A couple years ago I joined my friends Jen and Josh in watching some episodes of the 1990 show Get A Life starring comedian/writer/actor Chris Elliott.  The show was about Chris as a 30-year-old paperboy and his bizarre experiences living with his parents. Get A Life followed a classic sitcom style (single camera, diorama set) but with totally crazy and random story lines. It lasted only 25 episodes and has since been completely forgotten save for those who deem it a cult classic. I would never call it a cult classic and it has no value to me or anyone else i know, but volume one of the DVD release sells on Amazon used for around 40-50 dollars and new from $110-$340! I don’t know what that says about this show (It was amazing? It’s very rare in never-been-opened DVD form?), but I am shocked that someone would buy Get A Life for the same price you could buy the entire West Wing box set. I digress. The reason I am reminded about Get A Life is because after watching it I created a three person facebook group called, “Get a Life with Chris Elliott both suck and is awesome”. I was deleting old groups today and looked at this one to see if Jen and Josh had ditched it yet when i found that 19 other people joined the group. Apparently these Get A Life fans searched out this group and have been posting really specific memories about the show on the group page. Hilarious memories include: “The show ran on Danish tv around 1997 - i miss it so much” “When they remodeled the kitchen to add 6 inches of space” More than one group member comments that Get A Life is ahead of it’s time. It may have been ahead of it’s time, but I think it was just generally too ridiculous for any mainstream success. The jokes were totally inconsistent. Some were dry as dirt and some jokes were insanely over the top, but it is often hilarious (in an ironic “look-at-those-juggalos” kind of way). It’s entirely possible that Get A Life may have found an audience if it had aired on Adult Swim, but I can’t think of another avenue for it to find a following except online.  It’s hard to enjoy this show unironically. Regardless, I love the niche fan base that searched out Get A Life on Facebook.  They’re like a passionate little cult like those of Rocky Horror (40,000 fans on FB) or Firefly (250,000), but there’s only 19 of them. I say stand strong Get A Life fans. When Family Guy decides to make a Chris Elliott reference the payoff for you will be absolutely huge.
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