the show being continually being crushed by NBC’s “Friends”, which shared the same Thursday 8 pm timeslot. Or, as Tom Brooks mused, “Perhaps there were just too many cops patrolling the relatively quiet streets of El Camino, California.”6 By the end of the second season in May 1997, ABC had pulled the plug on the show due to ratings, and it never aired again. In the fall of 1996, Spielberg tried to launch two new sitcoms, which could not have achieved more drastically different fates with viewers. Despite the starpower of Emmy-winner Ted Danson and Oscar-winner Mary Steenburgen, “Ink”, a comedy about newspaper journalists at fictitious New York Sun, which was inspired, Spielberg told TV Guide, by His Girl Friday (1940). It could not hold it’s own on CBS’s Sunday line-up upon its October 21 premiere and was cancelled at the end of the season. Even before it’s premiered, Tom Brooks observed that “problems with the series pilot and the original producers prompted CBS to bring ‘Murphy Brown’ producer Diane English to take over the reins in August, less than a month before it was scheduled to premiere.”6 ABC, however, received great success from DreamWorks with the critically acclaimed Michael J. Fox political sitcom “Spin City,” which became a fixture in its 9:30 timeslot on the Tuesday night. Tom Brooks proclaimed that “this topical comedy lampooned the politically cynical ‘90s, much as Michael J. Fox’s earlier hit, ‘Family Ties’, so accurately reflected the materialistic ‘80s.”6 The show, which centered on the happenings of Deputy Mayor Mike Flaherty (Fox) and life in Mayor Randall Winston’s (the hilarious Barry Bostwick) office,
16