Pilot Season - Friday the 13^th: The Series

    Despite any impressions I might be giving I actually do a small amount of research on these things. Not enough that I’m just ripping off Wikipedia but enough to get a very rough idea of the shape of things and how they came to be. If I was any kind of professional I’ll reactivate my long-dormant PayPal account and scour Ebay for out-of-print DVD sets or PAL video copies but I’m not. Eventually my wandering obsessions will bring me back around to collecting vinyl and that’s when Peter Thiel gets his cut.

    So while I was looking around trying to identify ‘Nightmare Cafe’ I started poking at ooky-spooky obscure shows that have fallen almost all the way into obscurity. Before the name popped all unbidden into my head I briefly fell down the wonderfully nostalgic rabbit hole of late-80’s/early-90’s first run syndication television. We don’t have enough space to trace the whole history of the practice from its origins in the days of radio, the emergence and eventual takeover of independent local tv stations (thanks late-stage capitalism!) intersecting with FCC regulations, and above all the impact of ‘Star Trek: The Next Generation,’ just know that for a very brief, very weird window enough market forces converged that some truly weird shows were produced more or less outside of what we would now think of as the standard top-down managed model. If you could get enough investors behind you and sell it to enough local/independent stations you too had a shot at that sweet, sweet Star Trek money.

    The only shows anyone really remembers out of all of this (other than the Treks) are the Hercules/Xena shows (Baywatch technically doesn’t count because the first season was on a network, canceled shows that went on in syndication is a whole other thing) but there was some good stuff in there and by their very nature they were tailor-made to have a hazy kind of half-life/sub cult status to a very small group
of people: late Gen-Xers with access to bunny ears and lax bedtimes. This is the exact same group that makes up the really hard-core Old School Doctor Who fans, so strike up conversations with this group at your own risk.

    Imagine my surprise to find the show that was actually competing in the ratings with ‘Star Trek: The Next Generation” for the first season or so, a show that I was vaguely aware of growing up without ever bothering to watch more than maybe a couple of episodes: ‘Friday the 13^th: The Series,’ a delightfully misleading title that was explicitly chosen to get people thinking of the movies and so draw their attention. They had enough people behind the scenes involved in the actual movies themselves to avoid any lawsuits somehow and other than the title the show never had a thing to do with everyone’s favorite masked slasher.

I see what you did there.

    Maybe it’s the example set by ‘Nightmare Cafe’ but within five minutes of watching the pilot I was sitting up straighter and thinking, “Okay, now we’re talking.” The special effects aren’t any better (1987, people) but the writing and cinematography certainly are and the pilot machine they built was solid enough to last 72 whole episodes and be lifted almost entirely wholesale by later, better shows (looking at you, ‘Warehouse 13’ and, well ‘Librarians’). I won’t even pretend not to know the characters name this time.

    The premise is rock-solid and simple and close enough to Stephen King’s Needful Things that I was about to accuse it of quasi-plagiarism before I checked the publication date and found that, if anything, it was the other way around (see? Research!). An antiques dealer obsessed with wealth and immortality makes a deal with the Devil to sell cursed antiques and thus spread evil, I guess. After a twinge of conscience he decides he’s done with selling the items and the Devil shows like right up to drag him to Hell then and there. The antique stores then passes to a couple of distant relatives, Ryan and Micki who’d never met their ‘uncle’ or each other. After being spooked out by the items in the store they hold a fire sale to clear the place out before selling it on. A childhood friend and fellow occultist of their uncle’s by the name of Jack shows up, explains the premise, and Micki remembers a doll that creeped her out and how they sold it to a father for his little girl. Fearing the worst they rush out to track down the family only to find the girl’s stepmother being rushed to the hospital. Things quickly escalate with the doll convincing the little girl to start killing people who annoy her. They get the doll back by being adults and physically taking it from her, lock it in the vault beneath the store, and grimly decide they must get all the cursed antiques back. Fade to credits.

    Again, the three goals of a pilot are: establish the premise, demonstrate how it would function as an ongoing series, and establish the characters. Already this show has a substantial leg up on ‘Nightmare Cafe’ by essentially making the second part follow inevitably from the first: spooky antique store sold cursed objects, we have to get them back. Pick any old item that could exist as an antique, figure out something sinister it does, and boom, episode of the show. They even have a quick-flash montage at the beginning of the episode showing a bunch of random items and I have to admit I want to know what evil that thermometer can do.

    So now we turn to the third part, the characters, and after reflection I may have sold this part a little short, not in terms of the needs of a pilot but of a series as a whole. To extend the metaphor to dangerous lengths if a pilot episode is a machine to start the show then the characters might well be the fuel that keeps it going. Yeah, you’re there for the hook of the premise for that first season but by the third you need to be there for the characters, and going by what I’ve looked up that’s where this show eventually fell apart. They do a pretty good job of sketching in archetypes of the three main characters: Ryan is wacky and a little flighty, Micki is uptight but has a sold moral core, Jack has a mysterious past but is trying to do good, all right so far, you can’t ask for much more than that in a pilot, and the writing is decent enough and the acting solid enough that I can’t really complain.

    What this show mostly has over ‘Nightmare Cafe’ is it gives the impression it knows what it is and what it’s doing. The show is compact and it moves, it’s setting up and paying off, it’s dropping clues for future episodes and teases of what could come. What comedy there is is character based, the wacky shenanigans are mostly kept to a minimum. I don’t want to oversell the show, it’s not some hidden gem you need to track down like ‘Profit,’ but there’s a reason it lasted for most of three seasons without a charisma powerhouse like Lucy Lawless on screen every week. I’m pretty sure it’s still in reruns somewhere, or Shudder does the occasional marathon, and you could do a lot worse than check this out if you run across it.