GET A LIFE: SEASON 1: EPISODES 1 & 2

WARNING: BORING ASS TV HISTORY LECTURE TO FOLLOW:

Once upon a time, TV was just as stupid as it is today, but all the stupidity was scripted and not spontaneous stupidity on display due to shoving a camera up some shrew with a bad haircut’s cavernous cunt. In that fabled age, the early 1990s, no one had blogs about TV shows and if you wanted to discuss your favorite shows, you’d have to do it with actual human beings in a face to face context or at a “water cooler”. Back then, there were still new depths to plumb in the world of television and the world was blissfully unaware of the existence of Tyra Banks and her rapacious ego. Truly, it was a Dark Age.

But there was one shining light in that vast, all consuming darkness: The Fox Network.

Yes, believe it or not kids, Fox used to be really awesome and came to be known as the edgy, upstart broadcast network that pushed boundaries the Big 3 feared to touch. When the network started, it only had two prime-time shows: Married With Children & The Tracy Ullman Show. Soon, it added several new shows: Mr. President, Duet, Werewolf & 21 Jump Street. Of these, one went on to become a television institution, three are virtually forgotten, another is known primarily for having launched The Simpsons, and the last is cultural footnote for being the show that launched the career of future superstar Richard Grieco. When the Fox Network started, very few people thought it would last a year, let alone one day pay Ryan Seacrest millions of dollars for no discernable reason. The Fox Network was the first place I ever heard the word “whore” on broadcast television. It was a far cry from the Fox of today. For one thing, there was only one animated show.

Looking back at Fox’s programming decisions in the early years, it’s easy to see why the oracles of TV predicted its failure. There seemed to be nothing it wouldn’t greenlight, including a sitcom about life after a nuclear apocalypse (Whoops!) and a show where Sam Kinison yelled at Tim Matheson (Charlie Hoover). Being that I was a weird middle schooler by the point all this was happening, I absolutely loved pretty much anything Fox would put on the air.

Of all the shows Fox had the bravery/stupidity to put on the air, none was as weirdly brilliant and brilliantly weird as Get A Life. Get A Life starred Chris Elliot, one of the oddest looking dudes to ever be allowed on TV, as 30 year old paperboy Chris Peterson, who still lived with his parents and in a constant state of whimsical obliviousness to his own stupidity and everyone in his life’s contempt and disrespect for him. Chris’ mom and dad were played by Elliot’s real life dad Bob and Elinor Donahue, both of whom were Old Hollywood veterans.

Get A Life doesn’t sound like a genius show if you just describe its premise, you really have to see it to get the full experience. Sadly, it’s out of print on DVD at the moment, but if you can torrent, you can watch this show, and if you’ve never seen it, you owe it to yourself to do so immediately. You can feed your baby later.

Anyway, Get A Life is one of the best sitcoms ever aired, but few people remember it, or for that matter its star. Even I forgot about Elliot for a few years, even though through his appearances on Letterman’s Late Night show and the unjustly overlooked by the Academy feature film Cabin Boy he had won a place in my teenage comedy nerd heart alongside Letterman himself, Richard Pryor and George Carlin. I never forgot my dim, dusty memories of Get A Life though, particularly the episodes where Chris had to get his tonsils out and ends up dying under the knife and the one where Chris and his landlord (played by the inimitable Brian Doyle-Murray) found a perpetually vomiting alien they named Spewey, took him in, and then ended up eating him. There has never been a more bizarre TV show on network television, and I sincerely doubt there ever will be.

As with anything from my childhood, I was a little scared to watch Get A Life again. I didn’t want to sully my rosy remembrances of the show by exposing them to the harsh light of the present day, but Get A Life amazingly holds up well. The first episode, admittedly, isn’t the best exhibit of how bizarre the show really was, nor did it adequately display what an atypical main character Chris Peterson really was. In the first episode he’s actually kind of charming in a deluded man-child sort of way and is clearly being positioned to be some sort of slacker anti-hero. That all goes out the window in the second episode, thankfully, and the completely unmoored from the thin tethers of reality Chris I remembered is in full effect.

But first, let’s go over the first episode, shall we? The opening scene introduces us to Chris via some silly physical stuff, sets up that he’s a 30 year old paperboy who lives above his parent’s garage, and introduces Chris’ best friend Larry, who, to use the parlance of one off my colleagues, is something of a butt. I can see why the writers felt they needed him and his shrewish wife around as foils for Chris’ zaniness at first, at least until the viewer could get used to the Looney Tunes internal logic of the show, but my inner 13 year old was craving the full bore surrealism I remembered. My inner 13 year old also wanted to beat off and play Street Fighter 2 Turbo Edition but that’s a topic for another blog.

Back to episode 1: Chris crawls in Larry’s window and wakes him with a plan to ditch work and go to the amusement park for a day on the Hell Loop 2000, a rollercoaster with a 360 degree loop. Larry’s bitch wife wakes up and she and Chris engage in that early 90s sitcom witty repartee that Friends would run into the ground over the next 10 years. Eventually Chris convinces his henpecked bud to play hookey after calling his office and impersonating him using a 1970s street pimp patois wherein he simultaneously calls in sick and says his uncle died.

Once they arrive at the park, they of course get stuck at the top of the loop and hang upside down for several hours, eventually being interviewed by a local TV reporter played by MTV’s Julie Brown (not Downtown Julie Brown, the redhead). And of course Larry’s wife and kids are watching TV at the exact moment this news story is airing. After a few more minutes of Chris annoying and terrifying Larry, they finally make it down from the coaster, where Larry’s boss is coincidentally at the park and fires Larry. Chris, being an enormous jackass, saves the day by roping the mean boss into an impromptu news piece at which point he reluctantly gives Larry back his job. The episode ends with a Clapper joke, because it was the 90s.

Don’t get me wrong, the first episode isn’t bad, really, there are some solid jokes and the wisp of a plot is covered well by Elliot’s oddball charm and chemistry with Larry’s bitch wife. Chris’ dad’s disgust with him was pretty funny too, but episode 2 is where you really get a sense of how Get A Life wasn’t your typical sitcom. I’ve got four words for you: Handsome Boy Modeling School.

Chris’ delusions of grandeur were rarely funnier than in this episode, which featured a mercifully small amount of Larry and his family (now sporting two completely different kids) and the aforementioned Brian Doyle Murray as the head of the Handsome Boy Modeling School. The episode opens in his parents’ kitchen where Chris announces his intentions to become a male model, to much naked derision from his dad. Chris being Chris, he ignores this and is off to the races, starting with a great montage of silly model school antics. Along the way, he ignites a rivalry with fellow classmate Sapphire, which prompts him to change his name to Sparkles. After graduation, Chris gets his first job, working as the “Before” picture for a health drink, a purpose to which he is completely unaware. When asked to remove his top, Chris breaks into tears like a girl in an afterschool special about the seedy underworld of “swimsuit modeling”and goes into an emotional tailspin after being shown what he thinks is the tawdry underbelly of his profession of choice.

Chris’ logical progression from this point is to crash a runway show at a local department store, which we learned earlier was the pinnacle of his industry. He runs into Sapphire and starts a slapfight which ends with Sapphire being removed by the designer’s entourage and with Chris traipsing up and down the runway for what he assumes to be an adoring public. Chris’ triumph is summed up in voiceover as feeling like “Secretariat when he won the Indy 500.”

Episode 2 is just a taste of how magnificently weird the show would get as time when by, however.

WHO DIED: Nobody, but before long a running gag wherein Chris dies at the end of each episode with no mention made of it in subsequent episodes would start.

WHO FUCKED: Chris’ parents, maybe?

CHARACTER ACTORS TO LOOK FOR: Episode 1 has the biggest array, with several 90s sitcom mainstays and bit players on display, in particular Tracy Walter and Mike Hagerty. Episode 2 has Brian Doyle Murray prior to his later role as Chris’ landlord Gus.