Chris Elliott was a legend in the ’80s with his odd character that popped up all over David Letterman’s studio on Late Night. He was able to take his weirdness to Fox in 1990 with Get A Life. He played a 30 year old guy living above his parent’s garage with a desire to retire as a paperboy. Little did we know twenty years ago that this film would predict a generation of kids who can’t get a real job and move back with their folks. Chris’s real dad Bob Elliot (from Bob and Ray fame) plays his TV dad. The show quickly gained a cult following even though it only lasted a season and a half on the air. Now all 35 episodes are finally coming out on DVD with Get A Life: The Complete Series on September 18. Save up your paper route money. Here’s the press release from Shout! Factory:
Los Angeles, CA – Get A Life, starring Chris Elliott as America’s most lovable psycho, will finally be made available in its entirety on DVD when Shout! Factory releases Get A Life: The Complete Series on September 18! All 35 episodes of the show are included in the 5-Disc set along with an essay written by Tom Shales and bonus features with the cast and crew, including interviews, audio commentary, a Paley Center panel from 2000, deleted scenes and alternate versions of select episodes without the laugh track.
Get A Life: The Complete Series is based on the surreal, twisted, gratuitously violent, hilarious misadventures of Chris Peterson — a 30-year-old paper boy with an ever decreasing grasp on reality. Starring Chris Elliott (Eagleheart), Executive Produced by David Mirkin (The Simpsons) and created by Chris Elliott, Adam Resnick and David Mirkin, Get A Life has earned a rabid and disturbing cult following. Costarring Bob Elliott, Robin Riker, Elinor Donahue, Sam Robards and Brian Doyle-Murray, the show aired on Fox from 1990 – 1992.
Get A Life blazed new trails in television with its absurd plotlines and offbeat humor, following Chris Peterson as he lives above his parents garage (with Chris Elliott’s own father playing Chris Peterson’s father), and engages in activities like enrolling in the Handsome Boy Modeling School, getting stuck upside down for hours on the Hell Loop 2000, joining a street gang, befriending a foul, spewing alien, becoming a male escort, fighting the homicidal killing machine that is the unnecessarily huge 17-ton paperboy 2000, using time travel to keep his friend gus from peeing on his police captain, and violently dying in many episodes.
Get A Life was a brilliantly designed anti-sitcom, its ingenious and disturbing comedy influencing many of those that would follow. As Tom Shales writes in the essay accompanying Get A Life: The Complete Series, “…Get A Life wears the ‘cult classic’ badge with honor, with pride and, shall we say — as the hero of the show might say in his predictably pretentious way — with a certain air of absolute uncertainty.” Get A Life, Shales concludes, was “a laugh-your-bleep-bleep ass off show — one impeded by as few commercial compromises and patronizing precedents as possible…. Get A Life influenced far, far more comedy than it was influenced by.”
Bonus Features:
-A Conversation With Executive Producer/Co-Creator David Mirkin And Writer/Producers Jace Richdale And Steve Pepoon
-Paleyfest 2000! Featuring David Mirkin, Elinor Donahue, Brian Doyle-Murray, Robin Riker, Charlie Kaufman, Bob Odenkirk, Steve Pepoon And Jace Richdale
-Audio Commentaries
-Deleted Scenes
-Alternate Audio Version Without Laugh Track On Select Episodes
-And more!
