Cranky Lesbian

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Tag: Afterschool Specials

An Afterschool Special Asks, What If I’m Gay?

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On December 5, 2023

In TV Movies

Richard Joseph Paul and Evan Handler in What If I’m Gay?

There comes a moment in What If I’m Gay?, a 1987 CBS Schoolbreak Special, when our teen jock protagonist — the one with gay pornography stashed in his bedroom, its walls adorned with posters of muscled male physiques as if he were Josh Hawley — questions how people know they’re gay. “How can anyone be sure?” he asks Allen (Evan Handler of Sex and the City), a dweeby heterosexual friend who is not yet romantically interested in girls.

For some of us, all it takes is renting the right Gina Gershon film at the age of 14 for those puzzle pieces to fall into place. Others tread more winding paths, like the curious Todd (Richard Joseph Paul) himself, a soccer team captain whose girlfriend has recently started to wonder, after a year of dating, why they never spend time alone. Surely he has some idea, between his choice of reading material and previous (offscreen) sexual encounters with a friend, but acknowledging it’s a struggle.

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Rob Lowe Makes Room for Daddy in Schoolboy Father

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On May 27, 2023

In TV Movies

Rob Lowe in Schoolboy Father.

Our first indication that 16-year-old Charles Elderberry (Rob Lowe) isn’t ready for parenthood comes early in Schoolboy Father (1980), an Afterschool Special about the dangers of reproductive illiteracy. As his judgmental mother (a solid Sharon Spelman) reads a birth announcement involving Daisy Dallenger (Dana Plato), a girl he met at summer camp, Charles begins counting on his fingers. Later, he asks a friend if pregnancy always takes nine months. It’s information he could’ve used before roasting more than marshmallows with Daisy, if you catch my nonsensical drift.

Because mothers and newborns weren’t booted from American hospitals within 24 hours in the early 1980s, Charles has time to consider his options. Inconvenienced by the $2 parking fee, he nevertheless visits daily, staring at his son through the nursery glass. Daisy, who harshly dumped him on the last day of camp, never said a word about her pregnancy, not even after being temporarily kicked out of her parents’ house. When Charles asks whether she used protection with him, she retorts “You were there, did you?” before ruefully observing “Not that it matters much now.”

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Stoned: Scott Baio’s Reefer Madness

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On January 6, 2023

In TV Movies

“It’s just me. It’s just me and my ganja.“

There are life lessons that only Afterschool Specials and the school of hard knocks can teach us, and the wisdom imparted by Scott Baio’s Stoned (1980) is simple. If you smoke the devil’s lettuce, like Baio’s wiry, acne-scarred Jack Melon—known to some as Melonhead—you might nearly kill someone.

Jack, a lonely, awkward high schooler with an absent mother and gruff father, plays second fiddle at home to brother Mike (Vincent Bufano), a college-bound star swimmer who appears to be his only friend. When stoner classmates Alan (Steve Monarque) and Teddy (Jack Finch) offer him weed from their usual bathroom stall, he declines. “A goon like him? Pot would definitely do him good,” they derisively declare.

One of Stoned’s finer qualities is that Jack isn’t given a sob story. (Another is Baio’s knack for physical comedy.) His lack of social prowess isn’t a commentary on his character, it’s a natural byproduct of his age. He’s a quiet, puberty-stricken geek with an odd gait who experiences boredom so crushing that he walks down the street kicking a can. When a blowup with Mike leaves him vulnerable to Alan and Teddy’s invitations to smoke, he’s less interested in pot than companionship.

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I Think I’m Having a Baby: A Teen’s Pregnant Pause

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On October 3, 2022

In TV Movies

Jennifer Jason Leigh, dressed in a red shirt, waves.
Jennifer Jason Leigh waves goodbye to her childhood in I Think I’m Having a Baby.

As strange a title as it is — it’s preferable to possess a degree of certainty about whether you’re expecting — I Think I’m Having a Baby is also perfectly in keeping with the utter cluelessness of this 1981 Afternoon Playhouse special’s 15-year-old protagonist. Laurie McIntire (Jennifer Jason Leigh), a child with the hair and makeup of a divorced and disillusioned single mother of two, has entered that hideous phase of adolescence where she’s constitutionally incapable of doing anything but mooning over an unimpressive boy.

Star athlete Peter (Shawn Stevens) dates her older cousin Phoebe (Helen Hunt), whose preppy sweater draped over the shoulders tells you all there is to know about her. Peter isn’t particularly bright (Phoebe does his schoolwork) and teases Laurie on the rare occasion he notices her at all. But when her best friend Marsha (Bobbi Block, now known as Samantha Paris) and little sister Carrie (Tracey Gold, years away from the torments of Lady Killer and Midwest Obsession) mock his ape-like walk across the football field, Laurie gets defensive. “He’s not really like that,” she insists.

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Please Don’t Hit Me, Mom Spotlights Abuse

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On May 2, 2022

In TV Movies

Patty Duke and son Sean Astin costar in Please Don’t Hit Me, Mom

TV movie titans collide in Please Don’t Hit Me, Mom (1981), an Afterschool Special starring Patty Duke and Nancy McKeon. It begins in the typical style of such films, with McKeon’s Nancy Parks comically flying over the handlebars of her bicycle. Sprawled on the ground, she’s introduced to brothers Mike and Brian Reynolds (Lance Guest and Sean Astin). In the rare meet cute that intersects with child abuse, Nancy and Mike learn they’re new neighbors and will attend the same high school.

While the teenagers make eyes at each other, Barbara Reynolds (Patty Duke) angrily drags the younger Brian inside. The camera rests on the home’s exterior as she yells at him. We feel unsettled, a condition that extends to Nancy’s conversation with BFF Judy (Deena Freeman) about prom wear. “I blew my clothes allowance this month on a fantastic sweater,” Nancy admits. “So what do I wear to the prom?” She envisions unaffordable designer jeans.

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