I was watching old commercial compilations and saw a show I hadn't heard of from 1983 called Baby Makes Five. The information about this show is sparse and it only ran for 5 episodes. I'm unsure if it was cancelled, only had those 5 episodes, or if it was pulled from broadcast. There is a wikipedia page for it with a brief description of the plot that only says "Baby Makes Five is an American sitcom television series starring Peter Scolari. The series premiered April 1, 1983 on ABC." I have been looking and have only found the pilot episode on Internet Archive and have downloaded that for future saving since Internet Archive is going through some issues right now. However, none of the other four episodes appear. I can't locate torrents, websites, streaming, nothing. It's never been available to stream or purchase. Does anyone know anything about this?
Both of these give a bit more insight into this show. It appears that this show was a trial show, ran for 5 episodes, but scored low and was not picked up for more. So only 5 episodes of this show were taped.
Another update. I did manage to locate another very short clip of episode 4 on Youtube. It's a 4:56 video, with roughly 1:30 of it being commercials. I also found that one of the kids from the show has an Instagram that he's on semi-regular, so I reached out there. Have not gotten a response yet, though.
Newest update: I discovered that one of the girls on the show (who was 7 at the time) is now a musician and was able to locate their Instagram and sent a message. I also found the composer of the theme song and their website and sent an email. I sent ABC an email, and also discovered the Alan Landsburg Productions was purchased by Fremantle who has an archive of 100,000 hours of international TV episodes so if anyone has these remaining episodes, it's them. I sent them an email with info and a request.
Newest update: Of all the people I sent an email/message to, no one but Fremantle responded. I received this email today _____________ Thanks for your enquiry. I’ve no idea if this exists in the archive. I would need to make enquiries with some colleagues in the US. Requests of this nature can take some to look into so please bear with me. If we do have any episodes, I’m not sure on what basis we’d be able to make them available but that’s a discussion for further down the line. Thanks for your patience while I look into this.
After a month of emails back and forth, it was confirmed by Fremantle that they do possess all five episodes. I did ask if they were able to release the episodes, or had any plan to release them, but U\unfortunately, my contact at Fremantle is on PTO until the 27th, so we won't have any response until at least that date.
Update: This will likely be the final update as there's nothing I can do from here. My contact at Fremantle confirmed they have the five episodes, however, they are not going to release them as they have to license them out. So, unless someone, or some corporate entity (like Pluto or something) decides to license them for airing again, they'll likely stay in the vault. Actual email response below: ________________________________ From our point of view (in the archive) we only tend to put clips up for research purposes for clients wishing to licence clips to give a flavour of what we can licence. We wouldn’t be involved in posting complete programmes due to copyright.
I know some of our game shows have their own channels but that’s not something I’m involved in.
If you wanted to licence clips for a particular channel we can look into this but we can’t licence complete programmes.