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:
