Evening Entertainment: Cloris Leachman and Jim Rash star in "Thanks," a pilgrim-era sitcom

Remember "Thanks," the sitcom set in the zany world of the American pilgrim era?  You may not, as you might have been busy during the six weeks that it aired, starting in August of 1999 and gone over two months before Thanksgiving.  Heck, Sarah Vowell even wrote about it and compared it to "The Crucible."  It does feature Cloris Leachman defending the plague, Oscar-winner and "Community" dean Jim Rash as a young chap who has bad hair (who gets the best moments) and Erika Christensen.  Here's episode two, with original commercials that should give you fond memories of  the Taco Bell chihuahua and Disney's INSPECTOR GADGET.  It's much better than you'd expect.

Evening Entertainment: The pilot for David Lynch's "On the Air"

ABC was hoping for the next "Twin Peaks" when they got Lynch and Mark Frost to create a new TV series for them -- what they got was "On the Air," one of the strangest sitcoms ever aired on network TV.  The story of a young, dense actress (Marla Rubinoff) who becomes the star of a new TV series featuring a cocky has-been (Ian Buchanan) features a mesh of absurdist slapstick humor that nothing has ever been close to replicating.  Only three episodes of the seven produced were aired before the series vanished (and it's never been released on DVD), though  it has developed a deserved cult rep over the years.  With Miguel Ferrer, Marvin Kaplan, David L. Lander, Tracey Walter (who isn't blind, he suffers from "Bozeman's Simplex") and Kim McGuire, CRY-BABY's Hatchet Face.

Evening Entertainment: Unsold pilot for "Galaxy Beat," a 1994 sci-fi comedy from "Sledge Hammer" writer with Gregory Harrison, Roddy McDowall and Tracy Scoggins

Broad science fiction comedy is a tough sell on television -- just look at the short run of "Quark."  "Galaxy Beat" is a perfectly entertaining pilot that probably could have been developed into a highly entertaining show if they'd allowed to develop it.  The pilot, written by "Sledge Hammer!"'s Alan Spancer, is filled with sight gags, many of which work quite well.  (There are also a lot of cultural references that date it quite a bit.)  But Harrison seems to be enjoying himself as the amazingly-named Dax Steelbrow, and the supporting cast (which also includes "The Flash"'s Alex Désert and the voice of Michael Dorn) is just as solid.  Much of it works at least as well as SPACEBALLS.

Watch This Thing - Anthony Perkins in 1990's darkly comic pilot for "The Ghost Writer," from the writer of "Sledge Hammer!"

Anthony Perkins never quite found another great role after PSYCHO, and in the '80s, he embraced his most popular character in full, starring in several sequels and embracing a variety of twisted roles.  One of his last was in, of all things, a sitcom, in the 1990 pilot "The Ghost Writer," playing a widowed bestselling horror author with a goth son (RIVER'S EDGE's Joshua Miller) who remarries a woman with a daughter suspicious of the goings on that surround them.  It could have been an "Addams Family" for the '90s - it's written by Alan Spencer, who lent "Sledge Hammer!" similar sensibilities, but the series never got past the pilot stage.