One unintended consequence of internet search algorithms’ increasing uselessness for finding what you want is sometimes finding what you didn’t know you wanted.
For instance, the other day I was wrestling with YouTube in search of some obscure clip I was looking for. Instead, YT’s search engine spat out some even more obscure clips from a show I hadn’t though of in years.
Most of this blog’s readers are probably unfamiliar with Get a Life. A vehicle for David Letterman alum Chris Elliott, this unconventional sitcom embodied the early 90s trend toward quirkiness, edginess, and the outright weird.
If you want an idea of the Get a Life viewing experience, it came around back when the fledgling Fox Network was just finding its niche. That was when Fox execs were throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what would stick. And that real-life UHF situation gave us some long-running zeitgeist touchstones. For example: Married With Children and the honest, take-no-prisoners comedy that was The Simpsons before it lost its heart and became an animated zombie meme.
Which brings this post full circle since Get a Life was produced and co-written by Simpsons producer David Mirkin. For a bit of salient TV trivia, Matt Groening invited Mirkin to join the Simpsons production team when it was first picked up in 1989. But he turned Groening down to make Get a Life instead. Mirkin would join The Simpsons crew in 1992 after GaL’s cancellation. There, he would hire several new writers including Mike Scully and Futurama showrunner David X. Cohen.
But its Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon pedigree isn’t Get a Life‘s most intriguing point of interest. Nor is the show’s penchant for frequently killing its own protagonist.
No, in Current Year +7, Get a Life is noteworthy for its accidental prediction of many prominent aspects of Clown World.
Take the series’ main character Chris Peterson. His status as a 30-year-old man who lives in his parents’ attic and whose only income stream is a paper route was the height of absurdist humor in 1990. Nowadays we would recognize Chris as a NEET, and there are millions just like him. What Get a Life played off as a joke is now a serious socioeconomic crisis.
And Chris’ NEET-hood is only the most obvious absurdity mocked by the show that has since become normalized. Not only did GaL air at the tail end of the era when TV shows were still allowed to make fun of homosexuality – which it often did – you also had episodes with gag PSAs warning of diseases with low mortality rates, jokes about A.I. replacing workers in publishing, and even Donald Trump.
By now you’ve heard that parody is impossible because every absurd joke has become real. Get a Life is where an inordinate number of those jokes were told.
If this show’s track record holds up, we can expect the objects that the military has been shooting down to contain rubbery aliens who sweat surprisingly tasty mucus.
Right around now is when I’m wont to explain the post’s point. But this time I’m not sure there is one, except we’re now living in an early 90s live-action cartoon sitcom version of the world.
It could be worse. We could be living in a universe where tyrannical monopolies are working with demons to hasten the apocalypse.
For a captivating vision of that cosmos, read my award-winning adventure/horror series:
That period of late ’80s/early ’90s absurdist humor frequently had dark jokes and cynicism, but you still got the impression that the people who made them actually liked humanity. David Mirkin worked on this and The Simpsons, but he was also responsible for show-running the two seasons most regard as the best (season 5 and 6) and writing the episode where Homer goes to space which has a grandeur in scope that most series based on the subject miss. He also participated in the DVD commentaries, frequently lightning the mood with his irreverent humor, and in his last episode even included an extra bit thanking the viewers for not only buying the DVDs but watching the show in the first place. He does not come off as a miserable or hateful person at any point.
By the late ’90s it feels as if a lot of the people involved in this stuff allowed themselves to be poisoned by cynicism, and 9/11 was the straw the broke the camel’s back. Now all “comedies” are dark, depressing, angry, loud, and full of noise signifying nothing. Even Married With Children had points where the Bundys expressed appreciation for being family. Nowadays you’d be lucky to have a character grateful for anything at all.
I can’t even remember the last time a new sitcom made me laugh, but it was definitely not a single camera one. those are uniformly miserable and dreary experiences. I have no idea how anyone can enjoy them.
While I wouldn’t have traded anything for Mirkin’s Simpsons run – including Marge vs the Monorail, the series’ single best episode based on viewer metrics – it’s hard not to feel like Get a Life’s cancellation cost us a chance at something special.
Mirkin and Elliott had a whole character arc planned for Chris, which they’d plotted out over four or five seasons. In season 1 he’s a paperboy living over his parents’ garage. Season 2 had him move out, added Brian Doyle-Murray as his sociopath landlord, and cranked the weirdness to 11. The DOA 3rd season would have seen Chris become a hobo that roamed America leaving a trail of damaged lives in his wake.
I watched Devon Stack’s video on the Simpson’s mockery on Christianity. It was always peppered in here and there, but really picked up steam once the show hit double digit seasons. Eventually the more *ahem* “subversive” penned episodes where Marge is telling Rodd that he doesn’t need to pray, a visiting hippy Protestant pastor is supportive of gay marriage, and God says that all atheists are allowed into Heaven.
There’s such a mean-spirited anger against their parents within these episodes. Like they despise the fact that God lives rent-free in their heads (as it should be.)
All the good writers left during season 10. If you want to know why Futurama and King of the Hill were both much better than The Simpsons was around that time, it is because the ex-Simpsons writers were responsible for those series being good in the same period their old show nosedived. The Hollywood clique writers have been writing it ever since.
In the audio commentaries there are a few jokes about faith made, including one guy who tries to rant about how atheists are oppressed (a writer who has never written a funny episode yet has been there since season 10), but many times people like Matt Groening (of all people) and Mike Scully denounced such talk and changed the subject. I think it goes back to my earlier theory that the older generation of cynical and irreverent writers were a different breed than the ones that came later. One of them understood what growing up in a stable society was like.
The show should have also ended with season 10. In fact, this brand of comedy should have ended with the ’90s.
But as we know, Cultural Ground Zero doesn’t allow things to die anymore.
As Jordan Peterson would blubber, “They’re prosecuting God for the crime of *sobs* BEING!”
What a bizarre show. Can you believe my parents let ten-year-old me watch this? Though to be fair all I remember was the intro/theme song (R.E.M.‘s “Stand”) where Chris slams into a parked car after checking out an attractive miniskirt-clad babe bending over provocatively to pick up a lapse (family TV in the 90s, everyone!), his super-bitchy best-friend’s wife, and the fact that Chris Elliott looks like my uncle. Reading about how bizarre the show is has been pretty astounding—I remember none of this.
Speaking of bizarre and Chris Elliott, have you ever seen Cabin Boy?
I’m one of the few who did see Cabin Boy, yes.
And thanks for bringing up another point I overlooked. The inverted dynamic between Chris’ friend Larry and his wife Sharon is the prototype for a lot of Gen Y and Millennial marriages. But unlike in real life, Larry sometimes lets go of Sharon’s apron strings to go hang out with Chris.