Sometimes you watch a promo for an upcoming series and think it's been created just for you. That's how I felt in the fall of 1991 when I saw a teaser for NBC's Eerie, Indiana, a family-friendly, comedy-laced horror show about an ordinary kid Marshall Teller (Omri Katz), who moves with his family from New Jersey to a distinctly unordinary small town -- Eerie, Indiana, population 16,661. Like Marshall, I had recently been uprooted as well, leaving downtown Toronto for suburban Virginia. And while the community my 13-year-old self had moved to wasn't home to a still-alive Elvis Presley or an orthodontist who designed retainers that allowed their wearers to read the canine mind, it still seemed pretty strange and alien to me. When Marshall described Eerie as "the center of weirdness for the entire planet" in the show's great credits sequence, he basically summed up how I felt about my new home.
Speaking as a kid who grew up without cable in the '90s, PBS is underrated. Obviously, everyone loves Sesame Street, Reading Rainbow and Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. And the Internet (and cosplayers) will never let anyone forget about The Magic School Bus, Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?, The Big Comfy Couch or Bill Nye the Science Guy. You can't bring up classic '90s PBS without talking about Wishbone or Lamb Chop's Play-Along, nor should you. Still-thriving Arthur remains underpraised, despite being the longest-running children's animated series in the U.S. (and the second longest-running American animated series behind The Simpsons)... and I have more than once on TWoP snuck in the fact that I am basically committed to watching Marc Brown's aardvark-helmed series through to its bitter end. But, in my humble opinion, the two most overlooked series of all time are The Puzzle Place -- a show that I was up until recently convinced only existed in my head, because to this day I cannot find a fellow fan in the flesh (even its forum hasn't been touched in years) -- and the one I'm writing about today in the spirit of Halloween: Ghostwriter.
At first glance, it might not seem that the new CBS medical drama A Gifted Man has much in common with The WB's family drama Everwood. After all, Everwood was a small-town saga and set in the mountains, while A Gifted Man thrives in the hustle and bustle of New York. But if you look more closely, you'll see that these two shows are remarkably similar. A Gifted Man just has fewer quirky neighbors with "personalities."
Full disclosure: I love Will Arnett. Frankly, I don't know many people who don't think he's hilarious and wonderful and has the perfect family. But this relationship -- mine and his, not his and Amy Poehler's, obviously -- can only be one-sided for so long; I've been giving him chances to have a new and interesting character in a funny and likable series for years now, and every time he sorely disappoints. Maybe it's not fair to blame him for his failures in the past few years, but it seems like every job he takes, he refuses to play a different character. In Up All Night, there are pangs of change and a small glimmer of hope that he'll finally broaden his range, and if he learns from his former mistakes, he'll be golden. Here's our advice:
Today's the day that an entire universe dies... and gets reborn. With the heavily-hyped release of Justice League #1, DC Comics is re-starting each of its 52 superhero titles with new writers, new artists and a new continuity. Since the reboot was announced, the company has been subjected to endless fanboy slagging, but, as past experiences have shown (like, say, Chris Nolan's Batman films) sometimes there's a lot of potential in starting over from scratch. Following DC's bold example, we'd love to see reboots of the following small-screen superhero shows, some of which were pretty good the first time around, but we think could be made even better.
Way back in March, after Nick announced it was bringing back some of its '90s shows, reports surfaced that Hey Arnold! would be coming back, too -- but with new episodes. While I was happy to hear the news -- I am to this day a huge Hey Arnold! fan -- I was almost relieved to hear it wasn't true. (If you read the article, it seems the source was a high school newspaper.) The thing is, I'd rather Nick just bring back old Hey Arnold! episodes. But nothing has been said by Nick about it since. I'm thrilled that Kenan & Kel and The Amanda Show are getting a reprise -- but Arnold deserves one just as much. Here are the five reasons I think it's a really, really good show; why it holds up -- and why Nick should bring it back. (In the mean time, Season One just came out on DVD if you get desperate.)
Confession time: When I decided to watch and then write a piece about the first season of Veronica Mars as part of my internship at TWoP, I told the editors that I had never before seen the show. But I had -- just once.
Over the years, and most recently with Awkward., MTV has tried its darndest to prove to the world that they "get" their teenage audience. It's no easy feat to capture the high school experience, but it shouldn't be rocket science, either. Let's take a look and see which of MTV's attempts at representing the four best years of our lives made the grade, and which were total failures.
Though it's been available on iTunes for years, for those of you who still collect non-digital forms of media, the physical DVD release of Nickelodeon's much-beloved cowboy comedy Hey Dude is finally out this week. Like millions of other children of the '90s, I was a huge fan of the show as a kid, so when we got our hands on a copy of the DVD-set I decided to take a nostalgic look back at the show. What I found was that, in addition to the expected hilariously unfortunate '90s fashion and the awful acting, the show is also so firmly set in the analog age that it's outdated in many other unexpected ways as well. These were the ones that stood out to me the most when I wasn't, you know, obsessing over how stupid the boys are for not noticing that Melody is still so much hotter than Brad (which took up about 95% of my viewing time).
Every generation has a group of kids they feel like they grew up with because they watched them on TV. For me, it's the Disney and Nickelodeon "class" of 1995 to 2005. They were examples of how to always feel embarrassed by my parents (That's So Raven), crimp certain parts of my hair and not others (Lizzie McGuire) and talk in loud, obnoxious voices (All That). So with Raven-Symone's impending return to TV on ABC Family's State of Georgia, I'm taking a look at where my former Disney and Nick role models are nowadays, and assigning superlatives to their adult lives and careers.
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