Michael Landon may forever be remembered for his starring turn as family patriarch Charles
Ingalls on the long-running family drama, Little House on the Prairie. But in 1984,
Landon starred in another endearing NBC series that ran for five seasons, Highway to Heaven.
Two contrasting sources lead to Highway to Heaven: a Christmas movie and traffic.
In his memoir The Last Great Ride, NBC's president of entertainment
Brandon Tartikoff recalled discussing favorite movies with Michael Landon in the early 1980s.
Landon mentioned the 1946 classic It's a Wonderful Life, about an angel-in-training named Clarence
who helps depressed George Bailey, played by Jimmy Stewart, find meaning in life again.
"Merry Christmas!"
"Merry Chrstmas! Merry Christmas, George!"
Tartikoff said he liked the movie, too. Landon then reportedly told Tartikoff:
"I'm glad because I'd like to do something with the same spirit, the same human values."
Landon laid out his premise: He'd play an angel working on behalf of the Christian
perception of God who — just like Clarence did for Jimmy Stewart's character — comes
down each week and changes somebody's life. In 1988, Landon told the Los Angeles Times
that the spark for Highway to Heaven came when he was sitting in his car:
"I was driving through Beverly Hills to pick up my kids on a Friday night,
and people were honking at each other. [...] I think when people have a little bit more money,
they really believe that the Red Sea will part and their car will go forward."
That got Landon thinking about the mass frustration before
his eyes. He told the Los Angeles Times, "If they would just spend that time being nice,
the flow of traffic is going to go much better."
Brandon Tartikoff, as he wrote in The Last Great Ride, didn't think
the show that would become Highway to Heaven would work in the TV landscape of the 1980s,
or that Michael Landon was picking the right project after a decade of
starring on Little House on the Prairie. Tartikoff told Landon:
"You're going to write, produce, direct, and star in a series where you essentially play
God. No pun intended, but you're going to get crucified by the TV critics."
Landon said that he no longer really cared what critics thought because
his years of television experience indicated that viewers knew what they'd get out of him,
and they enjoyed it. Landon told Tartikoff:
"I know how to make people cry. And I believe that there's an audience for that. If you can
move people in an hour of television, they'll be back next week for more."
Trusting Landon, who, with Little House on the Prairie and Bonanza before that,
had consistently delivered millions of viewers to NBC, Tartikoff ordered a pilot script.
In his book The Last Great Ride,
NBC entertainment executive Brandon Tartikoff called Highway to Heaven:
"[An] idea that I personally thought was preposterous but had no intention of derailing,
at least not immediately."
That's all because he couldn't really say no to the project or the man who wanted to make it.
NBC was contractually obligated to at least launch, in good faith, the successor to
Landon's Little House on the Prairie, a hit for the network since the mid-1970s.
Nevertheless, when he got a load of Landon's pilot script for his new show,
Tartikoff and other NBC executives found it, quote, "a trifle old-fashioned."
After NBC spent $3 million producing a pilot episode from the script,
executives got a viewing, and some were not impressed. Of the 40 network
managers who filled a screening room to watch Landon's new show, 25 walked out.
"Keep looking at it, son. Keep looking at the moon."
NBC considered writing off the $3 million as a loss and not airing Highway to Heaven,
but the network was obligated to put the show on the air. Needless to say,
Landon proved the doubters wrong. Highway to Heaven was a massive ratings success,
beating ABC's top 10 hit The Fall Guy. The series subsequently got a full season order,
and in 1984-85, NBC was the most-watched network for the first time in 30 years,
an accomplishment Tartikoff credits in part to the success of Landon's series.
Earthbound angel Jonathan Smith on Highway to Heaven needed a human partner to help
him get to the people who needed his help. That character manifested as Mark Gordon,
a former Oakland, California, police officer and brother of a retirement
home manager whom Jonathan meets when he works his heavenly magic on the elderly residents.
Before long, Mark has figured out that Jonathan is an angel, and together,
they're moving from city to city on assignments from "The Boss" upstairs.
Victor French played the bearded and increasingly less bitter Mark Gordon on Highway to Heaven,
which marked the third long-running TV show on which he'd co-starred with Michael Landon.
On Little House on the Prairie, he played alcoholic mountain man and brawler Mr. Edwards,
and on Bonanza, French played four different characters in five episodes. Landon and
French had grown close over the years, and the former moved to cast his friend as Mark Gordon.
According to the Los Angeles Times, NBC wanted to put a young, classically attractive, rising
star in the role, not a 50-year-old character actor. Landon stood his ground and got his way,
allowing French to get the job he likened to, quote, "working with the man I love."
Producing a TV show, especially an hour-long drama for a broadcast network that requires
around 20 episodes a season, is famously time- and labor-intensive,
and that can be very stressful and ultimately lead to a poor work-life balance for the cast and crew.
Highway to Heaven was reportedly the exception to the rule. As the creator,
developer, executive producer, star, and director of more than 80% of the episodes,
Michael Landon was unquestionably the boss on the set of Highway to Heaven, so the show's
staunch support of the importance of family and togetherness played out in how it was made.
Landon told the Los Angeles Times in 1988 that creating a family-like atmosphere on set
relaxed employees to the point where the show came in under budget and on time. In the 1980s,
a 16-hour day was the standard in network television. Highway to Heaven crew members
would be home by dinnertime. Everyone on staff got a three-week break for the winter holidays
and another three-week production shutdown in the middle of the season,
and any extra money in the budget at the end of the year was split up into crew bonuses.
In May 1988, NBC announced its lineup for the upcoming fall TV season, and Highway to Heaven
wasn't on it, instead shifting to midseason replacement status. An aging show, Highway to
Heaven's ratings had slipped, falling out of the top 30. As such, the show's fifth season consisted
of just 13 episodes, which aired very sporadically and out of order — a couple in December 1988,
one in March 1989, and the rest dumped into the little-watched summer months.
The show didn't even get a proper finale — the last episode,
a Christmas special, aired in August 1989. Michael Landon confirmed in an interview on
The Tonight Show in May 1989 that the series had ended production.
"Now you don't have a regular series. How do you kill all the time? Or do you?"
"It's, uh, it's the first time I've really taken a great deal of time off."
Landon, the creator and star of Highway to Heaven, broke free of his 30-year connection to NBC,
which stretched back through Little House on the Prairie and Bonanza, and jumped to CBS
for his next series, Us. The show would have been about a wrongfully convicted man freed
from prison who becomes a traveling newspaper columnist looking for inspirational stories,
but only the pilot was ever produced and aired, owing to Landon's death in 1991.
The hottest new thing in television in the 2010s wasn't new at all.
Reboots and remakes of old shows were in demand at the big networks,
as it's easier to promote and market a familiar brand or franchise and play off of the goodwill
and nostalgia of viewers than it is to get people on board with something totally new. Alongside
reboots of shows like Full House and Roseanne, came a proposed new version of Highway to Heaven.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, the cable channel A&E started to
develop a present-day-set version of the 1980s show about a helpful angel.
The twist was that it would have carried a harder edge and been a bit more gritty
than its inspiration, especially under the eye of executive producer Mark Wahlberg.
The new Highway to Heaven would have starred new actors, as original cast members Michael Landon
and Victor French had died decades earlier. A&E ultimately passed on the series.
Less than a decade after A&E attempted to bring back Highway to Heaven with a dark, 21st-century
spin, another basic cable network decided to give the idea a go, changing a few elements but
adhering close to the spirit of the original show about intervening angels. In June 2021,
Deadline reported that Lifetime had ordered a brand-new Highway to Heaven. Unlike the original,
this won't be a weekly series at all but rather a series of occasional made-for-TV "event movies."
Highway to Heaven 2.0 will center on new characters, too. Jill Scott,
primarily known as a singer, will portray a newly anointed angel named Angela, who descends to
Earth to help people in desperate need. Scott will also help produce the movies, which are
being made with the approval and assistance of Michael Landon's estate and surviving relatives.
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