It's hard to imagine how this didn't work - two of TV's biggest stars, irrevocably intertwined with each other because of a previous classic - getting their own shows back-to-back on the same network. You can see why CBS expected big things from Dick van Dyke and his former sitcom wife Mary Tyler Moore. 

On Wednesday night in the fall of 1988, the Eye Network decided to put two new shows on one right after the other. The first, called The Van Dyke Show, featured the former Rob Petrie as an old song and dance man trying to help save a theatre run by his son (played by his real-life kid, Barry.) 

In the second half hour that followed, Mary Tyler Moore returned to the same network to front her own show about a woman who remarries a man with two kids. The description didn't look that compelling, but it was Mary Tyler Moore after all, who had a great track record on CBS. 

You can just see the publicity people at the network salivating at the promotability of the shows - back-to-back, together again! 

Ultimately, both flopped and neither reached a second season. They were clobbered by Growing Pains and Head of the Class on ABC, and Unsolved Mysteries on NBC.

I have to admit I like both of these actors, and I'm a huge fan of the original Dick van Dyke Show and The Mary Tyler Moore Show - but I have no memory of either of these short-lived efforts. Does anyone here remember them or did you ever watch them? If not, you weren't alone. 

And by the way, pay particular attention to the kid leaning in the picture frame in the far right of the MTM show. He was about to become a huge star later in life, winning a Best Actor Academy Award for "The Pianist" in 2002. It's an impossibly young Adrien Brody, who couldn't have imagined what lay ahead of him in his career when this picture was taken.