Broken Pilot Saturday: Bill Daily & Farrah Fawcett In 'Inside O.U.T.'

In 1971, Farrah Fawcett was still a relatively unknown Hollywood actress looking for her big break. She had appeared in two movies and done a string of TV guest spots on shows ranging from THE FLYING NUN to THE PARTRIDGE FAMILY. So getting cast in her first pilot was probably a very big deal to her at the time.

INSIDE O.U.T. features Fawcett and I DREAM OF JEANNIE star Bill Daily as members of The Office of Unusual Tactics (aka O.U.T.), a secret government agency who cleans up problems created by other government organizations. Daily was just coming off of I DREAM OF JEANNIE and I'm assuming this was supposed to be a starring role for him. He played the hapless director of the agency and Fawcett was one of the agents.

In this pilot (which is missing the final few minutes), O.U.T. is given the job of recovering a shipment of counterfeit money that had been mistakenly sent to a bank. As flimsy as the plot sounds, the show itself is worse and it is everything that is terrible about early 1970s scripted television. Cheesy backlot sets, "comedy of errors" scenes that are painfully obvious and dialogue so stilted it comes off more as a performance art piece that a legitimate effort at making a viable TV show. I suspect this was supposed to be a GET SMART-like parody of MISSION IMPOSSIBLE. But there are very few laughs to be found.

There's not much to recommend the pilot, except for the familiar faces of Fawcett and Daily. Even in such an awkward project, Fawcett shows glimpses of the star quality that would later make her a household name. Daily is also criminally misused in the pilot, which fails to harness his formidable comedic timing.

After INSIDE O.U.T. was rejected, Fawcett continued her TV guest star appearances before being cast as a recurring character in 1974 on the detective series HARRY-O. She also made several appearances on then-husband Lee Major's SIX MILLION DOLLAR MAN before being cast in CHARLIE's ANGELS in 1976.

One piece of trivia from the era is that ABC head Fred Silverman canceled HARRY-O after two seasons and replaced it with CHARLIE's ANGELS. The decision was made to move ABC in a "different direction," although HARRY-O was still a solid ratings hit. The move so upset HARRY-O star David Janssen that he swore he would never star in another TV series.

The person who was likely happiest in retrospect about the failure of INSIDE O.U.T. was series co-star Bill Daily. The following year he was cast as Howard Borden in THE BOB NEWHART SHOW and that is probably his best known television role.

INSIDE O.U.T. was written and produced by Fred Freeman and Lawrence J. Cohen.

Freeman and Cohen are both a bit of a mystery. They wrote scripts for shows such as MAKE ROOM FOR DADDY, THE JOEY BISHOP SHOW, BEWITCHED, THE ANDY GRIFFITH SHOW and GILLIGAN'S ISLAND. They created and/or wrote the scripts for a couple of other unsuccessful pilots, including the 1973 NBC pilot KIBEE & FITCH. They wrote and co-produced a couple of feature films, including the very good 1970 film "Start The Revolution Without Me" and the staggeringly bad 1991 John Candy feature film "Delirious." Their last TV credit seems to be a couple of scripts for the NBC comedy EMPTY NEST in 1992.

There isn't much other information available about INSIDE O.U.T., so if you can contribute any tidbits about the pilot, include them in the comments below or email me at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..