How do they come up with these television shows? The thought, “Who the hell gave the green light for this mess?” has crossed my mind a lot lately while watching the new TV season. The great playwright George S. Kaufman was once asked why so many bad plays were being produced. His answer was something like, “Do you think I sit down at a typewriter with the express intention of writing a flop?”

Obviously, one needs the work of a team of creative and talented people to produce even the most banal of shows. Once the pilot has been done, marketing research people test the reactions of audiences to the show. From there, I’m sure it’s a gauntlet of junior executives, standards and practices people, and network poobahs before any show is aired.

I once participated in the process, a long time ago. In the mid seventies, I was attending the Newark School of Fine and Industrial Art. One December morning, the photography teacher told us, “Take your 35 millimeter cameras over to Rockefeller Center and photograph the tourists and the kids looking at the Christmas tree.”

Two of my friends and I took the fifteen minute walk from the school to Newark’s Penn Station, and then a twenty-five cent ride on the PATH into the heart of Manhattan. At ten o’clock on this overcast, cold day, Rockefeller Center was already teeming. At the curb stood teams of horses reined to gaily decorated carriages, available for rides through Central Park. The air was filled with the smell of hot pretzels and roasting chestnuts.

We were snapping away when a young man in a suit and tie approached us. He had some paper in his hands. Was he selling dirty postcards? No, he was a CBS intern, trolling on NBC turf, with free tickets to a “sneak preview screening.”

I was a little wary; I’d been approached by con artists in the city before. One time, a young lady came up to me, put a dirty plastic flower in my hand and said, “Would you like to contribute some money to the children?”

“No,” I said. Without another word, she grabbed the flower out of my hand and went looking for another sucker.

However, one of my schoolmates said, “Let’s go! It’s fun! I once got to see a sneak preview of the Incredible Hulk TV movie this way!” And so, we went.

We were ushered into a small theater with about thirty other people. A big, blank screen dominated the room. The chairs were comfortable, and on each arm was a joystick with a button on the top.

The young woman executive in charge of us explained that we would be watching a pilot for a situation comedy that the network was considering. While we watched the show, if we saw something we liked, we were to push the button in our right hands. If we saw something we didn’t like, we were to push the button in our left hands. Before the show began, we filled out profiles concerning our age, sex, vocations, and other sundry information that networks seem to cherish.

The show began. It was called Annie Flynn. (I think they got the “Annie” from the Woody Allen movie, Annie Hall. “Annie” was one of the “in” names that year.) The premise was that a nurse named “Annie Flynn” (a red-haired “Mary Tyler Moore” type), had decided to become a doctor and had enrolled in med school. She rents an apartment from a curmudgeon landlord (a “Lou Grant/Archie Bunker” type), buys her textbooks from a testy cashier (a “Phyllis” type), and registers for school and makes a new best friend (a “Rhoda” type). She also meets a handsome doctor (a “Magnum” type) on his way back from playing softball, and he asks her for a date.

The situation: she discovers Doctor Handsome is also her teacher, so she just can’t date him. She frets about this to her landlord and new best friend, and she decides to break it off with him before it even starts. She explains this to him on the first day of the semester, in front of the whole class.

All through the show, I was pushing the “left” button a lot. They had piled on the “situation” and stinted on the “comedy”. I don’t know how the others felt, except for one old guy who laughed through the whole show. An actor would say the lamest joke, and this guy would be rolling on the floor, just this side of a cardiac arrest. I don’t know; maybe it was the first time he had ever seen television.

After the show, the young woman executive was back to get our reactions. One person said, “Very unrealistic! Doctors don’t play softball; they play golf!”

She asked the laughing old man what he had thought.

“I thought it was so funny!” he said.

“What part?”

He suddenly got defensive and said, guardedly, “I just liked it; that’s all!”

Then, she asked, “Did anyone have trouble with the fact that a woman was enrolling in medical school?”

We all looked at each other, bewildered. Was this supposed to be an issue? After all, this was 1975.

If they were looking to make a controversial new sitcom, they had missed the mark. While they had dressed the show up with a superficial “women’s lib” veneer, it reminded me of a re-worked Doris Day movie from the early sixties. Was she worried about finding a place to live, or trying to remember all 206 bones in the body for an anatomy test? Was she trying to track down an elusive text book that needed for a class?

No, her biggest problem was who she’d be dating.

Every one of us had a suggestion on how to make the show better. Some were insightful. Some were silly. But, somehow in the process, it had become “our” show. Despite its faults, we wanted it to be good.

“We’ll be taking all your observations into consideration,” the young woman said. “You might see this on TV some day, with some of your suggestions. Thank you from CBS!” We were ushered out.

The following January, on a cold Wednesday night, right before the ‘sweeps” month of February, CBS had a ninety-minute “special”; three comedies. It was three unsold pilots that they needed to fill a timeslot. One of them was Annie Flynn. I tuned in, eagerly, to see what changes had been made to “our” show.

None. It was the exact same show we had seen in New York. Obviously, no one had wanted to develop the show any farther. It bugged me a little bit - at the time - that CBS hadn’t taken any of our suggestions seriously. Today, with better insight, I suspect that I was feeling a small part of what the creative people in show business have to feel when a project is abandoned or ignored or “reworked”.

The idea and good intentions behind Annie Flynn live on, however. Just tune in Grey’s Anatomy, where women interns struggle to become full fledged doctors.

And still worry about who they’ll be dating.