Saying No To Drugs!

Guys, I'd like to hear what you think about drugs.

Screech, you go first.

Oh, I hate drugs.

But my doctor says I gotta keep taking them

if I wanna get rid of my post nasal drip.

Hey, she's talking about illegal drugs like pod cocaine.

Oh, I don't know anything about those.

One twiggy, and I'm out of control.

I just wanted to let you know about my study group.

Oh, don't be a funny buddy.

I'll be your study buddy.

I'm about to embark on one of the great challenges

of my scientific career.

This work right here is gonna change history.

I think this is gonna be our greatest mission.

I don't have time to study.

I'll never get into Stanford.

I got big plans for you tonight.

I got maps, I got charts.

I gotta see you through this,

because my credibility is online.

It's at this point that you'll wanna start taking notes.

Welcome to the sitcom study.

The podcast where we contemplate the TV shows

we grew up with and searched for the truth

and wisdom within the tropes and cliches.

And Amy, what's the trope we're talking about today?

Hold on one second, Jay.

I need to do this bump to get some energy for this podcast.

My God, what has happened?

We're talking about saying no to drugs friends.

Say no to drugs.

A ubiquitous message to the youths of the 80s and 90s.

Of course, this is not the first time that we're tackling

the scourge of drug abuse on the sitcom study.

About a year ago, we did hooked on pills

where we covered the iconic Jesse Spano caffeine pill breakdown.

Yes.

We boasted at that time of being the only sitcom episode

to cover Horsak, Irkel, and Screech in the same episode

because we touched on family matters

and welcome back hotter.

But yeah, the distance...

The only one we're missing is Donald I.

That is true.

But yeah, the distinction that we made then

and we'll reiterate now is that that episode

was all about prescription in some cases

but non-recreational drugs.

Those that was all people who were taking...

Yeah, legal drugs, but being abused in ways

that they weren't meant for.

In many cases, they were taking them to help them study.

That's what got Alex P. Keaton and Jesse Spano in trouble.

In some cases, they took them by accident

as happened to Horsak and Irkel.

No, I didn't Horsak do it on purpose.

I think he didn't like to prove a point.

Oh, he was like, if he says it's fine, then it's fine.

Because he was susceptible to a very specific peer pressure

which was wanting to be just like Freddie Washington.

That's right.

But anyway, yeah, that was all about what happens

when you fall under the spell of these amphetamines

that are meant to help you study and whatnot.

In this case, we're doing your straight-up

recreational drugs.

Interestingly, the first two chronological episodes

we're talking about are going to focus on cocaine.

Yeah.

And then as we get into the 90s, it shifts to marijuana.

Yes.

But yes, that's what these episodes were about.

They're trying to instill in you this message

that was propagated by the Reagans

and all that in this era that drugs are very bad.

Does they know the two drugs era?

Exactly.

And they are trying to prepare you

for what they postulated was going to be this inevitable

aggressive peer pressure where your friends are all

going to call you a wimp and a weenie.

If you don't do drugs, and they needed to prepare you

for that happening.

Right.

Which looking...

So, I mean, I think I'm going to put the question to you.

How large did these messages loom in your childhood

in terms of serving as the warning that they were meant to serve?

I'll say very large in a way that held for a while

and then completely backfired when later in life

when I realized that the effects were a little overstated.

But you and we've talked about this on the podcast before.

You were fully in college before these messages dwindled for you.

Exactly.

Part of it was that and we'll get into it with the episodes

that the peer pressure that these sitcoms represent

is a little exaggerated.

A little?

Obviously, peer pressure is a real thing,

but it's not like a record scratch

and the whole party stops when you say,

no, thank you, I would not like cocaine.

Absolutely.

But also, I do think it is trying to heighten

that feeling inside that you get of having to say no to your friends.

Yes.

And like we always talk about their sitcoms,

they're exaggerated.

They're trying to get across in 20 minutes

what is sometimes a more nuanced concept.

But I'll say that me in particular,

my friends in high school were pretty clean cut.

We didn't really drink or smoke weed or cigarettes or anything

until later in life where we did start to get up to no good.

I'll out myself as a big old weeny.

I've never done cocaine.

A lot of my friends did.

I didn't know that.

Later in life.

But part of what I find so...

I love that you're like classifying yourself as a weeny

according to these episodes.

According to these episodes.

The Christie Swanson is looking down on you.

Part of what makes these episodes seem so silly now in 2026

is how cocaine and weed are sort of treated as the same thing.

And now that we live in a world where marijuana has been essentially decriminalized

and we can go down the store and buy it,

whereas cocaine is still very much seen as an illicit narcotic.

It is kind of funny to see them presented as, you know,

almost synonymous.

But here's what I'll say in terms of answering your question.

We both grew up right in this time that all of these sitcoms take place.

And also for whatever it's worth, my parents, especially my dad,

were very straight laced.

There was no cigarette smoking or drinking or anything in the household.

So I definitely got a pretty complete picture of drugs being very bad.

The media thing that I remember most of all was this like Saturday morning crossover event

that had the Ninja Turtles and like a dozen other cartoon characters.

The Ninja Turtles who were totally stoned all the time.

All coming together in this like little 30 minute thing.

It was like the Ninja Turtles, the real Ghost Busters, the gummy bears,

like everybody coming together for this message.

Actively on LSD or on Mushrooms.

For this, it makes you bounce.

Yeah. For this, say noted drugs message.

There was of course the famous, I'm not a chicken, you're a turkey,

advertising campaign.

I have to remember that.

You know, I do what you're talking about.

I'm gonna have to re-watch that.

I might remember it, but I don't remember.

There was a TV commercial live action basically portraying the same sort of scene

with a lot of these shows are portraying where, you know,

the tough pressure says, oh, what are you a chicken or something?

And then the kid that's saying, no, the drug says, I'm not a chicken, you're a turkey.

It became an instant punchline just like the, this is your brain on drugs

and all of the other sort of.

I'm sure that for watching you dad.

Exactly. So yeah, I grew up in this, in this era.

And even though I recognize that some of these things were a little cheesy,

there really was no peer pressure for me to combat them as a young person.

So I sort of went merrily through life not really having any desire to do these things.

And then when I got to college and ended up, you know, in proximity and kind of go,

what the hey, when I sort of discovered like, oh, we does not necessarily

instantly destroy your life.

I ended up with a, you know, 30 year plus relationship with certain drugs.

So yeah, at the time this was fully, I was fully inundated by this message

and then throughout my young adult years, it sort of gradually fell away.

Yeah, I mean, we've talked about it a little bit on the podcast before.

I definitely was impacted by the message around hard drugs, for sure.

And that kind of dovetailed into, like I said, we didn't have the dare program.

I was a year-to-old dare started for the kids a year younger than me.

But we had this officer-friendly program and they like,

officer-friendly talked to us about drugs and definitely scared me off of

anything more than marijuana.

And it wasn't until I was probably in high school that I had this memory of my mom

when I told her this later on, my mom was like, God, kids really do remember

everything because she had told us this story when I was in elementary

or middle school we had gone on this hike and we went to see this waterfall

and she was telling us this story about the last time she was here.

It was in college, she had been in college and she and her friends had jumped

off this big waterfall and me and my brother were like, wow, that's really high

and you're like, that's really scary.

And she was like, yeah, we were high, so we were just making dumb decisions

and just kind of threw it away thinking that I would think she meant drunk.

So years later, of course, I remember her saying they were high,

asked her about it when I'm in high school.

And she's like, oh my gosh, I can't believe you remember that.

I can't believe it.

And she was like, we smoked weed.

We smoked grass as the old people would say.

We smoked grass.

And so we had a pretty like about so many things in my house growing up.

We had a really frank conversation about those things.

And yeah, it was like, look, marijuana in my house was an awful lot like alcohol.

It was, we know you're probably going to do it, just don't drive, don't be dumb.

And if you need help, call us.

Yeah. And yeah, in terms of family conversations,

that is going to be something that all of these episodes implicitly or explicitly

are designed to activate.

Right?

They want, you know, these are all family-based sitcoms to certain extent.

And they want you to watch these episodes and have that discussion about drugs.

In some cases, we are going to get multiple instances of cast members addressing the camera

and saying, please talk about this.

Yeah, well, and this is what I remember of these like very special episodes

or any of these episodes that dealt with something kind of serious.

They seem to always have that moment either at the beginning of the end

where they would address like the actors in the show would stop being the actors

and they would see their real selves and they would stop playing their characters

and they'd be their real selves and they would address the camera and talk about it.

So the first episode we're going to watch is growing pains.

And that happened in that because ABC refused to air that episode unless changes were made.

And so Kurt Cameron and the production crew was like, what if he sits down

and reinforces it as Kurt Cameron in like at the end of the episode.

And that was the only way ABC was going to air that.

So I think all the other networks were like, well, if it's okay for Disney, we'll do that too.

And they just kind of picked up on that.

Yes. And knowing what we know now about Kurt Cameron, it is not at all surprising

that he would embrace an anti-drug message.

This is a little before he was totally like a totally fundamentalized.

Sure, but still I see him now as a pretty straight-laced guy.

Yeah.

So it doesn't seem like a long walk that he would want to have.

No, but my favorite, one of my favorite things about the irony of all of this is that, you know,

you've watched Kid 90, right, which is Sulei Moon Fry's sort of documentary about her growing up

as being a kid in the 80s, a kid in the 90s who had some celebrity.

She was hanging out with all of these people and all of them were doing drugs.

Yes. Well, and we'll get to that with Saved By The Bell to what extent that hypocrisy is or isn't an issue.

But yeah, let's get to it. What is our lineup? What are the shows we watch?

All right. We watched Growing Pains Season 2 Episode 15.

Thank God it's Friday. Then we watched Webster Season 5 Episode 2, Basketball Blues.

Saved By The Bell Season 3 Episode 21, although that one actually, the numbering was different.

Saved By The Bell and the numbering is always sketchy.

Just look it up if you want to watch it. It's called No Hope With Dope.

Right. So No Hope With Dope. And then finally, Moisha, podcast first appearance.

Season 4 Episode 3. Hello. What's this?

Yeah. So starting with Growing Pains, second season, it's called Thank God It's Friday.

It starts on a Friday night. It's date night for Jason and Maggie, is that her name?

And there's a whole thing. Oh, they were going to go to the movies, but they canceled. They canceled a babysitter.

The point is that the whole family, except for Mike, Kirk Cameron, is staying home to have a sort of TV dinner,

a low-key Friday night at home, and Mike, who sports a ridiculous, what would you call it, a bicycle hat?

In the first scene he's wearing this bicycle hat, not unlike what Wes, what's the guy?

Wesley Snipes in Why Me Can Jump, where it sort of flipped up.

Just looks absolutely absurd, but he's sort of laying the groundwork for, oh yeah, I'm hanging out with Boner and Eddie, right?

Those are my two pals. And yeah, we don't know what we're going to do.

Eddie who looks shockingly like a young Billy Joel.

I guess. Yeah, Boner was the one that I was trying to place, who he reminded me of.

But anyway, they're going to go out. They don't really have any specific plans.

They're just going to hang out. Yeah, I don't know.

Yeah, like you would do on a Friday night, go drive around, go hang out at a restaurant for us.

It was always like coffee shops, so we could smoke cigarettes.

And then the little brother makes the comment, he says, 10 bucks says he's going trolling for chicks.

Oh my gosh. And they make Maggie and Alan Fick's character, Jason.

Jason, thank you. Maggie and Jason make a comment about, you know, if I knew what Ben knows at his age, I would have been trouble.

And Maggie's like, yeah, Ben is in trouble. Like Ben is a lot.

Well, yeah, that's because they, they say that because when they're watching their movie later on,

it's like some sort of crime drug kingpin movie. And he's like, he's got three kilos of coke.

That's a street value of $3,600 or something. Yeah, like 3.2 million or something.

Anyway, but he is, you know, we've commented in later seasons how Ben is like a troglodyte.

Oh, he sucks when he's older. Here, he's just a little cute kid.

Well, but that's the thing. They're laying the groundwork here for him being this sort of like narrative well.

And it just like him always knowing the bad stuff, being wise to all the things like having like trolling for chicks

and all of that at this age, you know, you can see the through line to him being as when he's older.

Yeah, that's true. At this point, it just comes across as precocious.

He just, he's saying things that are a little incongruous for a little kid, but when he's 12 is gross.

Yes, if you go back to our making a whole movie episode where teenage Ben is making his bikini babes movie,

he's pretty reprehensible. But now he's cute little kid.

We established that Mike has a curfew of 1am, which is definitely one of the references that I used

when trying to persuade my parents to raise my curfew.

Mike is a sophomore, maybe a junior, and I had to fight real hard to break out of a 10 p.m. curfew for most of my high school years.

So this was 100% a reference I used.

Yeah, I mean, there was definitely a double standard at least when we were teenagers that girls tended to have much more strictly enforced curfews.

I think, you know, I never had a curfew at all, and I was kind of surprising that Mike did.

But I guess it makes sense. He's in high school.

And he's also kind of a naughty kid.

Yeah, they kind of need to keep him on a leash.

Yeah, I wouldn't get up to anything.

But so, yeah, Mike and Boner and Eddie go to the local pizza shop. They're hanging out and

Mike feels very charles and charged.

Yeah, definitely. We've got the red and white checkered tablecloths and all that.

Mike's big suggestion is let's go watch the drive-in movie from afar.

Yes, we'll have to pay it in.

There's going to be basically like a Swedish sex movie or something.

Well, they said he said, let's go watch it from, you know, from outside.

We can lip read, and the guys are like that.

And he was like, but it's a Swedish movie.

And they were like, oh, okay.

Because, you know, as I'm sure you remember, there was this idea that foreign films didn't have the same

ratings, PG-13 rating systems as the MPAA.

So, if you're seeing a foreign film, there's going to be a whole lot more TNA.

Yeah, I associate that stereotype with French films.

But I guess, yeah, foreign films in general, sure.

And so, they're like, okay, they're about to go off to watch this distance Swedish drive-in movie

when who should walk into the pizzeria but Roland?

That's right.

It's a cool Roland who has graduated a year or so ago and is in town hanging out, picking up

what looks like about 10 pizza boxes.

10 empty pizza boxes, right?

Yeah, but you can totally see.

Completely weightless empty pizza boxes that he's tossing around like ragdoll.

Although one of them is all greased up on the side.

All right, they got the authenticity there.

They probably ate the pizza beforehand and then used it as a prop.

Yeah, the pizzas are all sitting over on the craft services table.

But so, yeah, Roland is older.

He hangs out with this cool crowd, this very affluent crowd apparently.

Yeah.

And, you know, it's that old thing.

Oh, hey, see, or I remember you, right?

Because I guess Mike's like kind of a cool kid in his high school.

He's friendly with this guy.

And so, long story short, Mike and his friends sort of get themselves invited to this party.

You know, they sort of shamelessly asked, you know, or like hint at that they would like to invite.

Yeah, the guys like, hey, are you begging to come to this party?

And they all immediately get down on their knees and they're like, please, please.

And he laughs and then he walks away and then he pauses at the door.

And without even turning around, he puts his hand up by his ear and with two fingers, he motions.

Come on.

Yeah, exactly.

So, Roland, you know, just to give you a picture, he looks like he's maybe 32 years old.

Yeah.

He's got that sort of curly hair, very waspy.

Yeah, very like James Spaderish in what is it?

Pretty in pink or whatever.

If this were like a snobs versus slabs type 80s movie, he would be like the country club.

And so, they show up at this house.

It's this big, fancy house.

It's full of these sort of well-to-do young people hair, right?

Big hair for days, full of lots of these young ladies with the fuzzy sweaters and the gigantic hair.

Yes.

They start seeing people coming out of the bathroom in groups, right, in little clusters of two, three, four people.

They're thrown by that, right?

Boner makes the remark, oh, I guess rich people go to the bathroom in groups.

Right.

But what becomes clear pretty quickly is not only are people using cocaine at this party, it seems to be the theme of this party.

Yeah, this is a Coke party.

Now, it's not a Coke party in that it's out on the table, like you see in like 1970s.

Right.

This is in Scarface.

This is in Scarface.

Disco time frame.

You know, we're 10 years after that.

And these are relatively mostly kids, right?

We're looking at people who are like 16 to 21.

They're kind of, you know, early college late high school time frame.

Which again, in real life means 21 to 40.

I mean, yeah, there's not really are people in the background like that.

But our main guest cast member is Christy Swanson, OG Buffy herself.

Yeah.

And it is her house.

It's her party.

Yeah, we don't find that out right away.

No, but right.

But later on, we also find out that it's her parents' Coke.

Yeah.

But so when they first show up, they don't get the going to bathroom and groups thing.

They're just ecstatic to be hobnobbing with these classy elite people.

Right.

And the hot girl from school whose parents bought her a Porsche for her birthday is there.

And so they're all excited about that trying to get a chance to talk to her.

Right.

And so then Mike starts hitting on this blonde girl played by Christy Swanson from the Buffy movie.

You know, everything's going well.

She likes them and stuff.

And she says, okay, would you like to go to the bathroom?

Right.

Do you want to go to the john?

Yeah.

And he's confused at first.

And so he says like, oh, no, I'm good.

I understand why he isn't thinking making out.

Because like when they first started coming in and out of the bathroom and groups like that,

I was like, oh, damn, this is a orgy party.

Interesting.

Yeah, yeah, maybe that thought doesn't cross his mind either.

But so what happens is when he says, no, thanks, why don't you just go without me.

She says, oh, I know what you're thinking.

You're probably worried that I'm going to steal your stash or that I'm looking to mooch over, mooch off your stash.

So I want to pause here and say that this is the reason why in real life,

there is not so much pure pressure to do cocaine because people are very territorial about their coke.

And you have a very limited supply.

And so in my younger days, when I would go out with my friends and some of my friends would use coke.

And by that time, it was very like like they would be shady about it.

And it wasn't like you don't want to, it's not like weed where you want to sort of, hey, it's cool.

It wasn't a party drug.

It was like only people who you knew were cool.

Did you let them know that you were doing coke and that you had coke?

And I witnessed quite a few sort of awkward little like passive aggressive conversations

where people would get annoyed at each other because it it like whatever amount you had on you was very finite.

And it was expensive.

It's expensive and there is this thing with coke.

I mean, ultimately all drugs are like this to some extent or another.

But you do it, you get your little, your pop or whatever.

And then when it starts to fade, you get anxious if you don't do more.

Right.

And so the need to do it really perpetuates itself.

See, that's so, I mean, and I know that that is like, I know that that's true.

That's been not in my experience.

But I know that that's true for some people.

Yes.

And they're just like, oh, wait, now it's fading.

I need more.

I need more.

And so like you said, the amount that you have on you is precious.

Yes.

And so, and to a certain extent that extends to all drugs, you know, like in college,

if anything, I would have been the pure pressure or with weed.

I would be the person offering it to anybody that stopped by the thing.

Right.

But if anybody said, no, thank you, I don't do that music to my ears.

Great.

Why for me?

Like, I don't, drugs are expensive.

And so I just wanted to call that out when she says, oh, I bet you think I'm mooching off your stash.

To me, that struck me as, yeah, that is why people don't like nail you to the wall.

If you say no, thank you.

Right.

But so, of course, what happens in this is that she says, don't worry, it's my treat.

She takes out her little thimble-sized container of cocaine.

There's a little keychain with a little bottle.

And there's a couple people at the party that we see having that.

And then we'll see some other instances of it later in Webster.

Yeah.

But so she says straight up, you are cool, aren't you?

Right.

And so Mike sort of skirts that, you know, though, whatever, I had cocaine for lunch.

Just kind of like evades the issue.

And then he spots Lana, who is another pretty girl that he knows from school.

Yeah.

And so he knows her, he feels comfortable with her.

So he goes up to her and he's like, oh, thank God.

Thank God you're here.

And he says like, I don't know if, you know, don't, don't freak out.

But I gotta tell you, there's cocaine at this party to which she responds, I should hope so.

Why else would we be here?

And then Christy Swanson sees them talking and is like, oh, let's all go together.

Yeah.

And so then Mike hooks back up with Boner and Eddie and they, they talk about it as though

like they found themselves at a party with like the sopranos or something else.

And we are in over our heads.

We need to just get out of here with our lives, you know.

Right.

Before anybody notices that we're total weenies, we gotta go.

Yes.

And Eddie in particular keeps kind of pushing back.

Like who's the one who introduces weenie?

Right.

And this party is pretty rocking.

The girls have said they're gonna go get the hot tub ready.

Yeah.

And so like after they do coke together, then they're gonna all go to the hot tub together.

And that's enough for Eddie.

Like his dick is making the decisions and Boner kind of keeps going back and forth.

He's like, when Eddie makes a good point, he's on his side.

When Kirk Cameron makes a good point, when Mike makes a good point, he's on his side.

So he's sort of going back and forth.

And Mike makes the point like, are we this wishy-washy?

And Eddie's like, no, we're not, you know, we're not, we're not flipped up and like that.

And Mike's like, look at Boner.

He just keeps going back and forth.

Yeah.

Now Mike also brings up the point that will happen again in the Webster episode.

This episode comes out the year after the death of Len Bayes.

Oh, that's the basketball star, right?

Cautionary tale.

Yes, I had to look this up because I didn't remember the name, but of course I remembered this anecdote.

So Len Bayes was a basketball player who died of a cardiac arrhythmia resulting from cocaine overdose.

Days after he was drafted, second draft pick to the Boston Celtics in 1986, right?

Wow.

So this was the ultimate tale.

Really timely in certain ways.

You will literally drop dead.

You'll have a heart attack.

Yes.

And that is what happened.

He did too much coke.

He dropped dead of cardiac event.

And this became the absolute, uh, yeah, just platonic form of why you shouldn't do drugs.

Which again is a funny contrast to the weed thing where, you know, it's, it's all a little nebulous,

but advocates of legalization will tell you there has never been a death associated with marijuana ever.

Now granted, I mean, I think if you take into account vehicular situations or things where people have psychotic episodes, you know, there's different ways to look at it.

There's so many things and I know a lot of people who are still really like anti-drug.

Maybe they've had, um, I have several friends who have had, um, major addiction in their families, uh, you know, siblings, daughters, sons.

And they say, like, they're against weed in all forms because they say that that truly is the gateway drug.

If you find yourself getting this fix from the cycles of getting high, then, and weed your entry point, then it makes you curious about what other ones have they not been telling you the whole story about.

Yes.

I, I struggle a little bit because like I was saying earlier, my experience with cocaine has been limited, but it has not been at all.

This like, oh my god, it's going to make your heart explode. Oh my god, you can't stop doing it.

Like I, I sort of was like, yeah, no, that one, like you have to do so much gold in order to die.

But I think you're right. Like it is way more addictive. It is way more like, oh, let's come back to it.

Let's come back to it all night long. Can't stop.

Yeah, then weed would might be. And it had just physiologically it does contribute to people's deaths much more.

And I will say that hung over me a lot because as I as a kid and as an adult, I a bacon like with almost every meal.

It really did kind of scare me the idea of like, and this is very silly thinking that I was like whatever 18 years old or something that I was like a candidate for a heart attack.

And so I shouldn't do cocaine. But so that's one of the points that Mike makes.

The two friends, yeah, are going back and forth. They don't particularly want to do cocaine, but they really, really want to get in with this crowd.

There's a point where the girl, the blonde girl played by Christie Swanson, comes back.

And when they sort of indicate, oh, we might not want to do it. She actually gets hostile. She goes, now what's going on here?

And then what they they sort of talk her down a little because she goes, oh, okay, I thought maybe you were narks.

Yeah, which I take it to mean literally like she actually thinks they're like undercover police officer.

That's like a nark. That's what a nark was then. So she was like, are you guys 21 jumps treating us?

Yeah, exactly. And so they convince her that that's not the case. But they're having this back and forth.

And then at one point, Mike says, I don't want to do coke, okay?

Well, and they realize that they've never done it before. So then they start, they're like, oh, they stop pressuring so much.

Like, hey, you know what? It's not that big of a deal that you haven't done before will be gentle.

Like, don't worry about it. And that's when Mike's like, no, you don't understand. I don't want to do it.

Yeah. And the whole party goes silent.

The record scratch moment, exactly. And then yeah, it really is this thing of like, like the spotlight is on him.

He needs to make this split second decision, either say, no, I was just kidding. I love cocaine or leave in disgrace.

Right. And the girls take their leave. They're like, well, let you guys talk about this. And we'll check on the hot tub one more time.

Yeah, which I honestly, that was the most sort of realistic reaction is after he has this whole sort of melodramatic thing.

She just kind of goes like, okay, whatever. I'll leave you home for a while.

She doesn't like make fun of him or anything. She's just like, I don't have time for this.

Right. Like, I'm just going to, you know, extract myself from the situation for a moment.

And so then he and his buddies kind of have it out. And Eddie and Boner end up staying.

And Mike's like, are you seriously doing this? Are you seriously staying?

Well, you know what they say is that Boner says to it. Boner says to Mike in reference to him trying to get them to leave.

He says, Mike, friends don't make friends do things they don't want to do. And then Mike goes, exactly.

And he's the party. Yeah.

And so then we get the app break. This were into the final act of the show now where we're back with Jason, the dad waiting up alone in the dark house.

We come to understand it's 2 a.m. by this point. And Mike isn't home yet.

Yeah, he hasn't done. He hasn't met curfew.

Yeah. And so then Mike comes home, walks in, the dad's being, oh, let me sit down for this.

I can't wait to hear your crazy story. Let me guess.

You saved a pregnant woman's life. What is it going to be this time?

And I will say for an episode that so far has been very heightened and a little silly in terms of the way it's portraying this peer pressure and all of that.

This last chunk of the show actually comes across as very sort of sincere and effective to me the way that Alan thick plays it where they sit down.

And Mike Siever as well. He is conflicted. He is feeling sort of bad about himself.

And he doesn't really want to tell his dad, but he does have to like like he needs to get it off his chest.

He's feeling very upset, particularly not about saying no, we come to find out.

But about the fact that like he's had this break with his friends.

Yeah. And just in general, like being subject to that kind of peer pressure, which he says I've never experienced before.

So yeah, Alan thick is like, let me sit down. So the both of them sit down on these perpendicular couches.

And yeah, Alan thick plays this tone shift really well where he's doing this stuff.

Oh, let me guess there was an old lady and you helped across the street.

And then I don't think Mike even says anything other than maybe like, no, no, dad, dad, listen.

And you see on Alan thick's face, he just goes, are you okay?

And it's this very sort of again, it's subtle compared to all the crazy dialogue we've had so far.

And then Mike explains like, yeah, look, I was at this party.

You can't get mad at me, no matter what I say.

He says, I want to talk to you as a friend and not as a son or whatever.

And then he goes on to explain. And of course, Alan thick kind of jumps up at first.

Wow, what do you mean cocaine? And then Mike's like, no, no, listen, let me explain.

Don't, don't react to this like a parent. And he goes on to say, I did refuse the cocaine, but I feel horrible.

I've been driving around for the last hour, two hours.

Yeah, I feel betrayed by my friends. I don't know how to face them.

I don't know if I did the right thing like I just feel so confused.

I know I did the right thing and saying no, but I feel like I'm confused about not being able to convince my friends to leave with me.

I'm hurt that they would choose to stay. And you know, all of those things, all those conflicting emotions.

Yeah. And so he says something to the effect of like dad, like what, what do you do about the fact that even your closest friends like want you to do stuff like this sometimes.

And the dad says, well, look, Mike, you can't please everybody. And he goes, yeah, but tonight I didn't please anybody.

And the dad says, except yourself.

There it is. There it is. Message coming home.

Yeah. And so, you know, it's like, okay, basically whatever. It's over.

Mike goes to the stairs to go to bed and then sort of like charges back to the dad and gives him a big hug and huge applause from the audience.

Yes. Right. Everybody kind of goes wild. And in this case, I kind of agree with it. Like it's a touching moment when he goes over and hugs him.

Yeah. And then as he's leaving, and this is where Alan thick goes back to being a little thick, if you will, a little bit of a dummy.

He goes, oh, by the way, boner and Eddie called, they left a message. They said they didn't go to the bathroom.

What in the world does that mean? Now, based on the conversation you just had 10 seconds ago, what do you think that means?

Whatever that means.

Yeah. But what Mike says is it means a lot.

It means a lot, dad. And you know, Alan thick gives a little smile so you know he gets it.

And then commercial break, we come back and we have the straight to camera. He's in the party set.

But yeah, let's break this down step by step because it starts with it looks like we're getting a little tag at the end of the episode because it's the party set full of all the kids.

Uh-huh. Kurt Cameron isn't there. It's just all the kids milling around as though we're about to see another scene in the party.

And then they just kind of stop and all, you know, we're talking about like 10, 20 extras, you know, these kids in the party stop and look at the camera.

And then Kurt Cameron walks on from stage right.

Yeah. And sits down on the table, looks right into the barrel and says, you know,

he's like, yeah, he basically is like this just this isn't just in the script. This isn't just, you know, I'm saying this because I'm told he says I believe this.

Yeah, he says I'm not getting paid to say this. This is how I feel.

Yeah. And but the but the extras in the background, the like they have such angry faces.

I think they were obviously directed not to smile and to sort of keep the blank expression, but they look pissed.

Yeah, menacing.

I'm like, why do they look so angry?

Yes, the camera's slowly zooming in on Kurt Cameron as he delivers this spiel.

We forgot to mention before this when the when the proper episode ended, after Mike went upstairs, it zoomed in on Jason the dad locking the door.

Right, putting on putting the the chain latch on the door, like go, my kids are home safe.

He goes, what a world.

I'm like, what's the chain?

Yes, as though these rich all the drug addicts have out these rich, preppy co-heads from the party are going to invade his home.

They followed my home.

Safe.

Yeah.

Time to put the chain on.

Yes.

Absolutely.

That that was like talk about going from a sincere moment to like too much cheese.

That was it.

Like the epitome of that.

I totally, you're right.

I totally forgot about that.

Exactly.

Do you want to know the city underbelly of this episode?

Oh, sure.

All right.

This sounds like a Johnny Dakota situation waiting to unfold.

It's not Johnny Dakota.

It's it's a typical Hollywood, right?

Chrissy Swanson in this episode is legitimately 17 years old.

She is not one of the, you know, extras that's actually 30 playing a teenager.

And she had been doing little bit parts here and there on the Warner Brothers lot where this was filmed over the past year.

Alan Thick was recently divorced as of last year.

I don't like where this is going.

They met when she was 16.

During this, the filming of this episode, she is 40, she's 17.

Yeah.

They are engaged.

What?

There you go.

How old was Robin Thick?

He was 10 years old at the time.

Okay.

So at least it's not like, you know, he's moving in on the down the sun.

So like squeeze.

No, but like, you know, absurd.

Blurred lines comes from, I learned it from watching you dad.

Absolutely absurd.

In terms of tracking the trope, it's an embarrassment of riches.

We have all of the anti-drug messaging and specifically the reference to this tragic basketball player that they'll make again in Webster.

This thing of sort of like going out in the world and having to deal with peer pressure and then coming back into the safety of the family and sort of the parents having to sort of walk this balance between discipline and compassion.

And just the general message that all of these episodes are going to put forth, which is watch out for the peer pressure, right?

It's going to come for you hard.

You're going to have to, you know, you're going to have to get ready for an entire party looking at you like you have three heads.

If you say you don't want to use drugs.

And yeah, I think that's going to continue to some extent or another in all of these episodes.

Yep.

Let's move on to Webster.

Basketball Blues.

Yep.

So we're in season five and the producers of Webster have seen fit not unlike the creators of Charles and Charge and so many other shows to introduce a random cousin, nephew, friend, extraneous character that's living with them.

We get none other than Coronemic.

Parker Lewis himself.

He is credited is credited as corky.

Yeah.

And through context clues, we ultimately figure out that he is their nephew.

Yes.

He's George and Catherine.

Yeah.

He's pop.

He's George's nephew, Papa.

Papa Dopolis, as Webster calls him.

And this.

So there's all these reasons for this happening at the end of season four, Webster was canceled and Paramount exercised.

It's option to keep it going in syndication.

They went out and they got all of these local TV stations to buy it in syndication.

And they got enough of them that they said, yep, even though it doesn't have a hundred episodes yet, it's worth it.

And like Charles and Charge again.

Not unlike Charles and Charge, nine to five, too close for comfort.

So many other shows during that era.

And so, but because of that, it meant that they were no longer beholden to the broad audience that they were trying to go for in the first four seasons.

Now they could explicitly focus on the younger audience that made up the vast majority of Webster viewers.

And so you have this kind of shift away from the store, the Webster that you and I remember watching to this latter day Webster that was a lot more like a punky Brewster, a silver spoons focused on kid,

like kind of a kid focused show more like a Nickelodeon show, the writing a lot more straightforward and a lot less nuanced as we will definitely discuss as we get into it.

And yes, at episode four of season five, they introduced quirky nemic.

He plays Nikki Papadopoulos.

Yes, I don't think I heard the word Nikki once in this episode.

So he has now we're at episode 20.

So he's been in for most of the season.

And then at the end of the season, he disappears just as suddenly as he arrived.

The premise for him arriving is that his parents work for the United Nations.

They've been sent off to Namibia to do some work in Africa.

And so they, I guess, return during the summer hiatus.

And he's never to be seen again until Parker Lewis.

Yeah, I mean, we were both a little confused.

But yeah, the episode starts with little web.

Our famous, our favorite little scam, who burned down his house and did all kinds of wacky things.

And now he's playing basketball with core nemic at this community center,

which seems to me like a real set.

We've got, I wouldn't you get the form outside establishing shot of community center.

We see it like five or six times throughout the episode.

And then they're just at like a basketball court.

But I think the basketball court is really outside.

It doesn't look like a set to me.

I could be wrong.

But it just seems a little bit bigger and more spread out.

And yeah, they're playing basketball.

They're running joke is that Webster has his city rules.

Where every time he gets tripped up by the fact that he's playing basketball

against somebody six times his size, he pulls, oh, it's city rules.

Your legs have to be three feet apart when you're taking a foul shot.

All these silly things that, you know, we come to understand that's just him kind of messing around

to try to get a competitive edge against this kid who is, yes, much, much,

not only older, but just by being a normal size person is dwarfs Webster giganticly.

Yeah, I don't know that he's older.

Well, maybe not in real life, but he seems like an older kid to me.

Because I was kind of wondering like, nephew or not, why doesn't this kid have his own friends?

Like he only hangs out with this little kid.

They're living there now.

Like so they're, you know, they basically are being raised for this year anyway as brothers.

And that's just, you know, so they're, they get along like gangbusters.

They are fast friends.

So it's all good.

Yeah.

So I mean, if you figure that this is season five and Webster in season one was supposed to be

like first grade-ish, like kindergarten first grade-ish, right?

He was supposed to be old enough to be in school kind of from the very beginning.

And now we're five years later, you would be saying that he would be 11?

Yeah.

I mean, part of it is as we've discussed, Emmanuel Lewis has this sort of ageless condition.

Yes.

But yeah, I mean, it's true that Coronemic, his voice is still high.

He doesn't sound like he does in Parker, Lewis.

So he's got to be, you know, he can't be any older than like 12 or 13.

But he certainly reads to me as older.

And like I said, he is literally at least twice the size.

It's not more a little Webster.

Well, so they're playing basketball, as you said, in city rules and all of that.

And Nikki is calling Webster out on making up rules by using this idea of city rules.

And he's like, yeah, well, just wait till I come at you with my country rules.

Yeah.

And then this much older guy shows up and he's got long hair and he's looking kind of rough and tough.

I would say he looks kind of like AC Slater's older Caucasian brother or something.

Oh, that's interesting.

He's got the pretty hair.

I would have said that he wasn't Caucasian, but okay.

He looks more like a wrestler than a basketball player.

Yeah.

He's very bulky.

He's, you know, in addition to being taller than them, because he is essentially a grown man.

We come to understand that he's, even though he's not in college yet, he's like 22 years older.

So he is in college.

He's in junior college.

He's in a two year school.

That's why later on you see him wearing his sweatshirt says something JC.

Right.

The junior college.

And that's why he's trying to be scouted.

So we come to find out that he is a 21 year old sophomore.

Yes.

And the only reason he's in college at all is that he has sort of been taken under the wing of George.

And George, you know, they met through the community center or something.

And he kind of like, you know, mentored him and was like, you're a really good ball player.

You're a really good basketball player.

Why don't you, you know, get off the streets and go to college and do this thing.

And so he's been kind of mentoring him.

But we don't know any of that when he arrives.

And neither does Nicky, a K.A.

quirky nemmick, right?

He's like, uh, this dude looks like bad news.

Well, no, he knows who he is.

They go, oh my god, that's Bob Kelsey.

Core nemmick doesn't realize that Webster and him have a relationship.

And he goes, oh my god, it's Bob Kelsey last week.

I saw him do a triple, you know, the spin around hook shot from 80 feet away or something like he's in awe.

And so then, and I have to admit, I fell for this too.

Webster looks across the courtyard at this gigantic dude and goes like, hey you, get over here.

One on one, you and me right now.

Yeah, Webster comes up to this guy's knee, no kidding.

Yes.

And so this giant Bob Kelsey guy who has, we've established, you know, 20, 21 years old,

he goes, you just bought yourself a whole lot of trouble.

And Webster is mouthing off to him like he's, you know, cruising for a bruising.

And then Nicky is like, oh no, I like it.

What am I seeing?

What am I seeing?

Yes, this is very out of character for Webster.

The whole thing is bizarre, but then we find out they're pulling a Han Solo and Lando Calrissian,

where you start out going, you got a lot of nerve to show your face around here.

And then you drop the act and give each other a hug and you reveal, oh, they're friends.

They were just playing around.

Right, but not before Webster pulls his signature move, which is a fast break in between the tall guy's legs,

getting the ball and going up and getting the shot.

Yeah, I mean, that's, that's pretty much your only move if your Webster is going through the person's legs.

It was great.

And then yeah, like as you said, this guy, Bob, Bobby Kelsso, Bobby Kelsey, he like comes over and gives him a big hug.

And Nicky's like, what's going on?

And so they explain, yeah, you know, George has been helping me out.

And he got me into college and now I'm getting ready to graduate from, you know, with my AA.

And I'm hoping to, you know, go on to a four year and I'm really excited.

And he's like, hey, where I'll see you tonight because I'm coming over for dinner.

Yeah.

And at this time, I didn't realize that Coronemic would be over for dinner because I just thought he was his friend.

But yeah, we cut to the Papadopolis household.

And it's one big happy family Webster, the foster parents, Coronemic and this gigantic Bob Kelsey guy.

All enjoying one of Catherine's trademark dishes.

There's some jokes in the dialogue about how she's like not good at cooking or something.

There's all, that's a long running gag on the show.

She's made some sort of like beef, beef something.

Yeah.

And it's green.

Yeah. And there's speaking of long running gags, Webster and Bob Kelsey have this thing where they're always sort of pretending that they're in like star wars.

They're always going like, oh, it's time to face the galactic, you know, leaders or whatever.

And I'll remember last time what our photon beams almost got explanitated or something like.

They're always going back and forth.

They have these fun little games, these little like in jokes that they're playing.

Right.

So we come to understand like, okay, this Bob Kelsey guy, he's this nice, you know, older kid young man.

Whoever you want to see him who's got this nice relationship with Webster.

The whole community kind of looks up to him because he's this great basketball player.

He sounds to me like a little bit of a showboat every time they're talking about his basketball skills.

They're describing some crazy maneuver he pulled where he like spun around five times and then did a back flip before a hook shot or something.

Right, but which we come to find out that a lot of that show boating isn't because he is a showboat.

It's because it's drug induced.

Yeah, yeah, I guess I don't know if I made that connection, but yeah, we're going to have the dinner.

After dinner, we've got a nice sort of family conversation where the younger boys are sent up to do their homework and

ma'am, aka Catherine and George Poppidopoulos.

Sit Bob Kelsey down and say, hey, we've got an opportunity for you.

I'm friends with this recruiter from Kentucky.

He's going to come and watch you play in the basketball game.

We've already established that Kelsey gave the whole family tickets to his graduation.

So I guess that's why I was confused.

I guess so he's graduating from this two year college and I had assumed it was high school.

So he's about to graduate from two year college.

He's got a big, I guess it's like a end of season game that they've invited this recruiter to,

but they've also invited the recruiter to their home and he is going to come momentarily.

So yeah, he asks, George asks Bobby earlier on like, hey, are you getting scouted?

What's been going on?

And he's like, yeah, not a lot of bites.

The University of Guam wants me.

Guam, I feel like was always a punchline in the 80s and 90s.

When you needed like a weird remote place to talk about Guam, just always.

It's just kind of funny sound to it.

So yeah, so this scout from the University of Kentucky happens to know George back from his sport days.

And so he has agreed to come over, meet this guy.

He's seen some of his tape. He thinks he looks pretty good and he's excited to see him at the game.

And so he gets to know him and they're chatting.

And right before he gets there, Bobby excuses himself for a second.

You see him get visibly nervous.

He's like, oh, he's coming tonight.

I need to make a good impression.

Let me just go to the kitchen.

That's it.

I'll go to the kitchen and we get a very similar to our good times episode from the alcoholism podcast

where we had cousin, franny or whatever her name is, goes to the kitchen to chug vodka while the family blissfully is unaware in the living.

Yes, exactly.

And so or goes to the bathroom in that case.

Well, she is doing the kitchen too.

Because I remember that family wasn't there.

Yeah.

They weren't just in the other room except for the, I guess the daughter was in the other room.

Yeah, it just reminded me of it because it was the same thing where we find out in this case just slightly before the rest of the character.

The rest of the characters do.

We get this sort of omniscient narrator point of view of seeing the guy alone in the kitchen.

He takes the cocaine out of his sock and starts doing his thing.

He's got a little canister and it has a little spoon.

Not unlike Sarah Michelle Geller's character and cruel intentions.

Yeah.

And so yeah, he hides it in his sock.

He's standing over the sink.

He's doing a couple bumps.

And then Catherine's like, you know what we should have?

We should have some ice cream.

So she heads into the kitchen, opens the door and she sees him but he doesn't see the door open because he is all into his coke.

And she just immediately, you can see her whole body language just like crumbles.

She turns around.

Yeah.

She goes to tell George and at that moment the doorbell rings.

So she doesn't get a chance to tell George what she's just witnessed before the recruiter comes in.

Yeah.

And then after the act break, we get the sort of tail end of this little visit where they're all smoothing with this recruiter.

And what I will commend this episode on is I was kind of surprised by the way it portrays this guy under the influence of cocaine, which is basically fine.

Like any time we've seen a sitcom character on drugs of any kind, they're climbing on the walls.

They're making a fool of themselves, you know, whether it's Tom Hanks and his wild antics at the job interview or Erkle pounding the wood planks into the wall or whatever.

Like it's always a thing, you know, Jesse going all crazy at the music video shoot.

It's always this cartoonish representation.

And here we get this, this guy, this young man interacting pretty much normally with everybody.

Like I would have bet dollars to donuts that this was going to involve him making a fool of himself or at least in some way, you know, doing something weird.

No, they did it.

You're right.

They did a really good job with this.

They have him sniff, like snuff his nose, a couple of times, but nothing out of the ordinary.

Nothing that, like the only reason you notice it is because you know, like first of all, like they never keep the take when somebody sniffs in the middle of it on television.

That's number one.

But number two, it's a very natural thing, right?

It's like, oh, he'll like finish a phrase and then he'll kind of wrinkle his nose up a little bit or he's shaking the guy's hand goodbye and he sort of scratches underneath his nose a little bit.

And then later on in the episode, he finds quirky and Webster, Nikki and Webster back at the basketball hoop and he's doing it a little bit more.

Yeah, a little bit more.

But before that, you know, after the recruiter leaves and again, like this little sort of informal interview with the recruiter is successful.

Yeah, it goes really well.

And so then Bobby goes off on his merry way and then we have again another very similar situation to what we had in the alcoholism episodes where Catherine says to George, you're not going to believe this, but I just saw Bobby doing cocaine in the kitchen.

And while it is brief, George pulls the thing of, I don't believe that. That makes no sense.

You know, why would he do that? He wouldn't jeopardize his future. He's worked so hard. He's come so far and she's like, I know what I saw. And he, you know, believes his wife.

What he says is George goes, it doesn't make sense to me, Catherine. And then Catherine says, well, drugs never do.

So tell him where we're coming from.

No, no, Catherine deep cut backstory about throwing someone down an elevator shaft or anything like that.

So then before we get the scene where he meets back up with with the boys, we get George finding him at the community center, you know, basketball place and pop it up a list.

Whatever the actor's name is, does a pretty good job of playing this as just this very straightforward, solemn, like it also helps that it's written in this sort of no frills way where he's just like, hey, I want to talk to you.

Why are you doing cocaine? You know, yeah, he was like, like you said, he was, he was very upfront with him. He was, you know, it was, it was such a, it was almost like too low energy.

Yeah, I mean, that's just what he's, how he's playing it. It's like, I'm not in a good mood. I'm not going to joke around with you. I'm going to confront this.

And he, you know, says something defective, like you've got a problem. You need to admit it. You need to get help. And the, and Bobby says, it's my problem. What's it to you anyway, right?

Again, very much echoing the conversations we heard in our alcoholism episode. And he declares I don't need help while he's doing the sniffing thing.

So they had that nice little moment where he's like, look, I only do it because I like to have a good time. And then he's like, all right, well, then why did Catherine see George is like, why did Catherine see you do it before?

You know, you have this meeting with the scout. And he's like, well, okay, also sometimes when I get anxious, I'll do it. And he's like, all right, and then George is like, all right, so you do it when you want to have a good time.

You do it when you're anxious. What about staying up all night studying? Do you do it for that? And he's like, well, yeah. And he's like, okay, so when are you not doing it?

Do you have a problem? And he like walk, he like lawyers him into realizing there's like no parts of his life that he isn't sustaining with some sort of drug.

Yeah, which is very much the deal with addiction or even casual addiction. It is that thing of like, well, you know, you need it to sort of celebrate when things are going good and you're happy and you want to loosen up. And then you also need it when things are bad to kind of help deal with the stress.

And so it sort of comes at you from both angles. Yeah. And so when he shows up next time Webster and Nikki are playing basketball at the community center, they're again very straightforward. They're just like, uh, we're not supposed to hang out with you.

You know, our parents are, you know, Uncle George and Aunt ma'am, they told us what was going on. And and so, you know, are you okay? Are you going to get help? We love you. Like we're worried about you and we love you. But like, we, you know, we, it's not good for us to hang out with you.

Yeah, it's interesting to me that they don't show us this family meeting quote unquote that the boys are referencing. I don't know if it's just a runtime thing, but you would think that would be a critical part of this episode.

Well, so they have that comment. They do show us the little family meeting, but they do it after this, right? Because Nikki and Webster say, you know, sorry, we're not going to play ball with you today. Have fun.

And he's like, well, before you leave, let me show you just one cool move. And he does like some big, you know, like you said, run jump turning slam dunky thing.

And they're like, man, you're going to go far. We hope you get help you need the help you need. And they leave. And then they go back to the pop it up with his house.

And that's when they say, hey, we, you know, we ran into Bobby and no, we didn't hang out with him. We told him we were worried about him. And that's when Georgian ma'am are like, you know, how are you?

And, you know, what do you think about what we talked about the other night? And they're like, yeah, it just doesn't make any sense.

He, he seems so happy. He seems so normal. He's not like, you know, he's not like the guys on the street. And ma'am's like, the fact of the matter is, anyone who does drugs is a junkie.

Yes, yes. I was like, whoa.

There's a lot going on here. Yeah. First of all, back when they're still talking to Bobby, he explains, look, I'm not one of those guys that's hooked.

I just, I'd like to work hard and play hard, you know, that that's all there is to it. And then, as you said, when Corin and little Webster are talking to the parents, he says, corky says, if drugs are supposed to destroy you, how come he can play so well and get good grades.

And again, I liked the fact that the show is acknowledging like, yeah, there's more than meets the eye.

Right. There's a lot of functional before you get dysfunctional.

And then I was also taken aback by that line where Catherine says straight up, people who use drugs are junkies and a store.

Yeah. And I was like, geez.

And they once again, they referenced the real life basketball player who had dropped out of a cocaine related heart condition mere years ago.

And Catherine also cites Jimmy Hendrix. She goes, you guys, I hear you listening to those Jimmy Hendrix records all the time.

Well, didn't you know that guy would have been the best musician ever, but he died in his 20s because of drugs, you know.

So between Jimmy Hendrix and his basketball player, those are the sort of case cautionary tales.

Yeah, exactly. And so they're like, all right, you know, there's no resolution to any of this.

But what they just have a little conversation about it, you know, there's, and that's, they're going to, are we still going to go to his graduation?

Yeah. And they're like, yes, of course.

Yes, very important detail. Again, the show is actually handling this really well in terms of like, we don't cut ties because of this.

We're not, you know, he's a grown man. We're not going to punish him. We're not going to necessarily do anything.

No, we just, they're going to be the people in his life who are like, hey, you need help.

And we're here for you. And we, like, we're going to support you to give that help.

Yeah, they're just, they're all very concerned. Nobody really has any particular plan of action.

They're just like, okay, I guess we're going to go to this graduation and this game.

And then third act begins with, again, the boys playing basketball, but now they're just playing in the driveway.

I think they're getting ready to go to this game.

Yeah, game or graduation or something. It's whatever that next, you know, like a couple days later was.

They're all dressed nicely. They're waiting for George to get home from work, I think.

Yes. So the reason why I thought it would be the game is just because I figured, well, that's when this is all going to come to a head.

Because what I was assuming, again, I would have bet the house on this.

That, you know, whether we get to see it or whether it's just an off camera thing.

That he has like a phone meltdown.

That some, yeah, that he, that he messes up the big game in front of this recruiter.

Right. Again, maybe we wouldn't get to see it. Maybe we would just be them coming home afterwards and being like, oh my God, I can't believe that Bobby took off all his clothes and ran around the stadium naked.

I can't believe he didn't score a single point. It looked like he was a zombie out there.

You know, like whatever it was that he was going to blow his opportunity because of his relationship with drugs.

Instead, what happens is George Pappadopoulos comes out looking even more somber and says straight up, I've got some bad news.

They found Bob dead this morning.

And then and that's it. Like end of episode audible gasp from both of us.

He had a heart attack from cocaine.

They, we get a slow motion replay of the kid, you know, doing his fancy moves while we get the sort of like echoey voiceover going.

It was like in memorial for Bob Kelsey.

Yeah, we get the echoey voiceover going like, I don't have a problem, problem, problem, problem.

I just like to have fun, fun, fun, fun.

Work hard, play hard.

And then we even get this like church bell type thing.

Yes, the definitely. Yes, exactly.

It was like it was tolling the bells of for his funeral.

And that was the end of the episode.

Yes, this was wild. There was no, I'm the actor that plays George or I'm a manual Lewis.

And I want to talk to you about drugs.

This one decided the sheer impact of the sheer events of this story would be enough to make the point that yes, if you use cocaine, you will die.

And they said it.

And then they started playing like doing that immemorial segment.

And I was just like, Jesus.

Yes, it really took us by surprise when he just came out and said he died.

They found his body.

I don't, you know, like we said, this instance of this lend by his guy was all over the place and it did become the defining cautionary tale.

I don't know how common this is for young people or for anyone, frankly, to drop dead of cocaine related heart thing.

No, I guess, you know, you've got to think about like Jim Belushi and Chris Farley and all those guys and all those issues.

It was more like the combination of the drugs and they did have heart attacks.

But it was like they were OD, you know, they were from OD from the eight ball.

Yeah, they were also, they were older and extremely out of shape.

They were not athletes like this guy was.

Yeah.

But yeah, it does just end on that note.

And it really just leaves me perplexed going like, okay, you know, we've been saying the whole time that this episode had this sort of subtlety where it's hitting the tropes.

But it's like, it's showing that yeah, it's not that hard for people to conceal their drug addiction because it's not like in the other sitcoms where you're crawling up the wall or foaming at the mouth because you're using drugs or drinking or stuff.

But then it jumps to death.

And I'm like, well, look, I mean, it did happen at least once.

And it is sort of showing like, yeah, like I guess if you want to be generous about it, it's making the argument that yes, somebody can seem perfectly normal and healthy until they're not.

Exactly.

And it's not always going to be this incremental spiral.

You could just wake up dead one day because your heart stopped because of cocaine.

Well, and I think it's also kind of doing a fast forward, right?

Like, it's not, it's not an hour long show.

They're not going to do this episode over multiple episodes.

So you're not, you're not seeing the, like, you're not seeing it get worse over time.

Yeah.

It's showing you the early warning signs.

It's showing you, hey, be on the lookout.

Don't like, this is where it's going to end up.

Be careful.

And then it's fast forwarding to the end.

Yeah, maybe what would have made it easier to swallow is if they showed a scene of this kid sort of showing you that, oh, the pressure now is more than ever.

Not only does he have his graduation, but he has this game where his whole future is riding on it.

And we've all had experiences like that where it's like, oh, normally I would have a few drinks.

But geez, this situation, I'm going to drink even more, right?

Like Tom Hanks in the job interview.

If they had showed like, oh, he actually did like double the coke because he was so nervous or something.

But we don't get any of that.

We just get the aftermath.

Exactly.

What else is there to say?

It's following all the tropes.

It's using those same cautionary tails.

I'll just say, you know, we're about to make the switch to weed when we discuss the later ones.

And it pretty much coincides exactly with 80s cocaine 90s weed, right?

Part of it is that cocaine, obviously people continue to use it prolifically to this day.

But it really was more of a thing in the 80s.

You have that stereotype of, oh, every, every movie said everyone was, was on cocaine.

You know, every, every yuppie in the city, every yuppie businessman was doing coke all the time.

And then that sort of gives way to in the 90s, the message sort of becomes,

keep an eye on your younger kids because they might be getting into pot even earlier than you might think.

Exactly.

All right. On that note, let's move on to Saved by the Bell.

Season three or maybe four, the episode 21, no hope with dope.

No hope with dope.

Now, as we mentioned, we've already covered the infamous Jesse Spano caffeine.

Not infamous break down episode stellar.

Yes, I think that is probably the most iconic moment in Saved by the Bell ever.

But for me, growing up with this series, this episode was just as big a deal.

This whole Johnny Dakota thing.

This was just as ridiculous and over the top and memorable as the caffeine pill.

Yeah, and we even get a moment where they're sitting around kind of brainstorming ideas for the commercial,

the like don't do drugs commercial that they're going to shoot.

And Jesse is talking about her experiences with caffeine pills.

Rare example of continuity and Saved by the Bell.

For a series that switches up, who has what parents and what state it takes place in.

This is one of the few times where they actually acknowledge something that happened in a while.

That happened in another episode.

But yeah, this starts of course with Zach addressing the camera.

He says he's got the mid semester blues, nothing's going on, everything's boring.

And then who should stroll into the school unannounced like, you know, outside adults are welcome to do.

This is in the days before fences around schools.

Yeah, fair enough.

Mr. Johnny Dakota.

That's right.

Saved by the Bell.

Sometimes takes place in a world with real celebrities where they will mention George Michael, Kevin Costner, MC Hammer, etc.

And then sometimes it takes place in a world with fake celebrities like Johnny Dakota.

Luke Diamond.

Yes.

Storm Sutherland.

Exactly.

The various made up celebrity portmentos that they have in this episode.

So Johnny Dakota is this young man who is played by one of the members of the guys next door.

Who we all know was the sort of new kids on the block.

Esk, you know, pop group that they made a TV show of which played after saved by the Bell.

Oh my God, I don't remember this at all.

The guys next door CD was, I think the first CD I ever owned.

I've used it to test out the CD ROM feature on my computer.

And you may not remember this, but I have played for you some of the songs on the guys next door album.

But yes, they were a group of, you know, teenagers again, like the new kids on the block.

And they had a sort of monkeys Esk sitcom that would play after the saved by the Bell episodes on Saturday Mornings.

This was not one that I've watched.

I definitely remember you playing some of these songs for me and being like, what is this?

Because I was not a Saturday morning saved by the Beller.

Right.

I was a after school, like I was an after school saved by the Bell on three different networks.

Yes.

And watch, you know, it was never in order.

Yeah, exactly.

It was just like whatever was syndicated in the afternoon.

I was doing it.

Um, the soap operas went off the air.

Morning, noon and night was my saved by the Bell regimen.

And so yes, this guy's next door thing was very short lived.

I doubt if there were even 12 episodes of it.

But it was very much keeping within the, you know, NBC Saturday morning family.

Of course, the only real celebrity that ever appeared on saved by the Bell to my recollection is Casey Kasim.

Right.

He would show up like every fifth episode.

He was constantly making appearances.

He wasn't the only on it like twice.

At least.

But yeah.

So, so Johnny Dakota shows up.

He's a famous movie star.

He's looking for the principal's office because he and his director, who is this sort of monosilabic guy,

who just says, yo, every time somebody talks to him, they're looking for the principal's office

because they want to film an anti drug commercial.

Right.

And so Zach gloms on to him and is like, oh, yeah, Johnny, baby, I'll take you to the principal's office and off they go.

That's right.

And so they get together with Mr. Belding and, you know, they pitch their idea.

And Johnny Dakota is very clear that he's not sure that this is the right school.

Yeah.

And so Zach kind of leaves the room, makes some sort of thing happen so that when after he's taken the tour of the school

to kind of, you know, scope out locations and see if it has the right feel,

then all the students are going to come into the hallway on the stairwell and they're going to do an offbeat rap number

about not doing drugs to show Johnny Dakota that this is the right place to film your commercial.

Yes.

This is not unlike the environmental rap that my classmates and I were assigned to compose.

When you were assigned a rap?

Yeah.

No, that was, when I was in, this was a GT thing, not to brag.

I was in the Gifted and Talented program.

And they had us split into groups.

And your teacher thought this was like the coolest thing they ever did.

This was like, I'm so hip with the kids.

Look what I'm assigning my class.

Yes, this was in anticipation of the 1992 law that would make recycling mandatory.

This was when we were all still learning about chlorocarbons and all that stuff.

Yeah.

And so we had to break into groups, right?

These saw these wraps about the environment and then go around to the different younger classes in the school and perform them.

Wow.

Yeah.

So this is very much the kind of thing that fits right into my worldview.

Zach, while, as you said, while Mr. Belding is giving Johnny Dakota the tour, Zach is off camera orchestrating this anti-drug rap.

So when Johnny Dakota comes back and says, yeah, look, I'm not quite sure.

He says, I think I've got something that'll make up your mind.

Guys, hit it.

And then yeah.

And it's so offbeat.

Like, it's ridiculous.

They have a random person in front pretending to beatbox.

But there's like a track playing over the top of them.

Not even Lisa, the lone black person in the scene is able to find the rhythm.

Like, the whole thing is so bad.

And that's also when I noticed that we are a good like three scenes into this episode.

We're in, we're past the first commercial break into this episode.

And I have not seen Kelly yet.

And I say, I said out loud to Jay, I was like, is Kelly just not in this episode?

I don't remember that.

He plays a critical role.

It's going to be her curvaceous bod.

That's right.

She seals the deal and, you know, she comes out wearing a unitard that is like shorts.

It's like a body suit that has shorts, you know, they're popular again now.

And she's got this little belaro jacket over the top of it because it's spaghetti shirts.

A little jacket that just goes down to like her ribcage.

I did not have the terminology.

I just wrote, Kelly runs in wearing an orange garment because I could not describe what this thing is.

Some sort of tight thing that goes like basically from your whole body down to your knees.

And yeah, Johnny, they're like, they became popular again a few years ago.

Lululemon started making them and that was like, it's a total look.

Like you definitely see younger women wearing them now.

I don't know that I could pull it off anymore.

So Johnny Dakota spots Kelly in this unitard and, you know, Zach, I guess this is during the time

when Zach and Kelly are not dating.

And they had a constant on and off with them dating other people.

That's always the way it was depending on which episode you watch have saved by the bell.

Either they are a couple or they are completely independent romantic entities with no ties to each other whatsoever.

Yes.

And in this case, yes, she is on the market.

Johnny is immediately smitten.

He says, okay, that does it.

We are filming the commercial here.

Now, after you, after what you told me about Robin Thick and Christy Swanson, nothing is going to be that shocking in terms of age gaps.

No, but these two are dating in real life during this episode.

So I'm watching this wondering like, okay, Johnny Dakota is, he's explained to be a movie star.

Like, I would say probably college age.

Obviously teenagers can be movie stars.

Absolutely.

And so he's not necessarily much older.

I looked it up.

He was born in 1970.

He's 21 at the time that they're filming this.

Kelly was born in 74.

She's about 17.

So, you know, to be honest, I had a girlfriend in high school when I was in college.

It wasn't quite this age gap, but not that different.

You know, again, compared to Alan Thick, 40-year-old marrying like a girl who can't even drink alcohol legally at her own wedding.

This is not that bad, but it is a little bit confusing that nobody bats an eye that this, you know, person shows up at the school and is romancing one of those things.

Particularly Mr. Belding, right?

Like Mr. Belding is standing there when Eddie's like, or what's his name, his name in real life is Eddie.

Johnny Dakota.

When he's like, whoa, look at you.

Well, I guess I will shoot here.

And like immediately is like touching her and putting arms around her and everything.

And like, no reaction whatsoever.

Mr. Belding is like, good job being hot, Kelly.

You got him to film the commercial here.

So, they are planning, the next scene is they're planning the shoot.

And Johnny has a story board with stick figures.

He goes, Kelly, I definitely want you to be in the commercial.

This is going to be you right here.

He points to the stick figure.

And then he very overtly checks out her ass and goes, except you've got a few more curves.

Right. And of course, this is nothing but flattering to Kelly.

And so yeah, it's all systems go.

And you know, as they're all sort of figuring out, okay, what is this commercial going to be?

What are we going to do?

Zack and later.

Later, discover they're in the bathroom and they discover a joint.

On the ground.

Yeah.

Left over roach, which they presume has been left there by scud.

Now, here's the thing about scud.

He's played by an actor named Troy Foman, who is sometimes scud when he is a leather clad,

Nair Duel dumb guy, and sometimes he's ox when he is a football jersey wearing

Jack dumb guy.

So they've got this big lug of a guy that he plays the beast no matter what.

Yes, he oscillates between being scud and ox.

This time he's scud.

Yeah.

And so.

And then they have another girl who kind of like hangs with him that's in the little confessional

brainstorming session talking about her experience with her brother who used drugs

and that's why she stays clean.

And she is done up in the same way that Tory was done up with the leather and wearing

all black and the bigger late 80s early 90s hair.

Yeah, you're standard burnout uniform.

But yeah, they find this roach, they're scandalized, and then Johnny Dakota walks in.

And we get one of these classic like cliffhanger act breaks that immediately diffuses itself when

they come back from the commercial because Johnny Dakota walks in.

He goes, what's going on here?

Guys, cut to commercial, cut back.

Oh, Johnny, this isn't ours.

Okay, fine.

I believe you.

Like that little strain is immediately diffused.

We don't know what's going on with that.

That's so crazy.

And so they're so worried that he's going to find out and cancel the shoot because they have

to protect basides reputation.

So before they can flush it, you're right, he comes in, and then he's like, I don't worry

about it.

And he flushes it and off they go, which is just giving us a little bit of foreshadowing

in that he doesn't care about drugs.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, look, he does sort of, you know, have that initial reaction like what are you doing here?

But then he says, yeah, let's get rid of it and whatever.

We go to this brainstorming session where Johnny takes a page from AC Slater.

Someone knows that AC Slater invented sitting backwards in your chair to be cool.

And Johnny Dakota does the same thing.

So both of them, they're all sitting in a circle.

That's what cool guys do, Jay.

Yes.

Slater and Johnny Dakota are both doing the thing of straddling the back of the chair, which always

looks extremely uncomfortable.

But you do not sit that way.

No, nobody sits that way except you.

That's not true.

That's not true.

So yeah, they're sitting like that.

They're brainstorming.

We get another reference to the cocaine guy that tragically died in the 80s.

We get the personal story of, like you said, the young lady who explains my brother used to get high and drive to the beach.

But now I have to drive him because he's in a wheelchair.

Yes, right.

He got in a car accident and heard himself.

And now he can't drive anymore.

Yeah.

So granted, you know, like we said before, I'm sure there are all kinds of vehicular incidents to do with

the influence of marijuana.

But again, we're making the shift from cocaine to pot.

And so in these later two episodes, it is more of just kind of an assertion that pot is so bad for you.

You know, there isn't this sense of like, well, you're going to drop dead of a heart attack.

It's just kind of like, we all know this is bad.

Yeah.

We've been telling you for years that drugs are bad.

And we've been giving you specifics for years about how drugs are bad.

Pot just lumped those, it lumped that in with all the other ones.

Yeah.

No, no specifics on it's going to give you a heart attack.

It's just like, you're just going to eventually die because you're doing drugs or bad.

Yeah.

And it's interesting that they don't even make the gateway drug argument.

No.

Which, like you said, would be a pretty solid, you know, whether you agree with it or not.

At least it's a logical thing that like, well, where does it stop?

Right.

And that was not something that I remember hearing about until I was much older.

It was way later when they realized this initial messaging to our generation around marijuana didn't work.

Because by the way, most of our parents were hippies and they smoked marijuana too.

So it was kind of like, eh, whatever, you know, it's not like heroin.

It's not like all these other really bad drugs, you know.

And so when the messaging kind of shifted, I don't know.

I just sort of always understood this marijuana thing to be aimed at people younger than me.

Well, that's the thing.

This is like we said, this is airing initially on Saturday mornings.

This is expressly a kid's show, not even a family show.

So I think, yeah, even acknowledging the existence of cocaine and harder drugs,

that's not going to be what they're doing.

You know, they're going to, they're going to keep it limited to pot.

Which is an interesting shift in the way that, in the way that the messaging around the anti-drug campaign worked.

Because when you and I were an elementary school, we were getting talked to about cocaine,

about crack in particular, because it was the 80s, and about a little bit about heroin,

but not so much.

Heroin was always like the cautionary tale of the music stars, especially after Kurt Cobain killed himself.

And then the other one that I remember, all of the, like, so much messaging around was LSD.

Oh, yeah, I thought you were going to say Angel Dust.

That was one that was always a big thing.

PCP, right?

But yeah, any of those ones, like PCP, Angel Dust, that was the one where it was like,

you were going to be a rage monster.

You were going to like, you know, hurt people because you wanted to get in a fight.

And then LSD was like, you're going to lose your mind and want to jump off a building

because you can think, you think you can fly.

And so there were all these like very specific cautionary tales around that,

and they did not shy away from it.

Eight-year-old me definitely was hearing all about LSD.

You're going to put your baby in the microwave.

I don't know about the train spotting reference.

But that's a heat reference actually.

Oh, then train spotting that the kid just dies now nutrition.

Right.

But yeah, I think it is the difference of what you would talk about in a school versus, you know,

NBC Saturday mornings, but in any case, Zach and Slater ambush scud in the bathroom again

and like pin him to the wall.

What's this?

And again, talk about the difference between the Aedes mentality and now they're like,

they catch him smoking something and they're like, okay, everybody relax.

It's just a cigarette.

Right.

He's only smoking a cigarette in the high school bathroom.

Everything's okay.

And of course, they hasten to add like, oh, well, these are bad for you too.

But it is funny.

I remember this time when like, yeah, marijuana is a drug.

That's really bad cigarettes.

I mean, of course, they're not good for you, but you can buy them at the local supermarket

and they're just, they're not.

What are you aiming for lung cancer?

Yeah, exactly.

And so, yeah, they established that scud.

He says straight up, you know, when they challenge him about,

are you smoking weed?

Are you the owner of that joint?

He goes, I'm not that stupid.

Come on.

And so we're living in a world where smoking pot is the absolute worst thing you could possibly do.

Right.

And yes, scud is like, no, just because I wear a leather jacket and have a earring doesn't mean I smoke weed.

Come on now.

And so they're like, all right, it's a mystery.

We don't know who's joined it is.

Oh, well.

And so Johnny Dakota invites them to his Hollywood party,

not unlike Mike Siever being invited to the posh party wherever he is.

They're all excited.

Right.

The whole gang is going to get to go to this fancy party.

Screech, of course, in one of his classic Screechism says it's my first Hollywood party.

I hope the Simpsons are going to be there.

Yes.

And yeah, they all get to go.

Screech shows up.

inexplicably sort of dressed as an old west outlaw.

No, he doesn't show up like that.

He explains it later on.

He had an incident with the guacamole,

which he refers to as avocado dip, which I thought was kind of funny.

And so Johnny Dakota offers him some of his clothes to wear while Screech's clothes are drying.

And then whoever he's talking to, I think it's Slater.

Oh, yeah, I see you have some guacamole in your ear.

And Screech is like, well, so yeah, he's wearing this big long duster,

like brown duster.

Yeah, or with a brown duster.

Or something.

No, it's a long trench coat.

A duster is a trench coat that dusts the floor.

Yeah, I thought it was connected like a poncho.

I guess it's just all buttoned up.

And it's like everything four sizes too big on him,

even though he is measurably taller than Shorty Johnny Dakota.

Johnny Dakota is like this little Tom Cruise looking guy.

And Screech is much taller than him.

And so he's wearing his clothes, but it's all oversized.

And he's got this Indiana Jones hat on as well.

And he's just kind of moving around the party looking like a weirdo as he always does.

Slater can't seem to get any traction.

Like he has no game with the women.

He's not trying to lie and say he's somehow connected to the industry.

So nobody's interested in him.

Yeah.

And then Zach says that he's his driver.

Right.

Yeah, Zach, when Zach gets two girls who have come over to hit on Johnny Dakota

and he gets kind of uncomfortable because he's with Kelly,

he pawns these two girls off on Zach.

And Zach's like, yeah, I got the two ladies.

Very unflattering portrayal of Hollywood women where when Johnny Dakota says,

oh, this is Zach, my co-star.

These two blondes in unison go co-star and just flock to him,

and each grab an arm, they are now his, you know, his playthings.

Yes.

And so, yeah, everyone said.

And then you've got Lisa and Jesse kind of doing a similar thing.

They're like, ah, did you see that guy?

Oh, my God.

Oh, my God.

Did this, my home, did that.

Yeah, we don't get to see any of this, but they come together and say, yeah,

I just got done dancing with Storm Sutherland.

She says, I just got done dancing with Luke Diamond.

So, I guess Storm Sutherland is supposed to be kind of like key for Sutherland.

I'm assuming.

And Luke Diamond would be sort of a combination between Luke Perry and Lou Diamond Philip.

Sure.

I guess, because I don't know where they're getting Johnny Dakota from.

Was there a famous actor who had like a state as the last name?

I don't think so, but Johnny Dakota reminds me of the Brady Bunch episode

where Greg, the oldest brother, he fits the pants of like Johnny something,

the music star.

And so, that just, you know, doesn't Johnny Dakota sound like a...

Yeah, it's a snappy name for sure.

Definitely Johnny anything, sure.

But it is just kind of funny.

It didn't seem like a direct parody to me.

Yeah, Johnny Bravo is the name of the character that he's like this music pop star

that, you know, is kind of something happened with the actual guy.

So, Greg Brady needs to... he fits the pants.

So, that's why he gets to be the new version of this pop star.

Yeah, that's the same plot as the Hillary Duff Lizzie McGuire movie.

She looks just like the Roman pop star.

Anyway, so, yes, Screech is pretending to be a stuntman.

He's going to impress the ladies by demonstrating his like wagon jump stunt or whatever.

So, he's like, let me just sit up here on the couch, pretend the couch is the wagon,

and then he like flings himself off the couch or something, injures himself,

and he has to be taken home.

Everybody's fine with leaving this party.

They're like, ah, whatever, we already met our hunks.

We already danced with our hunks, right?

And Slater's like, I'm not getting anywhere anyway.

Let's get out of here.

Yeah, so, but Johnny wants Kelly to stay.

Yeah, and Zack says he's just going to help Screech to the car and come back.

He doesn't want to leave either because he's got his two dates.

Yeah, so the whole gang except for Kelly leaves momentarily,

and then while Zack is gone, we get, of course, the moment we've all been waiting for

where they whip out the weed, right?

It's pretty much the same deal as the cocaine and the other one,

except this time it's just pot.

One of Johnny Dakota's fancy Hollywood friends comes up,

and he's like, hey, Johnny, I got some good stuff for you.

Get a load of this.

And, you know, of course, without blinking an eye,

he's like, oh, great.

Thanks, weed, my favorite thing.

And then start smoking, hands it to Kelly,

and it's like it hasn't even occurred to Johnny that he is in the middle of shooting an anti-drug commercial

that this young teenage girl he's with might actually be earnestly,

you know, opposed to drugs.

He's just like, here smoke weed.

Why wouldn't you?

And when she says no, his friend goes, oh, look, Johnny,

she's just saying no.

Yeah, totally making fun of her.

She's like mortified.

We don't get any of what happened in, in growing pains where Kelly is like going back and forth.

No.

Like Kelly, she just kind of freezes.

Well, because she has nobody to play off of.

Yeah.

Zack hasn't walked back in yet.

So she's just by herself.

And she's being, she's kind of looking at her feet and being, you know, like you said,

she's uncomfortable.

But she is saying like, no, I don't really want to do this.

And then Zack walks in.

And he basically has the energy of George Papadopoulos from Webster.

Right.

He's just like, sternly, seriously like, no, I don't smoke weed.

I can't believe you do.

What are you doing?

Kelly, let's go.

Yeah.

Just glowering.

And Johnny's like, she, Kelly doesn't want to leave.

Kelly doesn't care, right?

And she's like, um, no, I'm out of here.

Yes.

And leaves with Zack and off they go, but what's so kind of funny about this scene and you sort of

said it when you were describing it, you were like, it's just weed.

You know, it's very like, you're like, it was just pot.

Like very, you know, and he and Johnny Dakota says the same thing.

He's like, it's not like real drugs.

It's just pot.

And so that sort of mentality of like, it's not, it's not a bad drug.

Like, you know, it's just pot is kind of the mentality of the people at the party.

But this episode is making it feel just like those people are the ones doing coke in the earlier episode.

Yes.

That is not a distinction that the show is really agreeing with.

Right.

And so I guess I'm going to ask you, because I'm kind of perplexed by this, is what do you make of this sort of hypocrisy?

Is it okay for somebody, for a celebrity or somebody to do some sort of public service thing if it will do good,

if it will help kids be discouraged from whatever it is, drinking and driving, smoking cigarettes, whatever.

You know, is it okay for them to say, do an anti-smoking commercial and then, you know, go backstage and smoke a cigarette?

I 100% think that it is okay to be a hypocrite in these types of situations, not because it's okay to be a hypocrite in like real life.

But there's a lot to be said about knowing what's right to do and making bad choices yourself.

Right.

I think that is a perfectly human experience.

I think that especially, this is 1991 when this airs.

Right.

There is, like, we still had into the late 2000s, we had our young teenage celebrities wearing purity rings and taking chastity vows and like saying that that was, you know, they were saving themselves to marriage and totally clean and all this other stuff.

And that is, that's bullshit society putting things on them and not allowing us to have a real conversation around what it means to grow up.

The more we shove these young people who are celebrities in these corners, the more they're going the other direction.

By the way, these are the same kids who are having a deal with living an adult life by being a working actor from the time that they are very young.

They are treated as adults on set, they are in a commoditized, capitalistic industry, and they are constantly being sexualized and the victim of predators.

So, like, do I care that these kids are doing drugs and also saying, hey, guys, don't do drugs? No!

The poor things have never gotten, they were never able to have a real life in the first place.

Yes. And also, it's funny the layers of hypocrisy.

I, of course, read Dustin Diamond's autobiography a while back where he sort of spills the tea about all this stuff.

I honestly don't remember any details about, you know, the drugs and smoking per se.

The most scandalous thing is he would always call out Mario Lopez for being kind of predatory with young girls.

Oh, he's a total trash bag.

But continues to this day.

Yes. But I find it pretty likely to think that at least some, if not all, of these saved by Dick Bell cast members were recreationally drinking and smoking pot.

Off the set of saved by the Bell while they were having this, you know, while they were performing this episode in which their characters are scandalized by the hypocrisy of an on-screen personality, you know.

Right. Like, my issue here is that it's the adults in the room are not the ones, like, taking the reins and making sure that the messages are getting across, right?

Like, I think in later episodes, like in the Moisha episode we're about to talk about, you definitely see that change of like, it's not the young people that are doing the preaching.

It's the young people that are conflicted and it's the grown-ups that are doing the preaching.

And I think that, like, it's the responsibility of the grown-ups to send those messages.

And I get that we want to have, like, you're a perfect example of this, right?

You were like, I don't care what adults say. I don't care about TV shows that have grown-ups in them. I only wanted to watch kids.

And I only would hear messages from people who were kind of like me, or at least I felt like we're kind of like me.

I totally get that. And so, then we need to write them responsibly.

Like, for me, the Dawson's Creek, when we got, and Gilmore Girls, when we got to a level of discourse around young people in these entertainment spaces where, like, their characters were able to talk more intelligently and have more, like, more reasons conversations.

The Creek is war and peace right here to say by the bell. Yeah, totally.

And I pretty much agree there doesn't need to be this alignment between the messages on screen and these people's personal lives.

I will just say it is all the more sort of disillusioning when you sort of get to adulthood or where you get that peak behind the curtain and you realize, like, oh, this was all bullshit.

It's all just sort of like this kind of nambi-pambi messaging for little kids and they actually don't really believe any of it.

They don't really believe any of it, but I don't think it's their fault. It's the adults who are supposedly writing these things and running these things and producing these things that are putting them in these difficult situations.

You notice it's not the adults out there being like, don't do drugs because they are doing drugs and they don't want to be a hypocrite, but they're fine with making the kids do it.

And so Johnny Dakota, the next morning at school, continues to be blithely unaware that he has caused any sort of problem.

Right. He's like, whatever, it's just weed.

Johnny Dakota's trademark is to call everybody guy, right? So he doesn't know anyone's name.

Yeah, and he says, hey guy, what's up? You want to shoot this commercial? And Zach is like, don't you remember we're really mad at you?

Yeah, because we're not interested in your hypocrisy buddy. Yeah, we're out of here.

And so yeah, one by one, they basically stage a walk out where they're filming the commercial in a classroom building and the monosilabic director are there.

And all of the kids are like, no, like we're not going to do this. And the last one to leave is Kelly.

Johnny is like, hey, we don't need him. We'll give all their lines to Kelly. This is just going to be a mono, a mono commercial.

And then she walks out to Johnny says, I don't need this aggravation. And he says, I'm out of here in a way that I think directly inspired the state sketch with Doug.

Who goes, I'm out of here because that's exactly how he says it. I'm Doug and you're dead and I'm out of here.

Yeah, but interestingly, the director doesn't leave. I guess they're not a package deal. Like the director stays.

And so they're all like, what are we going to do? We can't film an anti-drug commercial now. We don't have a celebrity.

And Mr. Building is like, hang on just a second. I might have an idea. Yes.

So then commercial break, we come back and low and behold, Mr. Building has gone to college with Brandon or Brendan Tartikoff.

Brandon Tartikoff. The head of NBC. Yes, this is a real life figure who is responsible for many of the shows we talk about on the sitcom study.

He is credited with producing alph, family ties, cheers, sign-failed golden girls, saved by the bell, of course, Fresh Prince of Belair.

This guy was a big deal. He sadly was not long for the world. He would die at age 47 or 48 of Hodgkin's lymphoma in the late 90s.

Yeah. Well, and he was only his run at NBC as like the head of NBC was just like four years.

So he's very close to the end. I think is like 92, 93 is when he was no longer the head.

Yeah, but he had a similar, you know, sort of like a Jeffrey Katzenberg or Michael Eisner, like he was credited with sort of turning around their ratings and stuff.

Like he was, you know, in the words of the anchor man, he was kind of a big deal.

Yeah. And so it is, it's funny to think that the kids would be excited that this like executive from NBC, just some middle aged guy in a tie,

would be there. But nonetheless, we get this commercial. We get to see the tail end of them shooting it where he says,

I've got an idea for the new TV season. Don't use drugs.

And I have to say the guy is a terrible actor. And when he proceeds to have this dialogue, it's pretty bad.

But the way he delivers that don't use drugs, I think, is effective.

Right. But then he has a funny little dialogue scene where they're like, how do you guys know each other?

They explain, we went to college together. I had a crush on Becky, but, but, uh,

Belding ended up marrying her. So I had to settle for running NBC.

Ha, ha, ha. And then the episode ends. We don't get the, you know, I mark Paul Gosler and I want you to not use drugs.

We just get to see their, their commercial, which is,

the actual commercial they shot, right?

Which is one by one individually. They each sort of like have a moment where they turn to the camera and they go stupid dumb idiotic or whatever.

So I think Screech like pops out of a locker or something and is like insane.

And then, you know, then it ends with the whole gang surrounding Brandon Tartikoff,

where he says what we already saw him say. My idea for the new season is don't use drugs.

There's no hope with dope. Yes, they all say that together at the end.

So on the season three and four DVDs of saved by the bell,

this still shot the still frame of all the cast members on that desk kind of sitting around Brandon Tartikoff.

They photoshopped Belding's head onto his body and that's the image that's used on the DVD.

Are you sure that's apparently that's what the internet says.

Okay, I mean, very familiar with that with both images, but certainly with that DVD cover,

I never would have thought that that just seemed so odd.

How hard would it be to get them together to take another picture? I know, right?

Yeah, that is wild. But yeah, look, despite the switch from cocaine to weed,

this is still pretty much following the same tropes, right?

The pure pressure is going to be abundant. You've got to be ready for it.

It will most likely happen at a party with a bunch of rich people that you want to fit in with.

And you've got to be ready to say no.

Yeah. And what I find so interesting about this,

because you've mentioned a couple of times like, oh, Nancy Reagan and the whole don't do drugs thing.

But all of these episodes are almost all these episodes are taking place after 1988.

So from Webster on, 1988 is when Bush won, comes into the White House,

and you've got Barbara Bush, who's sort of taking over this mantle,

picking up where first lady Nancy Reagan left off with the, you know, say no to drugs campaign and everything.

And what I find the most funny about all of this is that they are parents who are dealing with,

a total drug addict and alcoholic son while preaching these messages.

It's just like the whole thing.

I don't know that that's hypocritical, but it's crazy that they aren't utilizing their own experiences

to talk about how difficult this is.

It's like, everything is still hashrashan underneath the rug.

It's that's other people's problem, not ours.

Whereas how much more impactful would these messages have been?

If we had our leaders out there saying, this is impacted my life.

This is hard.

I don't know how to help my kid.

I'm trying.

Yeah, you could see it either way of either they're ignoring the fact that their son is a drug addict,

or maybe that's what sort of inspiring them to be more, you know, to have this kind of advocacy.

But yes, we get this very continuous message from the Reagan administration to the Bush administration,

which kind of falls apart when Clinton gets into office.

But even he, right, he was like the big deal with Clinton in 92 in that election

was that he was like, yeah, I smoked weed.

I didn't inhale.

One of the more ridiculous claims that any person has ever made about anything.

The idea of smoking weed without inhaling is so stupid and illogical

that that should have been more detrimental to his campaign than just admitting that he smoked weed in college.

Right, but I just remember it being this like very funny thing that my parents and like, you know,

because they were of that generation.

So like everybody of that generation who was like on the supportive side of the Clintons, right,

knew that this was just a way that like to get around the idea that he, he couldn't say he never smoked weed.

Because obviously that's ridiculous.

But like, how could he possibly end?

We are still in the era.

And by the way, I think we still are, right?

Like you can't be in the FBI.

There are questions on the FBI intake survey of like if you've ever smoked weed, they're like, nope.

Sorry.

I've heard that.

Is that an urban legend maybe or is that real?

So it was definitely real for a while.

I have not heard anything.

I mean, it could be that they should like move them off.

I detect their tests and everything.

I mean, who knows.

I'm sure we could internet it.

Somebody out there internet that invited it.

Yeah, but yeah, absolutely preposterous.

The idea of smoking weed but not inhaling makes no sense.

But anyway, yeah, the episode ends with a funny meta joke about Brandon Tartakov going, this gives me an idea.

What if we made a sitcom about a principal and all of his high school students?

That would never work.

Done idea.

And yeah, there we go.

And we are off to our final episode, which is Moesha.

Season four, episode three.

Hello, what's this?

Yeah, so we're into the late 90s now.

We've never covered Moesha before.

Is this something you have any familiarity with?

No, not really.

This was a show that was on the air from 96 to 2001.

And it definitely fell in that time frame where first of all, it was on UPN,

which was not like a heavily watched network in my household.

But second of all, it was, you know, definitely kind of like geared toward kids

at a time when I was not watching stuff that was geared towards kids.

And so, yeah, you mean I'd think about it.

Moesha, who's played by Brandy, is meant to be our age, 15, 16 years old in 1996.

But to me, I know that younger people watch this.

And then also, I mean, that's not to say,

I'm sure that there are people in the black community who watch this

as like finally, you know, a sitcom that's got kids are age and that kind of thing.

But it just was not something that I was into.

Yeah, I think regardless of racial lines, I think this was definitely meant for younger people.

And yeah, I was very much a fan of Brandy, the woman.

As you pointed out, she's exactly the same age as us.

She was born in February of 1979.

But yeah, her, both her show and her music was definitely,

I felt anyway geared towards younger people.

My only real experience with her in the entertainment world is that she is in,

I still know what you did last summer, which is, of course, the sequel to,

I know what you did last summer where she joined Jennifer Love Hewitt and Freddie Prins

and all the rest of them running after the crazy raincoat hook man.

And yeah, I saw her in that.

But beyond that, I was just aware of her as this very attractive entertainer

that I didn't really, you know, have any interest in her music or anything.

She was in the, the Muppet's Wizard of Oz, I believe,

that was like a little bit of a, kind of a low point for the Muppets,

where they were kind of, kind of walking out in the desert, trying to figure out what's up.

You know, they were after Jim Henson died.

Exactly. And so that's when you had like Muppet Treasure Island,

Muppet Wizard of Oz, et cetera.

I don't think that one was even a theatrical movie.

So yeah, I definitely was aware of her, attracted to her,

did not watch her shows or listen to her music.

Yeah, no, I think, I mean, there were definitely some of her songs, you know,

like the boy is mine, her and Monica, that was on a, you know, definitely on my playlist.

But she, you're right, she wasn't somebody that I had her albums.

And I kind of lump her in with like Jessica Simpson and Britney Spears

and Christine Aguilera, who are all right around our age.

But they, you know, when they came out and we were in late high school early college,

that sort of like pop sugary stuff.

Oh, it wasn't until I was older that I looked back on that kind of like,

oh, I remember that stuff on TRL and that's good.

At the time, I was way too cool for it.

Yes, and I feel like I still am, frankly.

The late 90s, early 2000s sort of pop, boy bands, girl,

Shantoucis, whatever, as never been my jam.

That is true.

That is true, frankly.

I like the spice girls.

But anyway, yes.

So this is like you said, it's a family, seems like a suburban family,

I guess, pretty sort of straightforward, low concept show.

Yeah.

The only thing that's sort of tricky with us coming into this is that I feel like

a lot of this story kind of depends on Moisha's sort of track record

and her sort of character that's far, which we're kind of like,

I don't know, is she a Mike Seever type that's always getting into trouble?

Is she kind of a straight arrow?

Like it's a little hard to say.

Yeah.

So because of that, I did some research to try to find out a little bit more.

We're in season four.

We're towards the beginning of season four.

And at the end of season three, she and her dad have this big blow-up fight

and she moves out.

And she's in high school.

She's like a junior in high school at this point.

So it's not like she's, you know, in college.

But she, you know, she's like a junior, maybe a senior in high school.

She's got a job.

And yeah, she and her dad have just been budding heads.

The like broader story of the whole series is that

she, Moisha, Mo and her brother Miles, they're, they live with their dad Frank

and Frank is a widower.

And he decides to get remarried to Mo's high school vice principal, D.

And that's why she calls Cheryl Lee Ralph, who plays D.

That's why she calls her D.

So that was kind of like, yeah, that was kind of like an early,

sort of an early and an ongoing tension in the family of a little bit like

not only are you not my dead mom, but you're my assistant principal.

And I do not like this mix of home and school coming together.

And so there's a lot of storylines in the earlier seasons that we didn't watch

about this kind of tension.

And you know, D obviously being a principal has a lot of ideas about being a good parent.

Yes. And as she points out, a lot of experience with kids being deceptive and all that.

She's, I don't want to say jaded per se, but as she says herself, she is not naive when it comes to dealing with teenagers.

That's interesting. So she's like, what legally emancipated or something,

because they make a reference to Mo's only been out of the house for six months or whatever.

I took that to mean like she was off to college. I didn't realize she just left.

Well, and so I was kind of going back and forth with it, trying to figure out what was going on while we were watching it and how old she was.

But it was, it became pretty clear that she was still in high school, like through watching this episode.

And then yeah, yes, she has a job, but no, she did not become legally emancipated.

She just moved in, I think with her cousin or with her friend and their family because of the strife and particularly between her and her dad.

All right, fair enough. The only thing I think I want to point out before we get into the meat of this marijuana story is the first scene I didn't know if I was watching reality.

They're one of these blossom Parker Lewis-esque sort of impressionistic semi-dream sequences where she mentions the Brady Bunch right now.

Of course, the Brady Bunch series was way back in the rear view mirror, but the Brady Bunch movie, the sort of tongue-in-cheek self-aware parody movie, was pretty fresh on people's minds at this time.

And she mentioned something about the Brady Bunch and then they have this little, they have this girl blonde girl at the table going, Moisha, Moisha, Moisha.

Yeah, it's actually Jan from the girl who plays Jan in the parody movie, yeah.

And so this girl is never in it again.

No, so the other part of the conceit of this show that it sees him for so we only kind of see really quickly kind of midway through the episode is that like Dougie Hauser, nearly every episode begins with Moisha writing in her diary, telling about what's going on.

And so yes, this is this imagined sequence of like it all started at breakfast and it was like a scene from the Brady Bunch.

So we're getting this kind of thing that she's describing in her diary kind of being played out as though it really happened that way.

And then yes, then we do move later on into reality.

Yeah, I mean, I ultimately sort of realized that, but it was not apparent to me at all from the start, I just figured it's a VO beginning that episode, like they always do.

Yeah, you mentioned the writing and the diary thing, she does do that in the middle of the episode, but they move on from it quickly.

I will say as somebody that needs to purchase a new notebook for my sitcom study notes every month.

Oh my god, I noticed the same thing.

She is extremely inefficient.

She writes deer diary in the top conservatively the top third of the page.

Oh my gosh, it was in the middle of the page.

And deer took up a third of the page and diary took up a third of the page.

I guess she's doing it in a way that it will read to the multi-camera cameras, but yeah, it's very bizarre.

But okay, with that out of the way, let's dig into the story because I'm going to call this an outlier.

This is not really an example of peer pressure.

It's not about the teenager having to decide what the right thing to do is.

This is really all about the relationship with her parents and whether or not they trust her and the principal of should you submit to drug testing against your will and all that.

Yeah, I really see this as kind of a moving forward in time.

We had an 87, an 88, and a 91.

Those were the years of the episodes that we watched that handled this.

And now, I think what is this 1998?

So season four of Moesha in 1998, we have definitely moved beyond this is the way we have to talk to kids about drugs.

However, we still do begin the episode with Dee and Frank.

How could we forget?

Looking at the camera and saying, this is an important episode and we want you to watch it with your kids and have the conversation with your kids at the end.

Yeah, and it's sort of ironic because this is by a mile, I would say, the most gravely serious address the camera moment.

We get not one but two at the beginning.

We get the two adult actors saying this episode is intended to be a family episode.

We want this to spark a conversation explicitly instructing us, watch it as a family, talk about it, and then we get the same deal at the end with the younger actors.

And yet it definitely is much less about just the straight up evils of drugs.

It's more about a family predicament that sparks from drugs, no pun intended.

And I think, honestly, I like this evolution.

I think it really ties into what I was saying before when you asked me about, do we think it's okay that these actors aren't doing drugs but telling everybody not to?

I think this is the right move. You have the adults teeing it off saying this is a family conversation.

And then at the end of the episode you have the kids saying, hey, with the adults, this is important to us too and you should talk about it.

And I think Miles, the little kid, is the only one that's like, don't do drugs because he's super little.

The rest of them are not, it's not preachy in that same way.

It's like this is a family issue. We know that your kids are going to be exposed to it.

We know that you as adults are going to have to be dealing with your children who have been exposed to this.

We're not sweeping it under the rug and we're not preaching. Talk about this.

Yeah, this plot point really could have been swapped out with them who stole the watch, who broke the vase.

It really is more just about getting in trouble with your parents and do they trust you or do you need to prove yourself?

But yeah, what happens is the two parents when they're in the house by themselves, they're cleaning, I think, and they discover a joint.

They say, this is unmistakably a marijuana cigarette as their friend Bernie Mack will later refer to it.

I don't remember if it's the mom or the dad, but somebody says someone left this joint in the house and it wasn't Bob Marley.

I think that was Cheryl Lee Ralph and her fabulous delivery.

Cheryl Lee Ralph, who we love from Abbott Elementary and many other things.

It's cleaning day and Frank, the dad has said, oh, I'm so sorry, I have to go to work.

I can't clean today and he's on his way out and Bernie Mack, his buddy, or perhaps his brother.

I couldn't quite tell. There is an uncle that comes and they call him Uncle.

Right, but it might just be like family friend, Uncle.

I don't know, again, but he is Bernie.

Yeah, he's Uncle Bernie and so he comes in and spoils the ruse that Frank isn't actually going to the office today.

He was going golfing and so then he's going to have to be roped into cleaning.

So they're like, well, Bernie, you spoiled it, so you've got to clean too.

And then they turn around to go help Dee and she is holding the joint and is sort of paralyzed.

What the hell is this?

They kind of immediately jump to Moisha, but they have a moment of pause and they're like, wait, Bernie is this yours.

So that kind of tells us who Bernie is as the fun uncle.

And so, and so yeah, they're like, well, who could it be?

You know, maybe it was one of your friends.

No, okay, well, we've got to ask Moisha about it.

The mom starts postulating. She says all signs point to Moisha because it's been established.

She's been, you know, kind of driving herself crazy, studying for tests and stuff.

She's always up late. She's always eating junk food, they say.

And so it's like your Sherlock Holmes-esque detective skills are starting to put everything together.

Always, what were the signs? They had the like list of signs and one of our alcoholism episodes, same deal.

Always, you know, up at weird hours, eating lots of junk food.

Seemingly erratic behavior.

Distant, unresponsive.

And so they're, you know, she's like all signs point to Moisha.

And again, because she's a principal, she's like, look, I'm there on the front lines, buddy.

I can tell you, you think these kids don't get up to stuff, but they do.

So the dad's like, all right, I'm going to have to confront her.

Let me think about this.

We get to see how preoccupied he is because he's playing chess with the little brother miles.

And he thinks he's playing checkers.

He does like five little jumps and says, king me, classic jokes, saying king me when you're playing chess.

And yeah, ultimately, again, just like George Papadopoulos, they're pretty straightforward.

So Moisha comes in, so why so serious, right?

And they're like, well, what the hell is this?

And she says, she says, daddy, that's a joint.

And he says, is this yours?

And she says, no, what are you talking about?

It's not my joint.

So they argue back and forth a little bit.

And it's Moisha who introduces this concept sort of sarcastically.

What do you want me to take a drug test or something?

And they immediately latch onto that.

Yeah.

And I remember that there was definitely, I don't know if it was this period of time,

but there was definitely a period of time in my like young adulthood where this was a big question

of like these mandatory drug tests, a lot of companies started instituting them.

Did you ever have to take a drug test?

I did, but that was because I drove a company vehicle.

And so that often was, you know, I had multiple friends that had to take drug tests.

And maybe some of them were like just on principle, but it often was like, yeah, you're going

to be driving a school bus.

You're going to be driving a company van or whatever.

Exactly.

I honestly don't know what I would have done in my 20s if I wanted a job and said they had

to take a drug test.

Later, their friends will float a scheme where all you need is a newborn baby and a leak-proof

bag.

Yeah.

So maybe I would have tried to pull that.

Yeah, I remember back in the day, friends talking about different herbal supplements that

would quote unquote, like detox you.

You got a drink like 20 gallons of water every hour before the test.

Who knows.

But so, yeah, in my 20s, I was totally the opposite from you, right?

Like I, I partied a lot in high school and into college.

And then most of my 20s, I was kind of boring.

Like it wasn't until my early 30s that I started having a good time again.

And because of the driving company vehicles, we had sort of randomized checks.

And at any point, if you ever like got hurt on the job when I worked in television, they

would immediately, so like one time I was doing a story at a new ice skating rink.

And while filming, I slipped and fell.

And so obviously, they obviously said they immediately sent me as soon as I got back to the station

and we were all laughing at the blooper of me falling.

The HR lady, her name I think was Kathy, of course.

And she comes down and she's like, okay, you need to go down the street for your drug test.

And I was like, what, why?

And she's like, you fell.

If you're hurt at all, if you have a workman's comp claim, I'm like, I'm fine.

She's like, doesn't matter.

We needed on record.

Go take a drug test.

I was like, okay.

And then, and so yeah, that was a, like, that was never an issue for me, like I said, in my 20s.

But there was definitely this conversation around educators.

And then I remember, if not, if not hearing about this, but definitely covering a story

in my early 20s when I was a reporter about the school board sort of taking up a measure

to, are we going to add this to our labor contracts?

Do teachers have to take drug tests?

And the labor unions all fought back on this as an invasion of privacy.

You know what I mean?

Like it's one thing if you're showing up drunk to work.

It's one thing if you're showing up high at a work.

But like random drug tests are not just seeing if you're doing things at work, right?

They're seeing.

Yeah, no, they're policing your whole life.

Exactly.

Yeah, especially with weed, which stays in your system for like a month.

So it really is just sort of like, you know, really sweeping your whole lifestyle.

Yeah.

And the idea of that privatization, I think, during this time was definitely a conversation.

Yeah.

I worked as a teacher's aide for my first three years out of college and I was stoned every minute.

Oh my god, Jay.

And I did fine.

Nobody got hurt.

Yeah.

So Moisha refuses to take the test.

She's just like, if you don't believe like I moved back here because you said,

and you know, we agreed that there would be trust that we would, you know,

would stop being this antagonistic relationship.

Like I recognize mistakes I've made in the past and you dad recognize some of the mistakes

you've made in the ways that you've handled those mistakes that I've made.

And we're in a good place.

If you aren't trusting me, if this is like, if this is the only thing that you can do to trust me,

then that's not trust.

Like I'm not doing it on principle.

Yeah, which makes sense.

And when they're hanging out at the diner because this just sort of looms over the rest of the episode,

they keep wanting her to take it.

She doesn't want to.

She's talking to her friends.

And she's like, I can't believe they don't trust me.

And the friends point out that she has lied to her parents many times in the past.

They bring up all of these other incidents.

Yeah, like breaking her few, staying out late, like doing, you know,

being somewhere when she was actually, so you're saying she was going to be somewhere

when she was actually somewhere else.

All of the things that I didn't high school.

Yeah. And so, you know, again, it's hard to know exactly what to make of it

because it's just the way it is that certain teenagers have different relationships with their parents.

Yeah. And I think to your earlier question,

is she like a Mike Siever type?

Yes.

Yeah. So yes.

Mike Siever, Zach Morris, these are types where, yeah,

you don't really have a whole lot of leeway.

You're kind of guilty until proven innocent.

And so that seems to be like her parents stance.

Now, watching this, I honestly don't know exactly what to make of it.

I, you know, her stance makes a lot of sense that I am completely innocent.

You just write like, I don't know what to tell you.

You found this joint.

It's not my problem.

It's not my fault.

On the other hand, I was kind of thinking, if I were her, maybe I would want to just take this test

for the sake of, as Sheldon would put it, I told you thusly.

Yes. Well, and that's what her friends say and also her boss at the, at the,

at the den where she has a job, that's like their local hangout.

Yeah.

And, and her boss, who I believe also dates Uncle Bernie,

who is we were seeing that have like a little bit of a flirtation thing going on.

And so, yeah, so her boss and Uncle Bernie sort of and definitely her friends are like,

who cares?

Like parents violate privacy all the time.

Just take the test.

You know you didn't do anything wrong.

It will just prove you right.

And then you'll be like, why, why, I told you so.

Yeah, I think maybe if I were her, I would try to pull for some sort of tit for tat like,

okay, obviously if I test positive, I'm going to get in trouble and face whatever consequence.

So if I test negative, then you got a, you know, whatever, did buy me a car or say,

you know, maybe not something sort of expensive.

Oh my goodness.

A little bit of like, it's you.

I don't know.

That's, yeah.

That's a really good sitcom plot.

I like that a lot.

I definitely, like what was not in the situation of having to take a drug test in high school,

but I definitely got into these loggerheads with my parents about trusting me.

And, you know, they had reason, just like Moesha's family has reason not to always believe her.

But, like, when I say I'm telling the truth, like, I'm telling the, you know what I mean?

I'm telling the truth.

So if I'm taking a stand on principle, I think I would be a little bit more like Moesha in this instance

and be like, I don't have to do that.

I don't have to prove myself to you.

You either believe me or you don't.

And I kind of feel like I'm still stubborn like that.

Yeah.

And there's also the added elements I feel like that.

The fact that these drug tests involve peeing into a cup,

kind of makes it especially sort of like degrading, you know what I mean?

It's just the whole process is more invasive than if it was just something like I don't like a COVID test or something.

Are they up breathing into something?

Well, so she comes back home after having this conversation with her friends and her coworkers

and she has decided, I mean, all right, I'll do it.

And she gets home and there's a nurse there.

And the nurse is like, hey, are you Moesha?

Fill her up.

Yes.

And like shoves this cup in her face.

This, yeah, nurse, whatever, you know, professional is administering this test is super judgmental.

I would think that people in this line of work are sort of trained to be like kind of impassive.

Yeah, like no social work skills at all here.

Like this woman literally is like, oh, these I get called all the time by parents with these bad kids.

Well, fill her up, you.

Yeah. And what they say before Moesha comes home, the parents are trying to assure this woman,

like, no, this, you know, despite this incident, Moesha is a very upstanding.

The mom says or the stepmom, she's a wonderful child.

And the nurse goes, oh, a wonderful child who happens to need a drug test.

And so, yeah, she really, she's like with Catherine from Webster, where it's like any drug user is a total junkie,

sort of society, burn in hell.

Yeah, well, but it is her attitude that allows the parents to kind of look inside themselves and see that they sort of,

they don't, they stand in stark contrast to her beliefs, and they don't want to appear to believe that about Moesha as well.

So when Moes like, look, I came here today, like I came home today ready to say, okay, but this, this is untenable.

And now I'm changing my mind and she storms upstairs.

Yeah.

And it's because they've, to me, it wasn't necessarily the attitude of the woman per se.

It's the fact that they've initiated this.

Yeah, they totally come to her.

Yeah.

And so, yeah, the lady's like, well, okay, give me a call if she changes her mind or whatever.