NBC had a black hole at the bottom of their Sunday lineup behind Bonanza for much of the 60's. Whatever aired at 10 pm (ET) lost viewers from its lead-in.
One example was Sheldon Leonard's My Friend Tony, a spin-off from the short-lived Danny Thomas Hour, even though it took nearly a year before Tony graduated to series. A winter replacement series, My Friend Tony starred Italian actor Enzo Cerusico in the title role as a former street urchin who emigrates to the US to reconnect with the former GI who'd befriended him in World War II, now a professor of criminology (James Whitmore). The two become private eyes, and what Leonard was, I think, trying to do was recapture the magic that made I Spy so successful (1965-8).
Whitmore had failed a few years earlier with The Law & Mr. Jones, and would turn to comedy a couple of years later as a foil for Cleavon Little in Temperatures Rising. Cerusico would not make another American series.
My Friend Tony was created in part by Ivan Goff & Ben Roberts, who'd struck gold writing for Mannix, Ironside, and other series, and created The Rogues & Charlie's Angels, among their many accomplishments. Unfortunately, The Rogues was one of those shows that, like Tony, fell into that post-Bonanza black hole.
My Friend Tony lasted just four months of new episodes (16 weeks) before getting the hook, although reruns continued through the summer of 1969.
Here's an intro/close:
No rating. I was in kindergarten when this came out.
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