Once a Hero was an ABC

American Broadcasting Company

The American Broadcasting Company is an American commercial broadcasting television network. Created in 1943 from the former NBC Blue radio network, ABC is owned by The Walt Disney Company and is part of Disney-ABC Television Group. Its first broadcast on television was in 1948...

 1987 science fiction

Science fiction

Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...

 comedy television series. The series starred Milo O'Shea

Milo O'Shea

-Early life:He was born and raised in Dublin and educated by the Christian Brothers at Synge Street, along with his friend Donal Donnelly.He was discovered in the 1950s by Harry Dillon, who ran the "37 Theatre Club" on the top floor of his shop The Swiss Gem Company, 51 Lower O'Connell Street...

 as Abner Bevis, a down on his luck comic strip

Comic strip

A comic strip is a sequence of drawings arranged in interrelated panels to display brief humor or form a narrative, often serialized, with text in balloons and captions....

 artist whose life is turned upside down when his creation, Captain Justice (Jeff Lester

Jeff Lester

Jeff Lester is an American actor known for his various television appearances. Among his many performances, Lester played Raymond in a Seinfeld episode called "The Note". Lester played a masseur in the episode who apparently made George Costanza's penis move during a massage he gave him. George...

), comes to life. Also appearing in the series was Caitlin Clarke

Caitlin Clarke

Caitlin Clarke was an American theater and film actress best known for her role as Valerian in the 1981 fantasy film Dragonslayer and for her role as Charlotte Cardoza in the 1998–1999 Broadway musical Titanic....

 and Robert Forster

Robert Forster

Robert Forster is an American actor, best known for his roles as John Cassellis in Haskell Wexler's Medium Cool, and as Max Cherry in Quentin Tarantino's Jackie Brown, the latter of which gained him an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor.- Early life :Forster was born Robert Wallace...

.

Although widely promoted and critically acclaimed, the series was a ratings failure having to compete directly with NBC's Top 30 hit 227

227 (TV series)

227 is an American situation comedy that originally aired on NBC from September 14, 1985, until May 6, 1990. The series starred Marla Gibbs as a sharp-tongued, inner-city resident gossip and housewife, Mary Jenkins...

, and was cancelled after only three episodes were broadcast. Many ABC stations preempted the show's pilot with Star Trek: The Next Generation

Star Trek: The Next Generation

Star Trek: The Next Generation is an American science fiction television series created by Gene Roddenberry as part of the Star Trek franchise. Roddenberry, Rick Berman, and Michael Piller served as executive producers at different times throughout the production...

, which they correctly decided would be more successful. Marvel Comics

Marvel Comics

Marvel Worldwide, Inc., commonly referred to as Marvel Comics and formerly Marvel Publishing, Inc. and Marvel Comics Group, is an American company that publishes comic books and related media...

 began publishing a comic book

Comic book

A comic book or comicbook is a magazine made up of comics, narrative artwork in the form of separate panels that represent individual scenes, often accompanied by dialog as well as including...

 spin-off, but this too was short-lived.

The fourth, unaired episode was to have featured Adam West

Adam West

William West Anderson , better known by the stage name Adam West, is an American actor best known for his lead role in the Batman TV series and the film of the same name...

 playing a parody of himself.

Premise

Abner Bevis (Milo O'Shea) is the creator of a comic-strip superhero called Captain Justice. Lately Bevis is in a rut and repeating old storylines, and children have lost interest in the comic, so the comic's owners want to kill off the strip. Even the characters in the strip's fictional world of Pleasantville have started to notice that their lives are repeating themselves, and the lack of reader interest is causing characters to start fading.

Captain Justice (Jeff Lester) decides to cross the Forbidden Zone into the real world, where he becomes a real human being with no superpowers. Also crossing over is a detective character called Gumshoe (Robert Forster), who's looking out for Justice. The Captain's attempts to fight real-world criminals renews interest in the comic, and the owners agree not to cancel it; also, Bevis is inspired to make it more contemporary.

Adding to the stories is suspicious newspaper reporter Emma Greely (Caitlin Clarke), who keeps snooping around. Her troubled and precocious son Woody (Josh Blake

Josh Blake

Josh Blake is an American actor best known for his role Jake Ochmonek, in the sitcom ALF.-Credits:*Tony Hawk's American Wasteland...

) knows the truth about Captain Justice, but she doesn't.

Episode titles

Seven episodes were created, but only three of them ever aired.

№	Title	Airdate
1	"Believers"	1987 September 19
2	"Triangle"	1987 September 26
3	"The Return of Lazarus"	1987 October 3
4	"Things Get Ugly"	--
5	"Manos Arriba, Mrs. Greely"	--
6	"Remember the Cottonwood"	--
7	"Thank You, Captain Justice"	--