Tales from TeleView: The Good, the Bad, and the 70's

A special audio-only feature from [1] New Message:
theme songs from TV shows that never were. Or were they?

Giotto Massacio was an Italian filmmaker who came to America to fulfill his childhood dream of making an American Western TV show. Unfortunately, he arrived in 1977, at least 15 years after the Golden Age of TV Westerns.

Undaunted, Carlo funneled his Western obsession into another genre: the police drama. Their saloon was a bar on Van Nuys, their “horse” was muscle car, but Breedlove and Marcus, "two unconventional cops bringing their own brand of justice to the streets" were almost prototypically Western heroes.

Specifically, they were “Spaghetti Western” heroes, which made for the show problematic for both fans of cop shows and of traditional Westerns. For instance, why did they always wear full length cattleman’s raincoats in Southern California? Who puts horns as a hood ornament on a muscle car? Did anyone really still say "I reckon?" Why all those close-ups of people’s eyes?

While well received by film buffs, the show never found a solid audience, and was quickly replaced by an generically generic police procedural.