No one opens the door for a native New Yorker. (No one?) No one.

How did Odyssey's ready-for-prime-time 1977 hit "Native New Yorker" not find its way into the opening credits of a network sitcom back in the heyday of disco?



It was used to promote The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon earlier this year, with Fallon roller-boogieing down a New York City sidewalk, but why couldn't Busting Loose, a short-lived CBS comedy starring Adam Arkin as "a young man in New York City who has moved out of his parents' house to live on his own for the first time," according to the show's Wikipedia entry, give it a good home? What, not butch enough for you, Busting Loose?



Okay, I see your point.

To be fair, Busting Loose premiered in January of '77, and "Native New Yorker" didn't become a hit until that summer, apparently. That means the Barney Miller spin-off Fish, which debuted in February, would've been ineligible as well. (When a station in my hometown of Macon, Georgia, aired reruns of Fish in the summer of '83, it used Madness's then-current hit "Our House" in its promos, which is why Abe Vigoda and Suggs will be forever linked in my mind.)



However, the Mary Tyler Moore Show spin-off Rhoda was entering its fourth season in the fall of '77 and could've used some new platform shoes.



ABC's Makin' It didn't live long enough to see its theme song reach number five on the Billboard Top 40. That's because the show was canceled months earlier. (Oh, the humanity.) Besides, Makin' It centered on a native New Jerseyer, not a native New Yorker. (It's worth pointing out that Greg Antonacci, who was scary as hell in the final season of The Sopranos as one of Phil Leotardo's henchmen, was a featured player on both Busting Loose and Makin' It. He also made a couple of memorable appearances in those days on The Rockford Files, on which Sopranos creator David Chase was a writer.)



Welcome Back, Kotter, you could've used a boost in your final season (1978-'79) after John Travolta left for greener pastures on the big screen. On second thought, never mind—John Sebastian's melancholy but ultimately uplifting "Welcome Back" is a perfect TV theme song. No need for a quick fix of something that wasn't broken to begin with.



The same goes for Taxi, which debuted in the fall of '78. I love you just the way you are, Bob James's "Angela."



I guess it wasn't meant to be, "Native New Yorker," but keep your head up—I have a feeling you're gonna make it after all.

CBS has canceled Medium.

After having its seventh-season episode order cut from 22 episodes to 13 last month, Medium was officially canceled this week by CBS, with its final episode set to air in January. The supernatural drama, which stars Patricia Arquette as a psychic who helps the Phoenix DA's office solve crimes, spent its first five seasons on NBC before being rescued from cancellation by CBS. Now its luck has finally run out.

This is a golden opportunity, however, for Medium creator and executive producer Glenn Gordon Caron, who previously created the network series Now and Again (CBS, 1999-2000) and Moonlighting (ABC, 1985-1989), which was my favorite show when I was growing up. He was also the brains behind "When I Grow Up" (a.k.a. "Fling"), a series that never aired despite six episodes having been completed by the time Fox pulled the plug in 2001; a pseudo-update of Moonlighting, it featured Amy Sedaris, one of the funniest people on the planet, playing the Ms. DiPesto receptionist role, and was reportedly axed because Caron wouldn't take input from network brass. Now, with the cancellation of his latest—and longest-running—network series, Caron finally has a chance to create a series for HBO. (C'mon, guys, schedule a meeting already!)

One of the main reasons I loved Moonlighting when I was growing up was because it didn't follow the rules of other shows. The main characters, private detectives Maddie Hayes (Cybill Shepherd) and David Addison (Bruce Willis), occasionally talked to the camera and acknowledged they were characters on a TV show; overlapping dialogue was common; and comedy, drama, and romance were often combined in the same episode in equal measures. In its third season the episode "Big Man on Mulberry Street" showcased quietly dramatic moments for Shepherd and Willis that surrounded a stylish dance number choreographed by Singin' in the Rain codirector Stanley Donen; one week later "Atomic Shakespeare" featured iambic pentameter and a full-dress parody of The Taming of the Shrew.

For a while anything was possible on Moonlighting. It was wildly creative and had an energy no other show could match. No wonder it burned out so quickly.

Though Caron and company were supposed to complete 22 episodes of Moonlighting each season after the first, the most they ever delivered was 18 in the second season. Even the show's abbreviated first season ended up one episode short of ABC's six-episode order. Caron did complete 22 episodes of Now and Again for CBS more than a decade later, but rumor has it he went overbudget on the last few episodes of the show's one and only season in order to finish them on time. Since the show's ratings had steadily decreased throughout the season, the network pulled the plug; Now and Again ended on a cliffhanger that was never resolved.

I never read of any production delays on Medium, but I'm sure Caron would jump at the chance to produce just 13 or 10 or even 8 episodes per season, which is standard at HBO. Before he created The Sopranos for HBO, David Chase had written for network shows like The Rockford Files and Northern Exposure. Before The Wire and Treme, David Simon worked on NBC's Homicide: Life on the Street. And before Six Feet Under, Alan Ball spent time writing for the Cybill Shepherd sitcom Cybill; he once said that the former Moonlighting star's diva-like behavior frustrated him so much that he decided the best way to deal with it was to channel his anger into a script titled American Beauty, which eventually won him the Best Original Screenplay Oscar in 2000.

It's my guess that Caron would similarly thrive at a cable network that prides itself on letting inventive writer-producers do what they do best.