moon & sun & whisky

According to the new issue of Entertainment Weekly, Family Guy‘s football-headed animated baby Stewie is going to appear on the Fox crime show Bones, apparently in a series of hallucinations suffered by David Boreanaz’s character. Which just goes to show that the world is still catching up with the edgiest drama series of the ’90s — Diagnosis Murder.

Okay, so maybe we weren’t exactly Birdland. But my partner Lee Goldberg and I were always looking for ways to play around with our format, especially around sweeps time. Our first great success on the show came when we took an old Mannix episode, used it as flashbacks, and brought Mike Connors and most of the guest cast back 20 years later to solve the case. (Yes, of course Mannix had solved it back then, but we cleverly neglected to include that clip… and came up with a solution of our own.)

So we were always looking for a stunt as good as that one. I had what struck me as a brilliant idea — a live show. Not done since the Golden Age of television. We spent weeks working on Dick Van Dyke to get him to agree, and then more weeks working on Viacom to persuade them that the publicity bump would be worth a potential budget overage… and pretending that the overage wouldn’t be that bad. We were cranking the final numbers and it looked like it was a go — when ER announced they were doing their own live show that sweeps. And unlike us, they weren’t planning on doing it the cheapest and easiest way possible. They were getting something like $14 million dollars per episode from NBC — more than ten times our budget — and they didn’t seem scared of spending it all that week.

So the live show was out, and we were missing a sweeps episode. I supposed we were talking about teaming Dick up with another classic TV character, but we’d already brought back both Mannix and Barbara Bain as Cinnamon Carter from Mission: Impossible. It was beginning to feel like a well we’d been to an awful lot.  Then someone had the idea — and I’m pretty sure it was me, because I’d been watching a lot of Dennis Potter at the time — that we should team Dick up with the greatest sleuth ever to grace a television set… Scooby Doo.

After a long bout of giggles, the story fell into place almost immediately. Dick’s character, Dr. Mark Sloan, would witness a crime, but before he could get away the criminal would attack and leave him in a coma. While the rest of the team searched for his attackers, Dick would be solving the crime in a series of hallucinations… with the help of Scooby Doo. There was one little problem, of course — we didn’t really have a lot of money in our budget for animated sequences.  Fortunately, Lee can pull up TV trivia faster than Google, and he remembered that an animated version of Dick had “guest starred” in a Scooby Doo episode back in the 70s. All we’d have to do was get the rights to the footage, then write new dialogue, with our supporting cast doing the voices for Shaggy and the rest.

It was shockingly easy to get our non-writing executive producer Fred Silverman to sign off on the idea.  Usually he was a little nervous when we started getting too “far out,” as he might say. But Scooby Doo was Fred’s baby back when he was running networks, and he still had a great fondness for the big lug. We were all set to go.

Except for one small thing. Hanna-Barbera, the independent studio that produced Scooby Doo, had somewhere along the line been eaten by Time Warner. And they were trying to get a live action Scooby Doo movie off the ground. It wasn’t that our episode could possibly have hurt their feature.  It’s just that no one at the studio felt like sticking out their necks to sign off on anything concerning the big dog until they knew exactly who was going to be in charge of the project, and who might get mad at them. It’s not like anyone over there ever told us no… but it was clear that we were going to be maybe’d and we’ll get back to you’d to death. After weeks of pleading, begging, and nagging, we finally had to face that fact that Mark Sloan would have to keep on solving crimes without the help of a Great Dane.

So now Bonesis meeting Stewie — which has to be a lot easier, since they’re both from the same studio. And the Mark Sloan/ Scooby Doo cross-over goes down as one of the two stories we were never allowed to do on Diagnosis Murder.

And the other? That’s for another post. For now I’ll just say it was so edgy, so controversial that Lee couldn’t bring himself to tackle it when he was writing DM novels…