Trivia / Turn-On

• Creator Backlash: ABC disowned the show post haste, admitting that they too felt the content was objectionable. Tim Conway, the guest host of the only aired episode, actually felt differently, believing that the show had good material, but was "way ahead of its time."
• He Also Did:
  • Albert Brooks, 21 at the time, was one of the writers.
  • Bill Meléndez did the animation.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: It was an outright Missing Episode for decades since ABC was content to bury it as deep as possible. As mentioned on the main page, the Paley Center For Media in New York had the only two finished episodes, which was the only way to see them, until original producer George Schlatter released them to YouTube in 2023. He would later uncover the show's unaired third episode the following year.
• One-Episode Wonder: For a long time, it was considered the gold standard for this trope, with its rapid cancellation, though other examples in the years afterwards made it less unique in that regard. In fact, two of the future cases of shows getting canceled after one episode, Co-Ed Fever and McGurk: A Dog's Life (both from 1979) also featured Hamilton Camp among the cast.
• Star-Derailing Role: Some of the cast were still able to sustain acting careers after the show flopped (especially Hamilton Camp), but it ended a lot of the others' careers with a thud. Some of the cast members have Turn-On as their only IMDb credit. Particularly affected was Maura McGiveney, who the producers were clearly positioning as a breakout star for the show. She'd had a busy career before Turn-On (including a Golden Globe nomination), but her only screen credits afterwards were an episode of Hawaii Five-O and a Made-for-TV Movie, before her death at age 51 in 1990.
• What Could Have Been:
  • NBC and CBS both turned it down.
  • Had the series continued, The Monkees^note Who were reduced to a trio at that point after Peter Tork quit the group, and were trying to position themselves as a combination music group and comedy troupe, with a bunch of game show and variety show appearances throughout 1969. would have been the guests on a later episode (they ended up guesting on Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In instead). Joey Heatherton and Sebastian Cabot were also slated to guest (publicity stills of Heatherton on the show's set exist, and material from Cabot's appearance was used in the third episode that was released in 2024).

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