Forgotten Television Shows: Volume Twelve

A quick update on Tawdry Amusements at Respectable Prices: Still haven’t, you know, started to do any actual writing but by compiling up a lot of my old posts and creative writing exercises I am up to over 30,000 words. Of course, this includes several pieces that I wrote in high school and my one good short story from college (which I don’t think that I’ve posted in any legitimate form). Given that I am nowhere near finished in terms of gathering up all my old writings it does seem that I have a legitimate book on my hands. Maybe not the best book, but a book nonetheless.

And, since I haven’t done one of these in a while…

Forgotten Television Shows: Volume Twelve

Typically, when I write about a Forgotten Television Show I am really writing about a popular show that has been pushed aside from society’s conscious memory or at least is no longer in reruns. Cheers is not a Forgotten Television Show while Night Court is. Tonight is going to be a little different. Tonight I am going to talk about a show that almost no one watched and didn’t even last a full season because it was too damn smart.

It’s Like, You Know…

First off, this is a real show. It was on ABC in the late 90’s and starred Chris Eigeman, Jennifer Grey and that girl from My So-Called Life who wasn’t Claire Danes. It was about an upper class New Yorker (Eigeman, who was required by law to only play New York preppies and is in three quarters of my favorite films of the nineties) who moves out to California to write a book about how horrible and selfish and plastic California is. So your main character’s motivation is that he is intentionally having a bad time.

Of course, he gets sucked into the California culture. Spending an afternoon watching high-speed chases and keeping score. Falling for the flighty My So-Called Life chick (Ali something). And meeting Jennifer Grey, played by Jennifer Grey. In the only reason why this show should not be forgotten.

In what is possibly the first attempt to portray meta-fiction in a three camera sitcom, the fictional character of Dirty Dancing star and nose job victim Jennifer Grey was portrayed by Jennifer Grey. She was playing herself except that it wasn’t her. She wasn’t neighbors with a writer and a dude who was broadcasting jewish religious ceremonies on pay-per-view. All they had in common was that both had danced with Patrick Swayze and had rhinoplasty that was so successful that she became completely unrecognizable. It was just bizarre as you couldn’t tell if this was a real person who found themselves in a sitcom or the imaginary life of a person you haven’t met but vaguely know.

And let’s face it, that is the show that we most want to see. We want to see how celebrities really live. And not big celebrities. Watching Tom Cruise sleep on a bed of money while forbidding Katie to talk wouldn’t make interesting television. We want to see the people who used to be famous go about their daily lives. There is a familiarity in their past fame and viewers would line up to watch them buy groceries or do laundry. We don’t want to watch the famous succeed, we want to follow their struggles with the most normal tasks.

It’s Like, You Know did that for a few episodes. And people didn’t get the joke. You can’t find it on DVD. I might have an episode on a slowly degrading VHS tape somewhere. But at one point in time there was a show that talked about fame from the other side of the mirror.