‘People Next Door’ Shown the Door at CBS

CBS axed its new Monday-night comedy “The People Next Door” Thursday, marking the first cancellation of the new season.

The low-rated sitcom was chock-full of special effects, revolving around a cartoonist who could make anything in his vivid imagination come to life.

“ ‘The People Next Door,’ given the time to develop its audience, would have been a success,” said David Salzman, president of Lorimar, which produced the show. “But CBS needs a quick fix.”

The show, which premiered Sept. 18, had been part of the network’s all-comedy night. Network executives were concerned that the low ratings it was garnering at 8:30 p.m. were hurting the programs that followed.

The network did not immediately announce what will fill the open slot. Instead, CBS will give 8:30 p.m. tryouts to “Newhart” on Oct. 23 and to “The Famous Teddy Z” on Oct. 30. “Doctor, Doctor” a sitcom starring Matt Frewer that ran last summer, will begin airing Nov. 13 in the 10:30 p.m. Monday slot now occupied by “Newhart.”

Network programmers will evaluate ratings during the next few weeks before deciding on permanent repositioning.

Steve and Madeline Sunshine, executive producers of “The People Next Door,” said Thursday that they felt the plug was pulled too soon. “It’s a show that needed time,” said Steve Sunshine. “I think that hurt us.”

The husband-and-wife team, who are best known for producing the sitcom “Webster,” feel the show was improving every week and that their best episodes had not yet aired. Only five of the 10 episodes they had completed were broadcast.

“We discovered which (special) effects worked best and which not to use,” said Madeline Sunshine.

Her husband said that they learned quickly that having characters suddenly pop into the picture “was a nice idea but was getting tiring.” The team quickly dispatched a talking moose head on the wall, which appeared in the pilot, because it looked too “Saturday morning--too puppety.”

“The moose cried all night,” Steve Sunshine added.

The couple said they would like to have aired their later episodes out of sequence and put them on right away. But the complicated schedule required for the special effects prohibited any episode juggling.

Although the Sunshines said they enjoyed making the show, they do not plan to produce another special effects-type series for a long time, if ever.

Said Steve Sunshine, “I can’t even go to a George Lucas movie again.”