Welcome to the second installment of Flashback to the Present. I’ll be your contributing writer, Charles Knauf.
I’m not going to lie to you, dear readers; the last week was kind of hard on ol’ Chucky here. It started with that damn Broncos/Patriots game – I laid out a tad too much on the point-spread.
… goddamn Brady.
So, after I got a not-so-nice message from my bookie to pay up, I tried to squeeze FOG for some cash; however, I totally forgot that I was already in the hole with the editors after using the company card to have a white, ’89 Lincoln limo customized to look like Falcor the luck dragon. Probably not the smartest company car seeing as how it now only seats 2, gets 4 miles to the gallon, and measures a full 123 feet.
I needed to skip town fast, preferably to a location off the grid.
Then it hit me: there’s a place that’s not known to many, a little backwards but welcoming, a place with one phone and the only indoor plumbing can be found at the royal family’s estate. Not to mention the fact that, since they ran up a one trillion dollar debt to pay for the “Museum of Goat,” the dollar holds quite a bit of weight versus their currency, the digdas.
What is this magic land filled with rolling hills, gentle people and delicious bibbi-babkas you ask?
Why, it’s a tiny country in the Mediterranean called Mypos.
It was here that I got my idea for the second installment of Flashback to the Present: a little show called Perfect Strangers.
Perfect Strangers was a sitcom that premiered in 1986 revolving around two cousins, Larry Appleton (Mark Linn-Baker) and Balki Bartokomous (Bronson Pinchot).
It was essentially an odd couple concept: Wisconsin native Larry, having moved to Chicago and tasting freedom from his large family for the first time, is put-upon by his cousin Balki, a Mypos native whose naiveté is fueled by the strange and innocent customs of his homeland.
The series in and of itself wasn’t too groundbreaking: the premise, as mentioned above, was simply a re-hashed version of The Odd Couple – which, itself, is something that has been around since the birth of the sitcom.
However, it had a few things going for it.
The first was Pinchot’s performance – having been hot off of Beverly Hills Cop playing Serge, a character who’s nondescript accent was a slight inspiration for Balki.
The second was Linn-Baker’s often overlooked and surprisingly solid work as the straight man to Pinchot’s comedic routines.
The third thing was timing. The show comes from a solid pedigree – it was created by Dale McRaven (co-creator of Mork & Mindy) and developed by producers Tom Miller and Robert Boyett (Bosom Buddies, Happy Days, Full House, and Laverne and Shirley). With a combination of its background and performances, it had a steady run in the ratings for the majority of its lifespan. It was one of those network workhorses that was always chugging along (in this case, for eight seasons!).
Enter Jim Janicek; a writer and producer in charge of promoting ABC’s Tuesday and Friday night comedies. Inspired by the times in his childhood when his household would gather around the television and watch family-oriented programming, he molded the scheduling around blocks of light comedies and branded said blocks with titles. In 1989, Janicek’s biggest success, “T.G.I.F.,” premiered. It was a block of programs that included Full House, Family Matters (two more Miller/Boyett productions), Just the Ten of Us and, the lynchpin, Perfect Strangers.
For those of you who don’t remember a life before the internet, I’ll put T.G.I.F into context; it was, essentially, a mega-popular YouTube channel that had HUGE appeal to the youth market and could only be watched between 8 and 10 pm.
By the 1990’s, this block was a GIGANTIC success; eventually lasting more than ten years and glued literally millions of families around the box every Friday night.
Now back to Perfect Strangers. I’m not going to lie; this show (like most ABC family sitcoms of the late 80’s and 90’s) was nowhere near the comedic level of, say, The Honeymooners, I Love Lucy, The Larry Sanders Show, or The Golden Girls. Neither did it have anything close to the depth of The Cosby Show, All in the Family, or M.A.S.H. It was a gigantic Twinkie, battered in dough, deep-fried in lard and served to you by a dude in a TapouT shirt.
Every message is one-dimensional and ham-fisted into your ear holes. There is no subtext at all and the character arcs are so predictable it’s ridiculous. The jokes are basically all based on the fact that Balki is an immigrant that has translation issues and Larry is so neurotic he would make Woody Allen seem cocksure. After watching a number of episodes, I actually came to the conclusion that if you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. In a way, along with Full House and Family Matters, Perfect Strangers was a prime example of 80s and 90s corniness.
In other words this show, dear reader, doesn’t hold up at all.
However, remember what decade we’re talking about. This is the 90s, where the only game in town, for the most part, was the big four – ABC, NBC, CBS and FOX. As mentioned above, there was no internet and there was a huge void in the original content on the cable networks (yes, they were there, but Dream On wasn’t exactly pulling in the 10 million-plus viewers Perfect Strangers was on a weekly basis). Without the valuable channels of entertainment we have now, where one can choose what content that one appreciates, the formula for networks, especially regarding family broadcasting, was appeal to everyone and, unfortunately at the time, that worked.
Furthermore, if you wanted “safe” programs your kid could watch without concern that any subversive questions would be popping up in the content, ABC had the best track record at the time (especially after Disney bought them out in ’96).
Before I get to the conclusion, I do need to point at the gorilla in the room. The one thing that holds this show above the others in the T.G.I.F. block and, to this day, makes me warm over with nostalgic glee: the theme.
Good god did that theme kick ass.
Some of you might point out Family Matters, Full House, Step-by-Step, or Mr. Belvedere’s theme as better, but to you I say WRONG! True, the closest in the running was Mr. Belvedere, but nothing compares to Perfect Strangers. I mean, c’mon, it’s so epic that there are two versions!
It was incredible: in a little over one minute we see Larry and Balki’s story play out behind “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Me Now” (written by Jesse Frederick and Bennett Salvay). As a kid, I remember watching the beginning and really wishing I could go to Chicago and reenact the Balki and cousin Larry’s experience.
And I’m not alone – go to YouTube and type in “Perfect Strangers Intro Remake” and you’ll see some fantastic work.
Anyway, I’ve come to the conclusion that Perfect Strangers was simply a product of its time and place. That doesn’t get it off the hook, however – there were amazing sitcoms coming out at the time. It just means with that epiphany, I can just look at Perfect Strangers with a shrug and think, “Meh.” I don’t think it’s a case of “this show could be better,” or “it’s unwatchable;” I just think it is what it is. A sugary sitcom made to appeal to everyone.
Now I need to get out of here: I’m already booked for a game of bang bong poki noki waka yahoo against the Botulitis and our best player, Kristos, had to drop out because he ate some bad honey-roasted chalkidikis.
