And with the cancellation of Ford Nation after one mere episode — supposedly for the production costs; it took 5 hours to shoot 40-ish minutes of show, plus 8 hours of editing — Rob and Doug Ford, the mayor and the councillor who fancies himself the co-mayor of Toronto, join Wikipedia’s List of television series canceled after one episode.
As you might expect, the list contains TV shows with some stool-softeningly bad concepts. But even among all this list of disasters, one stands out: a 1990 British sitcom called Heil Honey I’m Home!
A spoof of American sitcoms from the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, Heil Honey I’m Home! features Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun as a Ralph and Alice Kramden-like couple living next door to a Jewish couple, the Goldensteins. It features a lot of tropes from old sitcoms, right down to the corny theme song, brain-dead plotline, and of course, the studio audience applause whenever a major character walks onto the set.
The show opens with a title card that claims that the show was found in the archives in Burbank, California (“Television City”), perhaps as a hint to the audience that the show is a parody. The one and only episode’s plot is based around the Hitlers having Neville Chamberlain over for dinner in order to convince him that Adolf isn’t a troublemaker, but a decent, ordinary guy. He asks Eva to keep the visit a secret from the Goldensteins, but Eva can’t resist boasting about it, and they invite themselves over. Hilarity, one assumes, was meant to ensue.
It’s painfully bad. I’ve seen improv troupes do a better job with similar concepts. Needless to say, the program was controversial and was accused of trivializing the Nazis; others say it was a show in the same spirit as Hogan’s Heroes. It’s not surprising it was cancelled after just one episode.
If you’ve got nothing better to do, or just morbidly curious, here’s the entire uncut episode: