Today's as good a day as any to remember Poochinski, the failed pilot about a talking detective bulldog
Some entertainment concepts are too strong to ever be made, their potential producers knowing that audiences aren’t ready to handle what they have in mind. Consider Poochinski, a TV show about Peter Boyle as an animatronic bulldog possessed by a dead detective’s spirit that was cancelled after a pilot episode showed it was simply too powerful an idea to continue.
Poochinski has survived only in YouTube uploads of that single, perfect episode. In a clip from the pilot, we hear Boyle’s (still human) detective Poochinski sexually harass a 911 dispatcher before heading to a crime scene where he replies to a child’s insult by threatening to shoot that kid in retaliation. Soon enough, Poochinski (still human) has been killed and, after a few moments of very meaningful human-canine eye contact, his ghost has moved into a bulldog’s body.
[pm_embed_youtube id=’PLZQfnFyelTBOQ15kmHSgEbdjzLMWzZpL7′ type=’playlist’]The next part of the pilot sees Poochinski grappling with his new existence as a singing, joking dog cop with Peter Boyle’s voice. Now a deeply fucked-up puppet creature, Poochinski initially delights in being a dog-human by pissing on the legs of people he doesn’t like and molesting a secretary at the precinct. It isn’t long, though, before this sitcom Gregor Samsa falls into despair at being trapped in his new body.