it’s your move, dregs of humanity

The Onion AV Club has an interview up with Jason Bateman. It includes this exchange:
O: To this day, there are people out there who are fans of It’s Your Move.
JB: I get a lot of really nice comments about that show. I guess there were a lot more people watching TV back then, and there were only three networks, and we were all 14 or 15 and doing nothing but watching TV and staring at girls. It was a good time to be on TV.
I confess: I am one of those people.
When I was a kid, I loooooved It’s Your Move. Bateman played Matthew Burton, a 14-year-old kid with a hot single mom. Matthew wants to protect his mom from the steady stream of loser suitors, so he becomes something of a con artist. He was constantly playing pranks and assembling Rube Goldberg-esque schemes to sabotage the men who pursued his mom.
At the series’ start, a journalist named Norman Lamb moves in across the hall from Matthew’s apartment. (Norman was played by David Garrison, later known as next-door neighbor Steve on Married…with Children. Actually, IYM shared a lot with MWC.) Norman’s cool, and he and Matthew’s mom dig each other. Of course, Matthew doesn’t approve and begins his usual sabotage campaign. But — and here’s the key — Norman is just as scheming and cunning as Matthew, and they spend the whole series trying to one-up each other with elaborate pranks and schemes.
It was awesome.
It’s Your Move gave hope to nine-year-olds like me that you could be a little awkward and a little dorky but still be cool — if you were smart and could think up cool pranks to play on people. (Remember, Jason Bateman had serious cool cred left over from Silver Spoons.) It was all about brains winning out over brawn. Hell, the cool adult was a journalist, for heaven’s sake.
Here are summaries of the show’s 18 episodes. At Episodes 12 and 13, you’ll notice the two-part “The Dregs of Humanity” epic, one of the seminal moments in my television childhood. The summary:
Matthew’s idiot buddy Eli (Adam Jay Sadowsky) loses the money to hire the band Morning Breath for a school dance. Out of cash and bandless, they resort to a brilliant piece of chicanery: they dress up some science class skeletons in rock finery and manipulate them marionette style as prerecorded heavy metal blares through the sound system and careful smoke machine fog and lighting obscure the truth. [The band’s name: The Dregs of Humanity.] Not only do they get away with it, but the band is an instant hit! Too big of a hit, actually. Matthew pays the price for overexercising his promotional skills as new fans demand to know more. Matthew, in WAY over his head, agrees to an interview — conducted by his mom’s reporter boyfriend, Norman Lamb…Matthew sets up his skeletons again, Norman gets suspicious, and as tension mounts, it’s all to be continued next week!
This was real drama! Would Norman figure out the charade? We’d find out in part two, to be broadcast the next week, January 9, 1985. But…
Reagan decided to hold an evening press conference on January 9! Part two was preempted! I remember being enraged that Soviet arms talks would come before the fate of The Dregs of Humanity!
Remember, these were the days before the Internet, before TiVo, before cable reruns. Thanks to Ronald Reagan, I’d never find out what happened!
(I think this incident may have had a formative impact on my political views.)
For the record, I evidently wasn’t the only kid thrown into a Reagan-fueled fury that night. Examples picked from the Internet:
– “I recall writing President Reagan a very angry letter when he addressed the nation and It’s Your Move was not shown that week”
– “preempted by a speech from then President Reagan (I knew there was a reason I didn’t like him)”
– “not even do I remember the Dregs of Humanity 2-parter, I remember that “It’s your Move” aired on Wednesday night, and that the week the second half of the two parter was scheduled to air, Reagan had some speech or press conference or something that pre-empted it. I was completely devestated, and it was years before I was able to see the second half of it when some loser friend of mine happened to have it on tape. And to think, until I thought about it today, I was under the impression that there was a time when I wasn’t a big loser. Guess not.”
We’re talking about a formative moment in my generation’s collective youth.
Anyway, the Internet has finally brought me closure, 19 years after the fact. Here’s what happens in part two:
The Dregs are no-shows at a sold-out concert, Norman gets wise, Matthew gets sued, and in a second stroke of brilliance, kills off The Dregs by having them drive off a cliff into the sea. And where did this teen con-man get a car? Well, Norman made enough money selling his interview to Rolling Stone to buy a used car. Presumably, he had something to lose if the band is revealed as a fraud, since he inadvertently perpetrated it with his interview. So he is convinced to donate his car to the cause. In a later episode, a newspaper shows the Dregs being posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.