Who ruined this show?

[johnlucas]

This was one of my favorite shows growing up as a teenager.
When they "normalized" it they sucked all of the charm & coolness from it.

Why do executives take everything imaginative & water it down into a puddle of bland blatherskyte (Fenton Crackshell loaned me this word)?

I hope I can find reruns of this show one day so I can remember how it was in 1990.

Maybe the Vanilla Ice backlash was one of the reasons for the excising of the Gumby cut. Hmmm.....
John Lucas

[charles bundy]

Yeah,i was a fan of this show when it first came on.I only remember parts of it though.

I'd like to have this on DVD(non bootleg)one day.

[Lastdaysofrain]

I don't think it got ruined, one of the best episodes is in the third season (when it was "normalized") but the writing was inconsistent. The third season does suffer from lack of Frank Lemer though (Brad Penny is a poor substitute)

[nosoupforyou77]

weird show. I dont hate the normalization that much, but such fond memories

[H. E. Pennypacker]

Originally Posted by johnlucas

Maybe the Vanilla Ice backlash was one of the reasons for the excising of the Gumby cut. Hmmm.....
John Lucas

You'd think so but David Silver (90210) managed to keep his for two more years!

[iank]

Yeah, the last season was ruined.

[TMC]

I can't find a definitive answer, but people online have speculated that Parker Lewis Can't Lose was pressured by the Fox network to be more or less, a Beverly Hills, 90210 clone, just a half-hour sitcom version. In other words, it wanted to be a show that could also function as a morality play/teenage soap opera instead of a surreal, absurd, innovative comedy.

[Old School]

Parker Lewis was even getting mentioned in rap songs like Naughty By Nature's 1993 smash hit Hip Hop Hooray:

Fools get foolish neither them or Parker Lewis knew us/You could have crews wit shoes and can't step to us

[TMC]

What TV series started off really well, but was ruined by the seasons that followed?

For a show that was thrown together in a hurry as a ripoff because a competing production studio had gotten the rights to a Ferris Bueller adaptation, Parker Lewis Can’t Lose was surprisingly witty, clever, and well-written. It didn’t hurt that the cast was great, and the direction aimed for a not-quite-surreal living-cartoon feel that they usually pulled off.

Apparently, not many regular people remember the show, but half the people who produce and write for TV do. You can see everyone involved in Ms. Marvel talking about how Parker Lewis was one of their major inspirations, for example.

The show did pretty well in the ratings, or at least well for early Fox shows. But in the middle of their second season, in 1991, Fox started sending notes to all their shows whose ratings weren’t improving as fast as their big 4 shows, because they apparently believed that had been hugely helpful in 1988, and Parker was one of the casualties. They were asked to tone down the weirdness, give Parker a girlfriend, and make the adults more relatable. They made those changes gradually over the back half of the season, and then season 3 was exactly what the suits wanted, and it’s almost unwatchably boring.

When the show was released on DVD by Shout Factory in 2009, they didn’t even bother to include season 3, and pretty much nobody complained.