I’ve long been obsessed with The Completely Mental Misadventures of Ed Grimley, a cartoon that aired briefly on NBC in 1988-89, which only I watched and had virtually no right to exist. It starred Martin Short as the titular character and boasted the voice talents of many other SCTV alumni, plus Jonathan Winters. Yeah.
I have now channeled that obsession into a lengthy appreciation/history over at Splitsider, which can read right about…here. Enjoy!
Thanks to The Interweb and roughly eight billion cable channels, even the niche-iest of shows has a chance to find its audience. This was not the case even 10 years ago, when there was very little hope for an offbeat show, unless you expand your definition of “offbeat” to include “Bill Cosby verbally torturing his children”. If a show couldn’t succeed in the strictly middlebrow world of network TV, it had no future.
Every now and then, a show with a cockeyed view of the world and a bold spirit would sneak onto a network lineup. Such a show would inevitably be either retooled or shuttled around the schedule until it suffered death by underexposure. These kinds of shows were, inevitably, the kinds of shows that I loved as a kid. I was attracted to complete lost causes–the television equivalent of a dog at the pound with one eye, half a tail, and the mange.
Some of the shows I’ve loved and lost were later lamented, rediscovered, and given a proper DVD release. Thanks in part to the success of The 40-Year-Old Virgin , Judd Apatow’s Freaks and Geeks has received the belated acclaim it deserves. There was a great series on the now-defunct Trio network, Brilliant But Cancelled, that highlighted awesome shows like EZ Streets (aka The Sopranos Before The Sopranos ).
There is one show I loved as a kid that has yet to get its day in the sun. I mean, I absolutely worshipped this show. This show should never have been made in the first place, because it had every odd stacked against it from day one. But if it had been come out more recently, I’m convinced that it could have run for 15 seasons or more.
The show was a The Completely Mental Misadventures of Ed Grimley , a Saturday morning cartoon that ran for only one season (1988-89). It starred an animated version of the titular character, voiced by Martin Short. It also featured the voice talents of a few of his fellow SCTV alums Joe Flaherty, Catherine O’Hara, and Andrea Martin. And for an
extra dollop of crazy on top, it also featured Jonathan Winters.