Photo by Ryan Yeaman on Unsplash
The last episode of the canceled first season of A Horse for a Horse aired on March 14, 1976. Some were surprised that the show, which never captured more than a one percent viewer share, lasted as long as it did. The Haworth twins looked nothing alike; then there was Joan Didion’s Esquire piece ravaging Carol Haworth’s parenting style and the Connecticut student who noticed the window in McKelvey’s (19th century) stable, home of Wesley McKelvey’s mare Firecloud, revealed the top of a Burger King sign.
I won’t defend the series. Its failure to become the next MAS*H–which it competed against for two months, then was moved opposite Laverne and Shirley for the kill shot–was well-deserved. But the show’s last aired episode, the sixth of 15 shot, “A Toast to Firecloud,” hints at a coming Haworth\McKelvey feud, confirmed by the gunfire scenes in the show’s opening credits, whose cause and outcome, as of the last aired episode, can only be conjectured. The series wasn’t based on a novel, just a teleplay by a former writer for the Glen Campbell Show and two other writers, one of whom, James “French” Frey, vanished into a pastry career. Wayne Parfit’s whereabouts are unknown after serving four months for conversion. Some script forensics lead to an intriguing path for the feud, however. One of the twins (the one who wasn’t Mary Louise) had been sneaking around with ranchhand Kyle, Mrs. McKelvey was a staunch Anabaptist, and Sue Haworth, David’s wife, seems, in Episode 2, to appear a bit ‘restless.’ Given the tangible wife friction at the McCandless’ picnic social (Episode 5) and the 6th’s scratching match between Mrs. McKelvey and the twin who wasn’t Mary Louise, there is good reason to believe the impending rifle play promised in the credits was driven by the women, not the men, which, in 1976, would have been a plot first for a network series.
If this speculation is correct, perhaps it accounts for the awkward Ludwig Wittgenstein quote at the beginning of A Toast to Firecloud. The mare might have approved that ‘whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must pass over in silence.’ Perhaps while dreaming of a Whopper.
Alan Brown was a co-author of the computer bestseller Peer-to-Peer (2001), and his anti-censorship projects appeared in the NYT, Playboy, the Utne Reader, and others. He formerly taught philosophy at three Big Ten schools and now lives in California.