@vetsoapfan @soapfan770 @Khan @Vee @slick jones @Paul Raven @All My Shadows @Soaplovers @te. @kalbir @SoapDope78 @Soapsuds @Franko @janea4old @I Am A Swede @Chris B @dc11786

At about 28 minutes there's a promo for the extremely rare and short-lived Beacon Hill, the American copy of Upstairs, Downstairs.

Musical Chairs Ep. 55 (~Sept. 1, 1975)

Edited yesterday at 03:01 PM1 day by DRW50

Thanks @DRW50 Beacon Hill was always going to be a risky proposition.

PBS made Upstairs, Downstairs a hit for them, but I'm sure the numbers were nowhere near what would be acceptable for a network

Upstairs/Downstairs fans would probably be (rightly) cynical of a US version and regular CBS viewers wouldn't know how to deal with a videotaped period piece. But initial ratings showed some curiosity and interest but it didn't last once the full schedule was in place. And there were BTS dramas as well.

BH debuted in a 2hr special Mon Aug 25 preseason and notched up a 23.1/42 share up against a rpt of Legend of Lizzie Borden ABC 18.2/33 and Baseball NBC 9.1/16

The following Tues it had its timeslot premiere, again up against repeats and earned a 31 share.

Once the season was underway BH earned a 14,6/27 up against Marcus Welby and Joe Forrester 19.3/36

But BH's lead in Switch had a 22.9/39 so there was big fall off.

By October there was no going back as BH was amongst the lowest rated shows. It was cancelled before Nov sweeps.

I noticed Michael Nouri in the cast. Did he get time off from SFT ? I'm sure a lot of NY actors hoped the show would take off as there would have been jobs to be had.

Thanks for the extra info.

Vaguely related, I'll just seeing Michael Nouri's elderly ass on The Pitt this season was not on my 2026 bingo card. Props to him for no vanity.

Thanks! I think Beacon Hill is one of those things that's more a curiosity, but once it's seen people will be... disappointed.

2 hours ago, Vee said:

just seeing Michael Nouri's elderly ass on The Pitt this season was not on my 2026 bingo card.

Now if he had shown ass BITD on SFT that might be a different story.

6 hours ago, DRW50 said:

@vetsoapfan @soapfan770 @Khan @Vee @slick jones @Paul Raven @All My Shadows @Soaplovers @te. @kalbir @SoapDope78 @Soapsuds @Franko @janea4old @I Am A Swede @Chris B

At about 28 minutes there's a promo for the extremely rare and short-lived Beacon Hill, the American copy of Upstairs, Downstairs.

Musical Chairs Ep. 55 (~Sept. 1, 1975)

I had such high expectations for Beacon Hill, and hoped it would be a classy, American version of Upstairs, Downstairs, which I enjoyed.

The first episode was atrociously written, and TBTB seemed to be treating the series as low-brow camp. I expected Jerry Lewis to pop up as The Nutty Professor at any moment, LOL.

When I saw that the writer was Anne Howard Bailey, whose abysmal writing had tanked How to Survive a Marriage and doomed that daytime soap to failure, I was crestfallen. With hackneyed caricatures and shallow scripts at BH's core, I quickly predicted it would be a bomb.

Most frustratingly, weeks into its run, the writing suddenly took an upwards swing. HTSAM had had the thing happen: after AHB was replaced by the great Rick Edelstein, the quality of the writing surged.

Alas, neither the viewers of HTSAM nor BH gave those dramas a second chance; once burned, twice shy, I suppose.

I stuck with Beacon Hill out of morbid curiosity, wondering if the network and/or show runners would do anything to turn the series around. I had watched the debuts of several soaps (HTSAM, Bright Promise, Return to Peyton Place, Where the Heart Is, among others) whose early days were stained by poor writing...but suddenly rebounded when new scribes were brought in.

Unfortunately, none of those soaps were able to recover from their disastrous beginnings.

Edited yesterday at 03:40 PM1 day by vetsoapfan

Thanks for the tag, @DRW50. That is some hairdo on Kathryn Walker, who played Fawn. My go-tos for Kathryn are Neighbors, where she played John Belushi's wife (and Lauren-Marie Taylor's mom!), and Special Bulletin, where she's kind of a Barbara Walters takeoff.

@vetsoapfan I'm glad to hear from someone who watched the show. It is frustrating how many times shows improve only when it's too late. From what you've said Anne's only successful soap stint seems to have been GH.

@te. I agree - the power of what we don't know is often more interesting than the reality. Still, for completion's sake, I wish some was available.

@Franko I haven't seen Neighbors since I was a kid. I should rewatch sometime. I wonder if she is as broad in that film.

Edited yesterday at 04:21 PM1 day by DRW50

Thanks @DRW50 . I feel like it's very rarely, if ever, happened where a the US remakes a UK series that's already been established here (and vice versa). If the audience already knows and accepted the original series, what's the point of trying to do it all over again in a form that you know will fall short? Filming it rather than taping might have actually saved it by welcoming less comparison and allowing it to have a different vibe/style.

Side note, it's pretty amazing that "Musical Chairs" has been mostly recovered and preserved. Gives me so much hope for other games/soaps.

1 hour ago, DRW50 said:

From what you've said Anne's only successful soap stint seems to have been GH.

And I think even that's up for debate, as it seems a lot of longtime GH fans around here who watched during that time have said that what saved GH back then was Gloria Monty's production and the fact that so many well-loved characters remained front-and-center.

4 hours ago, Franko said:

Thanks for the tag, @DRW50. That is some hairdo on Kathryn Walker, who played Fawn. My go-tos for Kathryn are Neighbors, where she played John Belushi's wife (and Lauren-Marie Taylor's mom!), and Special Bulletin, where she's kind of a Barbara Walters takeoff.

Special Bulletin mentioned!!!!

Anyway, yes she's amazing in it. And it's on YT.

13 hours ago, DRW50 said:

@vetsoapfan @soapfan770 @Khan @Vee @slick jones @Paul Raven @All My Shadows @Soaplovers @te. @kalbir @SoapDope78 @Soapsuds @Franko @janea4old @I Am A Swede @Chris B @dc11786

At about 28 minutes there's a promo for the extremely rare and short-lived Beacon Hill, the American copy of Upstairs, Downstairs.

Musical Chairs Ep. 55 (~Sept. 1, 1975)

Thanks for posting the link to the rare promo of Beacon Hill.

8 hours ago, DRW50 said:

@Franko I haven't seen Neighbors since I was a kid. I should rewatch sometime. I wonder if she is as broad in that film.

Be warned that if you do rewatch, there's lots of ersatz Twilight Zone music. It's like, okay, we've got it, it's a surreal comedy!

As for Kathryn, my memory is that she's the straight woman. She doesn't have the joke/baggage of blatantly playing against type, like John and Dan Aykroyd had. And she's not vamping like there's no tomorrow, like Cathy Moriarty did.

5 hours ago, Vee said:

Special Bulletin mentioned!!!!

Anyway, yes she's amazing in it. And it's on YT.

It's begging for a remake, but they wouldn't have the guts to tackle it in this day and age.

Thanks @DRW50 . It's nice to get a glimpse of this, though I agree with @te. I expect that if it ever did turn up it would be disappointing.

There seems to be a lot of press regarding Beacon Hill in the papers with mixed reviews and lots of ongoing discussion of what wasn't working and more post-mortem analysis of why things didn't work out. In a very little sense, the show was cancelled the weekend of October 25th after two weeks of disastrous ratings against the World Series. The October 14th episode The Million Dollar Gate had a rating of 9.77 and a 17 share; this landed it the position of the lowest rated nighttime show for the entire week. The October 21st episode, The Suitors, received a 8.2 rating 13 share. It rebounds pretty quickly the next week with The Test where 10.8 / 20 share but remains among the lowest five shows for the week.

There are lots of complaints given about the show. Some people liked the pilot episode, while others thought there was too much focus on sex. The episodes did not air in order, which Jackie Babbin complained about as the second aired episode The Colonel and the Fawn, the episode featured in the promo, was a later episode and Babbin felt it gave the show's audience a false sense of what the show was about as it was another sex heavy episode. Then, they switched episodes at last minute an week three showed The Marblehead Club instead of The Poor Little Thing. The consensus seemed to be that most people thought the show improvied around episode 5, which introduced the speakeasy run by the chaffeur Harry Emmet, an oblivious physically disabled Rob Lassiter, and Grant Piper, the son of the black chef.

In addition, there seemed to be some interest around the political storyline as Benjamin Lassiter groomed his son-in-law, Trevor Bullock, for the poltiical world and they backed Peabody Carbury for a political posiiton. The general audience and reviewers felt that Benjamin Lassiter was a clearly a thinly veiled Joseph Kennedy, which everyone involved in production claims was false. They did, however, say that the Lassiter sisters were based on the Cushing sisters.

There was lot of coverage about the production. Costumes had to be made, not rented, because there was supposedly nothing around from that era, which sounds suspect. There were live plants and freshly baked food in scenes. The production team would scour junkyards looking for authentic pieces to polish and restore in order to create authenticity and accuracy. A butler was hired as a consultant to explain how the staff should act.

There seemed to be some consultants who were brought over from England by the executive producer, Beryl Vertue, including Jean Marsh and John Harkesworth. Vertue stated that Harkesworth worked on the last produced episode, the unaired The Visit about Charlotte Hacker arriving from England to critique how the Americans ran their household. It sounds a little bit meta by that point.

After the cancellation, there were lots of complaints about the writing by actors who seemed to think things fell off after pilot and that the scripts were so bad that Jackie Babbin had to tell the cast to stop laughing when writers were on set. Some felt things got better towards the end.

There were structural complaints as well. Some that have already been stated and restarted over the years about how it was unlikely that nouveau riche Irish would be living on Beacon Hill in 1920s. Some point out that there wasn't enough of a distinction between the social classes from the clothes theywrote to the amount of intermixing between the two groups. Others pointed out that the Irish staff serving in an Irish household really ignored the complexities and interconnection of race, ethnicity, religion, and class in American. It was suggested that even a wealthy Jewish family with Irish servants would have allowed more of that to come to the surface.

At least one early episode hints at some of those possibilities. In The Marblehead Club, Benjamin Lassiter is put up for membership at an exclusive club by his snobby neighbor, Cleveridge, This occurs while Fr. Tom Lassiter, Benjamin's brother, is visiting after 20 years in India with Fr. John Dilip Singh. Tom comments about how men of color are treated and tries to get him out of town. Accustomed to his new homeland, Tom and John walk arm in arm in public causing a stir. The setup is rich in issues of social class, race, societal custom, sexuality and gender roles, and religion but I'm not sure how this was all handled by the scriptwriter David Wiltse.

Sidney Caroll, who wrote the pilot, outlined the next 12 episodes, but stated that his outlines were heavily edited and disavowed most of the work after the pilot. There also was ongoing issues with censorship according to Jackie Babbin. In addition, there was quite a bit of back and forth about the general direction of the show. Carroll and Vertue seemed to want a quieter series, while the network wanted somethign bolder. While Vertue loved the final script about the visiting sister, the network didn't like it. Ultimately, Vertue went on to say you couldn't make a show like Upstairs, Downstairs in the States because of the structure of the television industry.

The reviews were mixed, but I suspect some of the issues were that the reviewers were mostly male. One even complained that the products advertised in the commercials were female oriented, There is probably a bit of sexism in these. One post-mortem review was hypercritical of Kathryn Walker's acting but devolved into a critique of her looks, which is clearly unnecessary. Paul Rudd seemed to be the stand out new star of the group. George Rose , Beatrie Striaght, and Stephen Elliott were typically cited as among the stronger actors. David Dukes got mixed reviews in the beginning, but was praised later in the run fairly consistently.

Another reason I suspect it didn't catch on was the cast was too large. Despite there being 18 or so lead cast members, there were usually at least one additional featured guest star every week to drive the story. I think you could have easily reduced the show to 10-11 cast members by cutting several of the Lassiters (Trevor, Maud, and Rosamond) as well as several of the servants (Terrence, Maureen, and Marilyn). I know Brian and Rosamond were emerging as a major couple, but I would have combined Rosamond and Betsy's roles. Fawn's love Giorgio may also have been expendable in the long run.

@Franko Neighbors' score was composed by Bill Conti, a far cry from his Dynasty theme.