I tried to watch it again last night and I'm still confusedOK, I watched the failed pilot and the first episode again last night.
I guess I can see why the pilot failed. Pat Harrington was good at playing Schneider, but the rest of the characters didn't really click for me. First, there were too many of them, so nobody really had a chance to establish an identity. More important, they were all a bit too far over the top. Like the writers looked for every goofy character on every sitcom and tried to outdo them.