Dave Holmes Revisits The Top Shows Of September 1998, The Week ‘TRL’ Launched

Two classic sitcoms on their ascent. 21 years later, Ray Romano is swearing his way through Get Shorty, Patricia Heaton has become an anti-abortion gadfly, and Drew Carey is the host of The Price Is Right. Life is long.

The Hughleys debuted on Tuesday nights, but for its second season, it moved from Tuesdays to ABC’s TGIF line-up. It would be followed by the Lou Pearlman-produced Making The Band, wherein the boy-band O-Town was made. From thousands of hopefuls, Pearlman assembled the fivesome— and then foursome (goodbye, Ikaika!) and then fivesome again (hello, Dan!)— then pretty much robbed them blind. Get the whole story, and see how well Ashley Parker Angel has held up (very!), in The Boy Band Con, premiering on YouTube Premium this week. (Full disclosure: I am in this documentary. I have been told I got some good laughs in early screenings. That’s my career, folks: the comic relief in the movie about the con man and suspected pedophile.)

Limping through its last season with teen dream Jonathan Taylor Thomas, who left the show to focus on college and also apparently play a bisexual hustler in a Jesse Bradford movie called Speedway Junky. Late 1990s, you so crazy.

One of two David Spade appearances on NBC this week. To promote SNL’s 24th season premiere (Host Cameron Diaz! Musical guest Smashing Pumpkins!), NBC aired a one-hour special called Bad Boys of SNL, devoted to the work of Chris Farley, Chris Rock, David Spade and Adam Sandler. Singing opera about the news, making up nicknames for co-workers around the copy machine, being adorably nervous around Paul McCartney, and being mildly snarky about Stone Temple Pilots: such dangerous behavior! By this measure, Colin Jost is GG Allin.

You would have to wait a few weeks for the episode called “Suspicious Minds,” wherein an Elvis impersonator’s deaf daughter witnesses a mob hit and needs the special protection only Chuck Norris can give. Instead, let us turn our attention to The WB, and their entry into the nighttime soapstakes: Hyperion Bay. “The Bay,” as nobody called it, followed the 1990s sudser beats pretty perfectly: Assemble a cast of former child actors and daytime stars (Mark-Paul Gosselaar, Cassidy Rae, Sydney Penny, and sentient jawbone Dylan Neal were the big names), attempt to tell tamer, more grown-up stories, immediately sex it up with the arrival of an Amanda Woodward corpo-dominatrix (Carmen Electra filled that role here), then just kind of flail and get cancelled after 17 episodes.

The end of the Benjamin Bratt period ended this season on NBC, but on MTV, a new era was just beginning. Once the MTV crew had returned from the Seaside Heights beach house (where the seeds of Jersey Shore were surely planted), the higher-ups hatched a plan to combine the daily top-ten show Total Request with the live in-studio afternoon hangout MTV Live. And thus, Total Request Live was born. Fun fact: the title was originally a play on Total Recall, and thus was originally pronounced Total RE-quest Live. The show lasted, thanks in large part to Lou Pearlman’s many productions; the pronunciation did not.

In the interest of giving the people what they want, here’s Backstreet Boys doing “I Want It That Way,” which came out twenty years ago this week.

Who even knows which true crime or unsuspecting sex creep they were going on about this week, so let’s turn our attention to another Tuesday night NBC show, the half-season wonder Encore! Encore! What’s more surprising: that there was an NBC sitcom starring Nathan Lane as an opera singer whose vocal cords were damaged by a bad clam, that Joan Plowright and Glenne Headly played his mother and sister, or that most of its episodes were burned off on the cable channel that was devoted to highbrow entertainment like opera, which was Bravo? (This is a trick question: the surprising thing is that there was a cable channel devoted to highbrow entertainment at all.)

Other weird stuff you’d find on network television this week included CBS’s The Brian Benben Show, starring the genial, fresh-off-HBO, still-married-to-Madeline-Stowe-and-that’s-just-always-going-to-be-weird Benben as an aging newscaster who gets demoted to human-interest reporter. (Humans were not interested.) You could also see Kids Say The Darndest Things, where 3- to 7-year-olds say things that are darnd to…Bill Cosby, and a reboot of Fantasy Island starring Malcolm McDowell, Madchen Amick as a centuries-old shapeshifter, and as the travel agents who would anchor each episode, Fyvush Finkel and Sylvia Sidney. 1990s network television development executives said the darndest things, like “Can we get some more elderly people in this show?”

Song of the Year went to a tune called “Holes In The Floor Of Heaven,” which was famously written by a Nashville computer program. Best New Artist went to Dixie Chicks, who would see their albums publicly burned five years later.

Did you know Bill Cosby was also on Touched By An Angel, as Phil, the Angel of Reconciliation? Surely the angel of irony shone down upon CBS in 1998.

Also this week, the debut of ABC’s Sports Night, a truly special, deservingly beloved show. Dare I call this show Aaron Sorkin at his finest? As ever, his characters speak in thundering monologues, cannot talk without walking, and take themselves far too seriously, but in the world of sports television, it actually works. It is actually inherently funny for such sturm und drang to take place on a sports network, just as it is inherently depressing for it to happen on a comedy show. (Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip remains a top-notch hate-watch, and the Matt Albie Twitter feed continues to crush it.)

Kids, back in the 20th century, the big four television networks would sometimes produce and air original movies. These were certain to be either extremely wholesome, or just as Jackie Collins-style filthy as they could get away with (a la Lace). Forever Love was aggressively the former: a story of a woman (Reba) in a decades-long coma whose best friend (Bess Armstrong) steps in to help her semi-bereaved husband (Tim Matheson) raise her daughter, but then Reba wakes up and has to find out where she fits in this strange new world. It was based on a true story, and if it were made today it would be on Starz and they’d all have a three-way.

And yes of course there was a title song.

NBC was absolutely unstoppable on Thursday nights, when the bookends of Friends and ER could lift everything that came between, even relatively wack sitcoms like this one. Still, it kept Dan Cortese, Kathy Najimy and Daryl “Chill” Mitchell employed for three years, and it least it wasn’t Union Square. I mean, look at this darndness:

Season one of this Christina Applegate sitcom did fairly well in its post-Friends time slot, but so would stock footage of a fireplace. Jesse would go on to get booted from its slot by another show that had its first episode on Tuesday this week, a little situation comedy called Will & Grace.

Over the weekend, a friend of mine hipped me to Cheers: Live On Stage, an evening of (I guess?) old Cheers scripts that was supposed to have toured a couple of years ago but mysteriously never did, and now it’s all I can think about. Perhaps the fatal blow came from launching the thing in Boston, the toughest of tough crowds for such material. Maybe the executive producers of the source material put their foot down. It’s also possible that it just wasn’t all that great. Check out the fake enthusiasm of the theatergoers, particularly the peculiar word choice employed by the third pair.

It’s just like enduring an episode of Cheers! I need a Dateline NBC on this production, stat.

By 1998, Friends had gone full supernova. The ubiquity of The Rachel! The Diet Coke campaign! Jean-Claude van Damme! So for Season 5, the producers decided to dial it back a little bit and focus on the show’s core relationships. So this season gave us Phoebe’s triplets, Ross and Rachel re-evaluating things after Emily, and Monica and Chandler’s secret relationship. (But still nobody non-straight or non-white.) Elsewhere on the network, Mark Feuerstein starred in the third of what feels like a million attempts to make him a television star in Conrad Bloom, and Jeremy Piven was the lead in ABC’s Cupid. I mean this: can we trade Jeremy Piven for Mark Feuerstein? I feel like our culture will be stronger for it.

This would be George Clooney’s last season on the show, and Kellie Martin’s first. Also in the coming year, Backstreet Boys and *NSYNC would sue Lou Pearlman to be let out of their contracts, and MTV would celebrate a massive first season of TRL by sending us all down to the Bahamas and having Fred Durst blow up our boat so we’d be stuck there. No, really. It was an insane cultural moment, and even though he was a textbook villain, we owe a lot of it to Lou Pearlman. Check out The Boy Band Con this week, kids. And read your contracts.

Dave Holmes is an editor-at-large for Esquire.com, host of the new Earwolf podcast Homophilia, and his memoir Party of One is in stores now.