1990: Year of the Failed ‘80s Movie Sitcom Adaptation

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https://www.pastemagazine.com/tv/sit...hood-baby-talk

By Jim Vorel | March 21, 2024 | 12:15pm

It’s safe to say that despite an undeniable downturn in the pervasiveness of the format, and an evolve-or-die mandate that has reshaped the genre as we know it, the classic American sitcom is still alive and kicking here in 2024. The premises and settings may have grown more esoteric, like What We Do in the Shadows’ clan of vampires or the wandering souls of Ghosts, but for every one of those there’s still a painfully familiar Extended Family to ground us in the same old tropes the format has been wallowing in since the 1970s.

But even for someone who spent his childhood living through the era, it can be easy to forget just how utterly inundated TV was with sitcoms at the dawn of the 1990s. Each of the major networks was leaning heavily on the format, cycling through a seemingly endless procession of sitcom pitches that were so often discarded and forgotten as soon as they’d arrived. The classics that arose from this era are absolutely exceptions to the rule—the median sitcom from this period is the sort of show you’d probably have only the most vague memories of at this point, even if you were a voracious consumer at the time. A pall of bland forgetfulness reigned over the airwaves.

And into this creative wasteland, barreled a rather odd trend that coalesced in the 1990-1991 TV season in particular: movie-to-sitcom adaptations. Now, it’s not as if this hasn’t been a relatively common occurrence before or since, but the 1990 TV season was really something special in this regard, featuring no fewer than five different examples of popular 1980s movies subsequently turned into network sitcoms. And guess what? They all failed. Between the five shows, only one of them received a second season, and most were canceled before they had finished their first.

What films had the ignominious distinction of being turned into crappy TV shows in this stretch? Well, the victims included such beloved comedies as Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and Uncle Buck, joined by dramedies like Parenthood and Working Girl. Oh, and a Look Who’s Talking show as well. Incredibly, this group almost included a sixth entry: a Coming to America sitcom might have premiered in this slot as well but ultimately wasn’t picked up, and its sole pilot aired in 1989. There was clearly something noxious in the water at the close of the ‘80s, when it came to butchering well-liked movies.

Fascinated by the idea of so many failed movie-to-sitcom adaptations all landing on American TV airwaves in the same period, I decided to watch a few episodes of each one of these series, which—thanks to a seemingly total lack of copyright law enforcement—is quite easy to do without ever leaving YouTube. I’ve subsequently ranked the series below, descending from the very worst of the bunch to the (relative) best.

Watch a few episodes of these for yourself, and your rose-colored glasses for 1990s pop culture might need a little bit of polishing.

2. Ferris Bueller



Lasted for: 13 episodes on NBC

I’m almost shocked with myself for putting Ferris Bueller at #2 in this ranking of failed 1990 sitcoms, but that speaks more to the mind-numbing assignment of trudging through Baby Talk or Working Girl episodes than it does the quality of this strange adaptation of John Hughes’ iconic 1986 teen comedy. There’s a lot that is objectively terrible about Ferris Bueller, but its sheer weirdness—and a handful of quality performances—make it infinitely more watchable than the earlier entries in this list, at least in a sideshow sense. Watching this, you’re at least curious about what the hell they’re going to do next.

It’s important to note that Ferris Bueller displays an atypical relationship with its source material, in direct contrast to these other shows. Where Uncle Buck dopily goes through the motions of recreating entire scenes from the film point by point, Ferris Bueller can’t decide how much it wants to divorce itself from its movie. Most of the time, it diverges in huge ways in terms of setting, tone, and character relationships, but it then mimics other aspects.

Some of those changes include transplanting the whole series from Chicago to Santa Monica, completely discarding Cameron’s characterization from the film, and radically changing the relationship between Ferris and Sloan, who the protagonist is now meeting and attempting to woo for the first time. In some respects, the sitcom almost feels like a prequel to the film—except for the fact that it directly references the film in its pilot, claiming that the Ferris you see here is the “real” version. In fact, this goes so far as to include the TV version (played by Charlie Schlatter) physically pulling a cardboard stand-in of Matthew Broderick from his closet and then cutting it in half with a chainsaw, decrying him as “too white bread.” Which, if you’ve seen Schlatter act for more than a minute or two, rings as especially ironic.



The obvious conclusion to draw from such a surprising rejection of the film would be that the TV version of Ferris Bueller is planning to take the show in a very different direction, but Schlatter then proceeds to fly in the face of that bold stance by (surprisingly skillfully) imitating the exact vocal cadence and mannerisms of Broderick. This includes the fourth wall breaks of the film, but the TV show immediately abuses that crutch to an irritating extent—Ferris likely spends more time talking to the camera in the 24 minutes of the Ferris Bueller pilot than Broderick does in the entire 98 minutes of the film. And Schlatter, sadly, is simply not up to the task of being Broderick or Ferris, a supremely difficult character to avoid coming off as insufferably smug and predatory in terms of how he uses people. Any depiction of Ferris Bueller is going to need superhuman charisma in order to overcome the fact that he would rub most real-life humans the wrong way, and Schlatter just doesn’t have it. Instead, you end up feeling bad for the people Ferris is constantly wronging, even Principal Rooney.

What are the positives here? Well, beloved character actor Richard Riehle (Office Space) is a nice choice to step into the polished shoes of Rooney, while a young Jennifer Anniston (!) of all people steals scenes as Ferris’ now older but still resentful sister Jeannie. What was it with these failed 1990 sitcoms and the presence of future A-listers? Anniston is still three years away here from her first major film role in Leprechaun, and four years from the premiere of Friends. It’s funny to imagine Schlatter not knowing his fresh-faced costar would be one of the biggest sitcom stars of all time by the end of the decade.

At the end of the day, you have to admire that the single-camera style of Ferris Bueller shows at least a little ambition (and no laugh track), even if its primary ambition was apparently to be Parker Lewis Can’t Lose before Parker Lewis made it to the airwaves a month later. Still, as an adaptation, it didn’t really please anyone, and its many other shortcomings—like the fact that it has one of the most irritating theme songs I have ever heard—led to the show’s swift cancellation, while Parker Lewis ran for a respectable 73 episodes.

To quote one particularly inspiring piece of Ferris Bueller dialog from Cameron: “Rooney’s on a mission. If you keep thinking with your weenus, he’ll nuke you.”

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5 Hit 1980s Movies That Turned Into Massive TV Show Flops

Ferris Bueller



"Ferris Bueller's Day Off" was the classic '80s movie for high school slackers, starring Matthew Broderick as a teenager so supremely confident in his own charm that he's able to get away with doing pretty much whatever he wants. The result was a massive financial success, with the film grossing over $70 million on a $6 million budget, earning a place in the top 10 box office hits of 1986. So why would you not try to turn that into a film, capturing more of Ferris's zany adventures? In 1990, NBC did just that. By that point, Matthew Broderick was a superstar, so the role of Ferris went to Charlie Schlatter.

But there was a little twist on the storyline: In the "Ferris Bueller" universe, Schlatter plays the real-life Ferris Bueller who has a movie made about him ("Ferris Bueller's Day Off"). At least in the pilot episode, that's the case — they don't ever bring up the movie version ever again after that. Without the involvement of '80s teen film legend John Hughes, who directed the original film, "Ferris Bueller" struggled to capture the magic of its predecessor, and was canceled after just 13 episodes. But every failure has a silver lining: "Ferris Bueller" gave us one of Jennifer Aniston's first roles as Jeannie, Ferris's straight-laced sister.