Webster Tried to Go ‘Almost Home’ in This Failed Spinoff

Today, we look at how Webster tried to spinoff a show about a country star who lost his young son who decided to open up a foster home

This is Back Door Blues, a feature about “backdoor pilots.” Backdoor pilots are episodes of regular TV series that are intended to also work as pilots for a new series. Sometimes these pilots get picked up, but a lot of times they did not get picked up. I’ll spotlight examples of both successful and failed backdoor pilots.

December is a month of Back Door Blues!

CONCEPT: Almost Home – A country superstar loses his young son (and loses his wife, as well, when she leaves him due to their respective grief over their son’s death) and decides to open up a foster home.

SERIES IT AIRED ON Webster

Webster was a popular series about a young boy, Webster (Emmanuel Lewis), who was adopted by his “Uncle” George (Alex Karras), a former football teammate of Webster’s dead father (both of Webster’s parents died, leaving Webster as an orphan). George and his new socialite wife, Katherine (Susan Clark), who Webster would always call “Ma’am,” had to adjust to becoming sudden parents.

In any event, at the end of Season 3, the show took the adoption angle further by having Webster visit another one of his “Uncles,” Uncle Jake (played by real life country star, Mac Davis), who had played college ball with George and Webster’s dad. Jake was a country star, but after his young son died, Jake’s marriage collapsed, and Jake decided to take over a foster home. So the show would be about Jake and the foster kids.

Amusingly, this episode came out less than a year after a similar foster home show concept debuted as a backdoor pilot on Punky Brewster (I wrote about that one here). Billy Lombardo played one of the foster kids on BOTH shows, which is kind of hilarious. I shit you not, his name in this show was PJ, and his name on Punky Brewster was TJ.

There’s actually a pretty interesting conflict in the episode, as the little boy who clearly drew Jake into taking over the foster home (because he reminds Jake of his dead son) is being taken home by his mother, which just wrecks Jake, and he decides that he can’t stay there. The other foster kids are two little blonde twin girls (Robin and Shannon Lynch), a slightly older Black boy (Larry O. Williams) and then the NEW boy who shows up at the end of the episode, Jack (Ben Ryan Ganger), who reminds Jake that he really loves being a foster parent.

The additional adult roles were played by Allyn Ann McLerie as the social worker Jake works with (in another funny coincidence, McLerie was married to George Gaynes, star of Punky Brewster), and Norman Fell, as Jake’s agent, who initially wants him to give up the foster home to go back on the road, but ultimately tells Jake that he is better suited to this than being a country star (I have no idea how Fell’s character would be written into the show longterm. I guess his agent just, like, hangs out around the foster home?).

It seems that the Punky Brewster connections really were just coincidences.

DID THE PILOT GO TO SERIES? No.

SHOULD IT HAVE? I mean, it’s not like Webster was that good of a show, ya know? And it lasted quite a while, so I guess this was as good as Webster, maybe even slightly better (Mac Davis was a more talented actor than Alex Karras).

Okay, that’s it for this installment of Back Door Blues! I KNOW the rest of you have suggestions for other interesting backdoor pilots, so drop me a line at brian@popculturereferences.com (don’t suggest in the comments, as this way, it’ll be a surprise!).