Supercarrier

Excellent as in excellent to work on. I was story editor on the series, but not the pilot episode. We shot mainly on a stage in Santa Clarita with exteriors at the Long Beach Naval shipyard. The Navy tried to censor most things (sailors gambling, having family lives, drinking in bars, etc), tried to rewrite all the pilot dialogue so no one could understand it and the Navy Guy (An Admiral named Mike) liked to also send jokes over. We had a Navy man as a consultant on set so we could get things right (like funerals at sea) and of course Captain Dale Dye was one of the stars, so he could consult somewhat militarily.

The Navy pulled the plug when we did a show that took place in an unknown country in Central America. We had sold jets to their dictator and his brother, who was getting guns from Cuba, started an uprising against him and they flew our own jets against us. We did 2 more episodes the WGA strike hit and closed us down and when the strike was over 6 months later, we couldn't make it back. There were no bad guys like Saddam back then and the Navy refused to help.

This series was never filmed on a carrier. It was filmed on the USS Vandegrift FFG 48 which is a Parry class frigate. I know this because I was stationed on the Vandergrift at the time of the filming. The entire basis of the show was BS from the beginning and the "stars" and crew made our lives miserable from the moment they stepped onto the pier. The navy pulled its support for the show due to our ships captain writing a scathing letter to the secretary of the navy outlining the way in which these people conducted themselves while guests aboard our home. The way they portrayed the men and women in uniform had nothing to do with it losing support, although it should have.

This really might have made it. Supercarrier was an attempt to cash in on the popularity of the megahit Topgun. It could have been done, note how well JAG has done over its run. Where the network messed up was instead of trying to concentrate on the action, it tried to make a nightime soap on the water. The US Navy took one look at the pilot which featured a female officer sleeping around and a male pilot altering his records to allow him to keep flying and said "No thank you" and withdrew its support. Kind of hard to have a show about an aircraft carrier with no aircraft carrier. End of show.

I was still relatively new in the Navy when this show aired, enlisting in November 1986. I remember sitting in the barracks at NATTC Lakehurst, NJ back in May 1988, going through a Navy school, and listening to the comments from my fellow sailors while the show was on TV. Not having been to the fleet yet, I didn't have a common frame of reference, but when I spent time on my first ship, it was easy to see what they meant. Throughout my ten years, it was hard to watch any movie or TV show that depicted Navy life without overanalyzing it and picking out the mistakes and contrived scenarios. I had even forgotten this aired until I followed a link for Richard Jaeckel from a movie.

I was an extra in a scene in the berthing compartment of the USS John F. Kennedy CV-67. It was a drug bust scene, it took forever to finish because the actor couldn't get the simple lines right. He kept messing them up, it took no less than 6-10 shots per scene to get it right, and then the director wanted to shoot it from 5 different angles. They filmed a ton of flight deck footage while we were out. If I remember right we left Norfolk and did "Doughnuts" for like 4 days just for this show to shoot. The crew was psyched to do the shoot, when they first got there. But after we saw the episodes no one was happy with the result. Another reviewer stated the fact, it was a good idea, but the Navy did not like how the characters portrayed the service.