Wednesday, January 10, 2007

Speaking of Fantasy Comedies...

Over a year ago, in explaining why I liked the TV series based on the movie Weird Science, I pointed out that a bunch of the writers for that show seemed to have gone on to bigger things. For the heck of it, I thought I'd look again at the recent credits of Weird Science writers, and it turns out they're not just on Desperate Housewives, they're everywhere:

- Jeff Vlaming writes episodes of Battlestar Galactica and has written a movie script that Mike Nichols is set to direct.

- Kari Lizer created the Emmy-winning The New Adventures of Old Christine. She says in an interview that "Weird Science turned out to be the best job... It turned me into a real writer."

- Paul Lieberstein went on to write and produce for King of the Hill and more recently The Office, where he also plays the part of Toby.

- Adam Barr got hired by Kari Lizer to write for Old Christine, because he and Lizer both were prominent writer-producers on Will and Grace.

- Peter Ocko created a show starring Stanley Tucci, though it didn't last more than a few episodes.

The rest of the writing staff either is or used to be involved with Desperate Housewives. Oh, and the show's chief director, David Grossman, is still directing every show under the sun. And we haven't even mentioned the Lee Tergesen factor.

What does this prove? Two things:

a) This is possible evidence that I was not in fact entirely crazy to think Weird Science was a good show, and

b) If you are watching a show, any show, chances are that one of its contributors was also involved with Weird Science. Heck, even Entourage had a Vanessa Angel guest appearance. Can a "Six Degrees of Weird Science" game be far behind?


2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I never saw the movie but I loved the tv show when they were airing it on Fox Family Channel in the mornings.

"I went to second base with an alien!!"

Anonymous said...

The show was actually more coherent than the movie (John Hughes' output went steadly downhill from National Lampoon's Vacation onward), though for whatever reason -- possibly its lack of full network status/budget -- it never really fulfilled its potential. But it was still way better than Burt Reynolds-in-a-cube in the genre of off-network sci-fi sit-coms from MCA-Universal.