Four years after "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" topped the box office, and spawned a hit single for Jackson Browne, director Amy Heckerling decided to revisit the characters in a sitcom.
Fast Times, however, lasted less than two months as a mid-season replacement series. Apparently, the time lag between the movie & the show, despite the film being readily available on video, may have been too much. Vincent Schiavelli and Ray Walston reprised their roles as teachers from the movie, and for Walston, it was the start of a television comeback, as he had mostly been doing movies since My Favorite Martian ended 20 years earlier.
Screenwriter Cameron Crowe served as a creative consultant for the series. Singer Moon Unit Zappa was hired on as a technical consultant, having just graduated high school prior to the series (and, yes, that means she was a student when she recorded her 1982 one-off, "Valley Girl"), and had a better grasp of the youth slang of the period. Zappa also is among the guest stars in the sample episode below, along with Jason Hervey, later of The Wonder Years.
The other notable facts? Danny Elfman & Oingo Boingo composed the music for the show, which marked the TV acting debut of Patrick Dempsey, who'd later land the role of his career on Gray's Anatomy.
The sample episode, "My Brother The Car", is bookended by Aretha Franklin's "Freeway of Love".
Apparently, no one wanted to party with Spicoli anymore.
No rating.
8 comments:
CBS just doesn't seem to have any luck in shedding their image as a Geritol network and appealing to the Clearasil crowd. Their attempt to replicate 'National Lampoon's Animal House' on the small screen, "Co-Ed Fever", was so poorly received that it was yanked off the air after a single episode, then years later another high-school sitcom effort, "Square Pegs" likewise met a swift demise. To be fair, though, "Pegs"'s cancellation has less to do with ratings than it did with the show's creators, producers and writers (the show was created by SNL alumni Anne Beats and Rosie Shuster, BTW) having a penchant for getting high during work hours; rumor has it that they utilized a separate studio away from the CBS lot so they could burn tree in peace.
2 other youth-based CBS sitcoms, "Charles in Charge" and "Dreams" similarly failed to strike ratings gold and were each gone after a single season, though CiC received a second life in syndication.
CBS also aired "Live-In" (1989), which was basically a teenage boy's sex fantasy in sitcom form, which was gone after just a few episodes. Interestingly, Live-In was produced by Sternim and Fraiser, Inc., the same studio that previously produced "The Charmings" on ABC.
Getting back to "Fast Times", I only caught a few minutes of it. It didn't pull me in as a regular viewer. I always found it to be curious why the show's producers saw it fit to drop the "At Ridgemont High" part from the title. That was more interested to than anything that happened on the show.
@Goldstar: The shortened title might've been because in discussion of the movie, most people dropped the "Ridgemont High" part themselves.
@Silverstar: "Square Pegs" introduced folks to Sarah Jessica Parker, and she turned out okay (i.e. Sex & The City). "Dreams" was, I think, John Stamos' 1st post-General Hospital gig, and he rebounded with "Full House".
As I often note in these pieces, it's usually a case of poor scheduling. The story of drugs on the "Pegs" set carrying over from the creators' time on SNL probably shouldn't surprise anyone, then.
Oh yeah, that's right. I forgot that John Stamos was in "Dreams". By interesting coincidence, another member of that cast was Jami Gertz, who previously appeared on "Square Pegs".
Wasn't Gertz SJP's sidekick on "Pegs"?
No, that was Amy Linker. Ms. Linker's only other acting role (that I'm aware of) was playing Gabriel Kaplan's daughter in the short lived NBC sitcom "Lewis & Clark".
Jamie Gertz played the uptight prep Muffy Tepperman. Ms. Gertz also appeared in a couple of episodes of NBC's Family Ties and was in at least one 80s movie with a young Robert Downey Jr.
I watched it (premiered during my Senior year of HS) and kind of liked it, but with the frank sexual content of the film it was going to be a tough sell. Might have been effective counterprogramming to the older-skewing demographic of HIGHWAY TO HEAVEN on NBC, except that MacGYVER was starting to gain a cult following over on ABC in its first season. I remember some buzz about it then, several of my friends watched it. Considering the limitations of TV and of the 8 PM ET time slot on content, it wasn't bad. TOUGH COOKIES, which followed, was a vehicle for Robby Benson, whose youth appeal was a good half a decade behind him in 1986. Hey, CBS tried.
@Goldstar: Amy Linker was like a prototypical 80's band. At least a one-hit wonder, not much else.
@Hal: I'd never heard of Tough Cookies until you mentioned it. My folks watched Highway to Heaven. They were Michael Landon fans dating back to Bonanza.
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