(Go to 7:00)
I had forgotten about it until the other day. Turns out, I’m not the only one who did.
I’ve been watching Paul Van Scott’s YouTube series on TV shows that lasted one season or less. Some shows, I must admit, I’d never heard of. Others, however, I’d seen, if only for one or two episodes.
His segment about the short-lived series from 1980-81 included Breaking Away. It might sound familiar even if you never saw it: It was based on the previous year’s movie of the same name. That picture enjoyed both critical and commercial success; the TV show would only experience one. Why?
No one could answer the question. After all, it had all of the elements that made the movie so successful: The relatively unknown actors fleshed out well-written roles in a coming-of-age story that just happened to be about a young man who dreams of being a professional bicycle racer. The story also had an “underdog” element, as the young man was an American in the Midwest, and his heroes, whom he is trying to emulate, are Italian.
If the movie’s success surprised anyone, it was because relatively few Americans were interested in bicycle racing. Remember, this was before Greg Le Mond’s Tour de France victories. And while almost nobody thought the movie turned the Unites States into a nation of cycling fans, almost everyone involved with the project believed that what made the story so appealing on the big screen would translate to the small screen.
Some argue that it did. And that is why no one could explain why its ratings were low enough that it was canceled after only eight episodes. The other shows that aired at the same time were decent but hardly ratings juggernauts. Steve Teisch wrote and Peter Yates directed both the movie and series. Some actors reprised their roles. One notable exception was Dennis Christopher, whom Shaun Cassidy replaced in the David Stohler role. While nobody ever watched Cassidy for his acting chops, I don’t think he would have turned off TV audiences.
Here is my two-bit theory as to why the TV series didn’t make it through a aeason. People who didn’t care about bicycle racing (e.g., most Americans in 1979) were willing to watch it for the sake of the story in a single movie of less than two hours . On the other hand, I think that if they still weren’t interested in pacelines and pelotons a year later, they weren’t willing to watch them every week, even if the series had the same “feel good” story as the movie and they thought Shaun Cassidy was cute.
