The role Burt Reynolds thought “might be the last stop for me”
If you work in Hollywood long enough, you’re going to survive a lot of highs and lows, as for every Theory of Everything there is a Jupiter Ascending, and for every Mildred Pierce there is a Trog.
If you’re exceptionally lucky and a little reckless, you might be able to ride these waves like Nicolas Cage, tumbling around in the Wicker Man of it all, but forever rising from the wreckage into a Dream Scenario or Pig.
Some actors have more of a rollercoaster than others, and Burt Reynolds was more than happy to admit that he was one of them. Having gotten his start by accident and never really seeing himself as a serious actor, he watched in awe as friends like Clint Eastwood went from strength to strength while he went from Rent-a-Cop to Physical Evidence.
Over the years, Reynolds referred to several of his films as being the worst he ever made, and even when he scored wins with Smokey and the Bandit and Cannonball Run, he undermined them by making offensively bad sequels, sometimes more than once.
During one of his many career low points, he thought the jig was up; the writing was on the wall with the fact that he, a one-time movie star in excess of 50, was about to take the lead role in a sitcom in 1990, and at the time, most movie stars would rather do regional theatre than appear on TV.
The show was called Evening Shade, a scrappy little heart-warmer set in a folksy Arkansas town, and Reynolds was to play an ex-professional football player who moves to the eponymous town to coach a flailing high school team, with his community to be populated by a cast of wholesome character actors.
In retrospect, there’s no way this set-up wouldn’t have worked in the ‘90s, but in the moment, it may as well have been a career death sentence. This was doubly so for Reynolds, who not only had a string of box office flops behind him but (much, much worse) already had a failed sitcom in the recent past in the form of BL Stryker, a detective series which had been a bust. The man was pretty sure that his career was going down the tubes, where he knew that hopping into another sitcom might be the end of the line, but he felt that he had no alternative.
“I thought this might be the last stop for me,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1991, “And so I’ve got to take all the bad and the good and the ugly and learn something”, and what he learned was that audiences were eager to embrace him as his true self: a former football player looking for a fresh start after a career failure.
Evening Shade was a resounding success, running for four seasons and racking up consistently high ratings. Ultimately, its star power was its undoing, and the combination of Reynolds, Tony Award winners Charles Durning, Michael Jeter, and Elizabeth Ashley, multi-time Emmy winner Hal Holbrook, sitcom star Marilu Henner, and near EGOT-winner and legendary activist Ossie Davis was just too much for CBS’s bottom line to sustain. At least they had a grand old run of the grassy fields.
