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.