For those of us old enough to remember, "West Coast" Julie Brown had an MTV series, and she's kind of gone down in cult movie history with her bizarro 1980s sci-fi-musical-comedy opus "Earth Girls Are Easy" (which she co-wrote and co-starred in alongside Geena Davis, Jeff Goldblum, Jim Carrey and Damon Wayans). Hermain schtick is the '80s valley girl, and in this pilot, she was playing herself as a variation of that character. This time she hosted a talk show at CBS, but everything is going wrong - her boyfriend dumped her in a humiliating way, Elizabeth Taylor was set to guest on the show but dropped out due to an accident, and a would-be encounter with Michael Jackson left her with a stowaway chimp. Brown also sings an excerpt of her cult hit "I Like 'em Big and Stupid."
In an era of stuff like "Murphy Brown" and "Designing Women," I can't see this having sustained much time on the air if it had been picked up as a weekly series. Julie was likable and it was cute and fluffy... but there's an inherent problem in Brown's material that it's often too timely, so some of the jokes don't make sense out of context later (Brown's Fox series "The Edge" suffered from a worse case of that). At Fox this might've stood a chance for a season, but not on CBS.
The pilot's surfaced and You Tube and it's worth a look for fans of Ms. Brown and costar Larry Poindexter, but it's hardly earth-shattering material.
In an era of stuff like "Murphy Brown" and "Designing Women," I can't see this having sustained much time on the air if it had been picked up as a weekly series. Julie was likable and it was cute and fluffy... but there's an inherent problem in Brown's material that it's often too timely, so some of the jokes don't make sense out of context later (Brown's Fox series "The Edge" suffered from a worse case of that). At Fox this might've stood a chance for a season, but not on CBS.
The pilot's surfaced and You Tube and it's worth a look for fans of Ms. Brown and costar Larry Poindexter, but it's hardly earth-shattering material.
