What becomes a legend most? In TV land, it's hard to top a bad pilot.

Norman Lear has enjoyed a long and distinguished career, rich with well-earned accolades for pushing the comedy form forward with "All in the Family" and other influential works.

But even he's still trying to live down a project dubbed "A Dog's Life," a comedy pilot done for NBC in 1979 that featured actors dressed up in dog suits in an effort to present man as seen through the eyes of his best furry friend.

Lear was hardly the first to sniff around the talking-dog milieu. An unsold pilot from 1958, "The Adventures of Superpup," broke out the zip-up doggy suits for actors in a pilot centering on Bark Bent, alias Superpup, reporter for the Daily Beagle, according to Vincent Terrace's 1991 book "Fifty Years of Television: A Guide to Series and Pilots 1937-1988."

Lest the generational shift in the industry dim the memory of legendary past clinkers, ABC is serving up a special at 8 tonight, "The Best TV Shows That Never Were" (review on page 28), to remind us all that no matter how bad most of the stuff that gets on the air is, there's always something worse that the network didn't pick up.

Lee Goldberg, author of the 1989 book "Unsold Television Pilots" and an executive producer of the ABC special, says that it's usually a high concept that separates the merely mediocre from the truly awful. Goldberg knows whereof he speaks; he's also a veteran TV writer-producer who at present is an executive producer of Lifetime's "Missing."

Among Goldberg's personal favorites highlighted in the special are "Samurai D.A.," a late-'70s NBC effort about a man who is a prosecutor by day and sword-wielding warrior by night; "Higher Ground," which starred John Denver as a butt-kicking FBI agent; and "I-Man," starring Scott Bakula as a regular Joe whose freak encounter with a blast of "space gas" leaves him with the awesome power of being able to heal quickly.

While "Best TV Shows" revels in the worst of the worst, there's also a semiregular forum in town for celebrating the ones that got away. The Other Network is an offshoot of the Un-Cabaret stand-up comedy showcase staged at Hollywood's Knitting Factory and other nightclubs.

Greg Miller, producer of Un-Cabaret with partner Beth Lapides, says that they focus on finding passed-over pilot gems and unaired episodes from small-screen auteurs a la Judd Apatow, Bob Odenkirk and Todd Holland.

Among the crowd-pleasers that have run as part of the Other Network's screening series include the notorious Fox pilot "Heat-Vision and Jack," helmed by Ben Stiller and starring Jack Black as an ex-astronaut and Owen Wilson as the voice of his talking-motorcycle sidekick, and "Lookwell!" the early 1990s cop show spoof starring Adam West (a pilot hall of famer if there ever was one) that was penned for NBC by Conan O'Brien and Robert Smigel.

The Other Network screening series was born a few years back when Miller and Lapides produced a pilot for a Lapides-hosted MTV talk show and were crushed when the channel didn't share their enthusiasm. (The major studios and talent guilds have been remarkably supportive in granting their blessings for Other Network screenings, Miller adds.)

"We had that postcoital kind of thing where we knew our pilot was great and we wanted to show it to people," Miller says. "Then we realized that we knew all these writers who'd disappear for nine months while working on a pilot -- we figured they'd want to show their work, too."

The Other Network recently traveled to Montreal for screenings at the Just for Laughs comedy festival, and Miller says they're also close to striking a DVD distribution deal with Shout! Factory to further spread the overlooked wealth.