Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past!  This Thursday, I will be reviewing the unaired pilot for Johnny Garage, which aired in 1983 on CBS.  The show can be found on YouTube!

Welcome to New York.

Episode 1.1 “Pilot”

(Dir by Bill Persky, originally aired on April 13th, 1983)

Johnny “Garage” Antonizzio (Ron Carey) owns a garage in Queens. According to his employee Frankie (Val Bisoglio), everyone in Queens knows Johnny Garage. Johnny Garage has family all over the borough. But will Johnny Garage have the $4,000 necessary to pay the rent to rich Harriet Garfield (Carlin Glynn)? Johnny needs to make the money quickly, but that won’t be easy. Mechanic Mike (Timothy Van Patten) is more interested in flirting than working, and Johnny made the mistake of loaning out the mail truck that the local postman, perhaps foolishly, left at his gas station. “No problem!” announces the Johnny Garage theme song, which plays over the beginning and end credits.

This pilot is a little bit interesting because it appears that it was actually filmed on location in Queens. Almost the entire episode takes place outside as Johnny and Frankie watch for Harriet’s limo and hopefully some rich customers. I have no idea if the show would have held onto that concept if the pilot had been turned into a series. Filming on location is expensive, and most sitcoms in the 80s took place on one interior set for that reason. Of course, the pilot wasn’t turned into a series, and watching Johnny Garage, it’s easy to see why. Even the pilot seemed to be struggling to come up with any interesting stories that could take place at a gas station. The cast is likable, even if one gets the feeling that the show’s producers overestimated the appeal that gruff New York mechanics would have for the rest of the country.

According to IMDb, this show was inspired by an actual gas station in Queens, and I imagine that’s the root of the pilot’s problems. The location was a place that obviously meant a lot to the show’s creators. (One of those creators, by the way, was Sonny Grosso, the former cop whose work partially inspired The French Connection.) To most viewers, though, the location would just be another gas station. This pilot is the ultimate example of how no one is more fascinated by New York than the people who live there.