I have watched UM since I was a kid and while I remember Final Appeal coming on, I don't recall much in the way of details of how it was set up.

I am curious, with all of the "Final Appeal" segments that are making there way into the new Farina/Spike versions of UM, how many cases did the short lived Final Appeal profile?

Also, did they use an entire hour profiling each story or was it broken up into segments like UM?

Did Stack host it as well?

A quick check on IMDB shows that at least one segment was aired often on Lifetime as a regular UM segment. The black sailors in WW2 that refused to work in unsafe conditions. I had always thought this was an UM segment. Were all of the Final Appeal segments from the "Final Appeal" series?

It would really be nice if both UM and Final Appeal and the short lived "Story Behind the Story" were all eventually released, complete and unedited in their original versions and broadcast order.

To answer you FA questions

- In regards to how many segments they made: They made a whole bunch of them, several more than they were actually able to broadcast on the spinoff series. The reason being that the "Final Appeal" spinoff was canceled roughly a month into production.

- Is is believed that six (possibly seven) cases were aired on the spinoff. The first was a double shot featuring Dr. Jeffrey MacDonald and the Pt. Chicago Mutiny cases. The remaining four (possibly five) broadcasts featured one appellant weekly and detailed the cases of Paul Ferrell, Steve Shores, Tony Miller, Dan Montecalvo and Thomas Drake respectively.

- It is however possible that the case of the last appellant (Drake) scheduled to air on 10-23-92 may have not made broadcast at all due to preemption by election coverage that was going on at the time.

- Other "Final Appeal" cases including the appeals of Michael Lloyd Self and John Purvis are believed to have been scheduled for broadcast on "Final Appeal" but were never featured due to the show being canceled. Some of these cases were later absorbed into "Unsolved Mysteries" broadcasts during 1992-1993 season. In the case of Purvis however, all that is believed to have ever aired is a brief update on the case. This is likely due to the fact that Purvis was exonerated in January of 1993 despite the fact that his FA segment never aired.

- Robert Stack hosted all episodes of the "Final Appeal" spinoff and these segments can be easily identified (at least before the Spike revamps) by a very distinct type of font used to identify those being interviewed in the segments which is different from the traditional UM font.

Here are some links to information about the program.
Although I watched UM regularly when it was on NBC/CBS, I missed the original airings of Final Appeal.

The links:

1) http://www.unsolvedmysteriestelevision.com/
2) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103412/

Thanks for all the info.

One additional question comes to mind though; How much were the segments that have been integrated into UM been edited down? The MacDonald case seems long enough to be pretty much intact, but from what you said the other segments were profiled one per week. I assume that Final Appeal was one hour each week. Seems like these other cases would be heavily edited down. I know that Spike has obviously down some editing, and Lifetime probably did a little bit I am sure, but were these segments ever shown on UM unedited? Or at least mostly unedited? I would love to see the Montecalvo segment complete. I have only the Spike version at the moment...