It’s safe to say that despite an undeniable downturn in the pervasiveness of the format, and an evolve-or-die mandate that has reshaped the genre as we know it, the classic American sitcom is still alive and kicking here in 2024. The premises and settings may have grown more esoteric, like What We Do in the Shadows’ clan of vampires or the wandering souls of Ghosts, but for every one of those there’s still a painfully familiar Extended Family to ground us in the same old tropes the format has been wallowing in since the 1970s.
But even for someone who spent his childhood living through the era, it can be easy to forget just how utterly inundated TV was with sitcoms at the dawn of the 1990s. Each of the major networks was leaning heavily on the format, cycling through a seemingly endless procession of sitcom pitches that were so often discarded and forgotten as soon as they’d arrived. The classics that arose from this era are absolutely exceptions to the rule—the median sitcom from this period is the sort of show you’d probably have only the most vague memories of at this point, even if you were a voracious consumer at the time. A pall of bland forgetfulness reigned over the airwaves.
And into this creative wasteland, barreled a rather odd trend that coalesced in the 1990-1991 TV season in particular: movie-to-sitcom adaptations. Now, it’s not as if this hasn’t been a relatively common occurrence before or since, but the 1990 TV season was really something special in this regard, featuring no fewer than five different examples of popular 1980s movies subsequently turned into network sitcoms. And guess what? They all failed. Between the five shows, only one of them received a second season, and most were canceled before they had finished their first.
What films had the ignominious distinction of being turned into crappy TV shows in this stretch? Well, the victims included such beloved comedies as Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and Uncle Buck, joined by dramedies like Parenthood and Working Girl. Oh, and a Look Who’s Talking show as well. Incredibly, this group almost included a sixth entry: a Coming to America sitcom might have premiered in this slot as well but ultimately wasn’t picked up, and its sole pilot aired in 1989. There was clearly something noxious in the water at the close of the ‘80s, when it came to butchering well-liked movies.
Fascinated by the idea of so many failed movie-to-sitcom adaptations all landing on American TV airwaves in the same period, I decided to watch a few episodes of each one of these series, which—thanks to a seemingly total lack of copyright law enforcement—is quite easy to do without ever leaving YouTube. I’ve subsequently ranked the series below, descending from the very worst of the bunch to the (relative) best.
Watch a few episodes of these for yourself, and your rose-colored glasses for 1990s pop culture might need a little bit of polishing.
5. Uncle Buck
Lasted for: 14 episodes on CBS
If you’ve ever felt specifically nostalgic for the era of staccato, overly enthusiastic laugh tracks punctuating every other sentence out of a character’s mouth, might I suggest you queue up an episode of 1990’s Uncle Buck to remind yourself of just how painful this can really be in practice. The sitcom adaptation of the 1989 John Hughes classic comedy from only one year earlier, Uncle Buck is hamstrung more than any of these other shows by an overall lack of talent and capability, both in terms of its writing and performers. It is in every way possible a hollow retread of each and every thing a person might have fondly recalled from the film, albeit watered down and stripped of any element of charm.
This sadly must begin with the title character, as veteran comedian Kevin Meaney absolutely flails as he attempts to step into the shoes of the iconic John Candy as “Uncle” Buck Russell. His portrayal is broad and garish, having somehow become notably more chauvinistic than the impish Candy ever came across. Each character is a let-down, in fact: Dah-ve Chodan as Tia Russell is a huge downgrade, taking the nuanced, acerbic, witty character from the film and replacing her with an air-headed, archetypal teen girl obsessed with any boy who comes into her field of vision. Her tiny brother Miles, meanwhile, suddenly knows the meaning of the word “germane” and uses it in a sentence. None of it feels right. Entire scenes from the film are recreated slavishly, like Buck making a giant pancake or confronting young Maizy’s scolding principal, only this time, no one is up to the task of delivering the material.
Where Uncle Buck does deviate, it comes as a rather jarring shock: why, oh reader, would the titular Uncle be in charge of these kids for an entire series rather than the limited time frame seen in the film? Well, that would be because the series kills off the parents of the children, of course! Because lord knows there’s no better way to establish the setting for a zany, off-the-wall comedy than by taking a couple of grade school kiddos and bumping off their mother and father. It’s such a grim, macabre thing to do, conveying an absurd aura of tragedy to what is meant to be an extremely lighthearted premise about a big oaf trying his best to rein in some precocious kids. Instead, it just makes all of the wisecracking from the children in particular feel forced and inorganic–you want to sit them down and explain that they don’t really have to be making snarky comments in the midst of their grief, to their (also grieving) uncle. This might be the first time I’ve ever wanted to shame the voices captured in a laugh track, for daring to howl with laughter moments after someone is discussing the parents’ untimely deaths.
Uncle Buck failed to get through its first season on CBS. Savaged by negative reviews, it was canceled after 14 episodes, leaving 6 unaired. Subsequently, the property was revived as a second failed sitcom starring Mike Epps in 2016, also being canceled after one season.
Fun fact: the very first line of dialog in the pilot is “Miles, you suck!” and is apparently thought to be the first time the phrase “you suck” was uttered on network TV.
4. Baby Talk
Lasted for: 35 episodes on ABC
The fact that Baby Talk made it to a second season makes it far and away the “most successful” of these five series, but in terms of objective quality, it falls pretty close to the bottom of the barrel, saved only by the sheer unwatchability of Uncle Buck. If the name hasn’t given it away, this series was a fairly loose adaptation of 1989’s embarrassingly successful, Kirstie Alley-starring film comedy Look Who’s Talking. You know, the one with the voice of Bruce Willis as a roly-poly newborn baby? Yes, this premise somehow had two full seasons on network TV.
Baby Talk is no more and no less than what it sounds like: its primary characters are a single mother (Maggie) and her bouncing baby boy Mickey, whose inner monologue we are treated to. That voiceover is provided by none other than Who’s the Boss? star Tony Danza, who is tasked with providing almost the entirety of the humor for the series. Each episode of Baby Talk unfolds almost identically: characters having mundane conversations in Maggie’s apartment, before cutaways to the completely expressionless baby and Tony Danza’s voice, delivering a lukewarm punchline. I truly can’t emphasize “expressionless” enough here—the actual baby featured on this show has an incredible aptitude for staring straight down the camera barrel, into the souls of the audience at home. It’s really quite unnerving, but perfectly indicative of how empty Baby Talk always feels.
Today, the series mostly stands out for the convoluted nature of its production—three different actresses starred as Maggie over the course of two seasons—and the presence of one major “before they were famous” star in the form of a young George Clooney, who plays a recurring Season 1 love interest. This becomes an odd theme of these movie-to-sitcom series: every one of them except for Uncle Buck has at least one future A-lister in it. Clooney looks especially absurd here, with a massive head of shaggy, wavy hair, his breakout in E.R. still four years away. Downgrade alert: Scott Baio takes over a similar role in Season 2.
Baby Talk is far and away the most blandly forgettable of these series, a one-joke premise that has already grown long in the tooth before the end of the pilot. How fitting, then, that it’s the only one to have a second season, despite winning the 1991 Electronic Media Critics’ Poll for “Worst Series on Television.” It was mercifully canceled at the end of its second season.
3. Working Girl
Lasted for: 8 episodes on NBC
Working Girl has the odd distinction of being the only film on this list where its subsequent sitcom adaptation starred an actress as protagonist who arguably went on to be an even bigger star than the person who fronted the original film. That’s no disparagement to Melanie Griffith, the anchor to the 1988 Mike Nichols film that also starred Harrison Ford and Sigourney Weaver, but were you aware that NBC’s Working Girl was headlined by none other than Sandra Bullock as the enterprising Tess McGill? By the midpoint of the decade, Bullock would be Hollywood royalty, but here, she’s just a 20-something actress getting started, probably thrilled by the prospect of a steady job. It’s funny to think of how different things might have turned out for this series if Bullock’s breakout had come a few years sooner. As is, Working Girl lasted only eight episodes on NBC before Bullock was back to auditions, leaving four episodes unaired.
At heart, it’s questionable how much of an “adaptation” of the film this even is. After all, Working Girl is about an ambitious secretary coming up with a plan to bypass her bosses and take her to the top of the business world. The series, on the other hand, intends to slow this same overall storyline to a glacial crawl, meaning that the average episode can’t really be all that consequential to the career of Tess. It means Working Girl the sitcom boils down to a show about the day-to-day drudgery of office life and company politics, as Tess balances those challenges against her hapless dating life and overbearing parents. Perhaps this could have worked with an ensemble of interesting characters, but it badly lacks the depth of say, The Office-–this sitcom only asks you to care about a single character, rather than all of them.
Nor does the show even read as much of a comedy, as confidante and fellow secretary character Lana ends up bearing the burden of almost all the comic relief, and the resulting episodes are very light on jokes. It instead has a low-key depressing vibe to it, given the perpetual glass ceiling that always seems to be positioned just above Tess’ head. This malaise bleeds outward from the character, making interactions with others, such as her parents, that are supposed to read as supportive instead feel oddly combative. Sandra Bullock gives it a game effort, but there’s ultimately just nothing to recommend in the series besides the simple novelty of seeing a future A-lister toiling in relative anonymity.
But hey, at least it’s got the Carly Simon theme music.
2. Ferris Bueller
Lasted for: 13 episodes on NBC
I’m almost shocked with myself for putting Ferris Bueller at #2 in this ranking of failed 1990 sitcoms, but that speaks more to the mind-numbing assignment of trudging through Baby Talk or Working Girl episodes than it does the quality of this strange adaptation of John Hughes’ iconic 1986 teen comedy. There’s a lot that is objectively terrible about Ferris Bueller, but its sheer weirdness—and a handful of quality performances—make it infinitely more watchable than the earlier entries in this list, at least in a sideshow sense. Watching this, you’re at least curious about what the hell they’re going to do next.
It’s important to note that Ferris Bueller displays an atypical relationship with its source material, in direct contrast to these other shows. Where Uncle Buck dopily goes through the motions of recreating entire scenes from the film point by point, Ferris Bueller can’t decide how much it wants to divorce itself from its movie. Most of the time, it diverges in huge ways in terms of setting, tone, and character relationships, but it then mimics other aspects.
Some of those changes include transplanting the whole series from Chicago to Santa Monica, completely discarding Cameron’s characterization from the film, and radically changing the relationship between Ferris and Sloan, who the protagonist is now meeting and attempting to woo for the first time. In some respects, the sitcom almost feels like a prequel to the film—except for the fact that it directly references the film in its pilot, claiming that the Ferris you see here is the “real” version. In fact, this goes so far as to include the TV version (played by Charlie Schlatter) physically pulling a cardboard stand-in of Matthew Broderick from his closet and then cutting it in half with a chainsaw, decrying him as “too white bread.” Which, if you’ve seen Schlatter act for more than a minute or two, rings as especially ironic.
The obvious conclusion to draw from such a surprising rejection of the film would be that the TV version of Ferris Bueller is planning to take the show in a very different direction, but Schlatter then proceeds to fly in the face of that bold stance by (surprisingly skillfully) imitating the exact vocal cadence and mannerisms of Broderick. This includes the fourth wall breaks of the film, but the TV show immediately abuses that crutch to an irritating extent—Ferris likely spends more time talking to the camera in the 24 minutes of the Ferris Bueller pilot than Broderick does in the entire 98 minutes of the film. And Schlatter, sadly, is simply not up to the task of being Broderick or Ferris, a supremely difficult character to avoid coming off as insufferably smug and predatory in terms of how he uses people. Any depiction of Ferris Bueller is going to need superhuman charisma in order to overcome the fact that he would rub most real-life humans the wrong way, and Schlatter just doesn’t have it. Instead, you end up feeling bad for the people Ferris is constantly wronging, even Principal Rooney.
What are the positives here? Well, beloved character actor Richard Riehle (Office Space) is a nice choice to step into the polished shoes of Rooney, while a young Jennifer Anniston (!) of all people steals scenes as Ferris’ now older but still resentful sister Jeannie. What was it with these failed 1990 sitcoms and the presence of future A-listers? Anniston is still three years away here from her first major film role in Leprechaun, and four years from the premiere of Friends. It’s funny to imagine Schlatter not knowing his fresh-faced costar would be one of the biggest sitcom stars of all time by the end of the decade.
At the end of the day, you have to admire that the single-camera style of Ferris Bueller shows at least a little ambition (and no laugh track), even if its primary ambition was apparently to be Parker Lewis Can’t Lose before Parker Lewis made it to the airwaves a month later. Still, as an adaptation, it didn’t really please anyone, and its many other shortcomings—like the fact that it has one of the most irritating theme songs I have ever heard—led to the show’s swift cancellation, while Parker Lewis ran for a respectable 73 episodes.
To quote one particularly inspiring piece of Ferris Bueller dialog from Cameron: “Rooney’s on a mission. If you keep thinking with your weenus, he’ll nuke you.”
1. Parenthood
Lasted for: 12 episodes on NBC
Ron Howard’s 1989 ensemble dramedy (headlined by Steve Martin) Parenthood is likely less remembered today than the 2010 TV adaptation it inspired, a series that went on to have six seasons and more than 100 episodes on NBC. Consigned to the dustbin of history, meanwhile, is the first adaptation of the same source material, a drama-tinged sitcom version of Parenthood that, like these other shows, premiered during the 1990-1991 TV season. Boasting a more mature tone than the other series on this list, it likewise tried to tell a fairly ambitious story by following three different individual family units, in three different houses, as they influence each other’s lives. Shows like Modern Family and the more recent Parenthood adaptation have subsequently refined this kind of premise, but any would-be sitcom with a cast this large requires distinct enough characters for them to all stand out, and 1990s’s Parenthood pulls it off better than you might expect.
The tone of Parenthood is one of good natured, wholesome, and earnest dramedy, buoyed by solid performances. It’s not the kind of writing that elicits big laughs, but rarely is it really trying to do so. The one exception is Ed Begley Jr. as patriarch Gil Buckman, who is constantly joking, behaving as if he’s the only character who believes he resides within a comedy. It’s a little odd how much of the humor is placed onto him and no one else, but he carries it pretty well. An episode like “The Plague” (penned by Joss Whedon), which sees all three families dealing with chicken pox at the same time, weaves threads of all the characters together while exploring a mature central storyline about Gil fearing his own apparent selfish desire to shirk parental responsibility. It’s certainly more realistic in its depiction of parenting than anything you would have seen on Baby Talk, that’s for sure, and the show trusts you to recognize jokes to the extent that it doesn’t deploy a laugh track.
But wait, you want more entries in the “before they were famous” file? Well, Parenthood has no shortage of them. Thora Birch plays one of the youngest kids on the series, oddly credited as simply “Thora,” while David Arquette plays a meatheaded teenager. And there’s even a future Oscar winner in the house, as a young Leonardo DiCaprio also plays one of the kids, just a year before he would join the cast of Growing Pains. It’s a large, strong ensemble, befitting the film it was adapted from.
The worst thing you can say of Parenthood is that it’s not particularly thrilling, but compared to the worst material found in the garish Uncle Buck or the resentment Ferris Bueller has toward its own source material, it easily walks away as the best and most watchable of these series. Contemporary critics agreed, praising Parenthood, but viewers were uninterested, and the series was canceled after its short first season.
As the decade rolled on, some of the most popular sitcoms in history would reach their zenith, but the brief “movie-to-sitcom” boom of 1990 would linger as a curious footnote in the history of the genre.
Jim Vorel is Paste’s resident genre movie guru. You can follow him on Twitter for much more film content.
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