More Top Picks Best Powered Subwoofers For Cars
player ready...Now that “Weird Science” is into its second season on the USA Network, it seems fair to anoint the made-for-cable series “Dream Girl: The Next Generation.”
The first generation, of course, was personified by Elizabeth Montgomery as Samantha the witch on “Bewitched” and Barbara Eden as Jeannie on “I Dream of Jeannie.”
At a time when women’s liberation was first stirring in the mid-’60s, these shows sent mixed messages. Both women were beautiful and powerful, yet were content to be utterly subservient to their domineering, unimaginative, largely inattentive husbands.
Jump-cut a generation, and you’ve got “Weird Science,” a weekly teen-fantasy series based on the 1985 movie of the same name.
With TV’s “Weird Science” now in its second season (9 p.m. Saturdays, USA), now would be a good time to measure the evolutionary distance between the Jeannie and Samantha of the ’60s and the computer-generated Lisa of the ’90s.
And you know what? These paragons of power, these TV temptresses, have come a short way, baby.
In Freudian terms, the ante is upped in “Weird Science,” because the two nerd high schoolers didn’t romance and marry their personal wish-fulfillment companion, or find her on a bottle in a deserted beach. They created her out of a malfunctioning computer program.
The sexual and greedy subtexts of the genre are more honest now, too. Michael Manasseri’s Wyatt, and especially John Mallory Asher’s Gary, lust after Vanessa Angel’s Lisa, and would like nothing more than to become intimately familiar with her.
Also, where in “Bewitched” and “I Dream of Jeannie” the heroes were too noble to ask the women to conjure up anything for them, these teens ask, and receive, all the time.
Yet they don’t receive Lisa, because her computer programming somehow forbids it. And they don’t benefit from Lisa’s ability to affect reality, because most of the wishes she grants Wyatt and Gary go awry. Therefore, the sexual quotient is minimal, and there’s always a little moral lesson learned at the end.
In other words, “Weird Science” is like a “Fantasy Island” for teens: all wish, no fulfillment.
The USA series also is a second-generation “magic” show in another interesting aspect: William Asher, the father of the actor playing Gary on “Weird Science,” was a director on “Bewitched.”