ANATOMY OF A FAILURE
How Drugs, Ego and Chaos Helped
Kill a Promising Series
by Andy Meisler and Ann Salisbury

In Hollywood, where no image fades as fast as that of a failed TV show, truly memorable failures are few and far between. One such rarity is Square Pegs, a half-hour CBS situation comedy described by the production company as a show "about the problems, joys and experiences of being young and in high school." It was created with the highest of hopes for the 1982-83 season by Anne Beatts, then 34, one of the prime movers behind the old, good Saturday Night Live, and produced by sitcom veteran Norman Lear's Embassy Television. Unlike some other recent high-school shows, Square Pegs would be set in the present, not some nostalgic version of the past, and populated with real teenagers, rather than capped-tooth overage juveniles. Many in Hollywood believed that the show had a real chance to breathe new life into the tired situation-comedy format. Yet, after only 20 episodes, the series died an uneasy and painful death: in May 1983, CBS canceled the show critics only months before had judged "very funny," "a breakthrough" and "more entertaining than anything else this season."
Just another failed show, say the inevitable TV-industry "observers." Some talented, dedicated and genuinely regretful people say otherwise. Our six-month investigation into the rise and fall of Square Pegs illustrates all the classic elements of the dark side of Hollywood --with some interesting New Wave fillips thrown in. Dozens of on- and off-the-record interviews with the show's cast, producers and writers, as well as conversations with numerous members of the crew, the staff, and others involved in the show, provide a rare, inside look at the causes behind the death of a highly touted situation comedy. What this post-mortem reveals is a prime example of how, despite the best of intentions, a promising series can die--or, in effect, kill itself.
All the industry's talent-wasting machinery was at work in the making--and unmaking--of Square Pegs: there were clashes of egos, of generations and of special interests; there were gifted people misused, abused and chronically confused; there were accusations of financial chicanery and of Machiavellian power plays--all at the sacrifice of creative quality. And there were drugs.
Indeed, in response to recurring reports and rumors of drug and alcohol use on a set where minors worked, Michael Grade, then president of Embassy Television, asked, in March 1983, for an internal investigation of his company's show. But by then, after months in shambles, Square Pegs had already completed shooting.
Harvey Shephard, the CBS senior vice-president of programming responsible for canceling the show, has refused to comment on the demise of Square Pegs or to explain why the plug on Square Pegs was pulled even though other promising shows with lower ratings have been allowed to survive. But Grade, the man who had full responsibility for the show at Embassy, was not hesitant about disclosing his frustrations with Square Pegs. "I could see the show going down the drain in front of my eyes," he says.
Grade's investigation turned up "no tangible evidence" of any wrongdoing, he says. But the investigation fell short. Grade's trouble-shooter, Embassy executive Glenn Padnick, was not as thorough as he might have been.
Item: "There've been drugs on every show I've ever done, from professional theater on down," says Merritt Butrick, who played Johnny Slash, one of the leads on the series. On Square Pegs "it was certainly no worse ... I'd have to say average." Butrick says Padnick never spoke to him.
Item: It was not until Grade was shown police evidence by a TV GUIDE reporter that he learned that Michael Brown, a crew member during the shooting of the Square Pegs pilot, had died of a heroin overdose.
Instead, Grade chose to downplay the fact that word of possible drug use had repeatedly filtered through to him, explaining that the show "was a hotbed of rumor and innuendo."
It was, however, more than that. TV GUIDE's post-mortem also revealed:
[] At best, a casual attitude toward the use of drugs. At worst, according to sources who worked on Square Pegs, a situation in which drugs were readily available on the set, were used, and affected the quality of work.
[] A bizarre and almost suicidal relationship between an established production company and the bright, young talent hired to pioneer a fresh new area of comedy.
[] A disdain--even contempt--by those bright young people for proven methods of TV production, and indeed, even for the television industry itself.
[] A bleak, remote location, scheduling problems with minor actors, and minimal supervision by those responsible for the show.
[] And, finally, chronic disorganization resulting from producer Beatts' obsession for total control, plus late scripts, a breakneck production schedule, inexperienced personnel and a general atmosphere of paranoia on the set.
In the end it was these problems, more than the Nielsen box, that killed Square Pegs-- a series that, in an industry filled with retreads, knockoffs and cynical attempts to reach the lowest common denominator, "clearly had," in Michael Grade's words, "the chance to be a landmark television show."
In the beginning, there was optimism. Chief among the series' assets, most agree, was Square Pegs' originator, Anne Beatts, a New York writer whose work on the original Saturday Night Live has been described as "brilliant." In one of her favorite skits, as she remembers it to an L.A. newspaper reporter, she played the part of "Ellen Sherman, Cleveland housewife and mother":
"I'm an astrophysicist, a commissioner of consumer affairs, and in my spare time I sculpt, do needlepoint and work with the deaf," chirped Beatts, skewering all those irritating "Super-Mom" stories. And she went on, talking faster and faster, compulsively folding paper bags. "If anyone wants a paper bag they can just take it out of my paper-bag collection. If they double-bag my order, why, I just take out the inside bag and fold that one separately, just the way they do at the supermarket. And how do I do it all? I take speed."
Not the kind of joke that made such conventional sitcoms as Three's Company successful. Nor did Beatts resemble your everyday Hollywood comedy writer or producer: she was a woman comedy writer, for one thing, in a profession filled with male class clowns who made good.  She dressed in weird, state-of-the-art punk fashions. She drove a '59 Rambler. She was different.
And she had a jewel of an idea for her move into prime time. Square Pegs took "the nerds," a Saturday Night Live sketch she had helped create, one step closer to reality. It was the story of her own growing up, Beatts says; the story of a gawky high-school freshman much too bright for her own good, struggling for popularity among social forces she was not quite secure enough to scorn. Beatts wrote a pilot as part of a development deal with CBS. And when, after the usual round of revisions, the network accepted it, it became the focus of attention from major production companies.
"I was given a chance to read the script and absolutely fell in love with it," says Grade. And indeed, Embassy--the company of Norman Lear, the Great Innovator of such breakthrough shows as All in the Family, Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman and Maude--seemed to be the logical choice to transplant the heart of Saturday Night Live into prime time. The agreement eventually reached contained a significant stipulation, however: Anne Beatts was to be the producer, even though she had never produced a show before. But it was believed that Embassy, filled with old pros accustomed to cranking out the likes of One Day at a Time, Diff'rent Strokes, and The Facts of Life, could compensate for her inexperience by providing Beatts with a strong backup producer--someone who could help her execute her ideas, curb any tendencies toward excess and keep a firm hand on the budget. They chose Ron Frazier, a sitcom veteran.
Another possible problem was Lear's stepping back from his company's day-to-day affairs. "Norman Lear had very little to do with Embassy's productions during that period," says Beatts. "I mean, Norman Lear once came in and made a courtesy tour through the offices at Embassy. And I don't think that Norman particularly liked the show. It's not exactly like the Norman Lear product.... It was much more sarcastic and snotty, and perhaps less warm. And it did not revolve around issues such as 'Will Maude get a mastectomy?'--my feeling being that everybody knows that Maude will not die of cancer."
And there was Beatts' relationship with Embassy itself. Her dealings with Grade, her immediate boss, were bad from the start. "I don't understand exactly what happened, or what it was, or why he  seemed to have an enormous personal dislike for me," says Beatts. "[Maybe] I remind him of his ex-girl friend or something. But people seemed to remark on the fact that he really disliked me."
There was also the "gender gap." What is called aggressive when referring to males is called bitchiness, or even less complimentary epithets, when a woman is being spoken of. There were those who worked on Square Pegs who thought Beatts was a bitch; that it wasn't a woman's place to be in charge of a network series.
"Listen," Beatts says, "I'm a girl. Let's not forget that. Let's not forget that I'm just a girl doing this. There aren't any other girls doing this. I wonder if a man in that job would have been as much of a lightning rod for these kinds of problems as I was. And ultimately I came to the conclusion that with Michael Grade that was the problem: I was a girl. There aren't any girls in English public schools." (Grade is English.)
Finally, there was the location, the staff, and the production process. All of Embassy's other sitcoms are shot on videotape using three cameras. Square Pegs, though, was shot on film with one camera--a vastly different technique--entirely on location at Excelsior High, an unused school in the rather bleak suburb of Norwalk, about 50 miles from Embassy's Los Angeles headquarters.
To act as program executive--in effect, to watchdog the production in Norwalk for them--Embassy chose Constance Kaplan, Beatts' former secretary from Saturday Night Live. To crank out a new show every seven days, Beatts recruited a bright, though mostly inexperienced, creative staff.  Her associate producer, for example, was Stephen Smith, a 26-year-old whose last job had been as a wardrobe man.
In Grade's view, there were problems almost from the outset: "She was all over the place; she took on too much," he says, commenting on Beatts' preoccupation with everything from public relations to costs, editing and sound-dubbing. "She didn't know what to delegate and what the priorities--for me--should always be: the script, the script, the script! ... You have to give the audience a story."
Beatts' protege, Stephen Smith, says that Grade's ideas were traditional, old-fashioned, and not the goals set by Beatts for Square Pegs: "Anne wanted this to be a creative show, not another Facts of  Life.... [Embassy] wanted beginning-middle-end types of stories--like ... what they're famous for." Beatts did not. Indeed, as Square Pegs entered production, it became clear that Embassy and Beatts had opposing concepts of what the show should be.
"There were ... people there who were disdainful of sitcoms," says one of the show's writers. Another adds: "I thought there should be more structure.... Some of the scripts looked like five drunk monkeys had written them and then thrown the pages up in the air."
But Beatts proudly insists that Square Pegs was "a writer's show." Scripts, she says, weren't given the customary homogenization or rewrite-by-committee.
The down side of that, says one writer, was that no one felt a part of anyone else's script.  Each writer had his/her own  interpretation of the characters.  Vinnie, for instance. One time he was dumb. Then he was sexy. Then he was stoic. There was no continuity.
Ultimately, it showed. In its debut on Monday, Sept. 27, 1982, Beatts' pilot won the 8:30 P.M. (ET) time slot for CBS and pulled the highest ratings the show would ever get. The reviews also were favorable: "Square Pegs is a very funny show," wrote critic Marvin Kitman of Newsday, a Long Island, N.Y., newspaper. "The characters have brains like New Yorkers. And mouths. They talk smart and funny.... Square Pegs is a thinking kids' sitcom."  James Wolcott, writing in New York magazine, added: "Watching Patty and Lauren negotiate the slopes of puberty should be more entertaining than almost anything else scooting our way this season."
And then? "They turned it off in droves," comments Embassy senior vice-president Barbara S. Brogliatti.
Why? Beatts talks of "plot lines not coming out well" because of tampering by Grade. Grade insists Beatts "had absolute editorial control over the show. And the result was the show wasn't good enough."
But there is another explanation as well--a very different one. "Drugs didn't cause the show's downfall," says one of those closely involved with Square Pegs. "But they all but pushed it over the edge."
The subject of cocaine is a touchy one in Hollywood these days. This past April, more than 300 entertainment-industry executives, union and guild representatives gathered at an invitational conference on drug abuse. There are more than 20 chapters of Cocaine Anonymous operating in the Los Angeles area. And Los Angeles physicians engaged in treating cocaine abusers say that what the entertainment industry has got on its hands is an epidemic.
One reason for this epidemic is a self-imposed rule of silence in Hollywood. Many of those interviewed for this story were willing to talk about drugs on the set of Square Pegs. Few were willing to do it on the record. Writer Deanne Stillman equates questions about drug use with the Hollywood blacklisting of 30 years ago: asking about drug use, she says, is like asking whether you are now, or ever have been, a member of the Communist party.  Others are worried that by admitting to having seen or participated in drug use they will never work again.
The fact is that on many Hollywood sets, drugs are accepted:
[] Anne Beatts says, "I think that, certainly, there was some drug abuse or drug traffic that may have happened, because I would say that that is a norm for a set."  Which means that people were using.
[] Set decorator Tom Cost put it this way: "Some sets have drug use, some don't.... This particular one had drug use."
[] Sarah Jessica Parker, who played Patty Greene, another of the lead roles, adds: "They knew, the few people who were doing it, that it would put the show in jeopardy if it ever had any influence on what the outcome of the show was. Maybe they couldn't see [how it hurt the show]. But they knew enough."
Says another cast member, who asks not to be named: "Yeah, there were drugs.... The thing that made it very dangerous and stupid in our case was that there were minors on the set. And that was a large concern. I think it would have been conveniently ignored if we were all adults. But as I said, because of the fact that there were minors, it was an issue."
Did drugs--cocaine in particular--affect Square Pegs?  A writer who asks that her name not be used thinks so. "If you do drugs and you're working," she says, "it's gonna affect your work." Another says that drugs are "what caused all the other problems, linked all the other problems together.... It was a problem, and everybody in the business knows it. It was a big, big  problem.... It's why they couldn't write good scripts. If you're not sober, you can't write good scripts. You can't hold it together."
The strongest on-the-record accusations about drug use on the Square Pegs set are made by Michael Milgrom, who worked as one of the series' three successive property masters. Milgrom says that he saw a fair-haired young man dispense a white powder that resembled cocaine to people in the Square Pegs production company at least five times. Milgrom says that the young man was selling the powder for $120 a gram, slightly above the going rate in Los Angeles, and that he was a regular visitor to the Square Pegs set in Norwalk during the nearly two months in which Milgrom worked on the series.
Milgrom, however, cannot be considered a totally unbiased witness: he was fired by Embassy and made to pay $6000 back to the production company after production auditor Cindy Quan found a number of discrepancies in his petty-cash receipts. Says Quan: "There were receipts in Mike's handwriting that didn't agree. We tried to call some of the places he had listed, and they didn't exist. Then we went back and audited everything he'd submitted to the show."
Milgrom says that he was made a scapegoat and forced to pay for a number of props he never lost. Either way, Milgrom obtained a bank loan and paid Embassy $6000 after the company threatened to go to the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department.
Anne Beatts denies that the quality of Square Pegs was affected by drug use. Or that she used drugs: "I did not use drugs either openly or privately while I was doing Square Pegs." And even if she had, she says, "I could clear myself of these drug rumors in a very easy way.... All I have to do is go on The Mike Douglas Show and say, 'God, was I a drug addict. I did cocaine, and I did speed, and I did this, and, ah, what a terrible life ... and now I've found--you name it--health food, Jesus, motherhood, what have you. And now I'm not a drug addict any more. I'm reformed.' And then everyone would say, 'Oh, well, yeah--fine. Anne used to be on drugs, of course, but now she isn't'." That kind of hypocrisy doesn't appeal to her.
Still, the stories persist. Asked why Square Pegs went downhill, a writer smiles weakly, then places a finger to her nose and sniffs.
And despite official denials about drugs on the Square Pegs set, some people were aware that a problem existed: midway through the season, according to supervising producer Ron Frazier, he called a meeting with the department heads and threatened to fire anyone proven to be using drugs. But no one was fired.
There were, however, firings for other reasons. By mid-season, the actors and the crew, working long hours on location, had begun to feel all sorts of strain. Says one writer: "We all felt that we were out there alone. Nobody [from Embassy or from CBS] wanted to come out, and when they did come out. they'd complain that the bathrooms were terrible."
Among the staffers who left the show because of creative disagreements was Susan Silver, one of the few Square Pegs writers experienced in the art of sitcoms. "I had a talk with Anne before I left," Silver recalls. "I was extremely unhappy and had become very vocal about it. One of the problems ... was that Anne didn't like dissent. And because most of the other writers were both her friends and very grateful to [have been] brought out here and given the opportunity to work on a network show for the first time, understandably they didn't feel comfortable disagreeing with her. I did." With Silver's departure, the series lost critically needed creative input from an old sitcom hand.
Embassy's program executive, Constance Kaplan, had had a working relationship with Beatts prior to Square Pegs.  Now she saw their friendship deteriorate.  "At one time she called me a spy," Kaplan said. "I'd tell her things like, 'You're in overtime now'--just doing my job--and she said, 'What is this? You're like a little spy'."
"It was very cliquish," says one of several cast members. "The writers struggled to be as hip as Anne."
"In terms of chaos and hyperness they were crazy," says Cliff Bernay, a veteran Hollywood prop master who worked on the show, "in the sense that they would all go in and have a meeting and come out, and everything would change. In other words, nobody had control ... they'd rant and rave, and whenever you rant and rave as a director or producer you've lost the battle."
Beatts admits to some of the raving: "I get rahhhhh very easily because I'm just a very high-strung person," she says. "I'm very hyper--I'm from New York ... and I get much too intense and involved and over-excited, and I was under more pressure than I can ever imagine having been under before."
How did she react to the pressure? "I snapped people's heads off. But I usually regretted it afterwards."
The strain began to tell. "I saw the quality of direction deteriorate. I saw the strain on the kids," Frazier recalls. Several cast members became ill. "I had pneumonia during the Christmas show; [I  was] just run down," recalls one of the lead actresses. "I had problems with hyperventilating and tension and all that."
The last straw? It was probably the Square Pegs Christmas show. Beatts lobbied successfully with CBS to do a special one-hour episode for Christmas. The problem: she had no one-hour script ready. Instead, in "a week or 10 days or something--I can't remember exactly," says Grade, Beatts expanded a half-hour script over his strong objections and protests. "She had a great deal of difficulty constructing a half-hour film script as it was, and to stretch it to an hour ... I thought it was really too ambitious," says Grade.
A cast member agrees: "The first draft of that show was just the most terrible thing I have ever seen. It made no sense at all.... And Anne was laughing. She thought it made sense. It made no sense."
It also made no sense to the panjandrums at Embassy. Shortly before Christmas, Grade summoned Beatts and said he was firing her--with CBS's approval.
Beatts says, "I didn't know what was going on ... Michael called me into his office and told me he wanted to fire me. And I said. 'I don't think you can. I don't think you have the contractual power.' And so he said, 'I'll ask you to resign or I won't continue to produce the show.' And I said, 'Well, I don't know. I have to talk to my agent.' And I said, 'Does CBS know about this?' And he said, 'Yes.' And I got very drunk."
A few days later, CBS vice-president Kim LeMasters worked out an accommodation, says Beatts, and she was allowed to continue on Square Pegs. So the show limped on, mortally stricken. The network put in an order for enough shows to complete the season. When it had them, CBS let Square Pegs die.
Still, Embassy had one bit of unfinished business: to look into stories about what had gone on in Norwalk. "Again, [there were] all kinds of rumors," Grade explains. "People would say things like, 'You don't know what was going on down there,' and I would say, 'What do you mean?'
"And by the time the fifth person says that to you, or the sixth person, or whatever ... I thought, 'Well, we better have a look at this'."
But those five or six people, according to Grade, didn't approach him until Square Pegs had ended its production. "We never had any specific allegation, with or without proof, from what I would call any responsible source ... that would have caused us to go in there, close it down and find out what was going on."
Instead, Grade assigned Glenn Padnick, an Embassy vice-president sympathetic to Anne Beatts, to conduct what Grade calls a "thorough investigation."
Well--not quite. "Investigation is kind of a grandiose word," says Padnick, explaining that he spoke to five or six people "on a formal basis. I did not do an 'investigation' of drug use in general on the Norwalk set, per se." Nor, says Padnick, did he file a formal memo on his findings, which were minimal. "I did write a handwritten thing to Michael [Grade]. I frankly was so at a loss ... was so chagrined or struck by the lack of anything concrete.... So I gave an informal response to Michael in light of the nonresponse I had gotten from my questioning."
Embassy's Barbara Brogliatti says "We weren't looking to uncover 'Cocaine in Hollywood'. "
So Square Pegs died--and was buried quietly.
These days, most of those involved have gone on to other projects. "If the black side of the picture that others have painted is so true," asks Anne Beatts, "how come I have a three-project deal with CBS? And an umbrella deal at Warner Brothers?" A studio spokesman would say only that Beatts "has an association with Warner Brothers Television on the development of some properties."
Michael Grade resigned as president of Embassy Television and now has an "exclusive independent production deal," as they say in the trades, with the company. Sarah Jessica Parker received critical acclaim for an off-Broadway play and appears in the movie "Footloose."  Amy Linker, who played a co-lead, Lauren Hutchinson, is a voice on the Mr. T cartoon show, and also starred in an HBO movie. Tracy Nelson (Jennifer DeNuccio) has a role in ABC's new evening soap opera Glitter. Merritt Butrick landed roles in the movie "Star Trek III" and an episode of Fame. Supervising producer Ron Frazier is the producer of a new CBS sitcom, Dreams. Propman Cliff Bernay worked on The Rousters.
Michael Milgrom, shortly after being interviewed by TV GUIDE, was admitted to the intensive care unit of a North Hollywood hospital in critical condition from a virulent strain of food poisoning. He took out a second mortgage on his house to pay Embassy back the $6000 it claimed he owed them.
And every once in a while, says Anne Beatts, people ask her when Square Pegs is coming back. 

John Weisman, Washington bureau chief, contributed reporting to this article.

TV GUIDE JUNE 9, 1984