Trivia / Central Park West

• Creator Breakdown: Showrunner Darren Star has gone on record as stating that the experience of making this show "broke" him, as it convinced him that the type of material he wanted to write and produce couldn't be handled by a basic cable network, leading him to pursue future work at specialty cable stations instead.
• Dueling Works: With Beverly Hills, 90210 and Melrose Place, infamously. Both shows were on a competing network (FOX), and it is widely believed that CPW's scheduling against anniversary episodes of the two former shows is what led to it bombing in the ratings.
• Follow-Up Failure: Much like Models Inc, CPW was a failed attempt by Darren Star to create a Sequel Series to Melrose Place.
• Friday Night Death Slot: The show aired on Wednesday nights and couldn't find its footing (keep in mind that this is the same timeslot Lost would make a killing in when it premiered less than a decade later), so it was moved to Friday evenings for the duration of its second-season run, where the ratings plummeted even further.
• Inspiration for the Work: According to a feature story written by Vulture.com, Carrie Bushnell (the creator of Sex and the City) met series creator Darren Star during the production of this series, and subsequently gave her lead character the first name "Carrie", after the character of Carrie Fairchild. Star would eventually be inspired by experiences being friends with Bushnell to create the latter series.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: Two decades later, it still hasn't been released on DVD. Episodes can still be found on YouTube, however.
• Missing Episode:
  • Episodes 10-13 of the first season never aired on American stations, as the show was pulled from CBS' schedule after the ninth episode and retooled. As a result, the wrapping up of the Stephanie/Mark storyline (where they get fed up and go back to Seattle) was never addressed until the second season aired months later, and Alex's "fake pregnancy" storyline had several of its scenes reused in the second-season premiere to maintain continuity.
  • U.S. airings of the second season chopped out the conclusion of the Nikki Sheridan storyline (where she falls in love with a hitman who eventually tells her to run away), which were only shown in foreign markets. As a result, Nikki becomes the Unperson who randomly disappears for several episodes before showing up, summarizing her storyline for Carrie's benefit and disappearing for good.
• Network to the Rescue: CBS spent so much money making the show (the first season alone cost roughly $13-15 million, at a million per episode plus advertising) that when it suffered in the ratings, they had no choice but to stick with it in the hope that it would get better.
• Screwed by the Network: In addition to airing the first two episodes opposite hour-long anniversary shows of Beverly Hills, 90210 and Melrose Place, the network switched the theme of the show in the second season from "the glitzy world of socialites and magazine publishing seen through the eyes of Gen-X'ers" to "Dynasty in New York".
• Shoot the Money: Many of the scenes filmed in the downtown area include long panning shots, expansive cinematography and wide-angles. Given how much it was costing per episode to film in NYC, this was expected.
• Spiritual Successor: Sex and the City. Darren Star met author Candace Bushnell during production of CPW, and would later team up with her to bring the aforementioned series to TV, basing lead character Carrie Bradshaw on Mädchen Amick's character, Carrie Fairchild (to the extent that they both have the same job — a newspaper columnist — and the former was partially named after the latter), and on a network (HBO) that was the antithesis of CBS, which had far more restrictive content guidelines.
• Troubled Production: To put it simply, everything that could go wrong on this show did go wrong at one point or another. Cost overruns, lousy ratings, poor scheduling against anniversary episodes of FOX's flagship dramas, network panicking, advertisements that inspired Hype Aversion instead of interest... you name it. Mariel Hemingway (Stephanie), the main character, asked to be written out via exercising a clause in her contract, while other actors were either replaced or never had their characters' storylines concluded due to not airing several episodes from the first and second seasons. Its creator would later admit that the experience of making the show "broke" him, as it convinced him that the type of subject matter he wanted to pursue couldn't be accomplished with a mainstream network and censorship guidelines.
• Writing by the Seat of Your Pants: As the show moves into the second season, it becomes increasingly clear that the writers (having been told early on in production that the show would be canceled) decided to go for broke and start throwing in as many ridiculous plot points as they could. The show starts embracing tropes that were more at home on Dynasty, including plenty of cat fights and primadonna behavior from most of the characters, who begin to embrace Refuge in Audacity. Characters are killed off (or written out of the show) with increasing regularity, while the plot begins to increasingly revolve around a formerly-milquetoast playwright who undergoes Sanity Slippage before trying to kill the lead character in a convoluted scheme.

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