The 90s Were A Weird Time For Everyone

Over twenty years ago, a young Steinho got her own TV in her bedroom. This was partially due to wee Steinho having sleeping problems, which in turn was possibly due to dreams about man eating pigs and alien death worms, which is a story for a different day so back to the TV. It was an old TV without a remote, where you literally had to push buttons on the box to change the channel, and there were only eight buttons.

Some of the programs I liked to watch included “In Living Color,” “The Arsenio Hall Show,” and the home shopping network. I can’t explain these choices, other than that I thought Arsenio Hall was simply a newscaster, and then his opening monologue was not a series of jokes, but the same as watching someone like Peter Jennings. I remember after the whole Sinead O’Connor ripping up a picture of the pope situation, Arsenio had “the Pope” on his show to rip up a picture of her. I actually believed it was the pope, and was quite impressed that this holy man would take the time to amp up his cool image by visiting a late night talk show.

Anyway, in the grand scheme of evening television watching, I was exposed to a lot of weird programs in my battle with insomnia. Probably one of the strangest ones came in 1992, going on my tenth year on this planet. It was a post apocalyptical sitcom entitled “Woops!” It only aired I think nine or ten episodes, but the fact that it lasted even that long remains puzzling.

Here’s the logline of “Woops!” in a nutshell. Six crazy characters survive a nuclear holocaust and live on a farm. And it’s a comedy!

The show included such fascinating stories such as this golden nugget: the feminist plain jane discovers a magical crystal that makes her boobs grow bigger! See, that’s the good thing about starting with such a wacky concept for your show. Once you set the bar, things like magical crystals are totally acceptable! And how about this gem of an episode! The only black survivor happens to be a scientist, and the smartest one of the bunch. But when the former business man gets amnesia and believes he’s still living in a pre-apocalypse world, he thinks the sophisticated scientist is really his old black chauffeur! And he makes him sing Old Man River? Say whaaaat? These are the sort of wacky shenanigans you can only get on a one season failed sitcom. And on the Fox network no less!

Now, I don’t have a photographic memory, but I do have a pretty good one. I don’t know why “Woops!” stuck in my head. Yet, there it was. A shining beacon of bad TV. I can still picture the white dude being driven around on a tractor while poor scientist man sang Old Man River. I must’ve been only one of ten people to ever witness this scene, because I’ve been asking people for the last 20 years if they’d heard of the show, and no one ever said yes. And it was so crazy of an idea, no one could believe such a show could actually exist. I am not kidding when I say at some point, I wondered if I’d imagined it. After all, I’d been ten-years-old and prone to insane night hallucinations.

Then I read Phil Rosenthal’s book (blog post from March 23rd) and in a casual reference he mentioned the TV show. Oh, Phil Rosenthal, thank you! And not just for hugging me when I met you back in March. You gave me the gift of sanity.

You’re probably wondering, why the fizzle am I talking about a TV show that was canceled twenty years ago. Well, the honest answer is simply because it’s comical and I was thinking about it today. The intelligent answer, is that I’ve learned a lot about the television business in the last two years. The lesson of “Woops!” is how difficult it is to actually make a successful TV show. First you have to write an amazing pilot episode, and find a network/production company who wants to produce this pilot. Then if the pilot is good, maybe the network will pick it up for a certain number of episodes. And even then, if they don’t like the first ones you film, they can take those episodes back at any time. Twenty episodes can become thirteen can become six. If you look up “Woops!” on the internet, you‘ll see there were a few more they made that never aired. There are probably heaps and heaps of unaired shows, or shows that only ten people have seen before they were pulled. Most of these are terrible, but sadly some are really great, and were canceled simply because not enough people liked them. “Firefly” and “Freaks and Geeks” are two that I lamented the end of.

But there’s two sides to every coin. Yes, a lot of good shows get canceled too soon. Then, there are the shows like “Woops!” which lasted ten episodes. That’s ten more than a lot of scripts get and the fact that it got made at all just gives me hope. Because no matter how bad some of my ideas are, they’ve got to be better than “Woops!”