Broken Pilot Saturday: Sammy Davis Jr. In 'Poor Devil'

The late Sammy Davis Jr. is more remembered for being "Sammy Davis Jr." than for his impressive singing and dancing talents. He was a member of the Rat Pack and in 1960, at a time when Jim Crow laws were still very much in force in parts of the U.S., he married Swedish actress Mai Britt. Davis was a cheezy force of nature in Hollywood and for twenty years was a regular fixture on television talk shows.

But what's mostly forgotten today is that Davis also spent some time in the 1970s as a devoted Satanist. The singer dabbled with Satanism for several years before he became a card-carrying member of the Church of Satan in 1973.

His affection for the dark side only lasted a few years, but it did manage to inspire some truly bizarre career choices. The strangest creative decision to come out of his Lucifer-friendly period was a 1973 TV movie the singer made for ABC. POOR DEVIL was originally produced as a pilot for the network, whose executives inexpicably thought audiences would tune in weekly to see Davis play a devil who tries (and fails) to convince that's week's guest star to sell his or her soul to Lucifer.

In the pilot, Davis plays a low-level devil stuck in the furnace-feeding level of Hell. Lucifer (played by Christopher Lee) offers Davis a deal: he'll get a promotion if he can convince a schlub of a salesman played by Jack Klugman to sell his soul.

As if that isn't enough cringe-worthy entertainment to keep you happy, the cast also includes Adam West as Klugman's scumbag boss and Gino Conforti as Davis' main rival in Hell. The series was created and written by Richard Baer and Earl Barrett, both of whom had spent time writing episodes of BEWITCHED.

And did I mention that POOR DEVIL premiered on Valentine's Day?

Ah, the not-so-golden age of television.

This pilot isn't the greatest quality and looks to be a dub from someone's much-abused videotape collection. But it's worth watching strictly for the oddness of the idea and the craptastic execution.

NOTE: Despite what you'll read on the overly-aggregated Internet, Davis did NOT record an album entitled "Satan Swings, Baby." That much-repeated fact seems to have originated with this 2006 April Fool's Day post on AllAboutJazz.com.