TV Guidance Counselor
TV Guidance Counselor Episode 14: Nat Towsen
You have a TV? No. I just like to read the TV guide. Read the TV guide. Don't need to change it. Hello and welcome to another edition of TV guidance counselor. Thank you so much for checking out the show or for coming back if you've listened before. This week my guest is comedian Nat Townsend and Nat is a great guy. He's a really funny, interesting guy from Manhattan but I know him from his time here going to Emerson up here in Boston. He used to do a show called The Original Zings of Comedy and he is down in New York now and he's doing great down there. He's got a great show called The Moon and the Nat Townsend Variety Hour show. I'll put all links up to all his Twitter and all of his online presence on the Tumblr page so be sure to check him out. This episode is a long one as they often get when we get a little academic so please enjoy this week's episode of TV guidance counselor with my guest, Matt Townsend. Mr. Nat Townsend, welcome to my home. Thank you for having me. You're welcome. You're a beautiful museum. Oh thank you. It's a museum not in the more like Adams family museum not like Cameron's dad and first viewer museum. For those who are listening and can't see the house it is full of stuff that has been well arranged so it doesn't feel like it's full of stuff. They would say that Ken's house is a museum where people don't pay to see him. Oh thank you. Yes well you don't know I might just give you an invoice at the end of the year. So that came up from New York. No I'm not going to. Yes you're based out of New York now but we know each other from when you went to school here. Yes and you're up there doing some shows so you're nice enough to take some time out and come over here. Oh thanks for having me. You're quite welcome. So you picked a TV guide from the week of August 22nd 1992. What drew you to this specifically? Well there's two things. The year is really what initially drew it to. The cover says a big bold black letter that has a kid sitting too close to the TV. Yes. Is TV violence battering our kids? Special issue. New study. New answers. Yeah so this will be on the tongueless. This cover you on the tongue. This is a very provocative cover. Yeah this is a pretty. This would jump out at you on the newsstand. And I for similar reasons that the year is important. This is I was born in 1985 and not to date myself but I bet you can figure out how old you're like new coke. Yeah exactly. I max had room as my sponsor and I the reason that I chose 1992 is I've gone back recently I think almost incidentally my girlfriend and I have been watching a bunch of shows from from 92 and 93 watching early Seinfeld X files Batman the animated series and I look at mid 1992 as the way as the period of time where my cultural awareness finally came online like the earliest references. There are things before that that I don't like 1991 I've had to go and look like in history now and fill in the gaps of like the late 80s and early 90s because it's like after anything you would have learned in school before I was paying attention before you learn when I didn't know what happened to the Waco complex until a few years ago. Well I mean most six year olds aren't there. Well exactly there's that weird gap right where it's like before you start learning about real world events but it's after history class teaches you. So 1992 is like that you know every I knew cultural references before then but that's when like everyone I knew started talking in TV quotes. It started to gel. That's what it started to be yeah we really started like paying attention to things that weren't just little kids shows like or that I was watching probably Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and nothing else. Right right well that's a good way to go I think I think the more people that I talk to because I can never use myself as an example. It's maybe the radical dude I am to. Yeah exactly I mean he came in here with a pizza and nunchucks which I thought was you know not that unusual based on the way people know. Turns out they had a lot of breakable things I apologize already. He also came in with the fedora and trench coat on and then immediately took it off as soon as he came in because he said he was he was in disguise but I think the more people that I talked to about this kind of stuff the more I realized that most people sort of become aware of popular culture especially television around age seven or eight. They definitely watched stuff before them but that's when the stuff starts to stick with them and I think that you know on average the four years between eight and twelve tends to be sort of the years that that makes everybody's taste and even if they think their tastes change over the years it kind of doesn't. It's mostly things where the ground markers say how much it comes back. There were a few when we went through where I was like as a kid I would have chosen this and now I'm pretty sure it doesn't hold up. There are a lot of things where you know but I know what you mean it's I think that's certainly true that that's sort of that's of the foundation. Essential kernel at least of your tastes and whether or not they they maintain they be like a literal analog to your taste it's definitely always affects how you feel about this. Are you an only child? No I'm an older too. You're the older. A brother who's four and a half years younger than me. So I think that makes a difference too because you didn't it wasn't like you had an older brother that was sort of serving as your guide. Oh no not at all. So you were the scout you were discovering this stuff. It's a matter of fact it's like my brother was born the same year I was because it's that little brother where I think if you're a younger sibling right you get like maybe one or two of those years kind of like but by the time you're seven you're watching what your older sibling was watching like right you're almost like you catch up faster. Yeah yeah that's the thing they're like I feel like you know my brother probably came online around age seven too but by age nine he might as well have been my age because he was watching this. You had done a lot of the work on his behalf so he was able to do shortcuts. Yeah exactly. So let's well jump right into it at eight o'clock but I want to mention there's a show at seven thirty that I've never heard of before but I noticed it in here okay and if anyone knows anything about it please email me @canateikenread.com. It's a show called Zirk the Jerk. I don't know if you've heard of this. You have heard of Zirk the Jerk? I just remember the name because it stands out but I don't know anything about it. It says it's a drama. It's a half-hour drama. It says in a rural town in 1943 several boys suspect that their classmate an Austrian immigrant named Carl Zirk is a Nazi spy. Oh my god. An elect him double agent to befriend Carl. Never heard of any of the actors in it. Never heard of anything. It doesn't give a year or anything so that I'm going to have to look into but. Seven thirty if that is a choice that's my pick. Seven thirty on a Saturday. We're watching Zirk the Jerk about Nazi spies. So eight o'clock would you go. Suspected Nazi spies. The idea that he was just some guy with a weird last name. Carl Zirk sounds like a Nazi. Sounds like a Nazi. Let's get him. Eight o'clock what'd you go with? I went with solid hour block Michael Jackson videos. Michael Jackson videos on MTV. So we're in summertime I should mention. So MTV was in beach MTV. 92 was sort of the tail end of Michael Jackson being cool. You're a big Michael Jackson fan? You know I'm as an adult. I as a okay in 1992 as much as I could have been a fan of anything as a person who had never purchased music before. Yeah Michael Jackson is probably the first person who I ever knew was cool. Like if you could be like Michael Jackson that was a cool thing to do. I recognize that now that his fame was probably that wave of it was fading. Yeah I would argue that 92 was not cool to be Michael Jackson. Well okay but for me like even even 91 I remember the year before everyone I knew would do a Michael Jackson impression. Like we didn't know other famous people. This was black or white era. So you go up and right in New York City or you grew up in Manhattan. See I that sort of disappoints me. Nothing you go up there. But that. Sorry. Kids in Manhattan downtown. So you were in like the the Bowery. Is that like kind of my scene? Yeah. You were talking about the earlier. That to me was like ground zero of coolness that wasn't in Los Angeles and was sort of the the downtown New York first season of the real world hip Keith Herring New York. And you guys were like yeah Michael Jackson is pretty cool. About 10 years past his sell-by date. Well you got to understand though like again this is black and white era Michael Jackson. Well first of all it's not like I was like hanging out with the junkies on the Bowery. No I mean my my working knowledge of New York is so skewed by television. Yeah well you had to at least be a teenager to start going out to like punk shows and stuff. 42nd street. But um yeah back when it was back when it was the real 42nd street and uh but no I mean I think I think also for like kids growing up because we were growing up like on the Lower East Side which was like now not really but Ben was a really racially mixed neighborhood. Yeah. And like Michael Jackson still was this hero to allow like a lot of young black and Puerto Rican kids. So what do you think they'd be hippier than that 91. They'd at least have moved on a new Jack swing. I don't know like you know we're seven. We didn't really have. I mean probably with a couple years we figured out what was really going on but like the first the first crisis of like this is how I look at it which is you know I'm sure everyone thinks that their youth was a simpler time but when I was a little kid I distinctly remember that there were two people who were cool. They're both named Michael they're Michael Jordan or Michael Jackson and who you wanted to be determined what kind of a person you were. Yeah they're gonna say Michael Landon. Yeah Michael Lisner. Those were the two role models for all children in New York. So Michael Jackson and Michael Douglas and Michael Jackson right now. I'm Jay. The MJ's. I don't know I I think people need to wake up and realize that you know Jackson is the superior Jackson. By fjords. By fords. The only good stuff Michael Jackson did was because of Quincy Jones and after Quincy Jones left the picture garbage pure simple garbage. Well I think that that's I would also argue that anything that he did with the Jackson 5 there's a lot of really strong work there. They didn't they didn't have anything to do with it that was all Motown right right okay but you know are we saying who's the greatest independent solo artists on the Jackson. You know we're going to or who has created the most solid work. You know what I really hate about here's what I hate about Michael Jackson the most. Like that's you should never do that in a song. Ever. That's not a singing stuff. But you know I really love thriller and I love all the wall but yeah. So again like they're not only showing this is an hour long block of Michael Jackson videos. So it's a whole year. We're getting the best of the 80s Michael Jordan. This is what I'm thinking we're not getting so much of the length. Yeah exactly. You're not getting that much lame 90s Michael Jackson and you're getting the really good, really good late 80s Michael Jackson probably. If this is an hour long block of Michael videos. To full disclosure here I really resented the fact that he married Lisa Marie Presley who I love. Oh now it's finally coming out. Well that is that is just well also you know the fact that he molested children. Oh now you're gonna make it personal. Yeah but but yeah. So about this time children. I probably wouldn't get on the Michael Jackson videos I guess is the point I'm trying to make. But I respect the fact that you did especially. Just because he was molesting kids my age at the time. Yeah. Oh big viral me. Ethical Ken read over here. I have a compilation I made of from 1992 of news stories from tabloid TV. So the hard copy a current affair which are huge at this time all those kind of shows. And there's one. This is before the allegations came out about Michael Jackson. And there is one where Michael Jackson went in in disguise into a jewelry store in New York. Okay. And so it turns out that this was the story. Michael Jackson came in in disguise and whatever. But it's very creepy in hindsight because they're interviewing the people that came in and they're like well he came in with a young boy and he didn't do any of the talking. His companion did all the talking and I'm just like wow what I mean come on man this is weird. A little weird. Now you bypassed completely Snick which was in its infancy. This is the first year of Snick and it just started in August 1992. Which shows were in the 8 and 8 30 blocks. So it was Clarissa. Clarissa explains it all. And 8 30 was unfortunately Roundhouse which was the worst show ever. Yeah. I think that's why I skipped over it. Clarissa I watched. I definitely watched that. I was a first of all an annoying young dooeybe kid. So I got compared to Ferguson all the time. So I think I had a general ingrained resentment of Clarissa. Who lives in New York now is friends with Mike Kaplan. Ferguson. Yeah. Yeah. He's a really nice kid. Jason Zemuller. I met him at a show. He lives down in New York. He had to find him and fight him. Yeah. Now he's very nice kid. No. He's gonna lose then. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Yeah. So I don't know. I didn't love that show though. It was a girl show. It was a girl show and it was always about a kind of a girl who I don't know that I would really like in real life. The other thing about MTV and New York. It's like quirky and a weird manufactured kind of vibe. Yeah. I didn't do it for you. So even at that time you're like I'm being lied to. No. I just like I don't think I could have unpacked it like that as a kid. Right. And it's just like I don't like this girl. Something was off putting about her. Yeah. I mean yeah. That's essentially true. And I think I may have had like a little bit of a crush on her when I grew older but in general I didn't really like that show. Fair enough. Fair enough. And Roundhouse to be completely honest in 1992 though. It wasn't Roundhouse the one with all the like sort of like sort of breaking like dance numbers. Yeah. It was like someone went you know we really like the flag girls on a living collar. If we could make them all white and be very theater studies improv game wannabe actors who weren't quite up to soap opera level. If we could mix those together into an attempt at an edgy sketch show that fails miserably. See that's funny. I didn't even remember the sketches. I just remembered the dance part because I think that as a kid I would have tuned in for the dancing part of that. You were a big dance fan. I really loved like I think I discovered breaking through like the teenage music ninja turtles or something but when I was a kid. You were talking the movie breaking or break dancing generally. No breaking like the style of dance. Okay. So you went to break dancing at this time. Oh huge. This is the other thing. Michael Jackson. Michael Jackson and breaking were like the biggest thing and like we all learned how to like pop and pop and stuff. Yeah. It was a lot more like doing roles and spinning on your head. Did you ever like God? You know we go down to the basement where we'll do the recycling. We get cardboard out of there. Really? You really would. Yeah. And you'd carried around in the streets? I mean you know again this is 1990. Oh this is well past the sell by day to break down. Oh but no but it was again like all this stuff trickling down to a little kid. Yeah to white kids and like but also bearing in mind that my best friend was Puerto Rican and that's how I got anything interesting culturally speaking. Right. So he was probably into freestyle music. Yeah and he was like he was a kid who like knew dance moves that had names and stuff. No one else I knew knew that. So he would like yeah he would be like here here's how you do the heel toe or something like that. I'm like all right sure. But but also bearing in mind it's 1992 in New York City. We're not allowed to go anywhere. No you're not going to walk around with it. Like when I say we're picking up cardboard so we're doing that to go like dancing a hallway somewhere. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah which sounds much worse than it is. Yeah. Why don't you I found him dancing in a hallway because we didn't have backyards. We didn't have any free space. It was a living room or a mall or a. I grew up hardcore suburbs in the Boston area. So a roof was the other one. A roof rooftops. That was a good movie. That's not a good movie. Came out the same year as Lombata. In the Forbidden Density to competing which was 92 both of those. So competing the two competing Lombata movies. But I I grew up hardcore suburbs. So I mean we're talking you know Boston suburbs, Erie, Indiana type suburbs. Right. So the the city kids sort of fascinates me. I mean you're the way you grew up is so alien to me. And the the the working idea I have of it is probably so incredibly wrong. But if it's not like it was like on TV that's almost no I mean that seems to be true with everything as I get older. But also anything when there's any real life danger always gets totally skewed if it goes on. Oh sure. And the weird thing was I when I was seven I used to hang out in Boston in our sort of equivalent of 42nd Street which is the combat zone in China. Oh yeah. Yeah. Which is where you went to school at Emerson right over there which was I mean really bad. I mean there were there were prostitutes all up and down there. There were there were pimps and scary people. I mean by the time I was there the vice squads had cleaned it out. Oh they had completely cleaned it out. Totally different. But I mean I was hanging out there at age seven by myself. I used to go to the Shaw Brothers Theatre. Really. They watch martial arts movies in Chinese. I had no clue what was going on. But I would go watch them because they were great fun movies. I doubt you're missing much. No. That is crazy though. I mean but to me when I look back at my my childhood I'm like very very suburban but really I was probably doing more more dangerous things than you probably were growing up in the Lower East Side which is nuts to me. But one thing when MTV was that that was New York. MTV at the time was right in the heart of New York. It was filmed in New York. It was so New York and I watched so much MTV at this time. And the fact that I could have just gone down there in three hours. I could have been there blows my mind and you were just blocks away of you know where they're shooting. How's the style? Crazy. Probably my favorite show on MTV at the time. So 8.30 you're watching an hour long show so you don't have to pick anything. Michael Jackson. Yeah. Nine o'clock what'd you go with? I went with Ren and Stimpy. And so he picked up Snick at this time. I did. Okay and then here's my here's my reasoning here. I did jump into Snick here. I as a kid did not love Ren and Stimpy. Really was it too gross for you? Yes. I think that is what it was. I remember there's the one where he eats kitty litter or that's an ongoing thing and it's and you know what it was though? It wasn't the kind of traditional weirdness that cartoons had prepared me for. It was like a grotesque style of like yeah it made it felt a little unhinged where it was like oh my god if they let willing to let things get this ugly what's gonna happen next yeah and you might not be able to unsee it and as a little kid who and I you know very like sensitive young boy sounds like I didn't it freaked me out a little bit. No I don't think you're wrong I mean I was I'm a little older than you so I was 12 at the time and I actually one of the things I really loved about Ren and Stimpy was Bill Ward's work on it who used to do the paintings. Oh right right yeah I knew his work from Cracked magazine and some of the pin-up stuff he had done because I'm a huge comic nerd which we were talking about earlier and I'll tell you what I would watch in a moment along those lines but so I started watching it for that but yeah it really did gross me out and there were times in that show when I thought I was gonna get in trouble for watching it and the very specific episode is when they're the rubber nipple salesman I don't know if you remember that episode vaguely they're walking around selling rubber nipples door to door and this guy goes uh I don't need any rubber nipples but do you have any rubber walrus protectors and he pulls out a walrus and the walrus just goes call the police and I remember thinking like I think something was bad I don't know if I'm gonna get in trouble for watching this like that was the moment I was like something I'm gonna get in trouble for watching that's what I mean when I say it's a little unhinged or you didn't know to expect and you didn't know whether it was okay yeah you felt like there were jokes you were missing that other people would get and then like blame you for and I think my parents generation or the people in my family my parents generation didn't like it but my mom was the old like my mom's youngest sister and her husband who are more behind so probably your age now yeah exactly they were gen X yeah they were kind of gen X uh they were into that kind of thing yeah but like me and my parents generation I was young enough that it was still scary to me and my parents generation were old enough that it was inappropriate and I think in that sense it was like not a show that I was really comfortable watching but your parents were probably kind of hip I mean you're living in the lower east side of New York this is this might just be my projection yeah I mean yes if they're listen you know if anyone's listening uh don't you know yeah totally hip no um you know yes and no my dad grew up in the 50s you know he's got some some I mean he's not a conservative guy by any means but he's got certain traditional values and and also like as to how he my parents were performers they were kind of hip people in that sense but my mom was also an educator they're both educators they're very concerned with uh damaging young minds oh oh the impressionability and desensitization is a word I hear my mom say all the time okay you can't watch violent tv it will desensitize you couldn't do gun games oh no no I remember there was a point when my you know toy guns and there was a point when my parents were like you know what no more swords and all the swords in the house went out really yeah well I think someone hit it someone else too hard with the story it wasn't just an philosophical decision I'm pretty sure it was caused by a specific incident and we will get too far into this thing but this is the thing that I always mention about Nat whenever at which is but your dad wrote the definitive book on clowning yes it is called clowns by john tousin yes it is the book to this day on clown and he is a uh a clown uh yeah well I mean not actively he directs clowns a lot now yeah he founded the new york clown theater festival with my mother and my dad directs a bunch of clowns I know I know it's well it's that but you know like clown theater it's just yeah kind of like sketch comedy oh yeah no it's for some reason that's one of my favorite facts that I uh yeah and uh so I mean like in that sense it's not like he was like this stern 1950s father by any chance that uh but like no they they performed he kind of stopped performing and went they both went into teaching when they had kids because you know stable income and everything you gotta you gotta you gotta uh now he is retired he teaches like clown workshops all over the world nice yeah um so I would have gone with the human target which you may be familiar with the comic book the human target it's a dc comic yeah I didn't really know that one uh it was a pretty good comics very 80s it was basically uh sort of a mercenary for hire who would impersonate people who are going to be assassinated and then he would turn the tables on the assassination sounds risky it is risky in this show the comic I enjoyed it was a good dc comic you could always get it in bargain bins but uh it was also remade on fox about two years ago uh was not successful only last in one season but was pretty good but this was the first attempt and this was in the post batman age when they were trying to adapt all different sorts of comic properties the flash didn't so batman the movie 80 90 that was batman the movie 92 this summer we had batman returns batman the animated series was just starting so they were really trying to mine a lot of these things and this was the first attempt at the human target where the human target chance was played by rick springfield yes this was the second action series rick springfield was in the first of which was about a vampire cop called nick knight which did go to series but rick springfield dropped out there he was recast oh really yeah so this was a human target that is such like a series of 1992 buzz oh absolutely absolutely get me comics get me rick springfield i don't know and his dad on the show was played by kevin mccarthy who's one of my all-time favorite actors uh you might remember kevin mccarthy from invasions of body snatchers or uhf oh okay okay and uhf so in this episode chance faces a difficult reunion with his stubborn critical father when he returns home to protect an old family friend from an unknown assailant uh i remember watching this episode and enjoyed it specifically because kevin mccarthy the show is very short lived and it did not do very well i had no idea existed uh your episode of ren and stimpy that you picked is if i'm remembering correctly the most disgusting episode okay well i think to revisit as an adult that's probably the one i want yeah i want to see if i would like that so this is ren learns about dental care of the hard oh my god loses all his teeth and the nerves get pulled out it's because dental stuff never mind i take it back i'm never watching that show dental stuff makes me cringe so at nine thirty what did you go with are you afraid of the dark so you so you're stuck with snakes i went back to it yeah at this point now um it's a lazy saturday i have not changed the channel so this episode is very appropriate for you net oh okay this is a boy like a really cool handsome guy it's about a really cool handsome guy who nothing bad happens to now this is a boy investigates a haunted house that is rumored to be haunted by a clown right right okay yeah i remember that episode so you were clowns never scared you growing up no no not at all actually i take that back um and there there was actually a show in a recent clown theater festival in new york it was like the return of the old timey clowns and a bunch of the people who had been in the first festival in the eighties came and it reminded me because i know a lot of people growing up are scared of clowns one of my sweet close friends from from high school is terrified to this day of clowns and his reason is there was like some festival there on the statin island fairy and there was he was like a little boy talking to this little girl who was really nice that her dad brought her into the back room bathroom and then she came out in clown makeup and he thought it was like an assimilation scenario what that's terrifying met a nice little girl and she was he was already a little scared and then someone got a he'd like got assimilated she was reprogrammed yeah exactly and like um so you know he thought clowns he thought clowns were like a race since he realized that's not the case now uh it's unclear okay all right but uh so i didn't have that kind of fear of clowns but i do i did remember in this old timey clowns show one person did a character and i was like oh that used to freak me out because i was around a lot of people who who wore clowns who did clown and they would be a person you could talk to and then all of a sudden yeah and then also then they would be on stage and they would be doing this weird voice or this character that's like pathetic sad or something right and not only that would creep you out but because they always had to do audience participation interaction and they knew you so they would pick you they all knew me and they would all come talk to me but they wouldn't be them it wouldn't be the person i knew and look like them but it wouldn't sound like them and that i now realized freaked me out as a kid well yeah i mean bat's invasion of the body snatchers with Kevin McCleary yeah that's the very thing that's terrifying about that exactly looks like the person i know but it's not the person i know and there's the uncanny and it's unsettling and that would be terrifying as a kid so to that sense yeah they did freak me out like seeing someone in clown makeup now i'm not like freaked out by that in a sense that a lot of people are but but the actual like the other thing is like i didn't grow up necessarily around white face paint red nose clowns like rainbow wig that's kind of like a birthday party idea it was all blackface it was all minstrel shows mostly minstrel clowns yeah i thought i was implied yeah it was some very hilarious racialist clowning but i said yellow face yeah no it was mostly like non-makeup more character based stuff but i think made the transformation scarier where it's like oh here's a guy i know he's just wearing a hat it wasn't it wasn't talking in this weird high-pitched voice and and using a different name and acting like he doesn't know me yeah that would be that would freak me out as a kid even more than the film's clown house and killer clowns matter space which i assume you've never seen i know i've never seen either clown house was directed i never even seen it oh yeah it uh the movie it not just we're not just not naming something uh we're not talking about the best starring uh did you read it and curry no no i've yeah it's a good book it's my favorite uh steven king book minus one part that that really bothers me but um i won't get into it but uh clown house was a was a 1990 movie i believe directed by victor salva who is a convicted child molester in the movie or in real life in real life okay go on he also directed the jeepers creeper's movie okay he looks like if you drew a picture of a child molester you would probably draw victor salva without ever having seen it is pensive he has a he is a fat greasy pencil mustache piece of shit this is a lot of child molestation talking this back to the jackson but he made this movie clown house which is about escaped convicts it's actually sam rockwell's first movie really yes and it's it's actually a terrifying movie but he molested the main child movie and filmed it went to jail came out was came out of of jail was sort of uh championed by disney speaking of michael asner who had him direct the movie powder okay he wrote and directed powder and this year i think 1998 it was 96 i think powder was but yeah terrifying movie and when you know the guy behind it even more terrifying i i can't believe he still worked so but on a more happy note let's move to sunday the lord's day all right what did you pick for eight o'clock all right so i've kind of got a back and forth here uh i at first i chose in living color and i'm not sure in retrospect that i think in living color was funny no i i've talked about this on the show before where at my school you're either an america's funny as some videos person or an living color person i liked the first season of in living color but in hindsight uh it was easily the best season but as it got on it was not really that funny i thought that was a really lazy show i did like that the description uh said james carrey james carrey playing playing fire marshal bill yeah one of the things i hate about fire marshal bill is ever being grotesque back to the rent and stimpy issues because uh for people who don't know fire marshal bill was sort of jim carrey's breakout character on on a living color and it was a burn victim fire marshal who was inept at his job yes but the makeup job was i mean almost freddy crueger level burn victim and he was the first annoying character that everybody did impressions of right you know uh there was a lot of that kind of thing so this is when fire marshal bill james carrey wanda the ugly woman played by jamey fox that's how you know it's it's a lazy sketch show that just wanda the ugly woman yeah these all sound like the bad mad tv year style sketches too everything's very very broad there's makeup and there's just yeah it's the sort of it's all these shows that it's all these sketches that wouldn't stand up to one layer of deconstruction very basic premises just for over and over again yeah and also if you were like to like hey like what's the like you know what's the message of this if you have like what if let's get one sentence into that and you go oh that's like that's very offensive well yeah i mean they had a character called a handyman who was uh a handicapped superhero yeah but by handicapped they meant developmentally mentally right i mean it was um horrific and so i don't know if this makes this episode better or worse but those characters and detective head who was just ahead are among those featured in a collection of bloopers and outtakes so it's not even the sketches it's bloopers and outtakes that sounds intolerable but some of those people were really talented oh absolutely warmers so who knows maybe you catch those candid moments when they it's actually better more yeah or they're making because i do you know as much as like late season home improvement you'd be like all right these aren't bloopers you guys are just recording extra time to put bloopers at the end of the show like you see a lot of like bloopers whoa can you believe he said cot instead of not but i would imagine that in a show i i do actually like it in shows when you see people making each other laugh to a certain degree like genuine blooper outtakes where someone where you actually get to see someone performing and you realize like oh wow this person is actually impressing the rest of the cast right like that's a kind of real moment yeah to see people actually creating together not in the in the diagesus of a show i'm talking about like if that's got to be a blooper i don't mind seeing people making each other laugh so normally so i'll do it when the marx finish i was really realistically probably would have been there but it was a repeat of five but uh a beauty queen takes a real fall out of a parade car an infant fiddles with a violinist bird follow-ups include a bird that would rather drive and fly why bother telling you what's on the show why boss just scribing it is funny to me it's perfect but as there was a repeat and this is show i've mentioned before i would have watched a nickelodeon a great show called high honey i'm home i never saw it was an original nicket night production and the idea was it was an instant rerun they called it so it was a co-production with i believe uh abc and it would air on wednesday nights on abc and then sunday nights same episode on on nicket night so they called it an instant rerun the premise of the show was that it was a nineteen fifties sitcom family that was uh whisked to the real world in the future so this black and white sort of leave it to beaver donner reacho family living in 1992 that's a really interesting uh premise for a show um and i mean this is the thing we could discuss like at nazium so i don't want to you know completely meander but just the the idea of that like i've always been fascinated by like when did the fifties become the fifties like when did that get locked in because now it takes about seven years for a decade to get canonized like but the fifties the nineties is getting canonized narratively now but the fifties had always been the fifties when i was growing up so i was considered like stand by me as a good like movie in the in how it deals with that too and like using that idea of the innocence of the fifties plus the innocence of your own childhood is kind of like a and then deconstructing that i think like that's very interesting to me but like so this is like uh well nostalgia you know this is '92 we're talking yeah but like the it's interesting because i feel like the fifties was the static american nostalgia for decades it was the first nostalgia it was um the fifties sort of lasted from 1945 the day after world war two ended to about 1962 till kennedy got shot that really was the fifties and nostalgia was in a lot of ways invented by american graffiti it was really the first movie set in the fifties in a way that looked back fondly on how people grew up and that set off the fifties nostalgia in the 70s and you had greece and you had shanana and you had all of these leverne and surely and happy days and all of these things that really uh gelled the the fifties nostalgia of the 70s and for a long time it was always a nostalgia that was 20 years ago so in the 80s you had 60s nostalgia the fifties nostalgia actually kind of spilled into the 80s a lot and you saw a lot of fifties diners opening and all that kind of stuff yeah that's what i was saying is the fifties thing kind of survived even even near 1992 dealing with that but at least it's like kind of a turn on it by 92 though was really when we started to get the gen x 70s nostalgia big time you had uh actually millenie hudsell from saturday night live got cast on saturday night live because she was playing jan in new york in a in an off-Broadway underground sort of theater production that these people used to get scripts of old brady bunch episodes and he got on stage and she played jan and laura michael sarr and cast her just on that i remember that moment in the simpsons when they're like schoolhouse rock comes on like what's this and like oh i don't know some can't be 70s throwback yeah that appeals to gen xers and i was like that's why that's happened yeah oh that's like that i know it's how it became aware of that phenomenon nostalgia in the 90s is huge you had surmounting in the brady bunch movie bunch movies which are great yeah i get that they were parodies oh they're some of the best ways to pay homage and parody something i've ever seen they're they're really really great and yeah that was all that there was a there was a movie called spirit of 76 starring the twins from the band red cross that is is a is a really good example of of the 90s 70s nostalgia i mean the 70s nostalgia in the 90s was was out of control my personal favorite days and confused yes just i think handle is it very uh non cartoonishly i think that's a very good job i know a lot of people who grew up in the 70s who watched that movie not knowing when it came out right i'm like what do you mean it was shot in like in the in the 90s like it's so active in the 80s you know on tv we had the wonder years which was 60s nostalgia you had in the 90s that 70s show oh yeah there you go that that's the 20 year yeah the 20 year mark and now it's starting to break down but that's been a thing for a while shortened i think the thing for me and maybe for you is that i grew up with um i think it's because it my parents generation spending all the time around my parents friends that that baby boomer nostalgia pervaded everything yeah the big chill the low town 60s everything of my childhood had like a yeah well like the early 60s and and late 50s nostalgia that's kind of stuck around yeah that was always there when i was growing up well i think one of the reasons that the 50s nostalgia stuck around so much was because of the sort of innocence lost of the 60s i don't think people were quite as nostalgic for that time because it was more tumultuous i didn't say the word right uh tumultuous tumultuous tumultuous i cannot speak today um but you know you had you know can't stay in in vietnam and all that kind of stuff whereas the 70s nostalgia was uh if you look at 70s nostalgia it's all post vietnam yeah it's all you know we're talking spirit of 76 we're talking disco right right uh you know Kansas and kiss and and that yeah because it doesn't really fit because it's like a little bit more about like dropping out in a time when things were actually difficult but in you know in the 80s you have movies like big wednesday which is a 60s nostalgia movie that is really set in the vietnam era of of 1960s where that that movie is a prime example of sort of when the 50s dissolved into the 60s and uh you know but then at the same time you have you have some great movies like Back to the Beach from 1989 which is Frankie in a net sort of parroting their their 1960s beach movies 20 years before that so uh it's an interesting thing and in the in their early 2000s we have the sort of 80s nostalgia and now it's just everything all at once although i do see sort of a 90s nostalgia oh no the 90s thing is very much in full swing right now maybe that's why people are listening to this show 90s nostalgia so 830 on sunday night what'd you go with i want to get smart good not a show that i really watched but that's where i'm like i think as an adult i would like that oh yeah have you not watched it at all like i have seen get smart but i've i i can't remember the last time it's a smart funny show i i think you'd enjoy it yeah that's a good move um so that's my like check it out now that i'm older yeah that's a show that i think was a good move i probably at low at the time would have gone with rock uh because it was live i don't know that show rock was a sitcom on fox uh star Charles Dutton and he played a garbage man okay he was a very blue collar sicama was very much in the tradition of samford and son and good times uh out the 70s again 90s kind of looking back to the 70s and it was a lot of stage actors so that by season two they did all the episodes live huh which was innovative and weird for a sitcom at the time and it was kind of exciting and i got caught up in it a lot nine o'clock would you go with watching the first half hour of city slickers city slickers yeah a movie i never really like that much you know i am not saying i would have watched the whole movie in fact i have said i'm gonna turn the channel by nine thirty i don't love it i don't i'm not like oh billy crystal there's the funniest guy but uh no i mean either i think of that isn't moderately funny it seems like a fine background angle sir i actually like a lot yeah that's and like again that's a movie i i'd probably flip around during the commercials i would have gone with without question house of style i know how to show it MTV's house of style originally hosted by cindy crawford i i have a weird obsession with fashion models and not in a boner way although you know they're very attractive but i was obsessed with the world of fashion model especially in the early 90s in that new york downtown fashion thing really i loved it house the MTV had about four hours of programming outside of videos that they would just air over and over and over on the weekends and so i would watch almost all the shows once but house of style i would watch every single time it was on so most weekends i would watch the same episode four times particular episode summer trends including terry cloth fashions surfboard designs and a profile of olympic swimmer dana torres i specifically remember this episode i was also very into surfing and california culture which is something i've never done this is like the op like you're describing something that i would that wouldn't have even made an imprint on my brain as a child like i wouldn't have i would not have recorded a memory before i changed the channel oh man i would have been like but you were right that you could have walked over to the studios and you could have seen but i would have models i could have walked right past that's like that kind of thing you're describing like fashion and like trends and i mean maybe a little bit of that california culture thing interested me well back to ninja turtles ninja turtles and like cal and california games for the nintendo entertainment and tnc surf yeah that wasn't great nintendo i played a lot of california games in the computer room at my school uh and in that sense i was interested in surfing and skateboarding but beyond that i would have had just no interest in this show man i would have been like you could have gone right down to so-hose seen taut oldum in person and i would have uh you're killing me so uh i've gotten along on that nine thirty what'd you go with nine thirty i'm probably gonna flick over from city slickers to dig van dyke dig van dyke uh another good good move you've gone with uh you've gone with uh get smart dig van dyke you own classic yeah i'm i've watched again this is like uh a part of a product of my upbringing both of my parents were not big on me watching tv however it changed if it was yeah nicket night was uh was allowed and and i grew up without cable too so but like i was in like i know i know it's like child of use i can see it on your face but i but you know i was spent a lot of time at my grandparents house and they had cable every time i was there nicket night was was well was wheel of fortunes over flip over to nicket night see parents basic rules if it's in black and white it's okay yeah or if it's like a thing that they looked fondly back on but yeah black and white was definitely made things better but but not everything you know but but anyway yeah yeah the classic comedies and and you know my my father to this day is in it you know something of a historian of of early comedy yeah comedy and stuff that's great stuff i mean it's not bad yeah so so i i sort of grew up with an ingrained respect for those kinds of shows i know we're a little more performative good thing yeah yeah and so i think that still affects that if i'm going to take a chance on a sitcom i haven't seen i the earlier the better yeah i know i think that's a good that's a good approach for sure although at the time i would have gone with hermit's head and that's not a show that i ever watched actually it's not a bad show it was one of the better fox it comes and i had a great a great ensemble cast so monday night i can't believe we're only on monday this is no i really enjoying this conversation so money in their people monday night eight o'clock what'd you go with father of the bride i would probably watch the first half hour father of the bride this is the remake not the original this is the steve martin father of the bride oh yes yeah absolutely i love steve martin i um didn't wasn't really interested in anything else there eight o'clock i as much as i hate commercials i do sort of like watching movies on tv especially the first half hour of movies on tv why is that because when you get to the last half hour they give you like two minutes and then they show a bunch of commercials and then they keep thinking the movie is going to be over and then they show a bunch of commercials and it's painful to finish a movie on tv but they have a lot yeah the first half hour is often the least commercial dense because they want you to watch the movie and get involved in the plot so i'll watch the first half hour of a steve martin movie eight o'clock on a monday night now i i would have gone with the movie as well but i would have gone with a 1978 made for tv movie called are you in the house alone they give it two stars uh this is a tv movie that started Kathleen beller as a teenage terror a teenager terrorized and assaulted by a mysterious attacker okay this is uh i i'm a sucker for the for the babysitter's conference at the house type movies and and that is a classic so you only watch the first half hour so i'm in for the whole two hours you're only watching the first half hour of uh father of the brad so would you go with a 30 well in a 30 i would probably switch over to superman and which if i'm not in black and white make it night we're talking george rees here right yes george rees i killed myself george rees yeah i know that was my father's favorite tv show growing up is huge superman fan that was the show he watched all the time and that show i you know i don't know how much of that i've seen but i i also grew up kind of obsessed with superman oh i love superman not my favorite incarnation of superman i will say that no no media but but there's something about in some ways and maybe because i learned about it from my dad it kind of all goes back to that to me like that's sort of like a classic incarnation and like when you watch like you absorbed your father's love for that show to some to some degree but also in a period of time when i was like really into superheroes so like anything there's you know when i was certain points in my child at anything like i didn't know human target was a comic book based show had i know that i would have watched every episode like oh sure uh they're running that show arrow and i can't watch it it's horrible but i don't mind some of arrow to be honest with you they're they're i watched the pilot and i i just couldn't it just seems like a CW show but halfway through the first season they started putting in a lot of obscure and fun sort of wink wink DC so they see that's what i've heard and i used to be able to watch anything dc related for those little wink wink references little easter eggs and now it has to be an engaging TV show i can't watch it if it's bad but as but if arrow would come out when i was a teenager i would have watched every episode oh i'm sure i mean but that part of that is too that that's a show that's aimed at teenagers well that is a good point but anyway superman also like skews younger as a kid i would have thought that was really cool i wouldn't have gotten the tongue and cheek elements to it but also like i don't think you know what i don't think superman was tongue and cheek at the time yeah i that's true i wouldn't have appreciated it on any kind of ironic level i would have thought it was but what i mean to say as i wouldn't have seen it as campy as a kid i would have seen it as cool it was so sincere yeah i was so sincere and i think that if you look at stuff that's based on other adaptations of superman i'll go back to this one like in the 70s superman movie i was like i'll disagree with you okay hold on let me let me give my example like in the 70s movie it's almost joking that they're bringing superman to the modern era right it's like 73 um i mean which was modern in 1973 superman the musical it was uh yeah i have actually but like there's like the moment where he tries to go change in a phone booth and a phone booth is now just a phone on a stick yeah there's some references to that there's a lot and like in the superman cartoons from the 90s they always make references to the george rees show to get to tie it back to the 50s nostalgia in the 70s i think that's part of the reason that they did that i mean i think the audience watching the 70s superman had a nostalgic fondness for the 50s right they're taking their kids to see it so they kind of need to reference it mm-hmm that makes sense anyway i probably would have gone back and forth maybe watch father of the brides during the superman commercial superman during the father of the bride i was a huge fan of of the fly show cartoons the 1940s and fly show cartoons and so i found which which look amazing they they still look good yeah i'm amazing there's like some channel put them all on youtube they're great i mean there's very there's a great blue ray of them but you know the the problem with them is that they're they're actually not very engaging plot lies they just look nice um and i i think that the 90s superman cartoon is the single best comic book adaptation ever made it improves upon superman it fixes a lot of the continuity issues with the comic and it makes a lot of things better can yeah batman the animated series i liked batman the animated series i still love batman the animated series but i think that batman had less is less impressive because i think batman translated to the animated series and much easier than superman that's true but it's still adapted it still is well in my opinion i don't know i just correct it is that it attempted better than superman because it was more fit from the medium but i don't think see i think i'm more impressed with what they were able to do with superman see i like i i think that the batman the animated series was an unprecedented and and really not oh it's groundbreaking but also really not repeated moment in history where batman returns which is a fairly dark movie you know now we have the dark night which is totally different but but for the time for like a superhero adaptation to be anything like that was amazing and the the animating or that the team creating batman the animated series had the sort of permission to do a much darker show than they would get to do they've never made a batman show for kids that's that dark and that's that takes on that kind of serious psychological issues well it also managed to i think a lot not to get too far into comic book talk because i'm sure you and i could do another two-hour podcast all about that but one of the things that happened to comics in the 90s and what kind of ruined comics during the boom and one of the things i want to mention was probably one of the reasons you were very into comics at this time was sort of the post the first batman in 89 up till comics crashed in the in the mid 90s that was there was comics everywhere it was huge and so i think it was probably hard to avoid for any kids especially any kids that were remotely into genre stuff but uh there was this darkness this post frank miller darkness and a lot of people translated that into swearing and murder oh yeah could be so forced it's not the layered sort of interesting adult adaptation that batman the animated series had and you know even the first episode there the men bat episode had such a great um multifaceted so weird one to start with by the way it is it wasn't the first one produced and it was a weird one to know it was like and towards the end of the world i thought but it was a standalone single episode and a lot of the best episodes from that first season are two partners like the feet of clay the clay that was really good yes that's really good mr. frieze is fantastic every mr. frieze episode is heartbreaking and really good yeah and they and that was that version of mr. frieze is a complete fabrication of the show that was nothing like which is just a retroactively sort of integrated into the visualist that that's what they did that's what they did with superman which was great uh by making brainiac from krypton and that kind of stuff and making him the man villain for that reason and their interpretation of lex luther which managed to uh take the sort of john bern man of steel businessman lex lutheran and use the best aspects of that with the the mad scientist lex luther and sort of it was just sort of they were able to cherry pick the best aspects of the continuity from the dc universe which is why jl u just sleek unlimited and uh justice league which is amazing see you know what's funny i'm actually watching justice league now because i didn't i like it now i didn't watch it at the time oh it's fantastic and i i think i i watched superman but i resented those shows and here's why i was so in love with batman the animated series that when they moved i don't know if they moved net when they moved from fox to wb and then the new adventures of superman and batman right so then when that happened in ninety five they re they overhauled the animation style they designed some of the characters they made it well they made things look more cartoonish less realistic proportions and stuff like an every incarnation after that got more flash animation looking disproportionate brighter colors well i think you're blaming the batman this is a terrible show no i never even watched that but like when in like you know the later when it became the adventures of batman and robin and was the and then which are still good they are well i've gone back and watched like the writing is still so solid but like you know they make the joker look like an alien his eyes are black he's less expressive all these things that they didn't they it was a step in the wrong direction and as a kid i was like through this i don't want to watch that i think you're right for the most part but i will say their redesign of the scarecrow fantastic oh the second scarecrow is is an improvement but the rest of the characters i don't i don't really think that's fair i think that's fair um so i forgot where we were at around nine o'clock on monday and you went with superman it was eight thirty on monday way out so i i probably would have gone with different world but what'd you go with at nine o'clock murphy brown good good call did you watch it at the time i did that was one of the shows where again like you know my parents were fairly protective but if it was a thing they liked or they thought it was smart i was allowed to watch it and murphy brown was a show i was allowed to watch at a pretty young age um so normally i would have watched even though i had to have a lot of the jokes explained to me right right fair enough um normally i would have watched that but since it was summer and it was a rerun i would have gone i would have a tough call between these two things and as people know i am not a sports fan but these two things really impacted me mtv sports no oh god no i hate dan cortez on espn we had surfing tape july ninth and a white absolutely would have watched it but on the sports channel which is not even around anymore as far as i'm aware uh a rerun of a two-hour 1985 episode of roller mania which is roller derby with the san francisco bay bombers versus the midwest pioneers in roller derby action i'm in absolutely in flat for two hours nine thirty what'd you go with nine thirty i'm probably back to flipping between father of the bride and stop or my mom will shoot so you did not enjoy designing women no i mean i didn't really watch it so i can't say for sure this is the season where they were as a repeat but julie duffey was in the cast who i love but fair enough i was a repeat so i would have gone with maniac cop two by robert with star robert zadar on cinemax tuesday night would you go with eight o'clock uh tuesday night eight o'clock full hour star trekking next generation that surprises me not at all also just to maniac cop two which is directed by bill lustig who uh runs a uh company nalka blue underground he was sort of a quintessential new york director to me director movies maniac and and vigilante and that's what new york was to me so maniac cop two in nineteen ninety two that's what i would have envisioned new york was like okay did not like star trekking next generation i am absolutely surprised at how many of my friends when we've recorded these shows watched it all the time i've tried to watch it now it's like kind of okay but i haven't watched it as an adult but also as a kid i didn't even know who patrick steward was and now i love the guy so i i have almost more reason to like that show now fair enough um but i i would be completely honest i was watching it because it was star trek and i was obsessed with the original star trek yeah i was the real star trek to me i enjoyed the sixtiesness of the original one uh very much i couldn't have told you that at the time but i probably did and i i remember even thinking that next generation looked too tv to me even though the sixties one was on they had a different aesthetic and i love the movies that came out of that one though okay which didn't quite look like the tv show but they looked like they felt like movies star trek the next generation i think because it was like it looked like video to me i guess was the thing but i did not one film although the special effects were edited on video yeah i think it was something that was too current about it to me that made it maybe it was the fact that honestly it looked like any other show that was coming out of the time that made it hard for me to believe it was the future right yeah i think that if i had to unpack that now as a kid it was like it was passable because it was in the star trek reality but again you go to uh the star trek movies which came out in the eighties i think the first one might have been nineteen eighty um but again that was back to sixties nostalgia in the eighties oh yeah one of the reasons that we had these star trek movies um i would have gone with either uh the movie invaders from Mars the remake the 1986 remake by towy hooper which i love or a rare prime time appearance of the show three two one contact oh i don't know which started the bloodhound gang it was a pbs show three two one contact it was a very scientific show but this was called three two one contact extra okay and it was because what kids want to know about sex and growing up a candid discussion between youngsters ages eight to thirteen and sex educators including puberty conception and peer pressure i would love to watch this now zero percent chance i would have been allowed to watch it as a child i would i think i think now i would be interested in watching what sex educators in 1992 wanted to tell eight to thirteen years yeah oh absolutely uh so nine o'clock what'd you go with uh nine o'clock rosanne for sure i would not have gone with rosanne and i'll tell you what go ahead normally i would we're in the summer it's august uh 25th is the date so it would have been a repeat so i would have absolutely without question gone with mistine usa oh man hosted by dick clark and lisa gibbons this was the 10th annual ceremony it was in bolloxie mrs sippy this particular episode swimsuits evening gowns 50 contestants i always watch these there was also uh a hip hop opening set to pokos follow your dreams and a production number blending michael jackson's jam with paula abdull's vibology it was aired live it would have been a big deal i would have been psyched to watch it all right i might have watched that hip hop opening but honestly this is again i think where we differ on this kind of thing i could not be less interested in any form of pageant i like pageants either but mistine usa for some reason i was really into yeah well i mean you know you mentioned the swimsuits it's kind of i could see the intrigue to a certain degree but even in these you know these blocks i know i chose an hour of michael jackson videos but you know i i would rather watch half an hour of a movie with a narrative than something without a narrative most of the time i i just lean to something that right and not the narrative of who's going to be mistine usa like a compelling storyline with a world like i'm obsessed with worlds i want i want not only do i want to see a tv show that takes place i want to know everything so like we're be i can just dive much more easily into a show with a reality well then i have a i have a suggestion for you oh at night at night o'clock hit me uh you mentioned you like diving into reality uh you mentioned you like swimsuits okay baywatch oh baywatch was on this is a great one eddie finds himself in big trouble after you rejects a teenager's advances a former lifeguard returns to baywatch part one of two uh aj langers and as caroline who was later on my so-called life she was all right and uh this very year she was in the people under the stairs and megan played by venessa angel of the weird science tv series well i do love boobs but i even knowing that uh it's a world it's a world i know but rosanne no it's rosanne all the way up here again another one of those shows where it's like i found out about things about sex because i was allowed to watch rosanne oh yeah i wouldn't have been allowed to watch that show about sex ed but i would have been allowed to watch darlene make jokes that reference the same thing or is it being on the pill yeah oh yeah exactly that's that's how i found out a lot of stuff dj master baiting well it was it was i think you know my mother who was probably the more i think again not con socially conservative at all but just protective of the two parents would have she was really into rosanne and i think that she saw that as a show that handled these issues maturely and and they had a realistic conversation absolutely like if you go back and watch it now it's a pretty progressive show oh it absolutely like they have conversations that weren't really happening on a lot of tv shows what we're happening in real life oh and oh absolutely but like you know the the way that like i i mean i think it was a more pragmatic show most tv shows existed in in a in a world where the problems that we had at the time were not really represented the right way and rosanne they was like yeah you know this this is what you know a young teenager older teenager this is what kids of the ages of her of her children were actually good yeah no it definitely felt real it definitely felt real and i think that still interests me as a show also it's fun it's fun it's fun it's very well written very good characters very well written but it's not big watch uh nine thirty would you go uh i what at nine thirty i switch over to uh nova although it actually starts at nine ten that's right uh so i would i only would have watched 20 i would only want to miss 20 minutes of it i probably would have watched this so weirdly and this particular episode of nova is almost like a very dry boring version of that three-two-one contact sex special uh-huh so this is a journey inside the human body that captures the conception and development of an embryo the Emmy winning film was produced by swedish film makers Lenart Nielsen and Bo Erikson microscope photography shows the merging of male and female cells the first divisions of a fertilized egg i'm not going to lie i didn't read the description when i chose nova and that sounds pretty boring yeah i was hoping for something about stars well if you want to go with a science show one of my all-time favorite shows beyond tomorrow is on the discovery channel watch it every week and this is about automotive hydraulics that improve shock absorption and cryptobiology okay that second half sounds interesting to me uh so wednesday eight o'clock would you go with wonder years wonder years absolutely back to the nostalgia thing great show i mean that is when i say like i grew up on baby boomer nostalgia defining the narrative of of how i knew about the world like it starts with the wonder years it's all like that show for i had the ability to deconstruct ideas of like aesthetics and and and the way things are being represented that show seems so meaningful yeah everything does and it still it still is like i mean that you watch that first episode it's as heavy today as it ever was one of the shows that managed to take nostalgia and mix it with the the turmoil of the sixties it's yeah i think that's what's good enough yeah oh i mean do you remember the one where wane's friend leaves for yes the father talks him out of it and then his friend leaves for it on the bus and then it ends with him going away on the bus and it plays forever young where they're basically like this guy dies and then absolutely like that's the whole point the the wonder years was set uh the age of the characters in the wonder years with the same age my dad was the years the wonder year was was set uh perfect so he watched that show and he definitely cried all the time i should i can imagine i mean that's that's got to be a heart wrenching if you are the age of those guys yeah i mean can you imagine watching a show set in 1992 with a seven-year-old main character and being like oh i'm really i feel a real connection with this i don't i feel like that you can't the times of that show is a rare example though of a show that's melodramatic but to a place where it doesn't feel false it also has a score that you could like never do i mean they can't even re-release that show because of this well well they can they just announced that it's being released in the fall with all original how they really do in that absolutely are absolutely not because that's taken forever you know i mean the streaming they stream it with other music it just doesn't do it it's not the same no you've got it i mean i think when i um when i was in college my friend uh who with who i'm staying here right now on the bus and actually she bought like vcd's of of it online because that was the only copies we could get and we watch these crunch down to you know vhs to digital yeah but hey it was it was you know so i'm gonna get it takes off the wonder years so yeah that's a good move and this is a repeat although it's a rare sitcom episode set in the summer because the tv season goes from september to may you very really get episodes set in the summer and this is a summer job right this is summer vacation plans turn to dust when kevin who reluctantly takes a job chopping onions at a chinese restaurant then calls in sick and heads for the lake to recapture old memories i remember this episode that's a great one but i would have gone with on-site mysteries it's a new episode yeah i considered it updates include the reunion of a family of a joba sisters from manatopa canada the 1991 prison release of a hillsborough mizuri woman also repeat reports on the search for a truck driver who kidnapped a woman in clinton mizuri and a mysterious medical condition that claimed the lives of six family members uh so eight thirty what'd you go with uh eight thirty i went with okay so i gave myself a couple options here i wrote doogie houser in i don't think i would watch that show and at the time i would have because i fancied myself a child genius but and have you come around to realize and that was not the case though i think i'm smarter than neil patrick harris so i'll take okay i thought that one evicted very enough but i probably would have watched the second half hour teenage mutant ninja turtles in the movie okay i think i would have gone with that as well uh now nine o'clock what'd you go with side felt absolutely but this is a great episode this is one of my favorites um early season i mean this is this is season one or season two of season two i believe it's season two yeah 92 next season two uh this is a subway adventures episode the whole thing takes place on different it's a jerry story and a lane story and a cramer story jerry's on the car where the guy gets naked um a lane missus or stop and goes to harlem by accident i forget what cramer's plot line is it might even be in there but uh this is like a early sine felled is a different show for one thing than late sine felled in a in a lot of ways and i i wished that there were a way to see early sine felled episodes without the laugh track because there's a lot of episodes that i feel like if you watch them now without the laugh track would feel like a modern comedy and probably the pacing of it is very different from what the show turned into did you feel like sine felled uh accurately reflected new york at the time uh yes and no i think i think this is a particularly interesting episode because um well like for example a lane is afraid to be on the subway right you took this away all the time you we were talking earlier how you've never driven no yeah i don't have a car i don't have a driver's license um i have driven cars before they're not that hard uh parking is hard driving is not that hard but i mean your world is around public transportation yeah my my the culture of driving is is is it's rare to see an episode all on public transportation yeah and i think that it's you know this is set in that sort of pre i mean you know new york is slowly gentrified been for doing that forever but like there's this sort of from from 92 to 2002 new york underwent this really rapid intense gentrification that changed things a lot you ship the homeless to florida yeah and uh sine fell oh here's california but sine felled um sine felled is set in you know what was then a wealthier neighborhood of from the most part at least jerry's it's a transitional new york time yeah well but i think that's what's really interesting about is tv always neuters how dangerous things are but because it's so the show is so new york and so and they're the people making it are facing it in having actually lived there right um it's an interesting show because that stuff does trickle into the reality and the subway episode although it is shot on like fake subway cars um they're wider much wider than the average subway car i mentioned that the woman who picks up george and takes the shirt off and handcuffs into a bed yeah that episode is played by barber stock who i absolutely love she played susan silverman spencers girlfriend on spencer for hire okay yeah i remember that actress very specifically he's great also early sine felt like i don't think that happens in this one because it's all in the subway but you see like the improv you see clubs like that there's one more stand up when there was more stand-up in it yeah i i've been rewatching early recently i i would rewatched some of the early seasons of sine felled with my girlfriend who is from uh debuke iowa okay and so obviously we have different takes on this show and she you know she's a person who moved to new york and sine felled well yeah i'm able to get the hell out of iowa but she's um you know it's always interesting people who moved to new york is like oh well you if you're my age you grew up watching the same things and i go oh yeah that was set in new york that's the kid you're just like you're normal of course it's set in new york that's where things are well that's what i was like with spencer for hire speaking of barber star right right so so she watched sine felled and and you know it was like i gotta go there right and so it's interesting to me i want to get kidnapped on the simple yeah but we disagree about one thing which i think is really interesting which is i watched we were when we were rewatching it i was like i said this show is so jewish like in the sense of humor is so extremely jewish that i cannot believe that it became a national phenomenon and my girlfriend was like i don't think this is that jewish and i'm like you're wrong you're right i think you're skewed a little bit style of conversation like i'm not jewish by the way but everything in the show i associate with jewish culture no but i think that i think that you're a bit skewed being in new york because i think that jewish i mean this is a whole other hour conversation but jewish humor has been such a major cornerstone in american humor that most people probably wouldn't recognize things are so jewish because they are just our comedy right also if you don't have jews and non-jews to see the difference between you might not recognize which traits are jewish culture and which aren't but like for example uh jerry's parents are like just the the biggest jews on television and there was some episode and they're arguing over like you know i think he his dad loses his wallet or something like that you know that episode and that was the one that made us talk about this where i was like i can't believe how jewish this show is and like everyone loved it and she was like no that's just like what old people are like i know i know this is why we're not watching it anymore they're coming up from florida like there's it's so obvious to me in that sense but but but also but that's also kind of new york yeah yeah i mean so some of it is more universal especially jesse jackson um so nine thirty would you go with uh nine thirty i'm watching the first half-hour teenage ninja turtles two secretly so you didn't go with wings which is one of my favorite shows no i never watched wings it's a great show i couldn't get into it i don't i don't know really anything about it at this point but it just was never early on my radar so i i love wings and this episode features a guest star who's one of my favorite actresses in the world who recently passed away in the last year sadly but susan torrell is in this episode and she is wonderfully insane she uh have you ever seen forbidden zone no no uh she's great net she she was uh also was in a cry baby a lot of people know okay you would recognize susan torrell she also narrates the ralph baske movie wizards okay uh but susan torrell's great and she's in this episode and it's it's a great episode so thursday night eight o'clock would you go with no question the simpsons yeah this is this is the move this is when the simpsons before they had moved to uh on sunday nights and danny devito does a guest voice on this episode of the simpsons yeah this is the second um this is i believe the first one's called oh brother where aren't thou where he's looking for his long lost half brother yes and this is the one after he's bankrupted him where her returns with a million dollar idea and we're we're august 27th so this was fox's brilliant move which they did with a lot of shows was to do new episodes in the summer and so this was just genius because you would have people who would get into the shows in the summer before all the other shows came back and would then be hooked into the fall yeah so this is early season right this is season three of the simpsons by the time this i mean i honestly am not watching the new episodes as they come out now but i feel like by the time simpsons hit season eight or nine they had gone from starting in the summer to starting in like september and then the first episode would be the halloween episodes and then by yeah by like by season eight it was like november 20th would be the beginning of the simpsons you know they they were huge they didn't have to try and hook people everyone knew the simpsons right but school would be back for me but we'd all we i remember there would be this like month or two where we would all be sitting around the table at lunch like what do we talk about right there's no stress that it's going to be monday more monday morning and we all be like this what do we like it was always this weird quiet and then the simpsons would start and then it'd be like oh now we have something that's what we used to always do and quote for a week and then and then school would feel like it had started and we all knew how to talk to each other again on the ground now again yeah uh it's an uncomfortable month early on there um but i will say that on any nature's kingdom was on where the skills of a dwarf mongoose keeps ahead of its predators so that's what you missed out on the lifecycle of the dwarf monster in my world it was it you watched the simpsons or you were not my friend so you're telling me that kids at your school would sit around and talk about dwarf mongooses i mean had that been on another time it was totally possible that we would have talked about that but the simpsons was i mean the the and uh my dad's a great guy but one of the best things he ever did for me is i had seen promos for the simpsons i never knew what what the deal was i remember one day my dad was like hey put the put the tv on fox i was like why i just just changed the channel and he was in the other room he wasn't even watching tv and i turned it and i was like the simpsons like i was familiar with it i knew what he wanted to watch i had never seen it i for whatever reason thought maybe i wouldn't be into it but i but i knew it because they used to run promos for it all the time and and he said the simpsons yeah yeah and he's on the other end of the house and i watched it and it was just changed your world changed my life no i mean that was probably like 1993 so this i wouldn't have been watching at that time right but that was like the foundation of my sense of humor of like what me developing my own not my parents yeah i mean i think that that's true for most of your generation absolutely yeah absolutely at this time 92 93's when the simpsons started to sort of be the simpsons most people remember the first couple seasons they made homeers voice was different yeah and i was season two still i mean i think there's a lot of really solid heartfelt stuff in there really be more it started to gel more this is season three i think we're talking about yeah and this season is is really fantastic and i was it's game and yeah i mean i obviously can't say enough nice things about the simpsons but it really especially when this hit like when we would have been watching this you know i i remember you know a lot of the kids i i knew growing up were into like friends or something like that oh god to this day one of the worst tg shows to be popular yeah and um kevin brad of your listening i i hope you died in a car crash but um did he teach you i never said no i did deliberately avoided it although i once did have a conversation with him in my in a bfa practicum course which as we discussed is the highest level film class you can take it Emerson he came in as a guest speaker and i asked him we all got a chance to ask him one question and i asked him about internet television and what it would take for the internet to actually challenge television and he's he said you know you'd have to have a captive moment that you couldn't have on tv and i said like a live execution and so i had this like really frank conversation with kevin brad creator of friends about what about the pragmatic right results of a live of a live televised execution that's why going to Emerson college is really good for most people i don't actually hope that he gets hit by a car but yeah but if maybe like a car could go through a time machine ahead when he was younger i might feel like i know you worked on dreamon which is a show that i i enjoyed yeah but you know i'd lose dreamon for friends to have never existed that's true and he he currently lives in the penthouse of the w hotel here in boston i met him once he he a couple times actually he'd come to a couple shows that i had done and would be very complimentary um and then i realized that that meant nothing well he you know i mean he tried to create a sketch pilot with a bunch of my friends who are doing comedy at Emerson at the time and here's the thing about him it was really reassuring to discover this um because as much as like you know he had this frank discussion with him about tv and he knew all about how the business worked um it was nice to know because i i was gonna say uh friends versus the Simpsons was the great divide in my middle school really those are the other ones that's like people who loved friends and there were people who love the Simpsons and if you were into friends i couldn't even talk to you i don't get i don't get how you could think that's funny pizza versus milk no but it was things that don't even but it would be people who would like they're like they thought the Simpsons was annoying and their friends was really funny and i guess like i can't identify with you at all so when i met Kevin Bright and my friends are trying to make this sketch pilot with him it was so reassuring to know that i'd been right all along because Kevin Bright does not get it like he's not funny he doesn't get humor in that sense he gets how to get a reaction from people he gets how to give him what they want he's not funny all the way to the bank yeah oh i'm sure he puts over a lot of people you know and i'm happy to know that nine-year-old me was right and it was just funny yes yeah Kevin right i think that's what it would take to to make sure that the Simpsons was funny there's probably a lot of things that support that theory it it is but it was nice to have my real a nice and surreal moment to have my real world experience prove that right childhood television every time of your tuition to Emerson a school i could not afford to go to i mean either um so eight thirty would you go with uh eight thirty i would probably maybe watch nova of which had started again at eight ten like it was making twenty minutes of it or Superman again this episode of nova is creatures that exhibit great speed and stamina are surveyed lee remic narrates footage of fleet-footed cheetahs no thing doesn't sound fascinating i probably watch Superman i want to watch the rerun of the series finale of growing pains this was literally the absolute last time growing pains aired at all as an as uh in prime time it aired in the syndication but this was the the final repeat of the final season of growing pains the next week it was the new episode the new show in that time slot would have cried Niagara Fall of Tears was very important in history i've brought this up before the day after growing pains ended i had to call in sick from school uh and so this was also the debut of martin wow it really hit yeah honestly martin was another one of those shows where i like it but again like in living color where um especially growing up in new york where like if you were a white kid latching yourself onto something like martin or in living color was like like cred for like oh i'm cool i like this show that's not for me right um but realistically i didn't like that show no i did not care for martin nine o'clock would you go with uh nine o'clock i okay i would have probably watched total recall starting at nine o'clock okay not the best for the okay dick adaptation no but i think but i do think it is one of the better uh 90s shorts and egg or action movies oh yes absolutely whereas most of those were not based on philipk dick no no that's true not officially no or both not at all in a lot of cases but and but i also wrote here there was a uh a like one hour tv special a focus on AIDS focus on AIDS 24 hours in the city not exactly uplifting but but modern me would be interested contemporary me i should say would be interested in seeing what the 1992 take on AIDS was i think that's a really because that's a big part of my upbringing and the AIDS crisis was a big part of my upbringing and i'm avoiding it but uh no but like that because that's that was one of those you know talk about coming online that's one of those news stories they couldn't avoid us knowing about oh yeah there's two very interesting sort of reality shows on at nine o'clock both massachusetts based one of them is focus on AIDS and this is uh the focus on AIDS is in massachusetts approximately 40,000 people are infected with the AIDS virus but only 8,000 are aware of it a candid examination of the impact of AIDS focuses on the Roxbury and Dorchester sections of boston that would have been very interesting to me since it had a local tie as well uh but i didn't realize it was massachusetts but i probably still would be interested there was another show called street stories on cbs and this was a visit to quote the arson capital of the united states lorence massachusetts to explore who's burning down the city and why this would have been absolutely fascinating lorence massachusetts uh if you want to wikipedia you'll find some fascinating things there i drive to it frequently it was uh i would have absolutely watched this at the time there was a lot of insurance fires in lorence uh that's what i would have gone with also the debut of the heights um the iron spelling produce show about a rock vent uh so we've both picked our shows friday night the final night of the week eight o'clock what do you go with eight o'clock all right uh i said the twilight zone for the hour okay i like the twilight zone a lot with the caveat though that this is a world war two episode which is not my favorite they always got very preachy there's a lot of world war two yes and i kind of feel like they're all the same it's a bit obsessed with world war two fair enough a lot of time travel to get to world war two i love time travel so some of the ones where it's like oh world war two i'm pretty sure there's a world war two fighter pilot wakes up 20 years later and a pilot wakes up 20 years earlier in world war two i think they've done that plotline in both directions at least the ones some of them are good i do like a time travel plot but the world war two ones are never my favorite i like the psychological ones i like the alien ones yeah those are never my favorite so i might have switched back and forth with family matters depending on whether or not the beginning of the twilight zone was oddly more terrifying than this was the final season of the twilight zone from season five obviously not in 1982 not live right but um these are the hour long episodes when it switched networks to i believe cbs someone will correct me i'm sure i think it started on cbs or no cbs currently owns it but yeah i i think it started on maybe see or nbc i want to say and move to cbs for the last season again someone will correct me i'm sure i'm wrong but i i'm fairly certain the last season was on cbs all right they changed the format from a half hour to an hour for the last season uh some of the weaker episodes of the last season or there is some good stuff and i believe it was to compete with the outer limits which was an hour long show right more monster centric normally i'd watch the twilight zone but at this time again not my favorite the more historical drama ones not my favorite as you stated there were two movies on i would have had a tough time picking between them one was the 1986 movie starring William cat called the house okay which is an excellent horror comedy never seen it uh you'd probably enjoy it it's uh it's a pretty good movie or the 1990 movie warlock starring Richard E. Grant and Julian Sands which has a fantastic climax that takes place in the churchyard of the old north church in boston with Richard E. Grant of with nail and eye which is a favorite movie of mine oh fighting julian sands the warlock says a quote that i bring up all the time and no one ever knows what this quote is from if anyone ever mentions pages or taking anything i'm always like take the pages if you're able and people are like no one has ever gone like oh warlock and i'm like no not warlock 1990s warlock and lory singer is in this movie who was uh promoted as going to be a next big thing for a while and then just kind of disappear all right remember tv guide only gives warlock two stars and i think that that is unfair also gives house two stars 8 30 you don't have to pick anything because you're kind of going back and forth between twilight zone and maybe family matters yeah 8 30 it might start flipping with superman again superman but not dinosaurs oh you know what let me tell you something i know you're gonna be mad about this i hated the tv show dinosaurs why i refuse to watch it there was i don't now i know that it was a smart show that got away with a lot of stuff everyone had been able to get away with and it had like a you know the ending is very dark there's a whole episode about marijuana that probably went over my head yeah i think the visual aesthetic revolted me as a child i watched that i would watch like a minute of that and i was just like oh no something that's wrong with it something that sort of rubbery yeah oh look at that like it just looked too real fake something like it was on also that baby character the worst i hated but it's almost back to the clown issue with the uncanniness of their almost two human looks two that's what they're saying too i would have i watched a thousand animated tv shows about wise crack and dinosaurs but you can they were really popular at that time they're not three-dimensional living breathing no though something about them being real enough was uh they were in that uncanny valley for me and i couldn't it just like it was a base level prejudgment revolting feeling instinctual revolution yeah i just couldn't just the no i probably didn't sit around long enough to watch a scene because i just couldn't handle it i think we've named two bands here uncanny valley an instinctual revolution two very good band names i love dinosaurs and for all the reasons that you've mentioned do you watch dinosaurs dinosaurs yeah yeah yeah yeah oh yeah well that i put a good i think was half of the dino power out or on devolve yeah dino writers and dinosaurs but that's that's a discussion for another time yes the answer is yes uh so nine thirty would you go or nine o'clock rather uh okay so nine o'clock um i i might watch this uh neck can call especially unforgiving forget to go just let me try it again unforgettable Nat King Cole just because you shared the same first name interestingly enough uh when i was growing up my parents told me i was not named after anyone and around actually probably around the around the time of this airing i learned that one of them let slip that they had read hey they were reading the scarlet letter around the time i was born i was like oh really is that like that's clear like it they're like oh both of my parents happened to be reading that while i was born i was like okay now i got it did you think you weren't named after anyone in that Nat you were the first person named yeah the first first Nathaniel on the entire earth no but they had always been like you know you're not named uh after because you know it's very common especially my mom's family is Italian very common to name the firstborn son after the father that kind of thing very common in the firstborn son after Nat King Cole after Nat King well so well here's so here's the thing is that i i was always told you're not named after anyone i was like okay it seems like a pretty big coincidence that the Daniel Hawthorne thing when i was like 17 like no probably like 19 my dad let's slip that actually he kind of had Nat King Cole in mind the whole time weird he like it wouldn't like even now if i bring this off he like back pedals and he goes oh that's all i don't even know what that is but i got i get the sense that like somewhere in his head he thought yeah yeah nana that's kind of cool but that explains why your dad makes you sing the christmas song every year yeah yeah i do always play that record i have that record at home i play at every business if you when you lived here going to school did you ever go up to Salem and go to the house seven gables no you know i never have actually you should it'll be like uh it'll be like going back to the old country yes Nat pilgrimage so i might watch this hour long that can call special depending on how panderia it is yeah well it's a bbc production okay so it'll be a little smarter yeah um or the Adam's family movie i might start watching a great movie absolutely great movie that's one also i think uh it ages well yeah and again you have uh sort of although it's a 90s movie it's going back to sort of a 60s yeah that's it has that ingrained like the base rate my base reality being that yeah 50s and 60s nostalgia that movie i think hits the uh all hits on the right lines i would agree and in why movies like land of the lost recently was just it just didn't work no it was missing sort of the heart of instead of going look at this old dumb stuff i think that things like the pretty much movie in the Adam's family movie had a real reverence and a heart for those things and which is why they were a success in it's like you said with the Brady Munch movie the Adam's family movie does a good job of being both of both capturing what was about not condescending to the original source material where it's like there was a good thing here uh it did something well in spite of some of the campiness right we're going to take that kernel you know that core interesting element of it and also kind of be a parody a self-aware movie without those two things coming into conflict that's hard to do yeah oh and you know like a loving parody basic and it's hard to do without Jon Astin who's one of my favorite people yeah i would have gone with sightings which was the low rent more monster centric version of Unsolved Mysteries oh okay yeah and this is a report on monsters including footage of an unidentified sea creature off Vancouver Island which i think is Ogo Pogo a Canada's version of the Loch Ness monster an analysis of evidence of Bigfoot and a Wisconsin werewolf i mean that i'm sold absolutely sold on that so that brings us to the end of the week we're done uh but i will mention this did you have another choice did i was going to say it and okay so nine thirty yep oh sorry well it's okay because that unforgettable nacking cola is an hour an hour Adam's family i might have been in for the long haul but as i mentioned as movies on tv go on the commerce was becoming tolerable might have switched over to either swamp thing or Cosby yeah swamp thing was a was a good adaptation uh it was very low rent but it was a good adaptation of the more Alan Moorish and as i mentioned any comic adaptation or i i would have watched it ever and and Cosby uh you know i like Bill Cosby yeah well that wasn't the Bill Cosby show that no i know well that's the thing i if it was the Cosby show that would almost have definitely been my choice i don't i didn't really watch Cosby but uh i would consider it now fair enough so i would have known a lot of flipping at nine thirty i have four options yeah that's that's a that's a rich night for for choices so as you know tv guide is not just informative it has opinions it cheers and it cheers and i'd like to read you the cheers and cheers from this week august 22nd 1992 and see if you agree or disagree all right lana so we start with a cheers because no one else has said it to the return of rob morrow to the set of cbs's northern exposure following a contract dispute over salary i'd share that um you know what never really watched northern exposure love northern exposure uh i dislike rob morrow i don't know him personally he might be a good guy but he seemed to hear him he seems like a real fucking cock like just a real fucking dickhead and he he left the series was replaced by paul vervenza good fucking riddance he was johnny Depp's roommate when they first moved to hollywood and yeah he just seems like such an asshole there's a picture in here he's got this look in his face let me see the picture and i'll but i'll base my judgment oh fuck this guy i mean i know it's dated but there's fashion but look oh he thinks he's the fucking what is your dad's jacket and what does this what kangol hat he's wearing a white kangol hat a beige jacket and a cream shirt and he's and he has a lollipop oh it's not what that is got a lollipop no this guy i i would if there was if it was cheers of jeers and he was in prison i would have said good yeah yeah awful basing this in tailand one photo well i think that's accurate so we're we're disagreeing with this cheer we're jeering rob morrow go fuck yourself you're wrong tv uh next we have a jeers to those ubiquitous floating billboards that turn up at too many televised sporting events blimps uh they've jeered blimps um i would have said they uh this is tough you're really agonizing over this well it's just funny to be like wow can you believe that there's like ads on blimps now like it's sports now you're lucky if you can see the field between the ads so like yeah i mean sure beginning of the end i'll jeer a blimp with you yeah it's also a derageable digerable joke and i couldn't yeah couldn't make it i um i'm going to disagree with this this jeer because i hate your problem probably the only thing i liked in the sporting event was the blimp well here's the other thing uh blimp provides a important camera angle and you don't get the bird's eye view otherwise without the blimp people aren't people aren't realizing this cheers to abc's recent run of first episodes from some of its top sitcoms recently the network showcased the pilots of rosanne coach the wonder years and doogie house or md within one week allowing viewers to relive rosanne's first wise cracks poach haden fox first crisis of conscience and kevin arnold's first flashback uh yeah i i'll agree with that i would i would love to the first the first uh yeah in the first wonder years episode in particular is really fantastic just watching over and over again never gets old yeah what that moment where he puts the coat around her in the in the middle of the woods oh man i haven't cried if i watch that now he's tearing up everybody just yeah and uh i don't care about coach but you know whatever if you want to catch up we come at you but but uh one or years in rosanne yeah absolutely getting on the ground level and finally uh nat thousand cheers to abc news for hiring a supremely talented reporter who just happens to be in a wheelchair you know what was john hockenberry i'll give them cheers for that and here's why um as different minorities and distance franchise unrepresented demographics make their way into television more and more now uh i mean you know and it's still a very sort of uh stale or stagnant way right a very tame way of bringing in you know but we are bringing more and more people who were unrepresented in the past uh the physically disabled are you never grab off never you do not see them on and and it's a it's a thing that definitely affects the way people act towards disabled people in real life yeah because if you never see images of them it becomes it seems grotesque it seems shocking to you and i will say you know i mean they're phrasing there oh just happens to be in a wheelchair as if there was no like consideration of like the moral high ground they'd be taking by hiring this guy now that i think about it it's kind of crazy that there's not more news anchors and wheelchairs they're sitting down at a desk one maybe there are we just don't know we don't know as far as you know every new z anchor so not done the thing you were doing the show i think you and i need to research this and see if every news anchor actually is in a wheelchair and if they're not maybe we need to have some work to do yeah we'll be like we're gonna put people in we're gonna kneecap oh yeah okay yeah because they can still do their jobs fine well thank you this has been a fun episode thanks for having me and there you have it that was Nat Townsend on the tv guidance counselor i told you it was pretty fascinating a lot of clown talk but you got a lot of good information and again i think you may be able to submit listening to this episode for college credit at least community college credit so once again please continue to email me at canadaicandread.com i love hearing from you please correct me i know that i get things wrong i do not research these things it is only from my own brain so i'm happy to be humbled by your corrections also please go to our facebook page where we will be having some contests and giveaways i have a whole basement full of television memorabilia that may show up as a contest or giveaway to the fans at some point so keep checking back there also for special episodes and we're going to have some great episodes coming up so so definitely keep listening thank you so much yet again and i will see you next wednesday on tv guidance counselor (upbeat music)