MacGYVER YOUR ENTHUSIASM (13)
By:
February 12, 2025
One in a series of enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, analyzing and celebrating favorite TV shows from the Eighties (1984–1993). Series edited by Josh Glenn.
GET A LIFE | 1990–92
I won’t pretend that I fully got Get a Life in 1990. I was a huge Letterman fan and I loved Chris Elliott in five-minute doses as The Guy Under the Seats and Marlon Brando and the Regulator Guy. His characters were always silly and stupid, and the common core was always there — eccentric guy with enormous ego, dripping with condescension, oblivious to Dave’s mocking laughter. He was like Dunning-Kruger come to life.
When he brought that Ignatius J. Reilly self-confidence to a primetime FOX sitcom, I should have loved it. Elliott as a thirtysomething paperboy living with his ever-exasperated parents. His dad played by Elliott’s real dad, Bob Elliott of Bob and Ray. REM with the theme song. Bob Odenkirk and Charlie Kauffman as writers.
But at 22 minutes, with an unbearable laugh track, it honestly felt too cute for its own good. I watched a few episodes, not all of them. I was busy. It was canceled after a season and a half. Even Herman’s Head got three full seasons out of early-’90s FOX.
In three-plus decades since then, the world has caught up to Chris Elliott’s antisocial brand of charm, and so have I. Rewatching it today, I’m struck by how current it feels. Elliott’s commitment to what he called his character’s “confident stupidity” is unwavering, and the show lives on in I Think You Should Leave and Curb and Matt Gaetz.
But weird it was. Here are the loglines for three episodes. One of them is real, and the other two are obvious fakes. Can you guess the real one?
- Chris tries to set a world record for having a ton of garbage stacked on him, all to save the local playground. Crooner Jack Jones sings “Call Me Irresponsible” on top of the pile.
- Someone steals Chris’s wallet in The Big City. He becomes known as Wallet Boy, and gets the key to the city. Which is inexplicably still stuck in the ’40s.
- An ornery, vomiting alien named SPEWEY lands in the front yard. Chris tries to protect the alien from government agents. Eventually he eats SPEWEY.
OK yeah, so actually those were all real. So was the one where Chris falls for his prison pen pal, and the one where he becomes a male escort, and the one where he takes his “neatly chiseled, well-groomed drop-dead handsome face” to the Handsome Boy Modeling School, and transforms himself into Sparkles, Professional Male Model. That one I did watch, and I did love, even at the time. So did Prince Paul and Dan the Automator, who took the school’s name for their genius early 2000s hip-hop collab. So much legacy for this one weird show. So much life.
MacGYVER YOUR ENTHUSIASM: INTRODUCTION by Josh Glenn | Michael Grasso on MAX HEADROOM | Heather Quinlan on MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000 | Mark Kingwell on CHINA BEACH | Judith Zissman on SANTA BARBARA | Adelina Vaca on TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES | Deborah Wassertzug on MOONLIGHTING | Josh Glenn on VOLTRON | Adam McGovern on A VERY BRITISH COUP | Alex Brook Lynn on STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION | Nikhil Singh on CHOCKY | Sara Ryan on REMINGTON STEELE | Vanessa Berry on THE YOUNG ONES | Dan Reines on GET A LIFE | Susannah Breslin on PEE-WEE’S PLAYHOUSE | Marc Weidenbaum on LIQUID TELEVISION | Elina Shatkin on PERFECT STRANGERS | Lynn Peril on THE SIMPSONS | David Smay on THE DAYS AND NIGHTS OF MOLLY DODD | Annie Nocenti on THE SINGING DETECTIVE | Tom Nealon on MIAMI VICE | Anthony Miller on ST. ELSEWHERE | Gordon Dahlquist on BLACKADDER | Peggy Nelson on SEINFELD | Nicholas Rombes on TWIN PEAKS | Ramona Lyons on ÆON FLUX
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