It's Like, You Know aired from March 1999 until January 2000 on ABC.
Los Angeles, a.k.a. " La La Land" never looked sillier than in this engaging spoof of the city and it's sometimes bizarre, self-obsessed ways. The city and it's denizens were seen through the eyes of Arthur( Chris Eigeman), a churlish, thirty-something New York journalist who despised all things LA, so much so that he had come to town to write a book about hating the place. He was staying in the guest house of Robbie ( Steven Eckholdt), a glib former college roommate and self-made millionaire who had made it big there( he invented a tv pay-per-view scheme that allowed Jewish citizens to watch High Holy Day services from the comfort of their own homes called "Pay Per Jew"). Robbie's other best pal and landlord was Shrug( Evan Handler), a spaced-out , totally bald little nerd who had never worked a day in his life, thanks to a trust fund from his fabulously rich family. Another friend was Lauren ( A.J. Langer), a perky, pretty young woman with 2 occupations ( " just because")-masseuse and process server. Sometimes she combined the two, serving papers while her clients were naked and faced down on the massage table. The most inspired bit of casting , however, was neighbor Jennifer Grey-the Jennifer Grey of Dirty Dancing and Ferris Buellar fame-who mocked her famous nose job and sagging career ( "You recognize me!"). ( Ms. Grey must have a great sense of humor).
Stories revolved around the little idiocies of LA life, such as spotting stars in unlikely places, taking the day off to watch a live telecast of a high-speed car chase on the freeway, or how shocked everybody is when someone is simply nice. For not honking his horn in backed-up traffic, Robbie was given a party by strangers , and approached by a producer interested in making a film about his " good dead." He couldn't tell them that the horn just didn't work. lol
A Review from The New York Times
TELEVISION REVIEW; They're Like, You Know . . . Seinfeld
By CARYN JAMES
Published: March 24, 1999
The ''Seinfeld'' DNA is unmistakable and the title entirely off-putting, but those are misleading first impressions of ''It's Like, You Know . . .,'' a witty, charming, acerbic comedy in which a cynical New Yorker parachutes into the midst of a group of Los Angeles friends. Experiencing severe culture shock, he is stunned by the models, the road rules, the pretty masseuse who moonlights as a subpoena server.
The series was created by Peter Mehlman, one of the most prolific ''Seinfeld'' writers, and its style undeniably derives from that show, centered on the friends' wry conversations instead of one-liners and sitcom plots. But just as ''Seinfeld'' was not really about nothing but about the telling details of social manners, ''It's Like, You Know . . .'' is about the culture clash between the East and West coasts and between the New York life of the mind and the Los Angeles life of the high-maintenance body.
Chris Eigeman (so good in urbanely understated roles in Whit Stillman films like ''Metropolitan'') is ideal for the role of Arthur, the New Yorker heading to California for the first time to write a book called ''Los Angeles, How Can You Stomach It?'' On the plane he meets Lauren (A. J. Langer), the masseuse/subpoena server, who tells him how a process-serving colleague duped someone by claiming there was a cellulite detector for arrivals at the Los Angeles airport.
It turns out that Lauren knows the people Arthur will be staying with: his old college roommate, Robbie (Steven Eckholdt), a Protestant who made his fortune by selling the rights to the Jewish high holy days on cable. ''He calls it,'' Arthur explains, with a pause and just the right sardonic tone, ''Pay-per-Jew.''
Robbie lives in the guest house of the bald, morose Shrug (Evan Handler), who inherited his vast fortune and occasionally feels guilty about it. When Arthur dryly suggests that Shrug pretend he works in a bookstore that pays him $2,000 an hour, Shrug thinks that's a plan.
The three men have already shaped their characters with sharp, terrifically confident performances. The women's roles are not yet as well-defined. Is Lauren a ditz or not? More problematic is Jennifer Grey, the ''Dirty Dancing'' actress whose cosmetic surgery reshaped her face supposedly past recognition. She plays a fictional version of herself as Robbie's neighbor, or ''the wacky next-door neighbor'' as she puts it, eager to talk about her stalled career and overactive sex life. The joke becomes tiresome after the first scene but is played out relentlessly (at least in the three episodes available for preview). The producers should have simply cast her as the wacky neighbor and be done with it.
If the Jennifer Grey plot sounds more clever on paper than it is, the rest of the series creates the opposite effect: it is far funnier than it sounds. The show would fall apart without its precariously balanced scripts. Happily, the culture clash is presented with a sophisticated wink acknowledging that something can be both true and a cliche. Robbie rattles off a litany of what outsiders hate about Los Angeles. ''The murder trials last two years, the marriages last two months,'' he says. ''Nothing's open late, you have to drive to take a walk,'' he goes on, ''then you throw in earthquakes, mud slides, road rage, race riots.'' But one day you play baseball in January, he says, and the next thing you know you're mindlessly happy waiting for your Guatemalan gardener to show up.
In next week's episode (all too reminiscent at first of the waiting-in-a-Chinese restaurant episode of ''Seinfeld'') the friends sit in Robbie's living room and watch a car chase on television. ''It's our version of a snow day,'' Robbie explains to the bored-out-of-his skull Arthur. In the episode after that, the friends debate who is dating for shallower reasons: Robbie is dating a model who likes him for his money, and Arthur, an annoying, unattractive publicist who might be able to introduce him to his idol, John Updike.
The first minutes of tonight's episode may well drive viewers away with a Seinfeldian conversation about whether the letter ''Q'' should come later in the alphabet. And the title doesn't get any better even when it's explained as a nervous tic of Los Angeles-speak. As the pilot on Arthur's plane says of the weather, ''It's like you know, 82 degrees.'' But the show soon rights itself to become one of the few new series to deserve a long life.
IT'S LIKE, YOU KNOW . . .
ABC, tonight at 8:30
(Channel 7 in New York)
Premiere written by Peter Mehlman; directed by Andy Ackerman, and produced by Suzy Mamann Greenberg and Mr. Ackerman. Jeff Astroff and Mike Sikowitz, series co-executive producers; Ms. Mamann Greenberg, Richard Doctorow and Amy Welsh, series producers. Mr. Mehlman and Ted Harbert, series executive producers. Produced by Dreamworks.
WITH: Chris Eigeman (Arthur), Jennifer Grey (Jennifer Grey), Evan Handler (Shrug), A.J. Langer (Lauren) and Steven Eckholdt (Robbie)
A Review from Entertainment Weekly
TV Review
"It's like, you know..." (1999)
Reviewed by Ken Tucker | Mar 26, 1999
The first time I went to Los Angeles, I hated it; the second time around, I loved it. I can think of no greater compliment to pay the uncannily L.A. sitcom ''It's like, you know...'' than to say I had exactly the same reaction to it: Watched the pilot and detested it as a sunny Seinfeld; watched the second episode, and began to get into its funny, actually quite distinctive groove. By the third show I was ready to move into the main characters' bungalow and ask Lauren (My So-Called Life's A.J. Langer) for a massage.
Which would have been perfectly above-board: Lauren is a professional masseuse — and, in creator (and former Seinfeld coexec producer) Peter Mehlman's nicely homogenized imagination, she's also a process server, a ditz, a babe, and the object of lust for the series' central character, Arthur (Chris Eigeman). Arthur is just the sort of recently transplanted East Coaster I and so many others have been over the years: people who despise L.A.'s showbiz-centric view of the world, its overreliance upon and pride in cars, and most fundamentally to a certain character type, its sun. Sunniness, to an Arthur type — dark-haired, dark-minded, dark-loving — becomes, in L.A., the enemy as much as it is for a vampire. Sunniness, for this sort of person, is deeply depressing.
How nice for Arthur, therefore, that there are distractions such as Lauren and his best friend, Robbie (Steven Eckholdt), a far more contented transplant and a schemer who's making money televising pay-per-view High Holy Day services under the title Pay-Per-Jew.
Arthur, arriving in Hollywood to stay with Robbie and write a book about a New Yorker who hates the sunny city, is introduced to two friends Robbie has made in L.A.: Shrug (Evan Handler), a hairless heir to independent wealth, and Jennifer Grey, the Dirty Dancing star played with remarkable self-deprecation by Jennifer Grey. Grey is unrecognizable from the Dirty days, thanks to subsequent cosmetic surgery (about which she takes an awful lot of ribbing in the premiere). The ribbing, in fact, becomes more distracting than her new face (she and the characters refer repeatedly to her nose job, but — since she's allowed the writers to bring up the subject — I must observe that the whole shape of her face has changed). You almost feel sorry for Grey; you think, Gee, was she this desperate for a job that she's essentially admitting she went too far with facial reconstruction, turning it into a lucrative, ironic TV joke?
Anyway, you can probably get past Grey after the first episode, and hone in on the others. Robbie and Shrug engage in a lot of non-sequitur small talk that's blatantly Seinfeldian: piddly debates about where the little-used letter q should appear in the alphabet; poor-taste whimsy about how Germany should change its name to ''Aspen'' to remake its poor World War II image. But once you grant that Mehlman was responsible for a good chunk of Seinfeld's distinctive conversational byplay, ''It's like, you know...'' transcends rip-off status to become a satisfying post-Jerry development. Besides, the dialogue sounds to me as though Mehlman is as much influenced by the albums of Randy Newman — with their contradictory mood of I-love-L.A. despair — as he is by Seinfeld.
And Mehlman has a very strong, distinctive leading man in Eigeman, whose perpetual frown and sneered-pucker mouth have managed to convey intelligence, not belligerence, in Whit Stillman's WASP- twit movies Metropolitan and 1998's The Last Days of Disco. As he's proved on the big screen, Eigeman is a deft ensemble player who scores with his own punchlines but also makes his costars look good.
''It's like, you know...'' is as gimmicky as its lowercase, conversational title. (In every episode, for example, someone — a TV newscaster, an airline pilot — utters the title phrase.) And like its numerous car jokes, the show traffics in L.A. and Manhattan cliches. (''Don't ask me anything about America,'' says Arthur, ''I don't know anything about it — I'm from New York.'') But its gimmicks are bolstered by vividly drawn protagonists and the show has a real understanding for the way L.A. can make you feel great — full of juice — while sucking you dry. Rather than saying it's like, you know...good, I shall deem it verging on excellent. B+
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