The Forgotten ‘Friday the 13th’ TV Show That Had Nothing to Do With Jason

Back in the fall of 1987, a new show called Friday the 13th: The Series turned up in syndication, and anyone tuning in for Jason Voorhees was in for a long wait.

Created by Frank Mancuso Jr. and Larry B. Williams and distributed by Paramount, it ran for three seasons and 72 episodes, from October 3, 1987, to May 26, 1990, and the closest it came to a hockey mask was a rumor.

How the Series Came to Be

Mancuso had a real claim to the name: he’d been on the Friday the 13th sequels since Part 2 in 1981, as a producer or associate producer on four of them. The show started out as The 13th Hour, and he told author David Grove, for the book Making Friday the 13th: The Legend of Camp Blood, that the switch was about selling it.

“I felt that it would’ve been a lot easier to sell a Friday the 13th show than something called The 13th Hour,” he said, though “when I first started pitching a Friday the 13th show, people would cringe because the films had such a negative connotation to them. But yeah, from a commercial standpoint, it was a no-brainer to call the show Friday the 13th.”

What he wanted from the movies, per Grove, was only “the idea of Friday the 13th, which is that it symbolizes bad luck and curses,” and the show never mentions the films’ events, to protect “the new world that we were trying to create.”

A hockey-mask tie-in was floated and dropped. What the show built instead was an antiques shop. The story goes like this: Uncle Lewis Vendredi (R. G. Armstrong) made a deal with the Devil to sell cursed antiques, broke it, and died, leaving the store to his niece Micki Foster (Louise Robey, credited simply as Robey) and her cousin Ryan Dallion (John D. LeMay).

They sell off the stock, then have to get every piece back, working alongside Jack Marshak (Chris Wiggins) and locking each indestructible object in the vault of a shop they rename Curious Goods. “Vendredi” is French for “Friday,” which is about as close as the premise gets to its title.

The Notable Cast and Crew

The show was shot in Toronto and started out in late-night slots, until some stations gave it a spot in prime time. A few of its directors came with film careers attached.

David Cronenberg directed “Faith Healer,” a first-season episode from 1988 that lands between The Fly and Dead Ringers in his filmography; it guest-stars Cronenberg regular Robert A. Silverman, and its cursed object, the Sforza glove, moves an ailment from one person to another. Atom Egoyan directed an episode too, the first season’s “Cupid’s Quiver,” in 1987.

For a show that kept its distance from the films, it shared a surprising number of people with them. LeMay went on to star in Jason Goes to Hell in 1993, guest star John Shepherd had already played Tommy Jarvis in A New Beginning, and Cronenberg later appeared in Jason X. Composer Fred Mollin, Rob Hedden, and Tom McLoughlin worked on both the series and the movies.

The end came without warning. By the third season, Steve Monarque’s Johnny Ventura had replaced Ryan, and the season stopped at 20 episodes; the cast and crew reportedly learned of the cancellation while shooting the 20th, so no episode wraps the story up.

That left room for a persistent, unsourced fan rumor that the final cursed object would have been Jason’s hockey mask. Back in the show’s first two seasons, Fangoria reported that hanging a hockey mask on one of the sets as an in-joke had been talked about and dropped—which makes it the most Jason the show ever had.

Friday the 13th: The Series is currently available to watch on Fubo TV.