No Release

Before the coronavirus pandemic hit, CNN was showing two six-part documentaries on Sunday nights - one about the British royal family, the other about presidential elections in U.S history. The final two one-hour episodes of both series were to be aired on the last two Sundays of March, but they were pre-empted - indefinitely- by coverage of the pandemic.  And not always for live coverage - in some cases, they've been pre-empted in favor of repeats of earlier reports on the virus.  

This, of course, has irked viewers following the two documentaries, who have demanded that CNN air the remaining episodes to give them a break from 24/7 coronavirus coverage.  CNN, which apparently finds 22/7 coronavirus coverage for just two Sundays to be a dereliction of duty on its part, still hasn't aired them.  It hasn't even put the two remaining episodes on any on-demand television services, as some viewers have suggested, and no explanation as to when they will be aired is forthcoming.  

We're just going to have to face facts and concede that the two remaining episodes of these documentaries will likely never be aired.  And this wouldn't be the first time CNN has pre-empted a documentary indefinitely.  A planned documentary from CNN reporter Bill Weir about Trump's use of Twitter kept getting pre-empted by breaking news - much of which was made by Trump himself  - to the point where CNN never bothered to air it.  (I managed to see it surreptitiously on YouTube, and I honestly don't know it got on there, nor do I remember what YouTube channel I found it on.)  

And there are several other TV series, movies, books, and records that have remained unreleased never to be experienced by the general public.  The list of finished movies never released theatrically or even direct-to-video could rival the Dead Sea Scrolls or a Tolstoy novel for length,  and this article lists a few of them.   

More recent are the cases of John Bolton (above) and Woody Allen.  Bolton, you will recall, was preparing a book that was going to blow the lid off the inner workings of the Trump White House, particularly regarding the effort by Trump to entrap Joe Biden and his son in a possible scandal in Ukraine.  The book, which Bolton promoted with teases of unfulfilled promises of testimony in the Trump impeachment trial, was due for release this past March 17, but government vetting for classified information delayed its publication.  By the middle of March, the coronavirus pandemic was in full swing and the impeachment trial was all but forgotten.  Now with a scheduled May release, Bolton's book, "The Room Where It Happened," may not happen at all.

Woody Allen's planned memoir has even less of a chance of getting out.  The publishing company that was about to put it out suddenly realized that Allen was an unredeemed child molester and that no one wanted to have anything to do with him, and so it unceremoniously dropped the book from its roster.  And, if I may also point out, A Rainy Day In New York, likely to be his final film, remains in a vault somewhere with no hope of getting even token direct-to-video release.

Maybe Bolton and Allen can start a two-man book club to discuss their respective works.  They can call the club "The Old Schmucks."

And then there was Reagan aide Michael Deaver's planned diet book "The Deaver Diet," intended for release in early 1983 - at a time of domestic-program budget cuts and 10 percent unemployment - which was also never published.

And then, on the flip side, there's the sad story of former Beatles assistant Mal Evans, who was just about done with his memoir about working for the band.  He mailed it out just before he was killed in a shootout with the police while living in Los Angeles with his girlfriend of the time, having been in a despondent, intoxicated state and holding what turned out to be an air rifle while making threats to his girlfriend and his editor.  The manuscript for his Beatles memoir, meanwhile, somehow got lost in the mail, never to be recovered. :-(

No, some works of television, cinema and literature are fated never to see the light of day, and so don't be surprised if CNN forgets about the remaining two episodes of its aforementioned documentary by the time this pandemic is over. 

But hey, at least be thankful that "The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus" was finally aired 28 years after it was filmed.