Classic "Molly Dodd" Series Remains Locked Up, Awaiting 'Bail'

By Tom Brinkmoeller

Rare snippets of The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd, like the opening sequence above, can be seen on YouTube -- but for those who would love to see that classic TV sitcom again in its entirety, I have some not-so-good news...

Any of you who fondly remember The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd already know what a great TV series we're discussing here. But for those TVWW fans who may be too young to remember a series that premiered 23 years ago, please read the following:

Do a Web search for The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd, and you get more than 80,000 returns. Do the same search for this brilliant late-'80s half-hour series, and add the name "Bianculli," and you get nearly 70 returns.

Click on this TV WORTH WATCHING internal link, to the MORGUE collection of some of Bianculli's favorite newspaper columns, and you'll see another reason why I won't have any trouble getting this story posted here. The guy who drew many of you to this site loves this series, uses it in his Rowan University TV History and Appreciation courses, and called it "too good for me to leave out" when he wrote his Dictionary of Teleliteracy.

And, should you still not be convinced I'm writing about one of the best comedies ever to appear on television, go to the website of Richard Lawson, who played one of the series' key characters, Det. Nathaniel Hawthorne (seen here, at left, with series star Blair Brown and fellow supporting actor David Strathairn).

Watch three classic clips from the show with Lawson and Brown, who played the title character. Please, take a taste of this really smart, way-ahead-of-its-time TV classic, by visiting Lawson's site HERE. It's SO good.

And now the bad news. This series has the slimmest of chances of ever appearing in home-video form. More than 60 episodes of brilliant writing, acting, storytelling, directing -- it seems they are lost forever. Last seen in 1991, when it ended a run on Lifetime (the network that rescued it from originating network NBC's blatant neglect), it's locked in a Burbank vault (at least figuratively), and there's no early release or parole on the horizon.

"We still own the series, but we currently have no plans to release at this time," was the response from the Warner Bros. executive who last took the series' pulse.

Though she gave no reason, it seems music, and the rights to reuse it, is the huge boulder in the road to a DVD set we can't buy. When the series was in production, rights for music use weren't secured for future home-use release. Molly Dodd is one of many, many TV series that were produced without the foresight to predict where technology would take entertainment options over a pretty spectacular quarter-century of invention and adaptation.

"Who would have thought back then that we'd be able to watch TV on a hand-held phone?" asks Shane Miller, an executive with EMG, a company that works to clear copyright use in situations such as this.

"It's gibberish to me, the reasons for all of this," says Jay Tarses, the executive producer, creator and creative powerhouse behind Molly Dodd. "It's all very, very labyrinthian."

Tarses would love to see the series reappear for its fans, but he's seen this same thing happen before. Buffalo Bill, starring Dabney Coleman as an abrasive TV personality, was another of Tarses' ahead-of-its time, boldly artistic series. In order to release the series on DVD, Tarses says, they had to eliminate some songs entirely. And though Warner Bros. owns the rights to The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd, and could make a DVD release happen, Tarses isn't optimistic.

"Warner Bros. told us they deficit-financed the series and, according to them, they never made the money back," he says.

About two years ago, producer Kenneth Kaufman, with the blessing of Tarses, tried to make a DVD deal similar to the ones he'd made for Alf and Buffalo Bill. Kaufman said he got approval from Warner Bros. to try to make a deal with another company, but no one was interested in buying in.

Three factors stood in the way, he said. Sales of DVDs have decreased to the point they often lose money. The music-rights and conversion costs are substantial. Finally, collectors "want new content on the DVDs they buy," and producing this kind of supplemental material also is costly.

"As hard as I tried, I wasn't able to do any deals," Kaufman says.

Tarses, Kaufman and the show's many fans are frustrated by all these obstacles, just as art lovers would be if museums had to lock up and keep from public sight their best paintings. Add to that list of frustrated enthusiasts the actress who played Molly Dodd, and who now is a supporting player on Fox's Fringe.

"Molly Dodd should absolutely be released on DVD," Blair Brown told me when contacted for this story, "if for nothing than to give Jay Tarses the credit he deserves for creating a quality show with wonderful characters that was so ahead of its time, possibly even now.

The series, she went on, "was before (CBS's) Murphy Brown and (Fox's) Ally McBeal, and Molly was this character who was just a person. She had no plot for her life, she just lived. She hit her stumbling blocks, like illegitimate pregnancy, and dealt with it.

"Other people often get credit for these forward-thinking ideas, so it should be remembered that it all goes back to Jay Tarses.

"Plus, in revisiting the series, viewers would get to see a young David Strathairn, Lewis Black, Nathan Lane, John Benjamin Hickey, John Glover, Victor Garber, etc., and that's always fun." [Strathairn just won an Emmy, his first, for his supporting performance as an inspirational teacher in HBO's Temple Grandin.]

One possibility rescue scenario remains. Shout! Factory is a company that has packaged videos of many other singularly good, cult TV series. In theory, it could do for The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd what it previously did for such "lost" series as NBC's Freaks and Geeks. Company officials said they have a policy of not discussing possible acquisitions, and, as a result, won't talk about any property they don't own.

Yet if there is a white knight that will save Molly Dodd, history points to Shout! Factory as a leading candidate. The cost for any DVD set would be higher than normal because of music-clearance costs. Would you be willing to pay a little more than the average DVD boxed-set price to finally be able to see this wonderful series again? Let us know.

Very visible fan support can work wonders.

Ask Betty White...