Remembering Get a Life!

Back in the early '90s, when FOX was an up-and-coming American network working toward equal standing with the Big Three of NBC, ABC and CBS, the channel was, like many such newcomers, relying on wackier, edgier, offerings to compete with its more staid competitors, in particular by appealing to a younger audience thought likely to be easier to peel away from its rivals.

Thus did the network's launch put Married . . . with Children on the air, a subversion of the family sitcom with which the others (like NBC with Family Ties and The Cosby Show, ABC with Growing Pains, etc.) were doing so well, with, in place of the dignified professional parents presiding responsibly over the kind of comfortably "upper middle class" household Americans are encouraged to think of as the national norm . . . endlessly cash-strapped and ill-fed and griping shoe salesman Al Bundy and his wife Peg. When elevated from sketch to sitcom The Simpsons did the same.

Both those shows, of course, became the foundation of a Sunday line-up that was the "Must See TV" for many a young person of the era, constants for many years as the other shows in that line-up came and went. Thus did it go with, for instance, Herman's Head--and Chris Elliott's Get a Life!. The latter show had for its central figure Chris Peterson, a 30 year old "paper boy" who still lived with his parents because, in contrast with his childhood best friend, into whose married, working, life he constantly intrudes, he never "grew up."

As the show lasted for a mere two seasons and 29 episodes it never came close to the syndication so important to a show's leaving much of a pop cultural mark in those days, and Mr. Elliott soon moved on to many, many other projects in which he may not have been the star, but in which, even though he was only a supporting player, he got to make more of an impression simply because more people actually saw those appearances. (Thus did Elliott play Amy MacDougall Barone's "geeky," comic book shop-owning brother Peter--perhaps not so much of a stretch from Chris Peterson in the conventional view of these things--in ten episodes of a truly massive sitcom hit, Everybody Loves Raymond.)

Still, I do find myself sometimes thinking of that show--and how its theme looks today. As is often the case with these things the show never really took its premise of a thirty year old living with his parents seriously, merely using it as a pretext for silliness (just as, for instance, the "Bucket Brigade" comedy Step Brothers was to do some years later), but in a period in which more young people are living with their parents longer, in part because they are "underemployed" in jobs for which they are "overqualified" as they are financially bowed down by student debt, that the show's creators did so can make it seem like an interesting time capsule from a period when the reality was neither widely recognized as an increasingly widespread indicator of socioeconomic stress, nor a right-wing moral panic.