Less Than Perfect: The ‘Some Like It Hot’ TV Series That Could Have Been (But Thankfully Wasn’t)

Even before arriving at a final exchange so memorable that Billy Wilder used a variation of it as his epitaph, Some Like It Hot has one of the all-time great final scenes. Joe (Tony Curtis), a womanizing saxophonist who’s come to see the error of his ways by donning a dress and falling in love, and Sugar (Marilyn Monroe), a singer with a weak spot for the wrong sort of guy who only thought she wanted to marry for money, have discarded all illusions and can’t keep their hands off one another. Jerry (Jack Lemmon), a bass player who, to his great surprise, may have found something like love while posing as a woman and spending time with the affectionate older millionaire Osgood Fielding III (Joe E. Brown) discovers there’s really nothing he can do to escape his situation (and perhaps doesn’t want to anyway). Then that line arrives and there’s nothing left to do but drop the curtain and bring the story to a close.

Or was there? In 1961, the Mirisch Company—the production company owned by Walter, Marvin, and Harold Mirsisch—attempted to spin one of its biggest hits off to the small screen by shooting a pilot for a Some Like It Hot television series that would pick up Jerry and Joe’s adventures shortly after the events of the film. What’s more, it would replicate those adventures by compelling the duo to, once again, don drag and go undercover with a female band in an attempt to avoid the mob. The results, which lay unwatched for decades until resurfacing on the Internet recently, are pretty much as sweaty as they sound. But they’re also pretty fascinating, both as a time capsule of a particular moment and as an example of what happens when everyone tries really hard to make a bad idea work.