy “Star Trek” from Paramount in 1968, but simply “uncancelled” it in response to viewer protests. In that case NBC placed “Trek” back on the fall schedule, but as you explained, on this occasion the network wanted Brosnan to have the time to do the Bond movie as well, so they made only a very limited pick-up.
Fair enough, Sean.
I still think that it’s reasonable for an actor (and his people) to overlook MTM’s right to “resell” the show once NBC had canceled it, simply because how often does a show get re-sold after a network cancels it and X amount of time passes? When shows get re-sold to other networks once canceled, they tend to be working on the deal right away (heck, sometimes before the network has even officially canceled them), so when X amount of time passed after NBC canceled the show and MTM had not even appeared slightly interested in re-selling the show, I think it’s reasonable for Brosnan (and his people) to forget about MTM’s re-sale option, but you’re most likely correct that I undersold the possibility of the re-sale, and Brosnan (especially his people) should have been more aware of it.
Like it or not, Brian, there was NO resale. When the cancellation of a series is announced by the network carrying it, technically (usually) said net is, legally, not fully committed to that status right away. When a show’s ratings AND reviews have both dropped the way “Steele”’s had, the studio is not shopping it around, and everybody concerned has no doubt whatsoever that the program is absolutely defunct. Consequently, they go looking for new work and all parties involved–every ****ing one of them, including the network executives–don’t care that legally the contracts aren’t quite out of the way yet. Several shows of this era moved to new carriers when cancelled. MGM took “Fame” into first-run syndication (their own distribution arm) when NBC dropped it for terribly low ratings, because the huge successes overseas easily offset the losses here, but not for the network as it didn’t own a piece of the show (same situation with “Baywatch” a decade later). “Taxi” had such high praise from the critics (as it always had) that Paramount had no trouble selling it to NBC after ABC cancelled. But “Steele” had none of that going for it. When a network buys a TV series from an outside studio, there is a contract (sometimes referred to as a license) almost always for five years. The network retains the right to cancel earlier than that, but if they do they do NOT have whatever is left of the five years to reverse themselves. When NBC cancelled “Remington Steele” after FOUR years, they then had under the contract a limited amount of time within which they could reverse that decision. As with most series cancellations, nobody had any thought whatsoever that they might actually do it. When the “TV’s Remington Steele to be the next James Bond” publicity broke, NBC still had a little time left, and they did indeed “uncancel” the series. Thanks to you I now know that they actually thought Brosnan would be able to do both projects, but they would NOT have been willing to negotiate a brand new fee with MTM, given how the Bond deal increased the value there. That brings us to this: Your header for this item should have read something to the following effect:
NBC sought to profit from the “TV’s Remington Steele to be next James Bond” publicity by uncancelling the series, incredibly failing to realize that they were killing the deal.
The status would have been some form of a qualified “False” because while that reflects the events, NBC had thought things through better than that and believed Brosnan would be allowed to do both. Again, thank you for explaining away THAT.
Let me put it another way. When NBC’s original set of options were gone, while MTM would have had the right to shop the show around, just as NBC would have to enter into a new arrangement with the studio, so would the latter with the talent. That’s why this sort of thing either happens very quickly (the three examples given above, plus “Too Close for Comfort” and “Silver Spoons”), or there are significant cast changes when the new venue eventually gets it on the air (”Charles in Charge,” “Nine to Five,” “Mama’s Family,” and the sitcom about the waitresses with “Living” in its various titles). To repeat my opening here: Like it or not, NBC did NOT buy the “Remington Steele” series a second time (and ignoring all my postings won’t make them not true or not existing).
Fine, Ted, instead of ignoring you, I am just done with you commenting at this site, as well.
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