My best friend and I are working on a sketch project together that involves how we grew up and where we grew up. It really has a lot to do with how our perception of reality was formed by television. Our current sensibility can be traced back to our viewing habits back then.
Yesterday, I spent the day watching a bunch of old TV on YouTube. I watched bits of an old Stockard Channing sitcom I had never seen called "Just Friends." I watched a bunch of after school specials and PSA films. I watched an Emmy Legends interview with Michael Patrick King, which was really informative. I watched the DVD commentary from Square Pegs.
I had a bit of a trip through my own bit of television history. Or my history of watching television.
Putting together this project, the two of us are laughing our asses off at the kinds of messages being thrown at us as kids. It's really the nurture half of the nature vs. nurture argument. I was born gay, but my particular sensibility regarding pop culture, music, and taste was nurtured. There can be no argument about that. It's like talent. You're born with it, but it needs to be cultivated and refined. Taste has the same path.
Going through all of this footage has really gotten me to think about how I took in information as a child. I really was a sponge. Everything seemed fascinating and interesting. I loved language and the fact that Square Pegs was a show I watched intently as a very young child speaks to that. I remember a cartoon called Wait Til Your Father Gets Home which had an influence on me. I was bananas about The Muppet Show and The Electric Company. All of these shows were on the air when I was VERY young, but I had a thirst for any sort of interesting talking. Story kept me interested, but it really was dialogue that I loved to listen to. I came from a family that wasn't very articulate. So words just really turned me on.
I loved The Facts of Life because I wanted friends. I didn't have a lot of people who understood me as a kid and here were a bunch of girls at an elite boarding school. They lived together and they were friends. And they were all so different. It was no accident that I went to an elite private high school. That aspiration came partly from The Facts of Life.
And I'm looking at my past in order to write what I hope will be a very funny sketch show. It's about kids who are too smart for their age. It's about what they're watching and talking about. It's about wanting to be cooler than what you see around you, but not knowing how to get there. Yet, it's also about looking back years later and thinking, "I was so much cooler than I ever even gave myself credit for."
And it's about hanging with my best friend, which has to be about the coolest thing.
No comments:
Post a Comment