Welcome to a new Wildcard Wednesday! First, I want to give you an update on when Sitcom Tuesdays will get out of rerun mode and return to the ’90s, where we will finish the decade off strong with Everybody Loves Raymond, The King Of Queens, and That ’70s Show… 

The truth is, I don’t know yet. I’m hoping soon, but the only guarantee I can give is that we WILL return to original weekly coverage in May at the latest… Frankly, I only decided to do another buffer rerun series in the first place because I wanted to make sure that I had all nine years of Raymond  — the last must-include sitcom that this blog was designed to highlight — covered before the show began appearing here. As one of my favorites, and likely one of yours too, it’s a series that I want to make sure I handle correctly…

Unfortunately, the rerun series had to get extended when I caught a bad case of the flu that laid me out for the better part of a month, keeping me from being able to do the work I intended. I’m feeling much better now, thank goodness (I hadn’t had the flu in probably 12 years!), but now I find my last semester wrapping up and school also demanding a lot of my time… At this point, I want to make sure that both class and Raymond get the attention they deserve. For this reason, I must continue the rerun series for a little bit longer… But, don’t worry, we’ll get back to some good sitcom stuff — some good NEW sitcom stuff (and all the Wildcard Wednesday attachments) — very soon. Thanks for hanging in there.

Now, as a thank you, and to give this post a more interesting purpose, here’s the pilot of a short-lived, little-known sitcom called Mama’s Boy (1987-1988, NBC), which starred Nancy Walker and Bruce Weitz, and was one of Tartikoff’s infamous “designated hitters,” a term he used for shows that would have no set schedule, but would be plugged in occasionally throughout the season. By and large, this experiment was a failure, and you can read more about it (and this series) here, in a post from last year that included an excerpt of a script… Now, please note that the installment you’re seeing was broadcast as the show’s third, on November 26, 1987. But it was actually the Pilot, and it’s different from the rest of the run… although this appears to have been a recut version, excising intended regulars who never made it to the actual series. It was written by Bill Levinson and directed by Greg Antonacci.

Come back next week for another Wildcard post! And stay tuned Tuesday for more sitcom fun!