We Bombed In Burbank: A Joyride To Prime Time

We Bombed in Burbank is Vance Muse's entertaining inside view of a phenomenon that for better or worse touches our lives almost daily - the 30-minute television comedy. Smoldering Lust, a sexy comedy-mystery series starring Kate Capshaw (Mrs. Steven Spielberg), was the brainchild of former NBC head Brandon Tartikoff and Jay Tarses, Emmy award-winning writer (for The Carol Burnett Show) and creator of The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd. Reviews of this quirky, lowkey-to-a-fault sitcom - which finally premiered under the much safer but completely inappropriate title Black Tie Affair - were baffled and mixed at best, and a beleaguered NBC, preoccupied with the loss of David Letterman and Cheers, yanked the series after airing only five expensive episodes.
Muse's wry, behind-the-scenes perspective - on everything from casting and costuming to Tarses's insistence on the purity of his vision and the ridiculous antics of the network suits - mingles the gossip value of People magazine with the bottom-line sense of The Wall Street Journal to create a witty, incisive portrait of a pop-cultural institution. With its fly-on-the-wall peek inside story meetings and the network suites, at what happens on the set and inside the stars' dressing rooms, there's no better look at the making (and unmaking) of a network show.