Beyond The Baseball TV Grave is a sub-series of Beyond The TV Grave, taking a look at short-lived baseball-themed TV shows. This fifth edition focuses on NBC’s Bay City Blues, a baseball drama that was pulled from the fall 1983 schedule after airing just four episodes.
Background
At the time of Bay City Blues’ series order, NBC was in a bit of a ratings slump. The network finished the 1982-83 season squarely in third place, with only two of their programs managing to finish the season in the top 30. Their highest-rated series was new midseason action drama The A-Team, which rated within the top 10 overall. After that was the serialized police procedural Hill Street Blues, which in its third season on the air ranked 23rd overall. Originally a low-rated Saturday show, Hill Street Blues was in its second season airing after a pre-Cosby-era sitcom block.
Hill Street Blues was praised for its storytelling, following police officers both on and off duty. Its serialized nature and single-camera setup helped pioneer a new wave of police procedurals, a genre of television that remains immensely popular today.
In a clear attempt to capitalize on the success of Hill Street Blues, NBC ordered to series Bay City Blues. The show reportedly cost $850,000 an episode to make, which at the time was one of the most expensive series ever produced on a per-episode basis. It was possibly only exceeded by Hill Street. Bay City Blues was scheduled in the Tuesdays at 10 pm time slot, just an hour removed from the second season of The A-Team. Despite NBC’s high expectations, the network would quickly realize Bay City Blues was no Hill Street Blues.
Synopsis
Despite what the title may suggest, Bay City Blues is not a spinoff or an attempt at franchising Hill Street Blues. Hill Street’s co-creator, Steven Bocho, did co-create Bay City with Jeffrey Lewis, a writer and producer for the police procedural. Both were also produced by Mary Tyler Moore’s MTM Enterprises. There were even some actors from Hill Street Blues who made their way into the cast of Bay City Blues. The two shows are intentionally similar in style and the nature of their storytelling, but they are not inherently related.
Bay City Blues can be described in two different ways: the show NBC likely thought they ordered to series, and the show that actually aired. In theory, Bay City Blues was a riveting, groundbreaking drama to complement Hill Street Blues, following the professional and personal lives of a minor league baseball team. In the eyes of the network, if you liked Hill Street Blues but wished it followed a minor league baseball team instead of police officers, did they have the show for you.
In reality, Bay City Blues played out like a primetime soap starring a baseball team, their manager, owner, and romantic partners. Throughout the series, there were countless plots going on at once with the bloated cast, most of which felt rather unrealistic if not downright odd. One character has a bedwetting problem in the pilot; another, a drinking problem that gets him pulled from the game, only to get called up to the majors anyways; yet another comes home to find his wife cheating on him. The stakes are initially astonishingly low for a show trying to associate itself with Hill City Blues, leading to injuries and even deaths to arise in subsequent episodes. It made for a jumbled series whose premise did not match the setting.
Ratings & Cancellation
Bay City Blues premiered on Tuesday, October 25, 1983, after a special two-hour episode of The A-Team. The A-Team pulled in a 24.8 Household rating, far and away enough to win the night. Bay City Blues, meanwhile, could only muster a 13.7. It finished behind all but one other series aired on the Big 3 that night, and well behind the 18.0 Hill Street Blues would get two days later.
As if that wasn’t bad enough for the new baseball drama, things got even worse the following week. With a regularly-scheduled Remington Steele as its lead-in (16.4 rating), Bay City Blues fell to a 10.6 rating; this time, last place on the Big 3. It fell again the week after, this time to an 8.5 rating. That was just 52% retention from its lead-in and nearly four ratings points behind the next-lowest-rated show of the night on the Big 3. If you thought it couldn’t get any worse than that, it did; the fourth and final episode of Bay City Blues to air before being pulled from the schedule mustered just a 7.2 rating and a 12 share. Comparatively, NBC started the night with a 25.1 rating and a 37 share.
The remaining four episodes would be burned off over a two-week period in late night the following July; its ratings are unknown, but presumably low. Bay City Blues’ first four episodes were the only ones that counted for the 1983-84 seasonal average; of those, the series ranked 31st out of 38 on the slumping NBC.
Bay City Blues was not unique in its cancelation. NBC premiered 21 new programs in the 1983-84 TV season, and renewed only two of them. What was unique about the cancelation of Bay City Blues was how quickly it happened, and for a show that was so highly anticipated by the network. Bay City Blues was such a high-profile flop that the New York Times did an immediate retrospective upon its cancelation in December 1983. Of course, the warning signs were there from the beginning: both the New York Times and the Washington Post gave the series negative reviews the day it premiered. The retrospective includes an important quote about a reason why advertisers were hesitant to buy ad space on the series: “Women don’t care about baseball.” Ultimately, a broadcast television show needs to appeal to women to succeed. Instead, Bay City Blues sexualized women and took place in a setting many are apathetic to. It’s just another example of a show made without a clear grasp on who its audience is.
Aftermath
Quite a few actors from Bay City Blues went onto bigger and better things, with some joining the cast of Hill Street Blues. Cast members on the short-lived baseball drama included Sharon Stone and Dennis Franz, the former of whom went onto become an Emmy-winning actress and the latter the star of NYPD Blue (after a stint on Hill Street Blues).
Believe it or not, almost every episode produced of Bay City Blues has survived over 41 years after its cancelation. The series was rebroadcast on the now-defunct ESPN Classic, with the first seven episodes remaining up on YouTube. The series is not available to download or stream otherwise.