During the early 1990s, ABC offered a "family-friendly" lineup on Wednesday nights, beginning with The Wonder Years, with Fred Savage courting the Girl of His Dreams in the 1960s. We sang a parody of the theme song, the Beatle's "With a Little Help from My Friends":
What would you do if I shat on your shoes?
Would you get up and kick me to the moon?
Would you get up and kick me to the moon?
Before turning the channel to CBS, with The Nanny and Melrose Place.
But we knew about each of the shows, because you knew about every show in the era. They included:
Doogie Houser, with Neil Patrick Harris (right, recent photo) as a 13 year old doctor named Doogie.
Coach, with Craig T. Nelson as a coach.
And Home Improvement, with Tim Allen as a grunting, sweating macho man who hosts a tool-themed tv series and tries to instill grunting, sweating masculinity into his three sons. Zachery Ty Bryant (playing Brad), the eldest and most muscular, was promoted as a teen idol to draw in teenage girls (they weren't aware of gay boys). But oddly, it was Jonathan Taylor Thomas (playing Randy) who took off, causing millions of teenage and preteen girls to tune it (again, no gay boys exist). It quickly jumped to #2 in the ratings.
Wait -- Brad is a jock, a football star, a letterman who every girl in the school swoons over. Randy is soft, bookish, somewhat femme, playing "a fairy" in the school play, an aspiring actor and journalist. How did Jonathan Taylor Thomas do it?
The showrunners were stumped. They should have realized that straight girls and gay boys just starting to recognize their romantic interests prefer soft, cuddly, and relatable: Malcolm, not Reese (Malcolm in the Middle), Chris, not Drew (Everybody Hates Chris); Adam, not Barry (The Goldbergs).
In the mid-1990s, Home Improvement moved to Tuesdays, in the hope that its popularity would help stragglers like Spin City. We still steered clear of the grunting, sweating Tim Allen, quickly changing from Roseanne (ABC) to Frasier (CBS) and then back for Drew Carey (ABC).
But we could hardly ignore JTT; he was on every magazine cover, in every talk show.
He presented at the Emmies and the Golden Globes.
We saw him waving in Thanksgiving and Christmas parades
He appeared in specials honoring Tom Cruise and Lauren Hutton
He praised James Bond in a documentary about the super-spy.
Elton John hugged him.
He played Tom Sawyer opposite Devon Sawa's Huckleberry Finn in Tom and Huck (1995), with a story only vaguely related to the original novels.
An adventure boy opposite Devon Sawa and Scott Bairstow (left) in Wild America (1997).
More after the break. Caution: Explicit.
And LGBTQ characters twice.
In Speedway Junky (1999), an aspiring stock car driver (Jesse Bradford) befriends a gay hustler. JTT plays Steve, a bisexual hustler who befriends them both. It doesn't end well. Hint: Bury Your Gays.
Common Ground (2000) is an anthology of three stories about the LGBT experience in different time periods. JTT plays Toby, a high school swimmer in the 1970s who struggles with same-sex desire, assisted by a sympathetic teacher and a female prostitute. He ends up coming out, graduating, and going to Harvard, which I guess is a happy ending.
JTT was asked about being gay himself in many interviews, and always said no, "not that there's anything wrong with that."
Teen idol careers are short, as the next generation of straight girls and gay boys move on to someone new. In the 2000s, JTT had a two-episode story arc on Smallville, as a metahuman who could split into two people; and a three-episode story arc on Eight Simple Rules, as Jeremy, a nerdish science student who dates Bridget (Kaley Cuoco).
Fun fact: Kaley Cuoco would go on to date the nerdish scientist Leonard (Johnny Galecki) on The Big Bang Theory (2007-2019). So we can think of JTT as a practice Leonard.
In 2000 JTT enrolled in college, studying philosophy and history at Harvard, Columbia, and St. Andrew's University in Scotland: "To sit in a big library among books and students was pretty cool." It's my favorite thing, buddy. He graduated from Columbia in 2010, and stepped away from the spotlight, devoting himself to writing, watching old movies, and going to the theater.
He returned to direct and star in three episodes of tv dad Tim Allen's show Last Man Standing (2013-14), playing John Baker, who owns the restaurant where Tim's adult daughter works. They kiss, but eventually she chooses Ryan Vogelson.
Fun fact: In the first season, Ryan was played by Nick Jonas, so she has to choose between two former teen idols.
JTT turned 18 in 1999, when his star was fading, so he never really had a chance to appear nude on camera. This seems to be a scene from Smallville, with the cock photoshopped.
Thousands of fans who swooned over JTT as kids have scoured every inch of the internet looking for leaked meat of any type, and all they have managed to come up with is a guy with a visible erection. But we don't see his face.
And the photo below, which can't be our JTT.
Not to worry, a correspodent sent me a story about seeing JTT and Devon Sawa naked. It's on Tales of West Hollywood.
Jonathan Taylor Thomas. Who knew that I profiled this guy before, without the nude photos?
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