#at least until the cleveland press collection at csu opens back up and i get to do some research there

[michelles-garden-of-evil]

Essay: The Broadcast History of Strange Paradise on WKBF-TV (Cleveland, OH)

WARNING: This essay contains spoilers for several episodes of Strange Paradise, the latest being Episode 94. If you do not wish to be spoiled, disable images and reload.

When Krantz Films’ now-obscure Gothic soap Strange Paradise premiered in the United States in September 1969, the company’s president Steve Krantz expected it to be a hit much like the similar, wildly popular serial Dark Shadows. “You thought every possible idea for a daytime drama had already been used?” one copywriter wrote in a trade magazine. “How about Colin Fox playing the dual role of a millionaire industrialist and his 300-years-dead ancestor, in a show set in the Caribbean, involving voodoo? Don’t laugh. Wait until you see the ratings.” Despite this initial optimism, Strange Paradise’s ratings failed to live up to anyone’s expectations, leading to an early cancellation in most American markets. The Cleveland, Ohio station WKBF-TV (Channel 61), an ultra-high frequency (UHF) channel owned by Kaiser Broadcasting, was no exception. The broadcast history of Strange Paradise in Cleveland provides a typical example of the quick decline and premature cancellation that the show saw on most networks that carried it in the United States.

In this essay, we will use the Cleveland newspaper The Plain Dealer to trace the short broadcast history of Strange Paradise on WKBF-TV from its beginnings in the 7 p.m. prime-time slot to its cancellation. After that, we will examine an anecdotal account of a second run of the show’s first arc in 1971 and determine whether the series aired again in Cleveland during that year.

Strange Paradise in The Plain Dealer

Banner advertisements for Strange Paradise from the Friday, September 12, 1969 issue of The Plain Dealer (pp. 107, 110, and 118, respectively).[1]

In the lead-up to its premiere on Monday, September 15, 1969, Kaiser Broadcasting promoted Strange Paradise heavily in the Friday, September 12 issue of The Plain Dealer. Banners appeared at the bottom of the television schedule’s pages, referencing the show’s voodoo theme and encouraging the newspaper’s readers to “meet Quito and Raxl,” two of the show’s major characters. The Selections section of The Plain Dealer’s Friday TV guides ran episode summaries to entice viewers to tune in. The show aired in the 7 pm timeslot, pitting it against Gilligan’s Island, Truth or Consequences, and other popular programs.

Excerpt from the TV schedule for Monday, September 15, 1969, from The Plain Dealer (September 12, 1969), p. 110. In this listing and all subsequent others, the listings for WKBF/Kaiser/Channel 61 appear in the far right column.

Summary of the pilot episode from the same issue, p. 117. The timeslot is listed inaccurately as 7:30 pm.

In theory, Strange Paradise’s original timeslot put it in a position to get good ratings. Bryan Gruszka writes that “initially, the series enjoyed strong ratings,“ but this seems unlikely to be the case in Cleveland. As a UHF channel, many televisions (particularly older sets) did not pick up reception from Kaiser, leaving the viewership low for all of its programs compared to the very-high frequency (VHF) “Big Three” networks of NBC (Channel 3/WKYC), ABC (Channel 5/WEWS), and CBS (Channel 8/WJW).[2] Every one of the Top 30 highest-rated programs of the 1969-1970 season aired on the Big Three television networks, further suggesting a low viewership for WKBF and other UHF channels. Disappointed by the show’s ratings, Kaiser moved it to daytime and scheduled Star Trek reruns in its place, which attracted far more prime-time viewers.[3]

3 pm listings from the TV schedule for September 29, 1969, from The Plain Dealer (September 29, 1969), p. 39.

Episode 11 summary from the same page.

Strange Paradise made the move to daytime television by Monday, September 29, when WKBF rescheduled it at 3 pm. In this new timeslot, it competed against two other soap operas, Another World (NBC) and General Hospital (ABC), which attracted 9.6 million and 8.5 million viewers, respectively, during the 1969-1970 season. Ratings for Strange Paradise do not appear on the list of soap opera ratings for this season, although it aired on the Big Three networks in some other markets. Because of this, it is impossible to know exactly how it fared against its competitors, but it most likely attracted few viewers.

During this period, episode summaries continued to run on the Selections pages of the weekly TV guides released on Fridays. Many of these are identical or nearly identical to the “Lost Episode” summaries from the Newport Daily News and The Fitchburg Sentinel documented on Curt Ladnier’s blog Maljardin: Tales from the Desmond Family Crypt. These summaries described early drafts of the episodes before the show’s producers mandated major rewrites, meaning that the events described in the listings did not correspond to the plots of the broadcasted episodes. Notable changes included the death of one character whom the summaries indicated originally remained alive, the omission of a flashback nightmare sequence about another character’s previous incarnation, and the focus of the main plotline shifting to the discovery of a mysterious black rabbit with a bloodied locket around its neck (which the summaries do not mention). The “Lost Episode” summaries continued through Episode 50, after which the published descriptions once again accurately reflected the episodes’ contents.

Summary of the original Episode 36, from “Monday Selections,” The Plain Dealer (October 31, 1969), p. 121. The description nearly matches this “Lost Episode” summary on Ladnier’s blog.

The original Episode 37 ("Tuesday Selections,” p. 125). The description is similar to the one discussed in this post, save that this version indicates that Holly is unaware of the Temple’s purpose.

Episode 46 (”Monday Selections,” The Plain Dealer (November 14, 1969), p. 84).

Episode 50 (”Friday Selections,” The Plain Dealer (November 21,1969), p. 76).

In early December, the series disappeared from Channel 61′s schedule, most likely because it struggled to compete against General Hospital and Another World for viewers. The show is absent from the "Television Today" guides as early as Tuesday, December 2, although summaries for that week's episodes appeared in the weekly guide from the previous Friday's issue and the other schedules from the same week still listed it in its 3 p.m. timeslot. The paper for Tuesday, December 9 included a summary corresponding to the plot of Episode 62, despite Strange Paradise’s replacement with The Huckleberry Hound Show. By the release of the Friday, December 12 paper, the show no longer appeared in neither the TV schedules nor the selections, indicating its cancellation.

Episode 62 summary from “Tuesday’s Selections,” The Plain Dealer (December 9, 1969), p. 30.

The revised schedule for 3 pm, according to the schedule on the same page. Note “Huck Hound” in the far right column.

After a month of absence, Strange Paradise returned to the channel on Monday, December 29 in the new timeslot of 11 pm. Airing resumed with Episode 56, which may indicate that Episode 55 was the last to air the previous year. Over the course of the next two months, WKBF broadcast the conclusion of Maljardin, the series’ first 65-episode arc, and began showing the second arc, the overtly Dark Shadows-inspired Desmond Hall.

However, the show’s viewers would not get to watch Desmond Hall through to its conclusion. On February 10, 1970, television columnist William Hickey wrote, “’Strange Paradise,’ the strangely bubbling soaper, will disappear from Channel 61 tomorrow night at 11 and will be replaced by reruns of ‘Alfred Hitchcock Presents.’”[4] This cancellation coincided with the introduction of the character Agatha Pruitt and the beginning of a new subplot centered around her blackmail and attempted seduction of protagonist Jean Paul Desmond, leaving that plot unresolved, not to mention the second arc’s overarching plot about the mysterious disappearance of Jean Paul’s brother Philip.

Summary of Episode 87, the last episode confirmed to have aired on WKBF, from “Tuesday’s Selections,” The Plain Dealer (February 6, 1970), p. 95.

Nevertheless, episode summaries of Strange Paradise continued to run in the highlights sections of the paper’s TV guides over the next week. The last episode summary to appear in The Plain Dealer describes the plot of Episode 94 and is noticeably more detailed than most previous summaries:

Summary of Episode 94, originally scheduled to air on Thursday, February 19, 1970. From “Thursday’s Selections,” The Plain Dealer (February 13, 1970), p. 103.

Strange Paradise’s run on WKBF ended abruptly in the middle of the second arc, leaving all of its plots unresolved and many viewers uncertain of the fates of Jean Paul, Agatha, Raxl, and others. WKBF-TV would disappear from the airwaves in 1975, leaving Cleveland-area fans unable to watch the series again until its release on VHS in the 1990s. That is unless an anecdote about its first arc re-airing in the Cleveland area is true.

A Second Run?

After Strange Paradise finished its original run in May 1970, a handful of stations available in the United States, including Canadian and Mexican stations based near the borders, rebroadcast it in syndication. It is possible that WKBF may have also rebroadcast it, but we have only anecdotal evidence. In a 2007 post on the Strangeparadise2 Yahoo! Group, user Larry M. (larmic1) claimed to have watched syndicated re-runs of the series’ first arc in 1971. He wrote,

I was living in Cleveland, Ohio [in 1971], and the "new" show came on about 7 or 7:30pm weeknights, so that leads me to believe it was syndicated. I believe that time is also when I used to watch Strange Paradise, so the station was obviously after that audience. It was just such a surprise when I finally came across the show after coming home from winter break from college, and totally pissed that I pretty much had missed the whole series! It was probably on for all of 3-4 months total. Seems like nobody else watched it either!

If the show did indeed air again in Cleveland in 1971, no evidence exists of its rebroadcast in The Plain Dealer’s listings. Here is an excerpt from the evening schedule for Wednesday, January 6, 1971:

And here is another from Tuesday, December 28 of the same year:

Although the schedule writers abbreviated the names of most shows, one can still tell in most cases what shows they refer to: “Jeannie” must be I Dream of Jeannie, “Hogan” Hogan’s Heroes, etc. (It helps that many of these shows are still well-known today, largely because of re-runs on various networks.) Given that neither Strange Paradise, any abbreviations of its title, nor anything to the effect of “Island of Evil” appear in these listings, one can safely conclude that no Cleveland-based stations re-ran the show during that period.

Even so, evidence exists that residents of northeast Ohio could tune into broadcasts from the Windsor, Ontario-based Canadian station CKLW-TV in the early 1970s. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) records from the 1970s indicate that CKLW-TV, based near the Ontario-Michigan border, was available in the Cleveland-Lorain-Akron market on Channel 9 in 1972 and possibly earlier as well. Larry M. most likely would have viewed Strange Paradise on this Canadian channel in 1971. However, even this is doubtful, because, thus far, we have been unable to uncover any evidence of its re-airing in 1971 on CKLW or any other Ontario channels.

Conclusion

For five months from September 1969 to February 1970, the Gothic serial Strange Paradise aired on WKBF-TV (Channel 61) in the Cleveland area. Premiering at 7 p.m. on September 15 after heavy promotion, it changed time slots twice--first in the same daytime slot as two more popular soaps and then in the late night--before its cancellation on February 11. Part of the show was allegedly re-broadcast the following year, but thusfar no evidence exists of listings of Strange Paradise on any channels based in the Great Lakes region in 1971. Although it quickly fell into obscurity in northeast Ohio, Larry M.’s post is evidence that it had local fans and that, even long after its cancellation, it was not forgotten.

Notes

[1] All clippings from The Plain Dealer come from the NewsBank InfoWeb database Historical Cleveland Plain Dealer (1845-1991). They are all reproduced under fair use for the purpose of education.

[2] Many people alive in this era, the author’s parents (born 1964) included, insist that “there were only three channels” in Cleveland in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This attests to the obscurity of Channel 61.

[3] According to Wikipedia, “the most popular and most profitable program on WKBF were syndicated reruns of the original Star Trek. It was well known that WKBF had rebroadcast the entire 79-episode original series in the exact order of play that had been originally shown on NBC when it aired on that network, and had also paid out of its own pocket for the special high-contrast black-and-white prints of the show in order to do so. In another bold move for the times, the show also ran in its original length, without additional editing for commercials.”

[4] William Hickey, "Tony Winners Promise a CBS Drama Delight," The Plain Dealer (February 10, 1970), p. 20 (6-B).