Lost broadcasts, rebuilt from the evidence.
Forgotten TV treats short-lived television as cultural history, following forgotten series, pilots, TV movies, and related music with patient archival detail. Its episodes move from Brady revivals and horror anthologies to Earth II, Popi, Lalo Schifrin, Alf Clausen, and old promotional ephemera.
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Forgotten TV looks at television history from the underside of the schedule. Its territory is not only beloved hits, but the pilots, TV movies, short-run series, clip shows, specials, promos, commercials, and music cues that shaped how 1970s and 1980s television felt. Chris Cooling approaches those artifacts with a collector's ear and a researcher's patience. The show can begin with a mock broadcast interruption or a horror-host setup, then settle into a dense account of how a project was made, sold, altered, revived, syndicated, or remembered. Recent episodes show the range clearly. A Brady-focused entry follows Sherwood Schwartz, the franchise's revivals, network interest, and the path toward The Brady Girls Get Married. A horror-history entry links anthology television, Rod Serling, Night Gallery, syndication edits, and The Darkroom. Earth II brings in space-station anxieties, MGM production details, Gary Lockwood, Soon-Tek Oh, James Hong, and technical advisors including R. Buckminster Fuller. Popi becomes a route into CBS scheduling, adaptation from the 1969 film, Hector Elizondo's casting, and old listings used to recover episode information. The Focus episodes shift from shows to the people who helped television sound the way it did. Lalo Schifrin is treated through biography, Mission Impossible, meter, jazz, and television scoring. Alf Clausen is remembered through his life before The Simpsons and the mechanics of writing songs for animated comedy. Supplemental material broadens the frame to Sun Classic Pictures, Hangar 18, market research, scripted narrative, and MPAA ratings history. The show also keeps room for pure texture: spooky clip-show material, old PSAs, bumpers, horror host intros, songs, commercials, and special episode promos. Its best quality is specificity. Rather than using nostalgia as a mood, Forgotten TV works from sources: period newspaper articles, industry publications, interviews, books, online archives, and recovered clips. That research gives obscure television a paper trail. The writing remains accessible, but the details are often granular enough for someone trying to place a half-remembered broadcast object. It is a show about what stayed famous, what nearly vanished, and what can still be reconstructed from listings, credits, trades, reruns, and recordings.
Made for: Suits a listener who wants television nostalgia with names, dates, production context, and source-conscious detail. It is a strong fit for people drawn to short-lived 1970s and 1980s shows, TV movies, horror anthologies, retro clips, and television music history.
What sets it apart: Forgotten TV stands apart by treating obscure and short-lived television as research material, not disposable trivia. Its mix of archival sourcing, production history, broadcast-style framing, and composer-focused side paths gives forgotten TV a surprisingly durable paper trail.
The podcast that brings you TV memories of the 70s/80s with a focus on short lived TV shows and TV movies you may have forgotten about!
Night Gallery reruns swallowed another series; Chris Cooling makes your TV-history outrage feel thoroughly researched.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A clear, thoughtful history of television horror shaped by vision, network pressure, and syndication drift.
Forgotten TV looks at television horror through the compromises that shaped it, moving from the high standing of The Twilight Zone to the more troubled story of Night Gallery.
Earth II becomes a focused look at how 1970s television imagined escape from a crowded, resource-starved Earth.
Earth II comes through as a half-buried television artifact, shaped by space-age optimism and the 1970s worries that crowded the future: population, longevity, and dwindling resources.
A focused tribute to how Lalo Schifrin made musical structure sound instantly recognizable.
Forgotten TV follows Lalo Schifrin from his Buenos Aires beginnings through the training, family influence, and film-music encounters that helped shape one of television and film's defining sounds.
A focused tribute that connects Alf Claussen's Simpsons songs with the habits and collaboration behind them.
Alf Claussen's 27-year run as composer for The Simpsons gives this Forgotten TV Focus a clear hook, but the episode's more rewarding thread is the path that came before it.
Classic TV memory, fast and friendly.
Queer sitcom history, lovingly side-eyed.
Horror films retold scene by scene, then a mock curse.
A Los Angeles Times statistic about 30% of marriages including children from previous relationships gave Sherwood Schwartz the core idea for The Brady Bunch, a widower-with-three-sons and widow-with-three-daughters sitcom that ABC eventually aired in 1969.
Forgotten TV ends on ABC’s Dark Room, where a 1981 story about a digital double and a retirement plan reads like an early version of deepfakes.
["Forgotten TV covers Earth-2, the 1971 MGM telefilm about an international space station that becomes a sovereign nation in orbit.", "Chris Cooling connects the movie to Soviet Almas, Apollo 11, Salyut, and NASA's Skylab, then traces the space-station idea back to Edward Everett Hale and Konstantin Tsiolkovsky.", "The film's central device is a 'Discussion and Decision' process, where a computer tags arguments as 'emotional appeal' or 'no evidence of this conclusion' before citizens vote.", "Cooling also details the cast, the Kennedy Space Center launch sequences, and Lalo Schifrin's score, while tying the telefilm to R.
Lalo Schifrin says he wrote the Mission Impossible theme in "exactly one and a half minutes" and "maybe three minutes" with the chorus and bongos.
Chris Kuhlen's Forgotten TV tribute centers on Alf Clausen, the composer behind 27 years of The Simpsons scores and songs.
Forgotten TV traces Poppy from the 1969 Alan Arkin film, about a Puerto Rican widower who plans to pass his sons off as Cuban refugees, to its CBS sitcom adaptation, which premiered May 2, 1975 with Hector Elizondo.
This episode explores Sun Classic Pictures' use of market research for pseudo-documentaries and how it influenced TV network ABC's strategies.
A clip show revisiting forgotten TV shows, commercials, and promos from the 70s and 80s.
This episode covers the history of minstrel shows and Aunt Jemima as a supplement to a main episode on Black TV history.
The host discusses updates on forgotten TV shows, including a follow-up on the WizKids podcast and a message from actress Keddie Lester.