Friday, August 20, 2021

From Primetime to Daytime: Roomies (1987)

 A 40-something Marine DI decides to return to college, and bunks with a teen prodigy struggling to fit in.

That was the premise behind Roomies, a spring replacement series that aired on NBC for 2 months in 1987, then returned to fill a spot on the network's Saturday morning slate four years later.

Burt Young ("Rocky"), who served in the Marines nearly 30 years earlier, co-stars with Corey Haim ("The Lost Boys"). Only 8 episodes were produced, and so it fit neatly with NBC's developing Teen TV block in the summer of 1991. The network produced the show themselves, as they were getting back into the business of developing their own shows (i.e. Saved by The Bell, California Dreams), as they did in the early days of television.

Following is a sample episode:

Edit, 9/2/21: The episode was deleted. We have a small sample in its place:


No rating.



2 comments:

Silverstar said...

Never heard of this one. I doesn't even sound like it would've been a good fit for TNBC, since it dealt with college life and one of its' leads was a 40-something adult. From what I remember about TNBC, they seemed to only want clones of Saved by the Bell; as I recall, another TNBC entry, California Dreams, was originally about a family moving to Cali and one of their kids just happened to be a teenager who had a band, but the network wanted more teen stuff, so the family got pushed into the background with the teen son and his band getting the primary focus.

hobbyfan said...

The need for teen programming is why this failed primetime series was given a 2d chance on Saturday mornings.

However, it probably gave Peter Engel and the network suits impetus for Saved by The Bell: The College Years 2 years later.