The Memoirs of Nicodemus Legend: Skeletons in the Closet

"Skeletons in the Closet" was the twelfth and final episode of Legend, and first aired on August 8th, 1995. It was written by David Rich and directed by Steve Shaw. You can watch the episode via Amazon Prime Video or DVD.

The Memoirs of Nicodemus Legend: Clueless in San Francisco

"Clueless in San Francisco" was the eleventh episode of Legend, and first aired on July 25th, 1995. It was written by Carol Caldwell & Marianne Clarkson and directed by Charles Correll. You can watch the episode via Amazon Prime Video or DVD.

The Memoirs of Nicodemus Legend: Fall of a Legend

"Fall of a Legend" was the tenth episode of Legend, and first aired on June 18th, 1995. The teleplay was written by Ron Friedman from a story by Bob Shane, and the episode was directed by Michael Vejar. You can watch the episode via Amazon Prime Video or DVD.

The Memoirs of Nicodemus Legend: Revenge of the Herd

"Revenge of the Herd" was the ninth episode of Legend, and first aired on July 4th, 1995. It was written by Tim Burns and directed by Bob Balaban. You can watch the episode via Amazon Prime Video or DVD.

The Memoirs of Nicodemus Legend: Bone of Contention

"Bone of Contention" was the eighth episode of Legend, and first aired on June 20th, 1995. It was written by George Geiger and directed by Charles Correll. You can watch the episode via Amazon Prime Video or DVD.

The Memoirs of Nicodemus Legend: The Gospel According To Legend

"The Gospel According To Legend" was the seventh episode of Legend, and first aired on June 12th, 1995. It was written by John Considine and directed by Michael Vejar. You can watch the episode via Amazon Prime Video or DVD.

The Memoirs of Nicodemus Legend: Knee-High Noon

"Knee-High Noon" was the sixth episode of Legend, and first aired on May 23rd, 1995. It was written by Steve Stolier & Frederick Rappaport and directed by James L. Conway. You can watch the episode via Amazon Prime Video or DVD.

The Memoirs of Nicodemus Legend: The Life, Death, and Life of Wild Bill Hickok

"The Life, Death, and Life of Wild Bill Hickok" was the fifth episode of Legend, and first aired on May 16th, 1995. It was written by Peter Allan Fields and directed by Michael Caffey. You can watch the episode via Amazon Prime Video or DVD.

The Memoirs of Nicodemus Legend: Custer's Next-To-Last Stand

"Custer's Next-To-Last Stand" was the fourth episode of Legend, and first aired on May 9th, 1995. It was written by Bill Dial and directed by William Gereghty. You can watch the episode via Amazon Prime Video or DVD.

The Memoirs of Nicodemus Legend: Legend on His President's Secret Service

"Legend on His President's Secret Service" was the third episode of Legend, and first aired on May 2nd, 1995. It was written by Bob Wilcox and directed by Michael Vejar. You can watch the episode via Amazon Prime Video or DVD.

The Memoirs of Nicodemus Legend: Mr. Pratt Goes to Sheridan

"Mr. Pratt Goes to Sheridan" was the second episode of Legend, and first aired on April 25th, 1995. It was written by Michael Piller & Bill Dial and directed by William Gereghty. You can watch the episode via Amazon Prime Video or DVD.

The Memoirs of Nicodemus Legend: Birth of a Legend

When I first started blogging 20 years ago, it was almost entirely a coincidence that I did so concurrent with the then-10th anniversary of UPN's Legend starring Richard Dean Anderson. As I made plans to restart the blog, I decided that one way to celebrate was by doing a review of each episode of Legend, to be released on the 30th anniversary of that episode's premiere. Thus, today, I'm celebrating the first episode of the series, entitled "Birth of a Legend," which first aired on April 18th, 1995. The episode was written by Michael Piller & Bill Dial and directed by Charles Correll.

Before I begin, I'd like to share this link, wherein I review the series as a whole, which I did 15 years ago, on the occasion of Legend's then-15th anniversary (wow!). The reviews I'll be doing on this occasion will focus on specifics relating to each episode. If you'd like to see the episodes, yourself, they are available via Amazon Prime Video. A DVD is also available.

That Time I Found The Quadrovelocipede from Legend

When most people hear that I'm a fan of Legend, they think I'm talking about something else. I can't really blame them. My version of Legend only lasted for 12 episodes, which first aired more than 20 years ago, on a network that no longer exists. The show is all-but forgotten. Indeed, although it was (amazingly) released on DVD last year, they had to change the theme music and some other musical cues for legal reasons, and I doubt it's sold especially well (Indeed, my search when I originally sought to provide a direct link was found on the ninth page of search results for the name "Legend" on Barnes and Noble, after already filtering for "Movies and TV," under the "Top Results" sorting!). So I don't really expect people to quite understand how it is that the impossible happened last week. But first, some context.

Remembering UPN's Legend

Fifteen years ago today, on April 18, 1995, Richard Dean Anderson made his first appearance as a lead actor in a television series since the end of MacGyver, playing Ernest Pratt, the lead character in Legend.  Legend takes its name from Pratt's alter ego, Nicodemus Legend, a dime novel hero created by Pratt, who Pratt is (often unwillingly!) called upon to portray in real life.  Perhaps taking a cue from a couple of "dream episodes" of MacGyver, where Anderson's character imagined himself in the Old West, Legend was a western, but with a twist.

I remember the first time I saw Legend.  It was my Junior year of college. Saturday afternoon. I was visiting a friend, helping her hammer out some grammar and citations for a term paper she was working on. She decided to turn on the TV while I mused over proper sentence structure. The channel happened to be showing a western. No big deal here. A lot of stations show westerns on Saturday afternoons, presumably because no one watches TV at that time. Before she could change the channel, however, I noticed something: "That's Q!" Sure enough, John de Lancie's face was square in the center of the screen, surrounded by two large columns of electricity.  De Lancie was Janos Bartok, an inventor (inspired by the real-life Nikola Tesla) who used his inventions to enhance the reputation of Pratt's "Legendary" hero.  I eventually realized that I had happened upon the first episode of Legend, a show on the then-new broadcast network, UPN (which no longer exists).  Because our college was located in the mountains of North Carolina, we didn't have enough local TV stations for UPN to have its own channel. For us, the local FOX station had agreed to air UPN's programming at whatever time it could be fit into the schedule. For Legend, that meant Saturdays at 3:00 PM. Not a time when I'm generally watching TV. If it hadn't been for that chance encounter, I might never have gotten attached to UPN's far-too-short-lived show.

Unfortunately, when ratings figures didn't immediately show up as highly as had been hoped, Legend was quickly in danger of being canceled. The fact that UPN was still in its first few months of programming didn't seem to matter. The executives were already threatening to kill the show after only its third episode. It's not that Legend did poorly.  It was UPN's second-most highly watched show (after Star Trek: Voyager).  Rather, the UPN executives simply had unrealistic expectations for what ratings on a brand-new network (that wasn't even airing on dedicated stations in a large part of the country) should look like (obviously, that's my own opinion, but I think that this is one that others would agree with.  I remember hearing John de Lancie, at a convention appearance a year or two later, remark that people often confused "UPN" with "UPS").

Valiant efforts were made to save the show, and it is largely due to these efforts that we saw a total of thirteen episodes of Legend (counting the two-hour pilot as two episodes).  I even took it upon myself to do what I could to save the show. I sent in written letters to my local UPN station (this one in Louisville, where my parents live, and where I watched the show that summer) and to the UPN headquarters in California. I also tried my hand at some Legend fan fiction. The result was a story I called "Legend Runs for Mayor."  At the time it was written, Legend was still on the air, running through its last few episodes. Although the show had already been proclaimed "cancelled" by this time, I figured hope was alive as long as it still had an on-air presence. I posted the story to AOL and several BBS's (both of which seem antiquated now, but the Internet was not yet the widely accessible "superhighway" it is today) with a note at the end of the story telling people how to write UPN to voice their feelings. Unfortunately, I was not able to gain anywhere near enough widespread notice for my little story to even make a dent, and on August 8 (my birthday!) of that year, the show aired its final first-run episode.  As it turned out, every one of UPN's first-year programs were scrapped, except for Star Trek: Voyager, the show to which UPN owed its very existence, even though that show itself was a disappointing take on the Star Trek franchise. (Note: Voyager was given a two year guarantee when it was picked up by UPN. Don't even get me started on how bad the first two years' worth of Voyager programming was. If Legend were given a tenth of the chance Voyager was, it would have lived a nice, long life.)

A year later, I started seminary. I lived at the time in a little middle-of-nowhere town in South Carolina. Still struggling to find a job, I had a lot of free time on my hands. My searches for Legend information on the web yielded very little of use. The only site I could find was this site, which even at that time hadn't been updated since the series was canceled.   So I then decided to begin my own site. This was my first effort at doing my own web page.  Perhaps due to the short run of the show, I never had too much competition, so it eventually was widely regarded by many as the premier Legend site on the web.  Unfortunately, I moved on to other things, and the site no longer exists (although parts of it can still be found via the Internet Archive, and I have given many of the images I collected, including a number of behind-the-scenes pictures, a home at Google Photos), while the other site remains (still unchanged, apparently) to this day.  I'm told that the show pops up in reruns from time to time, but this always seems to be on cable networks (which I don't get), so I can't say how reliable that information is, let alone how recently or often it happens.  Although there are a few You Tube clips out there, I've yet to see Legend on a service like Hulu, and the show has never been released on DVD, and so I encourage people to tell Paramount that there's an interest from time to time (although even that link is pretty old, dating back to before MacGyver had even been released on DVD!). (25th anniversary edit. Legend eventually was released on DVD! Sadly, some of the music had to be changed for copyright reasons)

I'm sad to note that both co-creators of Legend, Michael Pillar and Bill Dial, have passed away in recent years.  A reminder that the show actually has been gone for quite some time, even though it doesn't really feel like it's been so long....


Note: April 18th is also (coincidentally!) the 5-year anniversary of this blog. Between these two anniversaries, I'm going ahead with a Sunday post to make sure that it actually appears on the correct day.

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RIP Michael Piller

Unless you're a fairly avid follower of Star Trek, you've probably never heard of Michael Piller, nor have heard that he lost his struggle with cancer yesterday. Piller is credited with breathing new life into the Trek franchise after the first couple of years of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and co-created both of the Trek's that followed (Deep Space Nine and Voyager). Oddly enough, my reason for remembering him on my blog here has little to do with Star Trek, but rather because of another show Piller was involved in, which provided the venue for my very first foray into web page design.

If you read the obituary carefully, you'll see a quick mention of a show called Legend that Piller co-created with a man named Bill Dial (although the obituary doesn't mention Dial). Legend was a short-lived series that aired on UPN back in 1995 (UPN's first year of existence, a time when very few parts of the country even had UPN programs on a dedicated UPN station). Legend was a Western drama with a Sci-Fi edge, starring Richard Dean Anderson (formerly of MacGyver, more recently known for Stargate SG-1) and John de Lancie (best known as "Q" from the modern versions of Star Trek).

The series told the tale of Ernest Pratt (played by Anderson), a dime novelist who often has to portray his novel character, Nicodemus Legend, in real life to appease the publicity needs of his publisher. This is often a struggle, as Legend is the stereotypical hero: doesn't drink, gamble, or have illicit relations with women, while the very human Pratt enjoys all these things. When the character of Legend is accused of illegally changing the course of a river, denying water rights to a wealthy landowner in Colorado, Pratt must go to clear his name. He soon learns that Hungarian scientist Janos Bartok (de Lancie) has achieved this feat by scientific means, in order to help some poor farmers who were being denied rights by this landowner. Bartok has used the identity of the fictional hero Legend in order to protect his own identity so that he might continue his scientific research undisturbed. Faced with the reality that his actions may cause Pratt to face legal difficulty, Bartok agrees to help Pratt to clear his name. But faced with the prospect of denying the poor farmers their livelihood, Pratt decides to accept the responsibility for changing the course of the river, and he and Bartok start to work together against the landowner, who has been trying to drive farmers away from the nearby land they legally own so that she might profit from illegal contracts that would bring a railroad into town, leading to huge profits to those in on the deal. To this end, Pratt accepts the identity of his fictional hero, Nicodemus Legend, for real. After the landowner is brought to justice, Bartok convinces Pratt to stay in town and be a hero on a more permanent basis. As the series progresses, Pratt continues to struggle to maintain his bohemian lifestyle while being called to the higher ideals of the hero he is forced to portray, partly by his publisher, but also by the fact that, deep down, he really does want to help people.

Faced with low ratings (caused by the fact that, at the time, few people knew the difference between UPN and UPS, a paraphrase from de Lancie) and a corporate shake-up at UPN, Legend was cancelled after only 12 episodes (along with all of UPN's first year of programming, with the exception of Star Trek: Voyager, which had been guaranteed a two-year commitment.). About a year later, I opened "The Unofficial Nicodemus Legend Page," which I ran for over five years, and am pleased to be able to say was regarded as the foremost Legend page in existence at the time. I stopped working on the page as I took on other commitments, but if you go to the Wayback Machine and search for "http://NicodemusLegend.web.com," you should still be able to find some of what I had done a few years ago.

I invite you to have a look, and see Michael Piller's other legacy.