A Firey Retreat From The Stars
It struck me, while doing research for this io9 post, that my youth was filled with really, really bad American sitcoms. Not just the traditional Saved By The Bell – although I watched that and the New Class and College Years spin-offs, all of which ran on Sunday mornings at 9am on Channel 4 and were watched and beloved by many college students trying not to think too hard about anything after the night before – but shows even worse: Californian Dreams, or The Strange World of Alex Mack. They’d be shown at strange times, of course, the way that many American shows turned up in different time slots for British audiences (Buffy and Dawson’s Creek finding homes at 6pm on weekdays, same as the Star Treks, because that was apparently the stated “import television” timeslot, an alternative for the news bulletins on BBC 1 or ITV at the same time), but I’d always be able to find them nonetheless.
When I first moved here, I blamed by American Culture Hunger on growing up on Marvel and DC Comics; not just the stories, but the advertisements that promised exotic toys, television shows and foods (“What are these things you call… ‘Twinkies’?”), and I still think that accounts for a lot of it. But, as I looked up show after show after show on YouTube last week, I realized that the strange unreality of teen-centric American television programming had a lot to do with it, as well.
Which is to say, just another way in which the reality proved to be nothing like what I expected.
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Uh, excuse me, Secret World of Alex Mack was totally awesome.