Why NBC Really Canceled Voyagers!

James D. Parriot's time travel show "Voyagers!," although broadcast on primetime on NBC, had the makings of a marvelous weekday-afternoon educational show on PBS. The series centers on Phineas Bogg (the unbearably handsome Jon-Erik Hexum), a time traveler from the future who does research for a vague organization of future historians called the Voyagers. He travels using a stopwatch-like device called the Omni, which is supposed to deposit him into any year prior to 1970. Thanks to a malfunction, however, he accidentally lands in the year 1982, where he meets a nerdy kid named Jeffrey (Meeno Peluce), the son of a history teacher.

History is out of joint, it seems, and it needs to be corrected. Together, Phineas and Jeffrey use the Omni to travel to significant historical events and re-organize history the way it's supposed to be. Phineas, however, is a terrible historian who is more interested in flirting with beautiful women than correcting history. Luckily, Jeffrey is a history buff and knows how tiny historical events are supposed to play out, allowing him to take the lead on all their adventures. "Voyagers!" was a lightweight comedic adventure program, but it was also clearly orchestrated to teach kids about history. Over the credits, Peluce would, out of character, tell kids that they can learn more about history at their local library. For nerdy kids (like me) who always loved libraries, this show was catnip. It was whimsical yet serious about history, and who didn't have a crush on Jon-Erik Hexum? If you have a library card, sign up for Kanopy (one of only five streaming services you need to be cool).

Sadly, "Voyagers!" only lasted one 20-episode season before being canceled and relegated to the memory hole, which was awful because the series was actually fetching decent ratings. "Voyagers!" aired on Sundays opposite CBS's "60 Minutes," giving kids some reliable counter-programming. In its finite wisdom, however, NBC felt that it should slot in a competing news series instead, canceling "Voyagers!" in order to try something new.

This didn't work.

The story goes that "60 Minutes," although hugely popular, was being irresponsible in its reporting. NBC assumed that its ratings would begin to fall and wanted to strike while (it thought) the iron was hot. As such, it hastily threw together their own competing "hard impact" news program called "Monitor," named after NBC's radio news show. "Monitor" and "Voyagers!" lived in harmony for a little bit, with "Monitor" airing on Saturday nights and "Voyagers!" staying opposite "60 Minutes" on Sundays. Sadly, though, NBC got ambitious and decided to push "Monitor" into the "Voyagers!" time slot, shoving the adventure show off the air. 

"Monitor" wasn't nearly as popular as "60 Minutes" (of course), and it began to tank almost immediately. NBC, rather than just reinstate "Voyagers!" on Sundays, spent all its time and energy sprucing up "Monitor," changing its title to "First Camera" and then redesigning the sets. No one cared about the makeover, though, and the show stayed unpopular. It was frequently preempted by football games before finally being canceled in 1984. "Voyagers!" felt the crunch all the more dramatically, as it was often preempted as well. Eventually, the show was yanked from the air entirely during NBC's "Monitor" ambitions, coming to a close in July of 1983.

"Voyagers!" was so missed that its cancellation was spoofed on "Late Night with David Letterman." The jocular talk show host staged a fake after school special called "They Took My Show Away," wherein a distraught pre-teen's life was thrown into misery in the wake of "Voyagers!" being taken off the air. Letterman played a sarcastic adult who explained to the kid that, well, sometimes bad shows are taken away from us. The kid cheered up when he was shown the upcoming NBC schedule, which included "Manimal" (a series that also flopped). One can see that Letterman didn't think much of "Voyagers!"

He should have. It was pretty good. More than that, it was fun, educational, and quite exciting to watch. "Voyagers!" was a show for nerds and goodness knows we don't have enough of those. 

R.I.P. Jon-Erik Hexum, who infamously died on set while filming the TV series "Cover Up" in 1984. He was taken too soon.