Last Monday, at 8PM EDT, ABC aired a special about unsold TV pilots called The Best TV Shows That Never Were. It was a fun show, providing glimpses at sometimes bizarre or laughably bad ideas that in many cases are justifiably forgotten. The smug superiority of the narration grew tiresome however, especially when it was so wrong — as this video clip shows. [QuickTime. 22 seconds. 1½ MB.]The object of their derision in this case is a 1999 pilot called Just Deserts [IMDB link], starring Joel Grey.
Notice how the producers made a big deal about how the title was misspelled. I guess they were thinking “just desserts”, kind of like a dessert would be a sweet reward I guess. Funny thing is a quick glance at a dictionary — and they’re even conveniently online now too — shows that the phrase is properly used and spelled: “just deserts” as in something justly deserved. [Read Webster’s definition (you’ll need to click “[3,noun]”) or see what Snopes has to say.]
Good going guys. You went out of your way to point out an error when it was not an error. Now that speaks well of the brain power behind network TV, even more so than these passed-over shows. (At least they didn’t misspell ”misspelled“.)
By the way my QuickTime file is heavily edited. The clip from the show is much longer, but there’s no reason to upload the whole thing.