Talking Simpsons - Special Cross-Post: Our What A Cartoon Episode About Get A Life

Episode Date: April 12, 2021

A special Monday surprise that any Simpsons fan should enjoy! In case you didn't know, our sister podcast to Talking Simpsons is What A Cartoon! Each week we cover a different animated series in-depth with history and scene-by-scene breakdowns. For April Fools we covered the live-action series Get A Life, co-created by Simpsons legend David Mirkin. We dive deep into this show and its close connection to seasons 5 & 6 of the show. If you enjoy this consider subscribing to the What A Cartoon! podcast, or maybe even become a Patreon subscriber to hear all our podcasts early and ad-free! Support this podcast and get hundreds of bonus episodes by visiting Patreon.com/TalkingSimpsons and becoming a patron! Check out our new shirts on TeePublic! And please follow the new official Twitter, @TalkSimpsonsPod!

Ahoy, ahoy everybody. Welcome to a special hijacking of the Talking Simpsons feed. What's happening here, Henry? What's going on? Well, as some listeners may not know on this feed, but me and Bob have a sister podcast called What a Cartoon, where we cover an animated series just like we do The Simpsons every week. And this week, for our April Fools, we actually covered a live action cartoon and i think it's one that listeners to talking simpsons are really going to enjoy because it has a lot of close connections to the simpsons you may not be aware of that's right we covered the classic fox cult sitcom get a life starring chris elliott but more importantly showrun by david merkin the showrunner for seasons five and six of the simpsons and get a Life has a lot in common with The Simpsons.

Oh, yes. Yeah. You can pretty much see the through line from the end of season two of Get a Life to season five of The Simpsons. And me and Bob, I think every time Chris Elliott's character does a thing that a Merkin Homer did, we're like, oh, yeah, Homer did that. So I think you guys will learn quite a lot uh from that definitely we also give the bios of people like chris elliot and david murkin where

they came from what they're doing now and their uh showbiz histories all very fascinating stuff yeah including uh maybe some hollywood dirt as well there's some behind the scenes tension yeah it's it's a really fun podcast and if enjoy that, please check out the What a Cartoon feed on wherever you find podcasts. Or if you sign up at the Patreon at patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons. In addition to the week ahead of time and ad free Simpsons podcast, you also get every What a Cartoon podcast in the same RSS feed. So consider signing up for that today. But at the very least, I hope you enjoyed this What a Cartoon and check out the other cool stuff we're doing there.

Cartoons from present and the past Every week will be an animated bash What a cartoon What a cartoon Maybe a short but mostly short We'll talk, we'll analyze, exploring as we go What a cartoon What a cartoon

What a cartoon What a cartoon Hello everybody and welcome to What a Cartoon, the podcast that's still searching for a cure for sour stomach. I'm one of your hosts, the dangerous but necessary Bob Mackackie and this is an audio exploration of every cartoon ever who is here with me today henry gilbert and i thought today was one of those days i was semi-solid and cars would pass right through me and today's episode is all about the get a life episode girlfriend 2000 oh what a perfect day so lucky to be able to live in such a nice, beautiful, safe neighborhood. And welcome once again to our very predictable April Fool's prank on you, where we cover a live action cartoon.

The first time we did this, it was Strangers with Candy. Last year, it was The Adventures of Pete and Pete. And now we're doing Get a Life, a very important piece in the simpsons puzzle oh yeah you're a big time simpsons fan and you know us from our first show talking simpsons then you are probably big fans of seasons five and six show run by dave merkin but if you've never seen get a life it is an unlocking experience of like oh this didn't come out of nowhere the murkin years it's all there in good life and yeah this was a cult favorite of 90s kids for comedy nerds though you know i watched it some as a kid but i'd never seen the complete series it did get some you know

best of dvds and vhs's and i did watch those but i never sought out the full series until it finally came out in the the DVD set yeah it was widely unavailable until 2012 unless you went on YouTube or found you know people who had ripped them from VHS tapes but yeah I did watch a lot of this as a kid and all of my memories as a child are about watching TV so I have a very vivid memory of watching the episode Neptune 2000 that's the episode in which they build a submarine in their shower and almost die. And it broke so many sitcom rules that I had inscribed in my head that it blew my mind. Here's another sad thing about me. When I grew up, I didn't have a dad for a while.

So on TV, I was just finding father figures in different characters. So one of them was Launchpad. One of them was Peter Venkman from The Real Ghostbusters. And one of them was Chris Peterson. I them was peter vancman from the real ghostbusters and one of them was chris peterson oh i thought chris peterson could be a really cool dad so that explains how warped i am today oh wow that really why i shouldn't have children and chris peterson is the type of guy who watched tv his entire life and lives by it it's true that's one of my favorite things about peterson and definitely i live a life reflecting that too of like oh well i saw this thing on a tv show it must be true or like i remember this old tv show there's a joke where he says that doesn't listen to people or taking information because he always

has old tv show theme songs playing on a loop in his head except for him it's the 70s and for us it's the 90s yes yeah i like it a lot upon watching, it made me remember what a big Chris Elliott fan I am. And whenever he shows up in something, I'm delighted. And I've read all of his books, and I kind of seek out everything he does. I love Eagle Heart. And I have one other story. It's that one year ago, sorry, no, no, 10 years ago, big difference in numbers there, when I first moved to the Bay Area, I decided to check out this new town called Berkeley

that I was living in. Yo, let's go into random stores. And I went into the Half Price Books Books and I found a very special book. I'm digging in my book bag right now. I found this book in Half Price Books and I've held on to it ever since Daddy's Boy, Chris Elliott's first book, which is a parody of Mommy Dearest about him and his dad. Oh, that's amazing. The original.

Oh, that is classic. Made before Get a Life. It was made based on his Letterman fame and his, I guess, Showtime special fame. But yeah, this was my welcome mat to the Bay Area. Just like, welcome, Bob. Cool people live here. That's amazing. Yeah, you couldn't just walk into a store and find that in your boring suburban town.

That is so cool. I treasure the first purchases of comic books I made when came to berkeley and realized it was a cool town but yeah you know i got to more center my idea of like that chris elliott is one of the biggest like comedy geniuses and most groundbreaking people especially just in in the world of american comedy of our lifetimes like because all of his work led the way of like what weirdness could be on television and he pushed envelopes in so many different ways i got super into eagle heart that was it's one of my top five adult swim shows and maybe that'll be in two years from now we'll do that but i got to go to a uh been in the same room as chris elliott once for an eagle heart season two panel that they did and and it was just so great like i

asked the dumb question to the other people on stage who were just like are you guys intimidated writing for chris elliot such a you know an important figure and i think i made everyone uncomfortable with that question that's the point of any q a panel yeah but i think my question was good but uh well the tragedy of chris elliot is that the mass market was not ready for him. And these little niche markets that he'd be perfect for did not exist yet. If he was born 10 years later, he could have been a Tim and Eric style person. But he tried to make it work in the mass market. And they said, no, thanks to you, Chris Elliott.

You're weird looking. But Chris Elliott is the most normal looking guy on earth. I think they were just weirded out by a young man with a beard, which wasn't happening at that time period. A beard and being openly bald. Yeah. Just, you know, well, he wants to look weird. He likes to look at you and have a weird look on his face and make you uncomfortable just by his way of existing.

And there just weren't places. The closest thing to Adult Swim in the 80s was Letterman. It was this after midnight thing that the bosses were asleep and they could just do ridiculous bullshit and a perfect place for chris elliott and a whole generation of writers to grow up but once it was like how's it work if we give him his own show well there wasn't really a place for him even on like hbo or showtime and their networks didn't want his weird shit the club and this was 1990 to 94 was the last time chris ellie got to be mainstream and he got punished for the rest of the 90s because of that cabin boy destroyed

him and i like cabin boy i'm pro cabin boy yeah it's a pro cabin boy podcast i really feel bad for him and adam resnick that after get a life was so a cult favorite but canceled and treated so poorly by execs he then got to have a 10 times worse experience with a film and because it was much more money that he was responsible if only Tim Burton had actually directed that movie ah it would have made him peewee Herman yeah I think for sure I, that's our personal histories with it. But what led to the creation of the show Get a Life, which aired on Fox in 1990 to 1992? Well, three main dudes to talk about. They are the three credited creators of the show. Let's start with Chris Elliott.

We've been talking about him. Youngest child of the comedy duo Bob and Ray, Bob Elliott. One of the famous Bobs. Yes. Now passed away, unfortunately. The Bobs are dwindling. He was born in 1960, so perfect Gen X age. And he got into creative work very quickly following in the footsteps of his dad.

I mean, that book and other books joke about that. He's like, he does so many jokes about how in this show, too. They're like, my dad hates me. Bob hates, I disappoint him, all this silly stuff. But he loves his dad yeah very much and wanted to follow in his footsteps and look hey I don't like the nepotism that's in Hollywood it all turns but Chris Elliott's the one I give a pass for being like no he really is that good it's okay yeah and his dad is I mean his dad is notable but he is a radio

comedian yeah so he's not the son of Tom Hanks or something like that. Yeah. Also, he didn't grow up in Hollywood like so many of these IMDb Junior kids. That's true. Pennsylvania, I think, or Maine? I think so. By IMDb Junior, that's a copywritten phrase of Jack Allison, the very funny guy. But anyway, so yes, very quickly he got into the world of comedy.

And one of his earliest jobs was a production assistant at the start of late night with david letterman and swiftly he became a favorite of dave's and head writer merrill marco i mean you look at him he's funny he's a funny guy he'd be involved in like stupid pet tricks things they're like this guy's funny i watched a ton of his stuff on letterman i saw a lot of it's on youtube so check it out yeah the the don giller channel or something something like that guy yeah it has it has the entire guy under the seat saga which i'm like halfway through i can't wait to finish it tonight but when i watch those sketches i get the sense this is the only person david letterman ever liked yes yeah well no he's so tickled by chris elliott he likes him though in one of my many elliott

interviews i listened to he was like yeah dave liked me to a point but he said one time when he was in his marlon brando character he put his hand on dave and he was like after a few seconds dave was like that's enough touching right pulls the hands away but yeah elliot in 1983 became a writer and performer on the show officially learning the ropes and trying a bunch of things in this like quick disposable world of after midnight comedy he he talks in other things about how like get a life he was unprepared for get a life and cabin boy because he was so used to on letterman that if you did one thing and it sucked it's like well i got tomorrow i'll just do a funnier thing that

like it's just oh if something doesn't succeed i can just try the next time and nobody's gonna punish me for doing bad at this not the case outside of letterman unfortunately and yeah there were characters like panicky guy conspiracy guy guy under the seats fugitive guy and elliot was a breakout star of letterman it's funny to watch those clips of him on letterman because when he comes out people explode with applause and cheers they love him they can't wait to see him i didn't realize he was such a big guy on that show he became a real quick hit yeah you got to watch them all in sequence to see I go sometimes the audience doesn't get what he's doing but mostly they like it and and yeah you compare it to you know what was edgy American humor then and he was in a completely different universe from stuff you know like snl or whatever like that the

saturday night live is the ebersole era so it was the most like broey jocular the show an already jocular show god but yeah elliot was such a big hit that he could actually star in his own one-off comedy specials for premium cable his first one being action family in 1986 which aired on cinemax it to me honestly feels like he went to the future and saw that he did get a life in eagle heart he's like what if i did a thing that was both of those shows in one you're right it is both of those because it's a 70s detective show but when he comes home to his family it turns into like a brady bunch style sitcom oh it's so funny it had a joke just last night that made me laugh now it's so far ahead of its time it's a first person shot

of him entering his detective office and his secretary this woman comes up to him in first person view and she kisses the camera and then it pulls back to show both of them and because she kissed the camera in first person view, she kissed his eye. And there's just a giant lipstick mark on his right eye. And I was like, this is the funniest thing I've ever seen. And of course, David Letterman and Bob Elliott are in it. David Letterman is only in things that Chris Elliott does outside of the late night show. He was supposed to be in an episode of Get a Life.

But have you seen the one with Martin Mull? Which is good. Is that Chris Wins a Celebrity celebrity is that it's so obviously made for david letterman but i think as merkin would tell the story david merkin i'll get to him they all thought internally like well we'll definitely get dave and so let's just write this whole episode for dave and when it came time to ask dave they found out oh letterman won't do this at all they will show up with one line like want to buy a monkey and that's it i mean he didn't want to fly to la i think that was the big bit of it but action family look it up on youtube because it was released on vhs so there's a pretty good just scan event and also on that same vhs was 1987 cinemax special fdr one man show which is also

very hilarious that it is the character of chris elliott's like i can do a serious one man show which is also very hilarious that it is the character of chris elliott's like i can do a serious one man show where i play fdr the whole time everything goes wrong in it and it's very silly and one of his consistent things he does throughout his career is make these crazy revisionist histories of real life events a lot of his books are about that too uh i mean the character of the arrogant idiot is such a comedy staple now, but he did it in such a wonderfully specific way that like his arrogant idiot is based on him like looking so average, but he's like, I'm so full of myself. And then there's a great one in one of the Letterman ones I watched of him saying like,

you know, Dave, you should be in movies. And Dave's like, yeah, you know, I really should give it. And then Chris Elliott goes, fuck you. we actually bought it yeah dave you should be in movies i also like the skits where he's uh slightly psychotic because that's what the guy under the seats is because chris will come out do a little bit about the guy who lives underneath the bleachers that all the uh audience members sit on and then he and dave will have a conversation about how the bit went and he takes everything extremely personally And then he and Dave will have a conversation about how the bit went, and he takes everything extremely personally,

and then he threatens to kill Dave before going back under the seats. And just like in Get a Life, they play psychotic music as he's giving his threats to Dave. And Dave is not taking him seriously. He's like, now you don't want to threaten people there, Chris.

I love, yeah, he's so good at the creepy stare. But if you watch the FDR ones in Action Family, you can see already what he wants to do with the medium of television and like this parody of sitcom and sitcom tropes. Like he wants to make a subversive thing. He doesn't want to make a mainstream show. He doesn't want to make, you know, the Hogan family or whatever, or what we're seeing as standard vehicles for you know cosby shows i guess you'd say for when you have like oh we got to make a sitcom built around a popular comedian it was usually in that template so that takes us up to the mid 80s which is when a young writer fresh out of nyu joins letterman named adam resnick uh first as

an intern and then becoming a writer, quickly gravitating to Chris Elliott as a creative partner. In a 2012 interview with Resnick and Elliott together on the Tom Sharpling's The Best Show, Elliott is very clear in his praise of Resnick, like still really likes him today and says like, if my best work was almost always with stuff Adam wrote for me and that they are just such a great team together and I mean you can see when Resnick joined they did all the great guy stuff and other very funny Chris Elliott things but after that were like Chris Elliott Downey Jr. segments or him as Marlon Brando or one I really loved watching on that channel was his

parody of Letterman where Chris Elliott hosts a three minute version of the Letterman show within Letterman. Yes. And he interrupts the show, too, to do it. And he's like, oh, we have via satellite David Letterman here. Dave, how's it going? Well, my show's way better than yours, Dave. God, they're so good. But me and you didn't get to watch these in real time because we were like four when they happened. We watched them in the reruns of it and i was a letterman viewer at the very tail end of the nbc era in the early 90s

and then throughout a cbs run probably till the late 90s but he had lost a lot of his edge and it was completely gone by the 2000s but i saw like a hint of what i missed in the 80s in those early 90s shows i i do feel it feels weird now that like I think David Letterman has recognized that a lot of the criticisms of him were like you're a massive sexist and an asshole. And his way of dealing with that like I'll just grow a big beard and solemnly interview you know powerful people and be like you're pretty great. Yeah. Like I would rather he instead use that kind of platform to uplift the next Chris Elliott. But like David Letterman is not going to be that keyed into young comedians to do that. No. And going back to clips of him, it's so refreshing to see somebody who's not acting like Jimmy Fallon or Jimmy Kimmel.

Just someone who is willing to be himself. Just a curmudgeon who doesn't care. Could you imagine David Letterman pretending to like, you know, Rugrats or something? Let's sing the Rugrats theme. I was thinking he would never do karaoke with you. Oh, God, no. You know, Conan at least had some of that hate. But even he was like, ah, it's a fun game.

I'm a fun clown. Conan likes to entertain. David Letterman is just like, huh, how's that? Like, going through that channel, too, I just watched this writing gag. That YouTube channel is great, too, because he cuts together bits as they continued on. Yeah, chronologically. One of the best ones I saw that I'd never seen before was that one time on the show, he praised the new Stevie Nicks music video.

I was like, oh, it's a great music video. I'd love to have Stevie Nicks on. His people contacted Stevie Nicks's people and they sent him back a letter saying, please stop saying you'd want her on the show. And he's like, oh, well, then I'm just going to do a running gag. I'm going to promote the other shows she's on. He makes up terrible shows that Stevie Nicks is on instead of his show. That kind of bitterness I appreciate.

Yeah, that's biting the hand and feet. Well, Elliot would say that that actually taught him a bad thing for his Hollywood career because, you know, he played this arrogant moron mocking his own appearance and likability for laughs. And you rarely pitied him because he was such a jerk in his character. Elliot was so liked that he got cast in. He has a small role in the Manhunter film, which was like the first Cannibal Lecter movie. And he's in the abyss as well. He is so distracting in the abyss because

Chris Peterson finally got to go in a submarine his dream came true as Elliot and Resnick would tell the story in a 2012 interview they greatly regretted a real missed opportunity with James Cameron because Elliot tells the story that like James Cameron loved him he thought he was super funny they joke like oh I'll be in all your movies now and so james cameron comes to late night to promote the abyss chris elliott with another writer on the show do a bit going like oh abyss is just this dumb movie where like i'm stuck in a pool like the whole time and he thought it was funny to goof on the abyss and elliott said when he came backstage we thought it would have really entertained cameron he was instead furious because he was like now I have to go out and do this and he said the Cameron side I think never

talked to him since oh James Cameron self-serious that sounds unlikely you know what they should have cast Chris Elliott in the Billy Zane role in Titanic better movie way better movie oh man I'm just seeing it now in my head or is him as one of the below deck guys who's like we just love to party i want to see him dancing a jig poor and muddy but rich in spirit uh but yeah so on all that stuff elliot was doing mostly with adam resnick they were getting offers like elliot wasn't going to be on letterman forever you know he was hot hollywood wanted a piece of him here he is working in new york on the letterman show but they want a piece of him and it's pretty obvious that chris elliott and whatever he was going to do he was going to take adam resnick with him they were just so in sync as writers together all right david merkin covered him a lot on talking simpsons yes short version is gotta start as an aspiring comedian with a

darker sensibility late 70s early 80s in hollywood lover of monty python mike nichols woody allen the smart comedy of the 70s like he was super into that and and wanted to make some of that for himself but his first writing gig after giving up on stand-up comedy would be on the seventh season of three's company i kind of want to look up his episodes because pluto tv has a three's company channel and i'm waiting for a merkin one to look up his episodes because pluto tv has a three's company channel and i'm waiting for a merkin one to show up see that there's any merkinisms in those well he becomes story editor in the eighth and final season of it so he already moves up the ranks you can see ambition in merkin he doesn't just want to be some rank and file guy and instead

of dumping on three's company of like oh i can't believe i worked on that he's like no they taught me everything about structure and i i learned so much about sitcoms there and how they got out on time yes yeah then so merkin would then move on to new heart the 80s bob new heart show a different bob of comedy legend it was a fun and slightly strange sitcom though not you know as crazy as he'd like it to be he'd end up getting to show run the show in the later years. He leaves in season six and he says like he wanted to do weirder Dada-ist stuff. Like he really was getting sick of the sitcom format. Like in a million of those interviews, you don't need to prompt Dave Merkin much to say like,

all these sitcoms are bullshit. They lie to you about what things are going to be like. One of the interviews on the Get a Life DVD is talking he's talking to like steve papoon or jace richdale and one of them saying you know i almost went to the ferris bueller sitcom and he went that show is a piece of shit yes that show sucks exactly i just love how candid he is as long as a friend didn't work on it in a high position he'll definitely say that after leaving new heart he's trying to make his own stuff he also did small work on the fox adjacent it's the gary shandling show which was on showtime that was the first thing i gravitated to on fox as a little kid i was way too young for understand really what

it's the gary shandling show was but i liked that it was cartoony he talked to the camera and be like well that's pretty silly huh folks and that is in the simpsons universe too as well yeah it got him in contact with sam simon and guys like that yeah and another thing and like i didn't realize that new heart was mary tyler moore production yeah so that puts him in the james brooks world as well so like he knew james brooks he wasn't just like uh i'll take merkin to run the show. This Merkin guy seems neat. James L. Brooks was a fan of Dave Merkin. Merkin would say in 89 that he was offered to join Simpsons. Though, I wonder, I wouldn't think he'd be above Sam Simon or even at Sam Simon's level. I would think he'd be like below Sam Simon in it.

So I could also see that's why he would turn that down while wanting to work on his own things but yeah i mean it's the gary shanley show he also talks about that it was kind of what he'd end up doing on the simpsons later which is like a day or two a week in the rewrite room while he could focus on trying to make his own shows so 88 89 merkin is trying to make a show another important thing about merkin is that he loves British comedy. He aspires, specifically in the 70s and 80s, he aspires to make something like that in America. He was trying to make a show with Graham Chapman, 88, 89, and sadly, Graham Chapman passed away very quickly from cancer. And so, then he attempted to do a U.S. version of The Young Ones called Oh No, Not Them.

And I think there's a pilot for that, right? Yes, they made one pilot, which he says tested through the floor, but he did it at MTM, so another Barry Tyler Moore production. And I'm sure we'll talk about it, but he eventually made his own sketch show after Get a Life. Yes, yeah, he finally got to do that, but on Oh No, Not Them, he had hoped to get Chris Elliott in one of the lead roles, but Elliott turned him down because Elliott wanted to make his own stuff. So that takes us to 1990.

Merkin was a big fan of Elliott too because he was a giant Letterman fan. If you recall, on Simpsons, needlessly, they did a pro-Letterman couch gag when Merkin was in charge of just his way of saying oh yeah fuck jay leto i i'm on the letterman team after oh no not them fails merkin's looking to get a new gig and wants and ready to run his own show and they also talk up there's executives that did really like him he fought with some executives but he had other executives who were into his style comedy that includes peter churnin so let's talk about him really quickly because he was like the protector of get a life at fox he was an ex-showtime exec who was known to make noise with edgy series he

don't greenlit it's the gary shandling show and also this show that i'd never heard of before doing the research for this called brothers had you ever heard okay no so in peter churnin's interviews in the extras on the dvds he says like oh i greenlit the first gay sitcom i was like what wait what is that and i googled it like there is some gray area to actually call it the first gay sitcom but showtime had a sitcom that ran over a hundred episodes really called brothers about a close-knit group of three brothers, and one of them comes out as gay. And they actually deal with gay topics in a, like, been planned as a regular mainstream sitcom, but they wanted to make it less gay. And Showtime's like, let's go out there. We can say, get attention on us.

Like, oh, yeah, we've got the gay sitcom first ever gay sitcom a couple episodes are on youtube i've never watched it i've heard it holds up in some ways and not at all in others but i'll leave that to our friends the gayest episode ever to cover someday i asked our friend drew and he's like i have heard of it we probably will do it but also worth mentioning on brothers regular on the series for the first four seasons robin reicher who will go on to play sharon Oh, I love her. So a favorite of Peter Chernin. And yeah, Chernin says, he's like,

oh, I've got a twisted sense of humor. I really like Get a Life. It's like... When you really care about someone, you shout it from the mountaintops. So on behalf of Desjardins Insurance, I'm standing 20,000 feet above sea level to tell our clients that we really care about you. We care about you. Home and auto insurance personalized to your needs weird i don't remember saying that part

visit dejauden.com care and get insurance that's really big on care did i mention that we care yes sir boss yes he is the guy that made fox air spewing me the uh the gross out episode of this show he was the one defender of it there i think it made it i mean definitely as far as execs go he seems uh not as brain dead as most i'll say that in the interviews he comes off all right and then before i was feeling like ever liking churnin too much i looked up like what's he been up to so well uh he had rose to the rank of coo and president of news corp from 1996 to 2009 you know when fox news was really getting going he was there i mean it wasn't his division but he was the president but then he left news corp in 09 because rupert burdock just put his son in charge of it instead how nice don't't worry. Peter Chernin then started his own media company slash private equity firm.

And I'm sure he's doing great work. He's part of the funders of Barstool Sports, a great organization. I can't believe he went from Get a Life to private equity. I mean, hey, you go where the money is, you know. He wants to be a billionaire, not a millionaire. The funny thing is now I just kind of shrug at Fox News because we have more psychotic news networks like Newsmax and One American News Network. Way more insane than Fox News.

Fox News, they probably welcome the One American News out there because they're like, see, we're not that bad. Give us a break. Fox will not invite the MyPillow guy on. They will. The only reason they stop inviting the MyPillow guy is because they're like, don't get us in this class action lawsuit guys we don't want to just give away a billion dollars so churning is in charge of the fox network and is looking to make noise that's why they

had so many controversial or edgy shows in you know the early 90s and that includes taking a risk on say the first primetime animated sitcom since the Flintstones. And I mean, you see, by the early 1990s, you've got Bartmania starting and Married with Children is still hot, hot, hot. And they've got In Living Color. They're looking for more fun stuff. And Fox was one of many networks that wanted to work with Elliot. And Elliot was definitely going to make something with Adam Resnick. Though, Adam Resnick was still

full-time on letterman so he couldn't be in all of these meetings but this is where it comes into like i hear merkin on some of these things say like oh and then elliot brought in adam resnick i more get the feeling from listening to the elliot and resnick conversations that resnick was always planning this show with elliot and then merkin seemed to see it as like oh no resnick joined later but there's the feeling all right well i guess let's talk about it we haven't planning this show with elliot and then merkin seemed to see it as like oh no resnick joined later but there's the feeling all right well i guess let's talk about it we haven't mentioned the creative tensions uh that still persist 30 years later yeah so merkin will say that this is an approximation of merkin's views on the events elliot was looking to make a show

with a network he was getting offered very safe things. And Merkin was one of the people who was telling him, don't do something safe, do something crazy. And Merkin was very much in the mindset of, I still want to make the American Young Ones, which if you watch Young Ones and Get a Life, you can definitely consider them of a piece for sure merkin sees it as he convinced elliot to work with him to make this show and that david merkin as the more experienced showrunner would be put in charge of it and then adam resnick joined on and they created the show together and they would be the three leading forces on it elliot doesn't agree so much with that version of events says elliot carefully put it in a 2007 npr interview adam and i created the show and then they wanted to bring in you know somebody who you know they could call a showrunner who would also get creative credit and then the

interviewer goes isn't hollywood great no no it's not that's why i live on the east coast so i think it is more likely that merkin was an insistence on the network that didn't want to trust adam and elliot to run a show and then merkin was brought in for it earlier in that interview who if you really want to know how chris elliot feels about dave merkin well i want to play a clip from david merkin who's the executive producer oh please don't it's part of an interview, a DVD of the show. Oh, no, no, no. Chris Elliott, this is your life here. Let's play that.

The show is purposely so sarcastic and sort of angrily dripping by at most sitcoms. In other words, it was our reaction of being inundated by sitcoms that were full of sickly, sweet, and it wasn't real.

And so, you know, it really offended a lot of development people on very deep levels. Where they remembered years and years later, this is my No Get a Life, No Get a Life, and all of us were hooked on the show. We're always suspect. That's really interesting. I've never seen a commentary to the commentary now we're commentating on that and that was 20 years after they made the show too he still is really pissed off so yeah i mean when you hear elliot say things and that was from 2007 him saying like oh tell me about my show it's like there you go yeah the elephant in the room

on the dvds which are great by the way they're still in print i saw on amazon you can still buy them new commentary on every episode you know deleted scenes all kinds of crazy stuff on the dvds except for chris elliott is not on the dvds and dave murkin talks about him in glowing terms but as if he's dead yep yeah because they never work together again yeah i will say there's something of a pattern you can see that David Merkin works with a lot of great people who will go on to do lots of great things. But the person they don't keep working with is Dave Merkin. Very few people other than, I'd say, Jim Brooks and Matt Groening work with David Merkin on more than one project. I don't know what that says about his work attitude or how he runs things i mean there's that story in the unauthorized simpsons about him calling somebody an asshole and being pretty shitty

in the writer's room to people and then we have our interview with bill oakley saying that he and josh weinstein did not get along with merkin so they were kind of just sent off to write on their own yeah yeah in a more charitable 2012 interview elliot and resnick were like look there's we had a view of what the extras on that dvd should be a third person didn't agree with us and we decided not to be involved and you can figure out what else we're talking about here i'm upset whenever dvd commentaries are recorded but not released because he and ed and resnick recorded an entire commentary for all of season one right that's lots of time. Just like how there are Simpsons commentaries that exist but aren't online or on DVDs

because the DVDs aren't existing and they were going to be on the FXX app, which does not exist anymore. So that sucks. One thing about Merkin, it seemed like he could rub people the wrong way just because he is so, so sarcastic. Yes. Like directly to your face, he'll say the cruelest thing ever. And then he'll say, of course thing ever and then he'll say of

course i'm kidding yeah that's that's his gimmick he will say like something incredibly rude or insensitive those are the same those are those are synonyms by the way you get what i mean but he'll do that and say of course i'm kidding but like the one time he's actually sincere on the dvds is he mentions that when he was five his father died and that is why he went into show business because in show business because in show business people die but you see the actors afterwards like you can overcome death via entertainment and that is what led him to entertainment it's the only sincere thing i've ever heard him say he hates sincerity on simpsons commentaries when phil hartman is brought up he's

just like ah come on it's it's let's just laugh he was great let's remember the good times like or on the dvds they have the 2000 paley center discussion and he he basically just holds court and i occasionally ask myself why they invite other people here dave merkin just talks the whole time but like eleanor the mother on the show she tells this very sad story about when she got cast on the show during filming her husband of 30 years passed away and how bob elliott you know comforted her he'd been through similar stuff and then dave murkin can feel you can just tell that he feels the audience is getting too sad so he's like i of course was very bothered by that they just joke and everybody laughs it's like that's his thing he's like he doesn't want to

feel too much in a moment he is never sincere uh one of my favorite running jokes he does on the commentaries is if something horrible happens to chris or something dangerous is happening and he goes well of course that's safe and you should try it at home yes there's an impish spirit to him that is funny and leads to funny things i mean as much as this is going to sound like i'll say some other negative things about murk and i do think his seasons of the simpsons are probably the best the show yes uh season six is my all-time favorite but it was also thanks to not unlike get a life like murkin ran the show but he had some of the most talented people in the world working on it as murkin tells the story chris elliott had the idea of wanting a show where dennis the menace is a grown-up who never left home and is still having the same adventures merkin says that elliott pitched that idea without

merkin to peter churn in a fox churn in passed on it and merkin takes credit for repitching the idea and successfully selling the show to churn in which based on their friendship that was still going on in the early 2010s because it's on the dvd i do believe that like merkin knew how to sell that show so you could say elliot would never have made the show if david merkin didn't know how to properly massage an executive into green lighting he seems like he'd be a pretty forceful guy he's very articulate about his ideas too yeah yeah i think very forceful on other people's that's another thing from the paley center thing other writers talk about oh we had this idea that we wanted to make about chris

joins a freak show and merkin's like yeah i actually i didn't want to do that one so but i guess pitch it to everybody now and he kind of he kind of shits on their idea live like you get to see what oh this is what the writer's room was like. Guys pitched a good idea, but Merkin wasn't sold on it. And he's like, I'm going to tear your idea apart right now. That idea is shit. Yeah. Well, it's funny if you watch one of the DVD extras where he has Steve Fappun and Jace Richdale, both writers for the show, later a direct for The Simpsons.

They still have the same power relationship where Jace and Steve are just very timid. Yes. And it's mostly him talking. I think if you were going to try to have a more forceful personality than him, then you just couldn't work with him. Like, no, I get a feeling on some of those Simpsons commentaries, people are just like, well, I'll just hang around with Merkin so I can be on the commentary about my story. But I don't want to look. I don't know these things. I'm just guessing at power dynamics from commentary.

We still want to talk to him, so we will kiss his ass. Yes. Yeah. Look, I do want to interview David Merkin. I have 10 million more things to ask him after watching this. I want him to insult me. Yes. Oh, he'll be so mean to us.

But Merkin, you know, if there's one thing he hates, it's sitcoms. The entire job of his life. Like, it's all he's ever worked on and he hates it. Which is how he wants to live his life. He is a man who hates himself and hates his life and also wants women to be mean to him like these are all things we're gonna do that's what this episode's about exactly yeah i mean if you look at get a life in season five and six of the simpsons it's all about being the anti-sitcom yes yeah fighting the need for a peaceful resolution happy endings

any uh and just constant post-modernity of going like, yeah, well, I guess, like it's Homer looking at his watch and saying like, oh, it ended a little earlier than usual. Let's hug Apu again. But yeah, so once the thing was sold, they sell a pilot. They're still fighting Fox at all times. They have to like shoot multiple versions of the pilot. One of the things was in the original pilot, June Lockhart from Lost in Space played the mom, but Mer things was in the original pilot june lockhart from lost in space

played the mom but murky was nothing but complimentary about it but something didn't work with her and it also if you watch the pilot as it aired chris is played like not totally crazy and he actually wins like it actually is a sitcom win at the end of the episode it's a different character he's more like a bugs Bunny character than a psychotic loser who's completely deluded and in denial about what a loser he is. Yeah, he actually is kind of like, hey, man, I'm a counterculture guy. I don't buy into your rules, man. Also, Merkin said in the original filming, the executives were saying to Chris's face,

I just don't know if our lead works. This guy's freaking people out. Merkin also tells stories that they filmed extra stuff that were just lies to the execs of here's chris being not weird with women he's women actually kind of like him like he's not insane the cast beyond chris elliott though included bob elliott playing his father who hates him at every turn he's he's sick of him meanwhile eleanor donahue from father knows best plays the mother and she's insane as well i think he says like you can see chris peterson got his insanity from his mother and the nice touch about them is that they're always in their robes yes yeah they're living the like ultimate retired life apparently the part of that was

chris ellie didn't want his dad had to live in la that long so it's like you can just be in the same costume and we'll film a lot of them all together at once and also usually sitting down there's rare episodes where bob elliot does a lot more than just sit at a breakfast table and say things even later when they visit him in the hospital in like a season two episode they're still wearing their robes yes yeah it's very fun and it also all learned on here we just talked about her and eek the cat she's the the mother of that as well you're right about that she was doing a lot of post-modern like yes it's funny to cast the mom from a classic 50s sitcom as your silly mom in this new thing she gets the joke though and i do like that one speaking

of imdb jr sam robards plays his best friend larry son of james robards and lauren bacall okay yeah he's he's a handsome enough guy you know what uh he does a great job but i think larry's a bad character for this show and they got they got rid of him for a reason i i feel like i love season two and i enjoy season one season one's a little weaker i think because the dynamic between chris sharon and larry is a little too much like Married with Children. Yeah. Where like Sharon is like a harpy character like Marcy Rhodes. Yes.

And like the Steve character, which is sort of like the successful guy, but he's being pulled back into adolescence by this crazy neighbor, which is very much like the dynamic of Married with Children and I think they made a much better show when it wasn't a lot of characters commenting how idiotic and stupid and psychotic Chris is and when they just made everyone almost as crazy as him it was a better show like in this episode everyone is almost as crazy as Chris and it works yes as people get less normal around him it's better I especially with the Larry character the show is Al Bundy is mean enough tove but eventually by the end of season one every character looks at larry in the face and goes like why don't you kill yourself this is awful and i like that as a plot line for him you can almost read it as by the second season he's been told that enough that he's like yeah i need to leave i'm going to run away and i think sharon is better on her own yes yeah robin reicher plays her i read several interviews with her she's very proud

of her work on the show she she's happy playing the the ultimate bitch honestly she is called a bitch to her face several times in this series but honestly you can't blame her often she is played as you know literally a dom to subs around them and i mean you've watched several episodes a couple weeks leading up to this and we've joked like dave merkin saved some of those extra cuts for home of her yeah of her giving commandments to chris or in the season finale of one chris has this view that he thinks that sharon is being strangled to death but he actually was seeing their weird sex game like well larry says normally she's the one being rough with him but occasionally she lets him be rough with her in the beginning of season one

sharon will just sort of threaten chris but by season two she is like kickboxing him pushing his head through walls pulling out an axe when he comes over firing a gun at him yes over and over again god i know i love that in in season two eventually he kind of pushes it like yeah yeah you're all talk sharing and she just like kicks him in the face and then she becomes a stunt person who's just beating chris for like a minute straight in the second season brian doyle murray would join as a regular though he made a very memorable appearance in the first great episode of the show the second one handsome boy modeling school i do like the character of gus because you need somebody worse than chris yeah to make him more lovable

because he's a psychotic violent alcoholic ex-cop he's the person chris would age into it reminds me a lot their relationship of like when homer and wiggum would do stuff together in the mercenaries especially when marge befriends ruth powell that it's just two idiots hanging out together giving each other terrible ideas and i love bob ellie i love his flatline ratings but it's a more fun show when you have this character encouraging chris yeah yeah to do things instead of bob ellie going like well son i just don't think you'll ever succeed in anything it's funny to hear like gus go like now you shut your trap kid or I'll punch you in the face and then murder you I'll light you on fire I mean Brian Doyle Murray's voice too is just perfect amazing he has been old forever when he was in like season five of SNL

it's like yep he's old then he still sounds that way but yes after the pilot they also briefly filmed in front of a studio audience but the show has so many too ambitious things they want to do. You can't have a studio audience sit around for 18 hours waiting to film stuff. Yeah, like insert shots, location shots. There's a few crane shots throughout this series. Yeah, and Merkin didn't want a laugh track, but it was pretty much forced on him. And you can watch it without the laugh track on the dvds i think for the majority of the episodes but then you just hear the crew go like yeah yeah it's a

weird experience because the beats are still there for a laugh track so it's just very alienating it's better to watch it with the laugh track i think merkin wanted to include no laugh track stuff because now it's just seen as gauche it's like no all these other shows a decade later like unarrested development or larry sanders after all survived without a laugh track and it makes this show seem kind of retro in a bad way another major writer on season one along with resnick and elliot road on the show too but mainly his creative stuff was like oh i'll just do this on the set or whatever in merkin uh also marjorie gross writer of many of the best episodes she'd leave after the first season writing for seinfeld and sadly would pass away at 40 40 in 1996 i thought her name was familiar but yeah seinfeld

for sure yeah she wrote some of the classics and in season one he brought on the previously mentioned steve papoon who based on his imdb credit i think is basically retired after co-creating the wild thornberry okay i think that made him his nut and he's like i'll consult here now but i'm not working hard on that that chupo money he was an elf writer too and also he wrote the episode that won the emmy for the simpsons which was the cable episode stealing cable right right but he was not on the staff. He was a freelancer, I take it. We're going to get to that one soon enough, yeah. And so hardly every episode in the first season worked.

There's some ups and downs on that same 2012 interview with Elliot and Resnick. They talk about the Haunted House episode, which they thought was a real turd. They said the script really sucked. Resnick did a huge rewrite on it to try to make it into something they mentioned that it was written by an unnamed producer i don't want to guess who it is but he mentioned that like resnick not only thought this guy was a dick who they could hear on the phone to a friend in the office saying i just don't think this show's gonna work i'm what he likes the main guy but also that resnick was like and somehow that guy had more power than me on a show I created like he had a higher position

than Adam Resnick on a show he co-created I mean I really get the sense Elliot had to fight hard for Resnick to get co-creator credit on that show but the show you know it can be remembered as get a life is like oh it was a big failure from the start but fox was way behind it one thing i regretted to mention when we started season two was when simpsons moved off a sunday at 8 30 get a life was given that slot it was the lead into married with children yeah it was the best position it could be and it totally makes sense married with children and get a life that is a perfect combo of shows though i feel like married with children should lead you into get a life because it can ramp up the darkness i guess there are more sex jokes on that show so you need it at 9 p.m but yeah merkin was saying

that at one point it was a number one show and at certain points it did beat the simpsons i'm guessing those are simpsons reruns before season two started i think so but still that that's big for fox now the commentaries he talks up like you know we had an 11 share which would make it the biggest comedy on tv in 2010 the fox lineup at the time had hits like simpsons mary mitchell and cops and living color america's most wanted we get a life would premiere in fall 1990 alongside 90210 parker lewis can't lose and a lot of other shows that got canceled like like babes. Oh, I was a Babes fan. Yes, the debut episode did really good in the Simpsons time slot.

Birkin also jokes that Brooks was very pissed off that not only did he lose his time slot, but it was his friend who got his beloved Sunday time slot. Chris Elliott tells a story, though, that he got the sense that no one liked it when the show was airing. Tells the story of him and his wife and their baby walking down the street and passing by a person who goes like there's that guy on that show i hate and him going like let's keep going family let's get that might have been abby elliott's yeah i think so i wonder what the elliott children are up to now it's a real talented family they've got there lots of execs loathedhe it, but not Peter Chernin or Kayla Kelchak or Kolchak.

The female executive is in all the extras too. Elliot and Resnick also remember that they were constantly being told, like, get in heartfelt moments. And their F you to those notes were in the previously mentioned submarine episode. Once you know this behind the scenes story i could notice this a ton chris elliott would go like dad i think me and you finally you know are learning something about each other and tinkly music would come in and bob elliott would go like whatever fine i think he literally says i think we're having a bonding moment right now that's right yeah yeah i love

that as he's about to die bob elliott's like you're not a bad son after all god a guy will say anything to get into heaven that is great yeah the series got weirder and weirder as the show went on merkin on the commentary mentions that first they weren't renewed they were not an instant renewal he takes some credit for pushing the production company to put a big ad in variety about how it was a top rated new comedy of the year which if you were very selective with the first ones it is true a lot of asterisks there and it also that it was a real critical darling and merkin says that that did a lot to shame fox into picking up the show but it was a late pickup they thought it would be for mid-season but it ended up airing in November 91.

So in season two, giant reset for the show. They don't talk much about budget, but I feel pretty sure they cut a lot of that cast because of budget too. Yeah. So for the most part, mom and dad are gone. He moves out. He lives with Brian Doyle Murray. So David Merkin, it seemed like he rarely listened to notes or he was willing to work with the network. But one of their big stipulations is that when Chris moves into Gus's garage, he has to know it's a garage. He can't be that stupid.

Chris is a character who in the second season forgets his first and last name. Yup. Yeah. It just says beep. Like just rant for no reason. And we didn't mention this, but when David Merkin took over the Simpsons, he just turned Homer into Chris Peterson with a family. If you ask yourself in episodes like Homer and Apu, Homer goes to college, so many of them, Bart sometimes becomes him too,

but Homer went from being like the kind of dumb cartoony character of season four to an insane person who runs over the dean, who, I mean, also in one of Merkin's, his last one as a show runner, the joy of sect, that would be exactly the same if chris peterson joined a cult and he would drive them all insane yeah you mentioned the

slimming down of the budget saren is around occasionally and then larry is gone completely last episode he's on screen for like two minutes and some of the highest concept episodes just use one set so bad fish is an episode in which which Chris throws a party at Gus's place. He gets Bad Fish that gives him amnesia and then makes them into murderers. That all happens within one set. The same thing happens with the time travel episode. It's just one set. It's only Gus's set.

And Spewy and me, they don't leave too much either. And not to mention, if you watch in season one, they have some big props like the Paperboy 2000, which started the whole naming convention of having blank 2000 be the name of a lot of episodes. And it looks pretty expensive. Yeah. And they film a lot on the Universal lot. Now I can't wait till the next time I can do the Universal Hollywood tour. Universal Studios reopens.

I'll just be like, oh, that's where the gang was. That's where Chris got run over. This is where Chris hit the hood of the gang was that's where chris got run over this is where chris hit the hood of the car when he's looking at that woman's boobs yes yeah it's uh but i mean to pare down the cast to just have brian doyle murray yelling at chris like because in handsome boy modeling school that was one of the funniest things in season one it was mainly him lying to chris's face and taking advantage of him yeah season one did have some pretty big budgety stuff. I remember in Neptune 2000,

I forgot that the submarine crashes through the ceiling. It's amazing looking. Merkin said that cost $10,000 to do. They do so many like first person shots or crazy special effects shots. And yeah, not to mention the music, which would be a big problem later on for the show. They spent a lot on music, too.

Also on season two, they had what a murderer's row of writers led up by Bob Odenkirk and Charlie Kaufman as writers for the show. I think Bob Odenkirk really helped this show tighten itself up. And with his sketch know-how, he went from SNL to this to Ben Stiller's show to Mr. Show. Yeah, yeah. God damn. from SNL to this to Ben Stiller show to Mr. Show yeah yeah god damn it's Odenkirk is the perfect example of what Merkin said he was looking for in writers because he said they couldn't look for a lot of people with sitcom experience because this wasn't really a sitcom but he couldn't find a lot of great sketch guys because the sketch guys didn't know how to write in long form so they

could do the wacky archness but they couldn't do a full like you know 22 minute show script but bob odenkirk and charlie kaufman just that good at it god bob odenkirk only wrote the bad fish episode but it does feel like a mr show sketch yes just just drawn out and i think a big hallmark of the mr showiness of these episodes is that the episodes just end just blam like yeah chris dies that's one thing we didn't mention he dies a few times in season one but season two it's pretty consistent and usually over the credits it's a shot of what his corpse looks like yes or him hanging from the rafters on a noose they stopped playing the outro theme and just had it being his death over yeah yeah i uh bob odenkirk tells a funny story about how he got hired on it he was hanging out with a friend in texas and that his friend was already kind of jealous of him being a writer for snl he hangs out

with his friend all night and watches get a life because his friend's like get a life is a funny show ever like let's watch it i taped all the episodes they stay up all night watching it and he says that bob says for real he got a call from his agent at that guy's home and it's like hey would you want to work on this show called get a life and so he has to tell his friend like hey the your favorite show just called me to hire me as a writer on it god that's crazy yeah i think it's because of him and in a way it's a cheat for a story but i love how basically a lot of these episodes in the later part of the series and with blackout gag just big gag and then it's over usually the gag is death well i mean charlie kaufman's episode 1977 2000 it's the highest concept episode they did built around a crazy person who finds a silly thing oh i don't want to talk about

every episode but i love the premise for this one because chris needs to go back in time to help gus he already has access to three time machines but instead he decides to make time travel juice. He's like, I have this DeLorean, but I don't want to use that. The blinker's out. Yeah, the blinker's out. He's like,

oh, this time tunnel makes me kind of dizzy. And also Jace Richdale, another Merkin favorite who'd go on to write a couple of really good Simpsons. Writer of Burns' Air. Oh, what a good...

When Homer says, let's push him down the stairs, that's a Chris Elliott line or Peterson line for sure for sure yeah and uh jace richdale possibly the writer of sticking together is what good waffles do line we're still trying to get to the bottom of that that's what's on my wedding ring we need to all right all the more reason to reach out to jace richdale alone and ask him and and judd apatow tells a story that he almost got hired to the show but that murkin interviewed him but didn't do it which mur Merkin jokes about like, oh, who'd I skip over? Oh, Judd Apatow.

Oh dear. Like Apatow does say that his get a life in Simpson spec that got him that interview also got him the job on critics. So not only do the ratings go down along with the budget, but also they get kind of screwed by placement on the network. Like they first get put on Saturday night in a new Saturday night block that Fox is like, oh yeah, it's going to be huge. I think eventually they could have some sustained success with, you know, the cops and mad TV combo, but Get Life just died on Saturday night.

And I think he was saying that it was put on at 10 and that's when a lot of affiliates stopped carrying Fox. So yes, they had the night to themselves on Saturdays, but the remaining episodes that aired in 92, in early 92, those moved to Sunday night at 10 o'clock, which this was true for my market in 1992. It got preempted by the news. I didn't get to see 10 o'clock Fox programming. God, for a very short time, they must have been airing Get a Life reruns after The Simpsons or before, because I remember taping a few Simpsons

and then recording Get a Life after it. Yes, it was. Maybe this episode even. That's why I have such fond memories of it. I do think it got coupled with some reruns of it. Maybe its reruns got put on Thursday night too, though. Every first run won, at least according to tvtango.com season one was on sunday nights season two was either saturday nights or sunday nights but i mean ellie and resnick also told another funny story about their troubles

that they were on a phone call with some ad guy from fox who was making suggestions on how to promote it and they thought this guy was an idiot and they kept making fart noises as he was talking. And then they're like, by season two, that ad guy became a network executive and the writing was on the wall for them. I kind of crapped my fly at Letterman. The second season barely held on and by March 8th, it was replaced on a schedule

that was filled up with Drexel's class, rock Herman's head. And 10 p.m., it was put with the stand-up showcase, the Sunday Comics, which if I was a kid, I would have definitely watched that if I could have. So I know what must have been preempted in my market. It's a real shame because the show only gets funnier.

The funniest episodes are in the back of season two. They really are. And season three could have been amazing if Bob Odenkirk stayed on and Charlie Kaufman and jace richdale and maybe even a few other great writers who would have gone on to do even better things but man like it would just cut so short merkin's pitch for a third season about how it would be chris becomes a homeless drifter changing lives from town to town that would be great yeah it would have been really really great you don't need a supporting cast that's consistent and i think season two really shows that because there's one consistent character in this episode.

That's Gus for one scene. Everyone else is new. Yeah. As a sketch show. And I mean, that's also a cheaper way to do a show. You just have guest people every week. My guess is that Merkin likely had an overall deal with Fox because he says in the same phone call he was told that Get a Life was canceled. Peter Chernin picked up his

sketch show the edge and that would go on in fall 1992 which was led by his then girlfriend at the time julie brown yes a really amazing cast julie brown wayne knight tom kenney jill talley and jennifer aniston man in a sketch comedy show and i remember really liking of course, as an edgy sketch comedy show in the early 90s. I'm sure every sketch is problematic, but I kind of want to rewatch it. I remember really liking it as a kid. The one I remember watching on a YouTube clip was a Designing Women sketch about how Delta Burke was growing to Godzilla-sized proportions and eating everyone. I remember, I guess Kevin Nealon is friends with Dave Merkin because Kevin Nealon nealon's on one of the commentaries murkin can't stop saying he's like my friend kevin nealon suggested this i remember an edge sketch with kevin nealon as a dad who had

to get a baboon's ass transplanted onto his body but the entire episode was about censorship so whenever he said ass there'd be a robotic voice saying buttocks over his uh his use of ass that's funnier than hearing the word ass you know those censors led them to be funnier i but come on jennifer aniston in a sketch show that's amazing the wikipedia page will tell you that the edge got a lot of problems because they mocked 90210 in a way that was very cruel especially to tori spelling and erin spelling was not happy about that and didn't make him any friends in the executives' rooms. And so then, of course, once that show got canceled, well, that freed up David Merkin

for the crippled writer's room of The Simpsons at the end of season four. Yes, I mean, we talked about it on Talking Simpsons, but what, like 80% of the staff left? Yes. And my own thought was Fox was probably thinking, oh, this show has got a few more years left in it let's let dave babysit this we'll get 100 episodes we'll get syndication that'll be it

for the simpsons but they didn't know yeah they didn't know and it turned out like he is an amazing showrunner because the simpsons should not have been good after everyone left but it got better it got better it actually season four all these guys were burned out and merkin rebuilt the show with the remaining parts of conan o'brien bill oakley josh weinstein and dan mcgrath i think those were the only four yeah he rebuilt with that and also george meyer but george meyer couldn't do full time and then he just staffed back up a swordswilder too but anyway he staffed back up with a lot of his get a life guys and you can see the easy line to line of like get a life ends into the simpsons like deep space homer is a get a life episode it would be chris peterson joins nasa it was said that he came to the simpsons with that

idea it had to be a get a life idea there's no way he couldn't have had that in mind for chris 100 and one i think too you know for as great as Get a Life is, one of its problems with it is that it has to be filmed in live action. And reality makes things less funny because it's very funny to write in a script. Gus shoots Chris Peterson multiple times while trying to shoot a different person. It is funny to watch, but that exact same joke done in homie the clown when ned flanders gets shot over and over again is way funnier because animation can do it perfectly we should point out there's a lot of jokes in the simpsons inspired by get a life jokes which

is perfectly fine you should steal from yourself but i was marveling the time travel episode is amazing but it is so much like time and punishment yes i think merkin was also incredibly blessed that he may have lost all of the previous writers or most of them but the animation team was at their height of five and six and they could make his jokes work 10 times better than they would have even five years later on the simpsons the most interesting post-cancellation is chris elliott and adam resnick because in the short version is they almost got to make a film with Tim Burton. And we covered this some in Nightmare Before Christmas. Right, yeah.

Tim Burton, Disney, Katzenberg, and Eisner especially really wanted Tim Burton. They're like, we'll make anything with you. And so they thought they'd get movies Tim Burton would direct. And with Nightmare Before Christmas, they thought, yeah get movies tim burton would direct and with nightmare before christmas they thought yeah tim burton's gonna direct it well not really but they still sold it as tim burton's nightmare before christmas but burton definitely wanted to direct because he really loved chris elliott and adam resnick he was going to direct a film called cabin boy which was actually a takeoff of an episode in season one. The episode where Peterson falls in love with a bunch of construction workers and joins them like Jane

Goodall. And so he's like, oh, what if we did that with a fancy lad who wants to join up with pirates and befriend them and become the Cabin Boy? I think the movie's very funny, but Tim Burton ultimately was like, i'm gonna direct more stuff at warner so he just left to work on ed wood and disney is stuck with a film that they only wanted to make because tim burton was gonna make it and they're like adam resnick you can just direct it you can direct a 10 million dollar movie uh not a director adam resnick correct no i mean he hasn't directed anything since yeah he wasn't known for he was a comedy writer yeah he's a comedy writer and a very good one at that and it feels like he was set up to fail and a very sad thing about it was that like cabin boy was no more failure than hundreds of

films that have been released by studios and disney released way worse things that made less money than cabin boy that were less profitable than cabin boy but because it was open season on cabin boy you wouldn't piss off anybody that would fire you and so i think he got to be an easy target and it really did fuck up elliot and especially resnick just mentally they're like oh everybody's allowed to say they hate our movie this sucks chris la just became a joke which is totally not fair to him and it led him to make the bad decision he'd admit this in a million interviews he should never have done snl and he did a season on snl what an awful season that was it was such i mean that was mark mckinney was on it michael mckeon they're just asking do you do sketch do you how about you you were on a sketch

joe come on down i read this great elliot interview where he makes this point of like he could have done it in the 80s but doing it then it's like well you just see chris elliot you don't see him playing a character yeah you just see chris elliot and also like he mentioned watching it with his kids one time and then going like boy you you sure get sexually assaulted a lot in these sketches he's like yeah why did i do that i mean at the time i was delighted to see him but upon seeing these episodes again i just said oh you you were you're above this the show the show would get better i would get better when they refreshed the cast but that was a rough year i think janine garofalo was

on that year too weird what a weird ass year and you still had the frat boys too of you know farley and yeah sandler was on the way yeah rock was definitely gone yeah point yeah resnick would never direct again but he'd follow elliot to snl but then strike out on his own it worked with elliot sometimes but become a solo writer i think he'd stick around in la while elliot would move back to new york he'd do a show i never seen but you had looked it up the high life in hbo one seasoner yes it just buried it was like a black and white sitcom on HBO I want to see it it feels like a high concept sitcom it should be on HBO max but no one recorded it no one put it on YouTube HBO has built such a prestige around it post Sopranos yeah they don't like recognizing

the pre Soprano stuff they don't want to show you dream on their titty comedy and I knew them when they were the tales from the crypt and dream on network they should acknowledge that i think but after the high life resnick would move over to the larry sanders show which was i mean what a great fit for the an ex letterman guy who likes to do dark stuff like larry sanders is perfect for that and then he'd write two scripts that he completely disowns one of them death to smoochie so the writer of cabin boy then did death to smoochie but and now resident kind of just writes for himself did write on the show divorce that hbo show that's how he befriended tom sharpling which led to a lot of really informative interviews because sharpling is a giant get a life fan and i don't think sharpling's ever interviewed dave

merkin so i think that also shows how he feels about dave murkin but meanwhile what happens to this series well it does attain cult status it's passed around in vhs's around hollywood and was perfect to be achieving that cult status because like this is too good for that swine out there they can't appreciate great comedy like this did get rerun some on the usa network but even then they could not afford all of the music they're like change replacing music i think it was just one summer that happened it was super briefly i remember i found out about it just as it ended i was so mad because there was nowhere else to see these things there was no youtube yet i think it was like 1999 or something like that you really

had to like go into like a comic convention maybe you could find the bootlegs of it there or something like it was too few episodes too weird and too expensive for most syndicators so it wasn't going to get much of a chance now in the tv on dvd boom it did start to get a new chance because rhino home video released best of selections of episodes because they couldn't afford all the music for all the episodes they put them out on vhs and dvd 2000 to 2002 i think that was a two episode per disc thingy yes yeah and i remember one of the tragedies of my young life is being really excited about a show and then showing it to a friend and having them just be

upset or not into it and this is one of those uh that is a painful thing yeah just uh just like feeling myself turn inside out as they're not laughing at the prettiest week in my life right yeah and you have to say like, this isn't their best episode. Let me tell you jokes from other episodes I enjoyed. Me and you knew about these things too because we were already Rhino heads from those Mystery Science Theaters company. It's funny to me that Rhino started as like this boutique record thing of like, oh, we have the masters of this like lost 50s album. Well, who cares about that i want to watch mystery science theater do you have mitchell i still have i think four of the original rhino

mst3k dvds on my shelf i'm looking at a couple right now not enough of them i don't have the complete collection so it's a big hit for rhino and merkin tells the story that like in in the early 2000s rhino's telling them hey these are selling so well i think we can justify paying the music rights but then in 2003 warner the owners of rhino decide we want to just take rhino into our company and not have them release weird shit that barely makes money so rhino goes away and merkin's like oh well so much for that deal but fortunately several rhino execs then started a new company called shout factory and over a decade they eventually scraped together enough pull and connections to finally put the complete get a life dvd series out with all of

the music they paid for all of the music which is amazing i think merkin said it was a blessing because they released the dvds as the dvd market was drying up and that meant people were asking less money for music and they also got a deal from rem that they could pay way less than what the song is worth otherwise it would not be on the dvds oh yeah that was nice of rem to give him a deal then i think merkin, he got addicted to how in-depth the Simpsons DVDs were, and he wanted that for Get Alive too. So there's tons of original stuff he did. He did a commentary on every episode, just like he did on The Simpsons.

Definitely there was a difference of opinion between him and Elliot and Resnick about not only just recording together, but also putting their commentaries on there. In that same 2012 interview they joke about how the video quality on the dvds are worse because they had to make more room for custom edits of the episodes that have to fit with the commentary sometimes there's a separate video track it's not even the whole episode they'll do commentary maybe like 18 minutes or 16 minutes it's odd on this episode it really confused me of like why did you do a 17 minute commentary were there bits where they're like oh i hate this scene let's not even talk over it it didn't make

any sense to me just talk about what's in the news or something pass some time to take it to a scene you like so elliot and resnick sadly not involved at all they're all very polite in interviews but again i think you could really tell that merkin got full ownership of the story of this show on the dvs and i think that's unfortunate for elliot resnick that's a sore spot because it feels like we'll never hear the get a life story from chris elliot or adam resnick because the out of politeness they don't want to ruin the show for everyone yeah so they're just keeping quiet although you'll hear chris elliot make fun of merkin like we did in that clip that's as far as it goes but that's just because he's pissed that they play yeah he's

don't play this and he's like fine if you're gonna play it i'll i'll show you what i feel like you could see he's just disgusted by hearing merkin's voice but yeah i would really like to hear the story from them and their experience is making the show but it's all filtered through merkin and that's unfortunate but at least we get that on the record i can see why they don't want to tell people like, Resnick basically left the show in season two as well. He's not credited as a writer on any episodes. I listened to the commentary for the final episode

where it starts on a plane and every writer is on the plane. You can spot Kaufman and Mimplepoon and Odenkirk. And Merkin says, you know, I think Resnick might have just missed the flight, I guess. Or something like, I think Resnick probably stopped doing writing for the show out of frustration of working with merkin but also he was being demanded to do a lot on the cabin boy script in 1992 to lead up to the 94 release so it might just be he was just really busy on cabin boy but i don't get that sense from the commentaries but yes these days like you said the dvd is relatively affordable for a complete set of like you know six discs and a whole bunch of extras could go out of print any day now so if you're a get a life fan and it's not

streaming nowhere you'll see this episode on youtube if you want to watch it but even if you never watch get a life but you're a simpsons fan this is season 4.2 it's the other universe season 4 that leads to season 5 and we mentioned it briefly in that 20 years after get a life fans of get a life made a new show for chris elliott and it's even better yes eagle heart is the perfect continuation of the spirit of that show and as far as i know chris elliott loved working with everybody on that show. Especially season three is a continuous story. It doesn't really work 100%, but I like the ambition. And it's just a great way to end that series.

There's many great people that worked on it, but Jason Walner, it really showed that he's one of the most underrated writer, directors in comedy right now. Like everybody's funnier when he does a thing. He's so fucking good. I didn't want to watch the second Borat movie, i do give him credit for blank during only jason walner would be good enough to find something clever to do with borat in the year 2020 when borat is one of the most played out things in the universe i'll tell you what when i accidentally sat down next to brett

gellman and ken marino in an airport i heard bre Brett Gelman's voice. I turned around and I praised Eagle Heart. He seemed very touched. Oh, that's great. He's so good. He's like Chris Peterson in that show. He's like the junior Chris Peterson to Chris Elliott. Yes, a more violent lunatic. Yes, yeah.

It's such a great show. You guys, if you haven't watched Eagle Heart yet, that one actually is on HBO Max and you can watch it. You know what? The premise makes it sound lame. Like, oh, it's a bunch of Chuck Norris jokes. Think of Strangers with the Candy, but even more exaggerated. On an even higher level. Taking

that kind of humor and bringing it to Adult Swim. It's so great. You hear the stories on that too that they had a pilot that was more direct of like, yeah, it's Chuck Norris jokes. And I think very quickly they learn like this is so played out Chuck Norris jokes. Let's not do that. And so instead they make it crazy.

Just great. Maria Thayer, too. Perfect on that show. She's so good. That is the Strangers of the Candy connection. Yes. Yeah. God.

And she looks the same age as she did in Strangers of the Candy. Playing what? Tammy Little Nut? Yes. Tammy Little Nut from Sweet Valley High. That's our very in-depth history of Get a Life, though. Honestly, I kind of want to do this as our next miniseries. I'm a little tempted.

Ooh, maybe let's start out there. Our 10 favorite episodes, right? Our 10 favorite episodes, yeah. But before we do that, let's take a quick break, and then we'll be talking about Girlfriend 2000. СПОКОЙНАЯ МУЗЫКА the following title in no way represents the feelings of the fox broadcasting company toward the viewing public rather it reflects the feelings of one man who wishes everyone could have as much fun as he does. Get a life. Premiering next Sunday on Fox.

Hey, everybody, and welcome to the break for our What a Cartoon episode of Get a Life. I am Bob Mackie. I'm not standing in the place where I live. I'm sitting in the place where I don't live. Do not be confused. Who is here with me? Hey, it's Henry Gilbert and I think I'm a genius. Beep.

And if you enjoy this podcast and want to support the show and get so many bonus things on top of that, please go to patreon.com slash talking simpsons sign up there for five bucks a month to get every episode one week ahead of time and ad free and also access to everything behind the five dollar paywall that includes all of our limited miniseries the most recent one that's happening right now it just launched is talking to the hill season two part one that is 11 new episodes of talking of the hill our king of the hill chronological series just like talking simpsons but about king of the Hill, our King of the Hill chronological series, just like Talking Simpsons, but about King of the Hill. All of our other miniseries are behind that paywall. And also we have things like interviews,

NFC's and wrap-ups and deleted scene specials for Talking Simpsons and so much more. And once you sign up for five bucks a month, you can access everything we've done behind the Patreon paywall for nearly four total years of bonus episodes. So if you enjoy our voices and our commentary, there are so many podcasts you haven't heard

and they're all waiting for you at patreon.com slash talking simpsons and there is a $10 level 2 signing up for that will get you all the $5 stuff of course but also access to one megalon podcast once a month only for patrons of that level or higher and what is that henry yes that's a what a cartoon movie podcast if right before this uh apr's episode, you probably heard our extended preview of our talk about DuckTales the movie, Treasure of the Lost Lamp. Well, you can hear the full thing, which is, I believe, about four hours

if you sign up for the $10 a month tier, which gets you the entire back catalog of all the previous What a Cartoon movies we covered that range as wide as Kiki's delivery service in akira the spider-man into the spider-verse and tiny tunes i spent my vacation so so many movies that we have covered in the what a cartoon style and this month you're really going to want to sign up because me and bob are talking about the 20th anniversary of shrek that's right 20 years oh shrek this april you're going to get Shrek'd.

And you can only hear it all if you are a $10 and up premium subscriber at patreon.com slash talking Simpson. So please consider going up to that level. And if you've never signed up for Patreon before, it is so easy to do it. Once you do sign up, you're given access to a code. You can access that code anytime you want. You just drop that code into whatever you use to listen to podcasts. And that way you can download our bonus podcast alongside your free podcast as part of your podcasting lifestyle and patreon also has an app for any smart device you might have and you can download our bonus episodes that way as well but no matter what way you do it it is so easy to access all the bonus content waiting for you at patreon.com slash talking simpsons all right and now we'll get back to our april fools podcast about get a life but while you're don't forget, a car could run over you, so be careful.

When you really care about someone, you shout it from the mountaintops. So on behalf of Desjardins Insurance, I'm standing 20,000 feet above sea level to tell our clients that we really care about you. Home and auto insurance personalized to your needs. Weird, I don't remember saying that part. Visit Desjardins.com slash care and get insurance that's really big on care. Did I mention that we care? The moment you never thought you'd see. I'm leaving home. Honey, I hope you're not jerking us around again. Chris moves out on the season premiere of

Get a Life, Saturday. Stand in the place where you live. ¶¶ ¶¶ Welcome But you can stand in the place where you are. So stand. Welcome back from the break. I hope you enjoy hearing that R.E.M. classic bringing us in here. It's a Bob Mackie karaoke favorite because there's three lyrics in it, basically. It is the opposite of End of the World, which is one of the hardest karaoke songs to do. R.E.M. is on both sides of the karaoke spectrum. And this connects all of our things that we like because the director of the stand video

would direct Ventures of Pete and Pete episodes. That's right, man. So much of the spirit of that. That's how they got Michael Stipe in one of their first episodes is the sludge man or whatever his name was. So yes, this episode, Girlfriend 2000, of the cursed sunday after 10 o'clock often preempted episodes directed by david merkin he takes writing by credit too which when your show runner honestly feels slightly selfish to me it's like unless he literally really wrote this script

i think maybe he probably wrote a few scripts sure this time he was young enough to have that energy but yeah in some interviews i heard him say like i could never do get a life now we worked insane hours at the paley center one there's a story of him being yelled at by brian doyle murray because he's like i'm waiting to film this see we're eating a hot dog it's 2 30 in the fucking morning oh i want brian doyle murray to yell at This is pure Merkin in that it is just him. It's so mean-spirited, and it's about brunette women that hurt you. Yep, yeah. And hey, we've got some things in common.

He's very much into mean brunettes. I was also seen in Bart's Girlfriend in these years on the show. That is such a Merkin episode. You can see what his sensibilities are. I guess Mindy is a red-headed angel. He likes a sweet redhead or a cruel brunette blondes don't do much for him it's no there's nary a blonde to be found in the series but yes merkin directed 20 of the 35 episodes of the series he'd always wanted to direct and

the show really gave him a chance to learn on the fly he also made the point that when they would get outside directors they didn't really understand the tone and it was simpler for him to just direct the episodes too and i get that directors in the first season included like tony dow the man homer pretended to be when he was mr plow yeah they were gay and also dobie gillis the actor who played dobie gillis directed one of the season one episodes that's crazy merkin says he was like well yeah we're parading 50 sitcoms so why not have some 50 sitcom stars directed it seems like he directed three new hearts okay three episodes of new hearts so just getting a little bit his feet wet there i guess

this episode has a very long cold open i think intentionally so so you think it would end at any time like oh once he gets hit by a car a second time this ends and then it just keeps going and going and going we were talking about sketch and bob odenkirk this just feels like a perfect sketch yes cold open it really does like this would have been on mr show and filmed very similarly to on mr show i think actually the repetition of it has a very mr show finial sketch feel to it, too. They talk about, if you take the Universal Hollywood Tour, they drive by the streets and they're like, everybody knows this is 10 Wisteria Lane from Desperate Housewives.

The most current hot show ever, right? Is it 2006? At least when we were there the last time, when they drove through another part, they're like, yes, this is The Good Place, which is still airing on TV. So they updated the reference. Yeah. When I see it now, I will think, no, no, no. This is the get a life streets.

And yes, this episode begins like so many of American Simpsons 2 where a character says, what a great day this is going to be. And then a horrible thing happens to them. In Chris's case case he's hit by a car not only hit by a car but crushed under it but fortunately he falls in love instead of pain you are the most beautiful woman i have ever seen with the possible exception of charles durning i'm so sorry i'm usually a very careful, but I was on the car phone with President Bush, and I got distracted when Queen Elizabeth came in on call waiting. I have no idea who they are.

But anyway, it's not your fault. I just thought this was one of those days where I was semi-solid and cars could go right through me. I'm fine. I don't think so. Look at your legs. Oh, these. They're always like that.

Well, actually, no, this one's usually wrapped around my neck here I'll get it I'm going to have to reset your legs using an ancient Chinese technique but don't worry I'm a practicing surgeon Wow a doctor huh geez well maybe you can help me with another little problem I'm having what exactly does it mean when you wake up every morning in a pool of your own vomit? This is going to be excruciatingly painful, more pain than you've ever felt. Well, you weren't around me when I heard they had canceled Manimal. Don't worry, listeners, I will not make you hear him scream or the sound of crunching bones that follows that. It's great. And it makes me think, again, this is season two. Chris is not just meeting straight characters you know to bounce off of this person he meets as a model doctor scientist on the phone with both george bush

and queen elizabeth and doing a british accent well emma sams is a legitimate uk resident she was born there but it's also very extra that she has a british accent too she's perfect in every way it makes her sound smarter she was fresh off of acting on dynasty at the time that she would go on to do many years on general hospital her and robin reicher did multiple years on soap operas after this i'm used to the show i did know who charles durning is but i have to say re-watching the whole series they make so many references to people i just had to google because they're like Chuck Connors and Robert Conrad. Like the guys who were in the 90s who had been dead for years. And Manimal, that was the sort of action primetime show that promised the guy would turn into many animals but only turned into two?

That's right, yes. Yeah, it only lasted eight episodes. A famous failure. Now replace that with Sheriff Lobo and that's homer yes complaining about a canceled bad show let's do this about the entire episode anytime he does a thing that reminds me of homer was him getting hit as he's about to begin his paper route reminds me of another bit that got dropped as they ran out of money or had a shrinking budget chris's friends that he'd hang out with in a diner sein Seinfeld style, was children.

He hung out with three other kids, which I think was to make him even more off-putting. But they were his fellow paper boys. But just to see this man, 30-year-old man, hanging around with 10-year-olds all the time. I forgot about that. And by this time, they'd kind of lose the paper boy thing completely, right? I mean, it really only factored into a few stories. He does have his bike, and papers fly out of it when he gets hit by the car but much like homer at the nuclear power yeah the job no longer matters to him i also think they mentioned charles derning he was starring on

evening shade at the time which was filming at the same place as get a life they don't mention charles derning on other commentaries but on multiple ones they mentioned like oh evening shade was filming next to us on the universal lot and i thought oh maybe that's why charles derning is brought up on this at this point in the series chris is seriously deluded and he sees a woman and thinks of charles derning later he sees a man in a radiation suit thinks he's a little girl he sees a cat thinks it's somebody in a costume that's right he has some serious like sensory problems at this point he's increasingly stupid now let's again consider he's eating toxic waste most of the time when living with Gus but I mean we talked about you know they even joke about it on the show how stupid Homer got over the years it's a sharp decrease from season one to season two as I said

in season two Chris often forgets his last name and one time forgets his first name yeah yeah he loses his mind entirely as the show goes on he just eats paper often when he feels like it but also he's waking up in pools of his own vomit as well you get to hear some of chris elliott's horrid screaming as his legs being snapped around but eventually it hits his brain like it does on a dinosaur a very slow working brain he then screams again when he sees that his dear sweet lovable sniffable bike is bent up and we get another very long montage of her fixing his bike with various power tools chris is more in love than ever now wow i am too i think Beep! Good for you. Well, I have to go. Again, I'm so sorry. Oh, forget about it. There's really no problem.

I get run over several times a day. It's a great way to meet people. Hey, wait! Um... I forgot to ask your name. Tricia. Tricia Paddington. Well, I'm Chris. Chris, uh... Chris something. It's lovely to meet you, Chris.

Now I really have to go. Sure, I understand. Well, goodbye. Chris, you really should move or I'll run over you again. You're right. I love how she has to point out, because otherwise she would have run over him a third time. And he just steps more into the street,

and as she drives away away he's hit by three cars in a row and you'll see that footage on a loop over the credits at the end the behind the scene story on that merkin tells is that to make sure the dummy didn't move they had to chain it to the ground because it would just be dragged by the first car so see those are things on simpsons he could just say homer falls down or just a horrible thing happens to homer and it's drawn he doesn't have to think about the logistics of filming a live action thing i don't think homer would get run over by this many cars no he did cause a giant pile up that killed a bunch of people yeah he did do that but i can't recall you know in merkin's

years homer did more of hitting people with the cars than getting hit by cars. Take that, stupid Dean. He gets hit by cars so many times. I love it so, so much. But seeing that dummy getting hit over and over again, that again feels very like BBC comedy to me. Make it look as fake as possible. Yeah, every corpse on Monty Python was just a very obvious dummy. On Young Oneses all the characters

died all the time too like they exploded most of the time then we get the opening theme so great this is a great opening and Chris is a real hero in this opening he is just super competent throwing those papers I like how focused he is he's when he throws the water in his face yeah he has to stay with the camera like it is a tracking shot. So he has to make sure he maintains a certain speed, grabs a drink from a woman, drinks the drink and gets it in the trash can all while looking funny while he does it. And he does it because he's that good. James L. Brooks brings this up in his interview. He's like, who could find eight funny ways to throw a newspaper in a row?

And Chris Elliott does it. The joke in the credits is like he's distracted by a woman who's kind of flirting with him and he runs into a car dave merkin wanted the stuntman to fall into the concrete but he had to be talked out of it like no that that could hurt you it's really hard to do right and i think the boob lady in this opening she only appears in one episode yes a sexy woman though uh in classic merkin style she is frowning at chris like she's mad lee garlington is the actress she had been in cobra and field of dreams before this has been in countless like a giant imdb page of small roles she's in one of the saddest stories about her life

is that she was the sassy waitress in the original pilot for seinfeld written out of the series after the pilot because like this just doesn't work let's get this julia louis dreyfus in here instead i can see her yeah they were gonna have a waitress to bounce off of she is friends of a friend with jason alexander and she says sometimes she worries she might run into him because she'll just think about like the millions. She said the first five years it wasn't too bad. But when Seinfeld became the biggest show in the world for a brief amount of time, it was really messing her up that she was almost on Seinfeld. And you know what?

I was thinking about the title Get a Life and I never really sat down to think about it. But it is a strange title, but it is really evocative of the Fox in your face. Like Get a Life is an insult to something go to hell go to hell you're right you're right it's an insult name of a show yeah i don't know how do you feel about it because that actually makes it feel dated i have not heard the term get a life in maybe 20 years yeah that's true yeah i it's not a timeless title makes it more of a piece for its time but i kind of like that about it because it is he's a loser that would have be yelled at him like get a life like it is very uh evocative what the show is it's just a strange title and the sexy lady lee garlington this was all on the universal lot

if you look real close she lives in the monster's home that's where she's standing oh nice a bit of merkin says why he wanted stand in there was the shot of elliot moving the pedals to him looked like an organ grinder he's like oh the start of stand kind of sounds like that it is a very evocative image of his turning spokes with the beginning of stand and then the boy it reveals that it's an adult man throwing papers uh it's really good she's not in this episode so i just wanted to say because her name appears here robin reicher is really great yeah brian doyle morey is really great too bob elliott's great eleanor great too great cast but robin reicher is so funny as the

monster she's asked to play it's it's a shame that she's not in the second season as much as she's in the first but they do find ways to put her in and i really do like her whenever she shows up mainly by having her have to increase the sexual attention with her and peterson and i found a recent interview with her and she had nothing but praise to say about doing the show her favorite episode seems to be the cats parody they did of the zoo animals on wheels yes yeah she still brags about like tv guide list of the 50 funniest episodes of TV ever. Which that is another classic episode. One thing I didn't like in the second season is that in the first season they put her in these 50s housewife get ups.

That were a little sexy. And then in the second season she's just in like early 90s gear. Yeah she just becomes a regular person. Also the children disappear except for the daughter. Yeah she appears in Spewy. You'll see her there but otherwise we then come to another thing that seems to presage merkin's time on the simpsons radioactive jokes yes and homer goes to college he gets radiated just as much as chris peterson does in this scene and trisha is basically doing homer's old job it looks like yeah i like

that it's played like an old b movie the other doctor saying to her like oh dear i it's so great that you take such risks he's like anything to cure a sour stomach peterson though is in the chamber oh my god man in chamber man in chamber I'm in a standing chamber! Hey, watch it! Jeez, hey, hey! Get your dirty hands off me, pal! It's a little touchy-feely, if you know what I mean. Get some help, will you? Are you all right?

Yeah, no, I feel fine. I'm just a little tingly all over, that's all. Especially in my groin area. Kind of feels like it feels after I take a shower with that really minty soap. Wow. My sour stomach's gone. How did you get in there?

Oh. Isn't that the greatest hiding place? Like it for me, my house key just happened to fit the lock. Hey, can I keep this? I bet we're a selfish baby, aren't we? My, that we're a selfish baby, aren't we? What a silly lie that is. Watching this always puts me in a good mood because even though Chris is deluded, he's always so positive and in control that it just makes me feel good.

The man getting him out of it, he he's like this guy's molesting me keep your hands to yourself buddy it's some good carbon rod jokes although this one is irradiated yes yeah an inanimate carbon rod merkin loves it and you know her thing worked he also did have his sour stomach fixed but also i guess he was rendered there's another good thing on the commentary where they just say like well tricia can fall in love with him eventually because she knows he'll be dead in like six weeks he's he's so irradiated from this i will say a joke that doesn't fully work and would work much better in animation is is him saying like you cuckoo clocks are off seven minutes here because the joke i guess is that he thinks the alarms are cuckoo clocks and he looks at his watch to be

like oh they're going off on time i didn't quite understand that joke you're right that's my guess on the intention of it but in animation much easier to express i'd say peterson was directly told she's a doctor and a scientist he's in her lab but he remembers her as a nude mud wrestler or something and i also do love any chance they did everything they could with chris elliott's butt like he shoved his butt in the camera once an episode i think did chris elliott invent twerking that's my new article i'm gonna do there's a funny joke in one of the episodes and that chris wants gus to recognize him so he bends over to show him he's wearing jordash jeans that's right and the shot is gus holding a shotgun and

chris bending over that's right oh my god that's such a shot okay and merkin talks about in the gang's episode that chris sits down weird in a chair backwards and he just shoves his butt at the camera or when he's doing a sting operation he blocks the camera that joke about the hidden camera is also just homer wearing the giant yeah hat as well yes i also feel like we're talking about chris elliott's ass i also feel like i'm being gaslit by all these jokes about chris being fat yeah because chris has the most like average build i think he's less overweight than most humans in america you know i would love to have chris elliott's build man i if i had to take having his hairline to have his build i'd do it in a heartbeat i also love peterson saying like to have babies together

if someone would just tell us how it's how that's done he also imagines they'd have one ass together they got away with that ass yeah i get it you want to say ass like i think that too is why murkin his first episode rosebud he's like hom Homer's butt on screen right now. I could never get away with a butt in live action. So a long shot of Homer's butt. Chris is unfortunately turned down. Really, I'm very, very flattered and you're very, very sweet. But I feel that the best way to handle this is with total honesty.

And well, I'm just not attracted to you. I'm sorry. All right, I see how it is, huh? Miss Run-Em-Over, save his life and leave him, huh? Miss Working with Radioactive Isotopes and then he surprises her. Miss Says She Doesn't Love Him Even Though He Says He Loves Her. Oh, Miss Looks at him like he's nuts. Miss averts her eyes and walks away.

Fine. Stop! Miss interrupts him in the middle of a sentence. Miss! All right, fine. I don't need you, baby. No, I don't need you at all. There are plenty of other fish out there in the sea of recklessly driving cars.

No, don't feel sorry for me because i feel sorry for you because i've already forgotten your name trisha so chris is alone glowing in his bedroom again very homer joke yeah yes homer goes to college when he comes out of that test chamber and still glowing. That's very similar. With this episode more than others, we're asked to take a real journey with this character where no other show would make the main character an obsessive stalker. Yes.

But I think, I mean, it was a less sensitive time. So this idea was a little more acceptable. But I think they get away with it because Chris gets a taste of his own medicine and is later murdered. Yes. So they know what they're doing. It's also about teaching a bad lesson in the air too and always stalking is not treated normally the way you would which that is the intended joke but and at best he is just annoying the woman and not you know a serious threat and she easily escapes him though there is

there's a little threat in his eyes in a few scenes. But I also just love his insane rant about just describing everything she's doing. As he's saying, like, not only do I feel sorry for you, but he's like, Miss walks away and averts her eyes. Miss interrupts him. This could be a dramatic scene with a lot of tension if the laugh track wasn't there. And if they were playing it a little differently. It's a very funny smash cut to him screaming Trisha while glowing green. And in comes Gus for his one scene in the episode.

I love first. The only reason he brought out the Geiger counter was that he was worried it was broken. And once he finds out that Chris is radioactive, he is not concerned for Chris or himself. He's just happy his machine is not broken. Chris tells Gus all about his new love. Gus, I just met the woman of my dreams. The kind of dreams that can make a mess, if you know what I'm talking about.

But anyway, she's gorgeous and she's a genius, but for some reason, she doesn't want to have anything to do with me. And I can't get her out of my head. Everywhere I look, I see her face. Well, you got pictures of her plastered everywhere. Oh. Oh, so I do. Oh, thank goodness.

For a second there, I thought I was going out of my live-a-snap mind. Listen, kid, I've been through this unreachable broad crap myself. Sally Friedman. Gorgeous. Platinum blonde. Had a backside that went on forever. I told her I was crazy about her, but she wasn't interested. I tried everything, flowers, presents, singing outside her window. What happened? Her husband and two teenage sons beat the snot out of me and made me drink dog urine. uh i love his story because never are you thinking that he is describing a woman who

must be in her late 30s if not 40s and that who lives in a home with a husband and children so that is so insane that he was made to drink dog urine like that's extra funny they beat him up and then made him drink dog piss i love love, too, that he's just like, they have such disrespect for a cop. They're like, yeah, this former cop is a psycho who would use his power only evilly. That's what I love about cops. They were ahead of their time in, you know, making fun of cops. And I think the reveal works because when he says you got pictures of her plastered all over, you don't really see them until the reveal. I mean, if you look behind Chris, they're very out of focus.

And Merkin was worried that that blew the reveal. But for me, it chris they're very out of focus and merkin was worried that that blew the reveal but for me it didn't i forgot about that joke if you know the joke and are looking for it then sure you can make it out i think they successfully hid the joke enough for the zoom out reveal again in animation when everything you have such complete control over everything that's in frame yeah you can execute those jokes better but and there's at least four different pictures of that actress yes yeah in various different configurations uh they joke on the commentary too they're like oh this doctor has a lot of headshots like she's an actress or something this is also a very very murky thing that happened a lot on the simpsons where someone almost learns

the right lesson and is then told no do the wrong thing of course gus tells him to be a better stalker i'm not telling you to forget her i gave up on that major babe and look where it got me 17 beers a night and a nudie magazine bill that could pay for a shiny new trailer home i don't understand are you telling me i should call her? Any loser can do that. You've got to show her that you're different. Don't just call her. Call her every 15 minutes. Write her endless, rambling, deranged letters in your own blood. Dog her every step. Show her that you care with the passion of a psychotic maniac.

Yes, yes. And you think she'll like this? As a cop, I've seen the scenario a hundred times. And it worked? Never. I usually wind up with somebody getting shot. But, therefore, I follow the beauty of the logic of this. The odds must be due to change.

Oh, Gus. Gus, if you weren't a man, I could give you a big wet kiss right on the lips, right now. I'm not ruling that out for later. Let's get stalking i like gus's uh formula there if you follow the logic if i follow the logic the odds are yeah the odds have to mean it works i also love his description of like 17 beers at night and a nudie magazine bill he's thinking like oh i could have bought a trailer home by now with how much i spend on pornography like again no show would have a co-star be if it was a network commandment that chris is too weird that peterson has to move out of his

parents house because he's too unlikable i can't believe that they're fixed to that okay he moves in with a guy who's maybe more nuts than he is. Yeah, it's just only alcoholism slows him down. And then the way he talks to other cops of just like, no, come on, I want to shoot this guy. All right, we'll give you a gun, sure. There's lots of police brutality jokes later in the series. Oh, so many good ones. The time travel episode especially.

Also, when Nora Dunn holds him hostage, the police are like, they literally arrest Sharon. They're like, by the time it's all sorted out we'll be in the clear peterson is sold on this plan we get to hear animotions obsession that song rules i mainly hear the keyboard riff and things not the lyrics oh yeah yeah i love the use of like then new music or newish i mean it was like five years old for the snm episode that has the master and servant song like that was a real deep cut i liked hearing on the dvd you can see like about 30 seconds

extended version of this oh i missed that okay not the most clear dvd menus i'll say on there you gotta dig but you can see a little more stuff of him appearing on tv and waving at her and little more of the oven bit i love on that oven where she like kicks it closed with her foot that's him appearing in the oven is a great gag and i mean a lot of this reminds me of simpsons but when she's changing channels he's on every channel it reminds me of when the burns takes over the tv network yes and he's on every channel too it's again worth referencing that rosebud was the first one written of the murkin run so maybe that's why it is the most get a lifey of them. I think Homer goes to college actually is probably a little more,

but in an amazing joke in which he's in her lab, looking at her microscopes and Chris is on one of the slides and she rinses off the slide and puts it back under the microscope. And he's a little damp and like playfully like chiding her. I love his little finger wag. Like, come on. I love his act out on tv of taking

off his space helmet and acting like he's not breathing i'm just kidding and then playfully shooting at her with the gun when he's a cowboy yeah this is another one of those benefits american had on simpsons animation can make all this work with a great animator which he fortunately had but in this it really just counts on chris elliott understanding the joke and executing it well and he does it perfectly every shot yeah with no dialogue in this montage and that time lap shot that's where they reused the dummy that they'd run over earlier and they just put a dummy outside of one of the universal homes too i hate the song's just great i like hearing that song he liked using bad song to cover long sequences most i'd

say every other episode had a lengthy music montage i have georgie girl in my head yes because of the montage from when he moves out i think that is in the first episode that's where we did a great joke from that one one of my favorite jokes and i forgot i was in this but i tweeted it last night it's another montage of no dialogue and chris is enjoying his day of being free he moved out of his parents house he sees a little girl pushing a stroller he goes in to look at her dolly it's the severed head of an old man and that's just the joke he just walks away yeah yeah so the next morning as the montage ends chris meets her outside and glues his hand to her shoe and just his lines are funny about how he wants to like they're going to roast in hell together if they don't end up. But the way Chris Elliott looks up at her with an insane look in his eye is so good.

I like when they sometimes will drop the, you know, endless positivity facade that he hides under. And she's just a pure psychotic lunatic who is going to become violent. And just this blank stare like we'll be rotting in hell together trisha please trisha and he just becomes a high-pitched weirdo again but at this point trisha she knows the deal takes off her shoe and puts on a brand new shoe and continues walking and pet Peterson now needs to stock up on supplies. You are the most gorgeous, perfect, sexy man I've ever seen, with the possible exception of Charles Durning. Thank you very much. Oh, you know, I also need some deodorant.

All this running around has really made me stink up a storm. Woo! Run for your lives! I must know your name. Uh, Chris. Chris, uh... Chris something. Oh, hey, throw in some of those condoms, would you? You know, in case this harassing thing pays off. I love you. Thank you very much.

You have a very kind and courteous manner about you, miss. And people say the world has become cold and impersonal. Well, I say poo on them. So that is Amy Yazbeck, and Chris walks into this very sparsely decorated pharmacy to get foot pads. My feet are one big pussy blister, is what he announces. That makes it ten times funnier that all he says are disgusting things and Amy Asbeck just falls in love with him.

She's so funny here. She's an underrated comedic actress. Think right after this show, but pre-Wings, she does Robin Hood men in tights, right? I believe she's made Mary in her chastity belt. When you really care about someone, you shout it from the mountaintops. So on behalf of Desjardins Insurance, I'm standing 20,000 feet above sea level to tell our clients that we really care about you. We care about you. Home and auto insurance personalized to your needs.

Weird, I don't remember saying that part. Visit Desjardins.com slash care and get insurance that's really big on care. Did I mention that we care? And of course, Merkin got her on the show because she was married to John Ritter when he was alive. And of course, Merkin worked on Three's Company. Yeah. Every single story I hear about John Ritter is like, oh, he's the nicest person who ever lived. And it's really, everyone is just sad. It's like Phil Hartman, just one of those stories like,

oh, I wish he was still with us kind of thing. No cash, no jobs, no hope, no Ritter. Yes, Beck. I mean, we all knew her from Wings. I think people- Who doesn't know her from Wings? Wings had an amazing cast. I know everybody craps on it is

like uh what an average sitcom that was always on usa only because maybe it seems like al jean and mike reese had a real like hate boner for wings or something yeah it's weird now because al jean would like never be mean to any tv show but back then they're like yeah stupid wings maybe it was mike reese was the devil on his, like saying, let's just say every show sucks. The devil says, no, there are limits to even my powers when it comes to renewing wings. And next up on wings. Who cares? Yasmik's so funny.

She is great as this like stunned, wide eyed lunatic. Yeah. Well, speaking of Simpsons jokes, they remind us that him going like, thank you is very much. Yes, I do like working at the bowling alley not quite getting it especially when the exact same thing is happening to chris that he's doing to somebody else yes it's also homer refusing to learn a lesson that's clearly in his face i will say that condom joke is very horrifying let's just say that peterson thinks that it will lead to consensual sex and that's why he wants condoms and nothing let's not think of any darker readings on that joke that's how i read it yes yeah another extended dvd scene also has him buying eye drops at the pharmacy because he's hurting his eyes staring

at her glowing loveliness and sometimes he accidentally stares at the sun for a while because he thinks it's her then yazbek asks him for his address and he's like oh sure and he just tells her where she lives and that also leads to him then using his eye drops in the next shot while staring up at the window so Emma throws multiple rocks at him here we only see one rock smash him in the face after Chris gets hit in the face he then thinks he hears a Keebler elf which again very insane thinks that a Keebler elf, which, again, very insane, thinks that a Keebler elf is following him. It's real and 20 feet away. But that's when he meets his stalker, first thinking that she's mad that he stole a giant bra to wear. She lets him know really what's going on.

You see, I love you, Chris. I've loved you from the first moment I saw you, and I'm going to do whatever it takes to make you mine. That is the sickest, most perverted thing I have ever heard in my entire life. Now, please, leave me alone. I'm trying to stalk somebody here. No, Chris. I'll never leave you alone until you realize that you love me, too. Well, fine. Then I'll just move over here. Then I'll move over here.

You managed to follow me everywhere. What are you, some kind of evil superhero? Don't leave. Good obsession again. If you're going to pay for it once, play it twice. There's fewer clips for this one because there is the six minutes of this episode is obsession, I think. Yeah, her montage is shorter. There's a few good jokes in there.

I love him putting on the sweater and suddenly she's in it with him. And he starts screaming. It's extra funny after hearing their note on it on the commentary. There's no reason for Peterson to have a microscope in his garage garage they repeat the microscope why does he have a microscope why is he looking at it that's so great and she is on the microscope slide now i love that he's being driven insane by his own stalker and then after that sequence is over it cuts back to trisha in her home and she's playing it very realistic like she's terrified of like he has to be here somewhere. And she sits down and finds out that he's inside the couch. He's the guy under the seat.

He is. Oh my God, man. Merkin jokes that he wanted Elliot to like explode out of the couch, but there was really no fast way to do it. Again, that's where animation is where it makes much more sense for him. Chris learns that he may never get this girl. Chris! Get out!

Get out! Get out! Wait a second. Do you mean to tell me that you're not in love with me yet? Look, lady, if you don't start warming up to me within the next two years, I might just start to lose interest here. And one day, you will look under that dear sweet rump of yours, and I just may not be there. Chris, I am never going to warm up,

even if you follow me around for the rest of both our stinking lives! Geez, you know, for the first time, what you're saying to me, I think, has finally gotten through to me. I understand now. I really do. Really? You know, for the first time, what you're saying to me, I think it's finally gotten through to me. I understand now. I really do. Really? Yes, you don't love me. Right.

And you'll never love me. Exactly. Until we dance together. Yeah, no, just a sweet cha-cha-cha to break the ice. Come on. I love to watch Chris Elliott dance. He's so funny and bad at it. I do wish, you know, that song is fine. It's a good background music,

but I wish they were playing the tinkly piano song, Alley Cat. They got played so much in the show until it was finally a joke in Bad Fish. I watched that Bad Fish episode most recently, and I thought it was in this one too and i just forgot but no it's just a cha-cha song i do believe it's alley cat he dances to in the one where he becomes a male escort yeah but i wouldn't even know the name of that song had brian doyle murray not just said alley cats our favorite song and then we cut away to the giant collection of

alley cat records he has backups he can't because he's used to people destroying it over and over i'd like to again he almost learns his lesson but still refuses to a very homer thing he vows to maybe stop when i think of his dancing i think of him in groundhog day like a little after this he does groundhog day he's so good at that old ladies fall in love with him in that too as he is going to fix the speaker that's when amy asbeck pops out of it reveals she had also broken into the home and had been hiding at the same place and chris almost learns his lesson oh wait there's something more the way she's been following and harassing me that's not unlike the way I've been following you.

And it didn't feel good to me to have her following me that way. So maybe it's not making you feel so good. And maybe instead of making you happy, I've been torturing you. Yes, Chris, you have. Oh, oh, how terribly insensitive of me. Oh, Trisha, I feel so bad about this that, well, maybe I'll stop. Maybe? No, no, you're right. Only losers don't finish with this story.

And I'll never stop either. And how's this for an unexpected twist? If I can't have you, no one can. Well, Evelyn, you can't buy my love by showering me with trinkets and shiny knives. No, Chris, she's going to kill you. Oh. Oh! Maybe you'll love me in another life.

Yeah! And then a man falls to the ceiling. I forgot about this plot twist this very much feels like a murkin first draft kind of thing that it's hilarious in in execution but the idea of like they reach an ending where chris almost learns his lesson and he's like now you know what i'm not gonna give up and then a character literally says well here's a plot twist for you yes and then i can totally see merkin saying like boy i've written to the point where she's going to stab him i need two more pages um a guy falls out of the ceiling and then a new thing happens i'd love elliot's way of slowly explaining

out loud how he's starting to realize like oh this is like what i'm doing to you that's some complicated dialogue so kudos to ch Chris Elliott. He's so good. And one thinks that the knife is being presented as nice for him. And then he thinks he has to be told it's bad that he would be killed as well. I think, too, this was kind of for the fans. If you had been watching the show at this point for this new episode and you'd seen all the ones previous, you're waiting for Chris to die. You're like, does chris die so it's a fake out on his murder too because you think like oh this is how he's gonna die so once she leaves you're like oh i guess he's not getting killed this episode

but yes russell falls from the sky he's played by sandy hellberg who was in a lot of mel brooks movies and a million other small roles if you looked him up you'd be like oh yeah that was the doctor who is gonna undo the nose job in space balls yes i love his line of dialogue i've been watching you following him following her and his son would grow up to be big bang show star simon hellberg or co-star co-star but out. Then she, Yazbek, she hears about how much this stalker loves her. She says that she had never been interested in him before. But since he knows how to treat a gal, yeah, she'll marry him. Another one of Merc and Screw You endings. Yeah.

Famous for that. Oh, also, Elliot thinks that he's a dog at first. That's right. I was like, hey, well, look at this dog. He's like, Chris, that's clearly a man. Oh, you're right. You are a genius. That's right. I was like, hey, well, look at Stoggy. Like, Chris, that's clearly a man. Oh, you're right. You are a genius. I love that.

But yes, on the commentary, they recognize it is a very intentionally awful ending that after all of this, Trisha then reveals that she was just playing hard to get. And the stalker being stalked actually did turn her on. So the stalker's name is russell the final stalker and he says saw your killing spree is a good time to confess that's great oh what a great line god but yes one last clip as chris seemingly finds love at the end don't you want me out of your life forever can't you go play hard to get you mean you're madly in love with me now the way I'm madly in love with you?

Get real, Chris. Yet I have a certain interest. Maybe I just want to do a paper on you or at least some electroshock experiments. Oh, electroshock. Oh, boy, this is like a dream come true. First I get an incredibly gorgeous, genius girlfriend, and then I get to be an experimental guinea pig.

No offense to our Italian friends there. I was just talking to Russell, and we've decided that I should finish what I started and stab you. Oh! Jeez! Wow! Oh, well. and stab you. Oh! Jeez! Wow! Oh, well, good thing you're a doctor and a surgeon, huh?

Unfortunately, Chris, stab wounds are the one injury I don't know a damn thing about. Oh, jeez. Gee, I have the worst luck with men. And she just sits down and lets him seemingly bleed to death on her floor i was thinking this last scene could be a sketch by itself too yeah yeah totally it's a very mr showy set too yeah the cheap you mean yes cheap looking like well if that band was instead david cross it would be very believable yeah it falls out of the ceiling i just love all of the twists and you know chris wasn't always dying in season one but season two is when they decided let's just kill him all the time and all the other times he dies it's a

little you know over the top like he falls into an exploding bed he drinks the juice that makes you explode his head is torn off by sharon and gus and kicked down the street that's one of the most violent deaths he suffers it's not a cartoonish head rip it is a bloody stump with blood shooting out of it but i like how realistic this is just the knife is just shoved in his heart yeah and he gets a chance to react to it like oh yeah you know this one of all his deaths it really reminds me of python and i think merkin uh was drawing from it if you remember well there's many python sketches but i was thinking of the end of life of brian where they keep teasing the audience like oh we made you think he wouldn't die and someone would save him but no he's gonna be crucified like this constant no you don't want to see this person die we we saved him nah not really

he's dead oh wait is it same with this like all right for once we're not gonna kill him she's not gonna stab him and she just walks back and says you know what i decided i will stab you i like how sudden it is too it's great and uh one thing i forgot to mention is that the last time i re-watched all the series was when one up shut down and i lost my job in 2013 and i was between 30 and 31. So I was re-watching this thinking, boy, you know what? Chris's paper job, boy, is no less dignified

than writing about video games for a living. And is this going to be my life? But eventually I got employment again, but it was the perfect time to re-watch Get a Life. And now Chris is a young man and I'm old. Yeah, we're much older

than Chris Elliott now. It's the end of Chris Peterson, the character. Hey, you know, as the career of chris elliott has showed us it doesn't end in your 30s you keep going he's in his 60s now still doing great great stuff this ending is so mean and ridiculous i do love it this is an insane episode with bad sexual politics to it too but intentionally so like chris is murdered and then you see his

corpse desecrated at the end because it just run over by an endless loop of cars i love that and merkin would totally admit that like yes we don't actually believe that stalking a woman will make her eventually fall in love with you it's that this sitcom has to teach the wrong lesson every time it would be a failure of it as a show if the correct lesson was taught like that merkin would much rather have a bad lesson be taught than choose to do a good lesson that makes you feel warm and fuzzy it's why even in the warmest and fuzziest simpsons episodes they still had to end in an fu yeah just like even one of my all-time favorite merkin ones is bart's comment and that does end with like a big hug but then afterwards they have

to be like we're all troubled that homer was right i'm scared too uh i can see sharon being terrified that chris peterson was actually right about something for once with his insane rambling oh boy that would be a great good life episode the comet comes to town and they've all gotta hide all three characters that exist at this point it was so fun to revisit the show and to re-watch the whole thing and then crack back open my dvds uh so so good great one to do for april fools definitely yes hope everyone out there enjoyed it who knows maybe there'll be a get a life mini series in the books i think we're getting more comfortable with doing live action stuff so yeah yeah i feel like i've only begun to think about this show and yeah

i would totally think you know who knows uh in the fall maybe it'll be on our mini series list of choices our 10 favorite get a life just so duck man won't make it again duck man has a new challenger again uh but thanks everyone out there for listening if you want to support the show and get all these episodes one week ahead of time and ad free please go to patreon.com slash talking simpsons sign up there for five bucks a month you'll get just that but also access to all of our mini series the current one that's running right now it just started is talking to the hill season two part one that's 11 new episodes of talking to the hill only for people that are at the five dollar level or higher there is so much going on behind that paywall and if you sign up now you get everything that we've done behind the

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hear us talk about movies like last month's Duck Tales, the movie Treasure of the Lost Lamp. Before that, the 1995 Studio Ghibli film Whisper of the Heart, and a giant back catalog of so many films over two years' worth. That's over 100 hours of additional extra amazing podcasts on top of all the other great miniseries we did at the $5 level. So please sign up today at patreon.com slash TalkingSimpsons. So I've been one of your hosts, Bob Mackie. You can find me on Twitter as Bob Servo.

And my other podcast is RetroNauts. That's a classic gaming podcast about old video games. You can find that wherever you find podcasts or go to patreon.com slash RetroNauts. Sign up there for two full-length bonus episodes every month. Henry, what about you?

Follow me on Twitter at H-E-N-e-r-e-y-g anytime i've got cool stuff going on i tweet about it and if you're following us on twitter how are you not yet following the official talking simpsons network account at talk simpsons pod at talk simpsons pod we'll keep you up to date when new stuff comes out on our Talking Simpsons podcast on what a cartoon, what a cartoon movie, mini series like Talking in the Hill, polls, news, all of that. You will stay up to date when new stuff's going on in the Talking Simpsons universe if you follow at TalkSimpsonsPod. Thank you so much for joining us, folks. We'll see you next time for the Death Note episode, Re Rebirth and we run over you again. You're right.

I am a silly ass, am I not? Oh. I love you, Tricia Paddington.