Why Is Funny or Die Special
The Creator of A Very Special Episode Explains Why Full House and 7th Heaven Are the Most Special of All
Remember the episode of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air where Carlton bought a gun? How about the Boy Meets World when Shawn joined a cult? Dashiell Driscoll does. He's the creator, writer, and narrator behind A Very Special Episode, a video series featuring irreverent recaps of TV episodes that have tried to tackle serious issues like cancer and drug addiction, often in a brisk 22 minutes. While the past three seasons of the Funny or Die series have covered a variety of shows, the current season of A Very Special Episode homes in on two of the most reliably special shows ever aired: Full House and 7 th Heaven.
Slate spoke to Driscoll—who is also a writer on TNT's Drop the Mic and the host of the podcast Change One Page—about the new season, as well as his other Funny or Die series, Zack Morris Is Trash, which is dedicated to exposing the sins of Saved by the Bell's sociopathic protagonist. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Marissa Martinelli: How do you decide what to cover for A Very Special Episode? Do you just have an exhaustive knowledge of sitcoms?
Dashiell Driscoll: I mean, I'm definitely exhausted. In the first seasons, I would never repeat a TV series. In Season 1, there's oneFull House, there's oneFamily Matters, there's oneFresh Prince. Similarly, there's one episode about guns, there's one episode about drugs—every episode tackles a different lesson, and I was trying to space them out and end with a big finish. Season 1's big finish is AIDS onMr. Belvedere, which is, like, one of the most extreme lesson-learning TV episodes I've ever seen.
I have a pretty good grasp on TV at this point, but I still have plenty of pop-culture blind spots. I had seenMr. Belvedere, certainly, but I definitely didn't remember there was an episode where a kid got AIDS until I started researching special episodes. I was pretty shocked by just how deep the pool went. I also read all the comments on everything that gets posted. A lot of episodes, especially from maybe from the '70s or '80s where I don't have as deep a bench of things to pull from, were from comments on the Funny or Die YouTube and Facebook channels.
Any examples come to mind?
The one where Webster burns down the apartment, that was new to me. I had not watchedWebster prior to that.Punky Brewster … I think a lot of people know about the episode ofPunky Brewsterwhere a kid almost died in a refrigerator. That was going to be one of the ones I did, because that's kind of the one people point to, but I didn't know that the Challenger space shuttle exploded onPunky Brewster, and that was pretty mind-blowing.
When a friend of mine, Anthony Troli, saw what I was doing, he suggested I watch7th Heaven, which is a show I had never even seen before. I kind of wrote it off as, I don't know, The O.C., but more in the suburbs. But7th Heaven is probably the craziest of all of these shows, and the most high and mighty about the lessons that they were trying to teach.
For the current season, you're trying something different. The first half was all Full House episodes, and now you've moved on to 7th Heaven.
It's a very special season of A Very Special Episode. What was a little frustrating with past seasons, just from a looking-at-the-calendar perspective, was only doing oneFull House episode at a time.Full House has so many good ones, and so does7th Heaven. This is an opportunity to clear the deck a little bit and say, "OK, here's a bunch of theFull House episodes, here's a bunch of the7th Heaven episodes," and not be so precious about which one to pick each time, because they're some of my favorite ones to write and create, for sure.
Which ones in particular are you proud of so far?
A favorite of theFull House ones is probably the first one I did, where D.J. has an eating disorder and almost starves to death. There's something so insane about that episode to me. I like all of them. How can you pick your favorite kid? I loved the one where D.J. helps the Alzheimer's patient escape. I think that's insane, that that's a TV script that needed to be written.
I hate picking favorites. I grew up watchingFull House, so these are all, like, very near and dear to my heart.
What is it about Full House that makes it so uniquely mockable?
I think it's just, like, lessons in life are never as clear as they are onFull House, and that juxtaposition of trying to live your life and to learn things in your day to day versus getting walloped over the head with an Alzheimer's patient you helped escape … there's just something funny there. Now, there's another little layer with the whole Aunt Becky college scandal, but that's a very minor, light layer of what makes it funny and fun to goof on.
The first episode of your new season was the one where Aunt Becky gets her kids into preschool by cheating. (Lori Laughlin, who played Aunt Becky on Full House, was recently involved in the "Varsity Blues" college admissions scandal.) I take it that wasn't a coincidence.
No, that was impossible not to do. It was unfortunate that when that news broke, I was already done with the third season ofVery Special Episodeand I was already in the middle of making a season ofZackMorris Is Trash, so I couldn't do that in real time. But I knew as soon as we came back, that was certainly going to be the first episode of Season 4.
Would you ever do an episode about a modern sitcom, or is the appeal of the series mostly the nostalgia factor?
I think there's a lot of people also who have never seenSaved by the Bell who watchZack Morris Is Trash or watchA Very Special Episodeeven if they've never seen an episode ofStep by Step, so as much as there's nostalgia, they're also offering people a window into something they might not have experienced before.
Let's talk about Zack Morris Is Trash . Did you watch Saved by the Bell growing up? At what point did you realize that the protagonist was, as you put it, trash?
I did watchSaved by the Bell, although mostly in reruns. Those shows would be on right around the time Saturday morning cartoons would end, so I'd watch them. In high school, I would come home every day and there was like a weird deep cable station in L.A. called KDOC. I think it might've even been local TV but, like, masquerading as cable because it was so high up on the numbers. Then I kind of putSaved by the Bell away. It was in my pop culture lexicon, but I didn't think too much of it one way or the other, other than as a well to draw from for jokes and stuff to goof on.
But I had an idea for a spec script that I wanted to write forSaved by the Bell, and, as a result, I needed to go do a bunch of research and kind of make sure I was nailing the beats and the rhythm. Like, what does aSaved by the Bell episode feel like? Let's go back and watch them. The first one I watched was the one where he dates a girl in a wheelchair and proceeds to make her feel bad about being in a wheelchair for 22 minutes. It was a jaw-dropping moment of, "Oh my God, I do not remember this this way!"
I brought it up at work the next day, and it seemed like as soon as we started talking aboutSaved by the Bell, everyone had some vague recollection of a plotline that would not fly today. And it was kind of an, "Oh, maybe there's something here" moment.
Tell me about the origin of, "He probably fucking killed himself," which is a recurring line in both Zack Morris Is Trash and A Very Special Episode .
I don't know how familiar you are withSaved by the Bell, but in the end of the final season, there was a behind-the-scenes contract dispute where the actresses playing Kelly and Jessie wanted more money. This is obviously beforeFriends andSeinfeld and all those kind of big contract moments. So NBC basically said, "We'll just replace you for any 10 episodes." They replaced Kelly and Jessie with someone named Tori.
Tori shows up, out of nowhere, in a leather jacket, and she's around for 10 episodes, and they never explain Kelly and Jessie not being there. Then one day, Tori's gone and Kelly and Jessie are back, and it really makes no sense. The script I wrote is an homage to the Seinfeld episode "The Contest," and it's also a Tori episode. The sneaky intention was to explain, "Well, what happened to Tori?" with the end result being a reveal that she actually committed suicide, and that's why no one talks about it.
That seed of an idea is what got me researchingSaved by the Bell, and then I couldn't really let go of the idea that all these characters who get introduced on shows—and it kind of seems like at the end of the episode they're going to be best friends—and then we never see them again. The only conclusion I could come to is this person must have killed themselves, because why else would they just fall off the face of the Earth and never be mentioned, not even once?
Some of the very special episodes you joke about cover pretty sensitive topics. Have any of them ever given you pause about whether something is off limits?
There's aFull House one where the kid is getting assaulted by his dad, and which is really dark and scary, and I was concerned about how to do that effectively, but I think it came out all right. And I mean, a lot of these jokes are certainly—they're jokes that I would say many people would consider in bad taste, which is OK. It's a comedy show. It's supposed to make you laugh.
Even theMr. Belvedere one with the kid having AIDS, it was like, "Is this all right to joke about?" And just kind of had to follow my gut, which is often wrong, and hope it's all right. The target is always the show and the execution. It is so jarring, especially when you're dealing with super serious subject matter like AIDS, to be using a laugh track.
What is the state of the Very Special Episode today, do you think?
I think there's plenty of shows that are trying to teach lessons. They're just not nearly as heavy-handed, and we're in kind of a newer version of television where everything's not so episodic. Most television shows now have plotlines that aren't fully wrapped up in 22 minutes and then never touched again, so they don't need to kind of hammer a lesson into you.
There was aThat's So Raven on the last season of A Very Special Episode, which was not a show I ever really watched, but I'm sure as you go deeper into programming for kids now, the special episodes are still out there. And I would hope there's someone in 10 or 15 years that's going to be there to goof on those, too, because I'm sure they'll look just as ridiculous. Everything we do will look foolish through the lens of time.
Source: https://slate.com/culture/2019/08/a-very-special-episode-zack-morris-is-trash-dashiell-driscoll-interview.html
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