Image copyright MTV
If social media existed on April 8, 1994, Kurt Cobain’s passing would have broken the internet. But even online access in and of itself was barely eking out then and wouldn’t be readily available for another year, when more home computers had browsers and certain restrictions on commercial use were lifted. So, instead of TikTok lip sync tributes, Generation X was tuned in that entire weekend following to watch Nirvana videos, “Unplugged,” and “Live and Loud,” as well as Kurt Loder sharing updates and interviewing “Rolling Stone” editor David Fricke, all on a constant loop on MTV.
Jon Sherman was in his early 20s in a building on Tujunga in Studio City, in office space used by the network, the day the news hit. But he wasn’t privy to all the details of the devastating death, as he was preoccupied with finishing his writing for MTV’s first original scripted live action drama series. “I don’t know what I’m doing exactly, I hope someone knows what they’re doing,” he remembers thinking. “And no one did. What am I doing here? How did I get here? How do I get out?” Two months later, “Dead At 21” premiered.
The network had launched the reality show genre as we know it now, which would go on to dominate television for decades, through “The Real World” in 1992. (Disclosure: I worked on the show for multiple seasons in the late aughts and can be seen in the middle of a fight between Seattle cast members during a reunion special). It already had a history of airing comedies and dramas from other markets, such as BBC’s “The Young Ones” and Canadian import “Catwalk”. It had also found success in animation with “Liquid Television” and installments of that show spun off into their own series, such as “Aeon Flux” and “Beavis and Butthead.”
“Dead At 21” creator Jon Sherman was a young writer coming from an assistant job off the Paramount lot. His friend Anne Blanchard, an assistant at Triad Artists who became an agent, had taken Sherman on as her first writer. “We got friendly, she said ‘what do you want to do... let’s get you out there.’” Sherman met with a development executive named Tom Campbell (who would later create “Drag Race” with RuPaul at World of Wonder). Sherman had understood Campbell was looking for “fun MTV ideas and game shows,” but nothing he brought sparked an interest. Campbell told him to come back some time with more. “Being young and naive, I took it to mean ‘come back.’ As opposed to ‘go away’, which I now know.” Sherman and Campbell discussed what MTV was aiming for. “(The) audience is young and we’re trying to bring them in,” says Sherman. “MTV is cool, MTV is rebellious, MTV is young… this was my first exposure to the idea of a brand, and branding, and what a network is.”
Sherman started to think about action-adventure. His British mother had shared “The Prisoner” with him as a kid. Skepticism about the government was nothing new in pop culture, but perhaps in television programs with youthful characters, as Sherman began to conceive it. In literature, there was somewhat of a precedent with Robert Cormier’s 1977 “I Am The Cheese,” adapted for film in 1983. Cigarette smoking men were only just beginning to stalk federal agents on “The X Files,” but it would be several more years before shadowy government types became a staple of such shows as “24” and “Prison Break.”
Sherman recalls the “percent of the brain” myth that was still prevalent then, the since-debunked idea that humans do not use all of their potential mental capacity. For example, 10% of the brain was part of a plot device in the 1986 film “Flight of the Navigator.” In 1991, a line in Albert Brooks’ “Defending Your Life” placed the actively used portion at about 3%. That was the number Sherman was working with when he asked, what if the government wanted to harness the other 97%? What if it all went wrong and the test subjects self-destructed when they reached a certain age? Sherman came up with Ed Bellamy, a protagonist who finds out on his 20th birthday that he was part of such an experiment, and that the microchip in his brain will kill him in one year.
“Rebellious kid on a motorcycle, not trusting anyone over 30... 100% in the sweet spot,” remembers Sherman. “Kids watching MTV, that’s what they’re feeling deep down. At the same time, ‘there’s something going on and I’m special. And it may not be what I want but it’s what I got to deal with.’” Ed is framed for a murder by Winston, a government agent seeking to eliminate him, and with a girl he just met named Maria as his accomplice, Ed goes on a run closer to “The Legend of Billie Jean” than “The Fugitive,” though like Helen Shaver and David Janssen before him, seeking answers and helping others along the way.
There was a clear cyberpunk influence. “I was somebody who was reading books like ‘Neuromancer,’ ‘Snow Crash,’ things like that. I got an early copy of a (William Gibson) book, some sort of galley copy… that was definitely something I was very much into at the time.” But this was at the infancy of the internet, so the “cyberspace” mentioned in the show later on (which we would think of now as “virtual reality”) was still theoretical. Sherman remembers a French teacher in 1988 who recommended they get modems and practice French in emails. And as a student at Stanford University, says Sherman, “Jerry Yang who founded Yahoo! was in my freshman dorm.”
It was Sherman’s childhood with sci-fi and fantasy roleplaying games like “Dungeons and Dragons” and “Traveller” that more deeply informed the themes of his teleplay, from which the show would eventually be made. “It’s definitely an outgrowth of something I continued to be interested in and resonates with me whether it is ‘Stranger Things’ or ‘Ready Player One,’ those themes of technology, fantasy, being a kid, feeling like an outsider, trying to make sense of your world, needing to kind of step up and push back against the forces that are either victimizing you or telling you ‘you can’t.’”
While Sherman turned a few pages of a pitch into a half hour pilot script, “I had no other iron in any fire.” Then, a mandate by President Bill Clinton about educational television led to Disney pairing with a PBS affiliate in Washington to create a kids’ show with a science guy named Bill Nye. “I was also a kid who had grown up going to the Children’s School of Science in Woods Hole in Massachusetts during the summers and had parents who were biologists.” Sherman’s heart was in comedy, with music and lyrics also one of his favorites, so he took a job on the staff and relocated to Seattle despite the advice of his agent Blanchard. He says Blanchard told him, “If you leave L.A., no one will ever hire you again, they will forget about you.” But he was sick of the desk job and being an assistant, he was a Gen X-er in Doc Martens and flannel, and his connections at MTV got him into the December 1993 “Live and Loud” show with Nirvana, The Breeders, and Cypress Hill that would become a New Year’s Eve special and posthumous Nirvana DVD.
Meanwhile, a writer named PK Simonds did a “phenomenal” polish on the pilot script, says Sherman. (Simonds would go on to write and produce for “Party of Five” and “Ghost Whisperer.”) The pilot was greenlit to be shot for consideration as a series. Sherman was one season into “BIll Nye The Science Guy,” but Blanchard insisted he had to return to L.A. for the sake of his career. “This isn’t the last show you’re going to work on,” Sherman says quoting Blanchard, “this isn’t the ticket to big time, take it as a stepping stone.”
Nye was unhappy about his talented young writer leaving the series. Sherman remembers him asking, “Why would anyone want to live in L.A.?” (Nye now resides in Los Angeles.)
Upcoming actor Jack Noseworthy was cast as Ed. Whip Hubley, who had played Hollywood in “Top Gun” and starred in the film “Russkies” with Joaquin Phoenix, was cast as Agent Winston. Lisa Dean Ryan, who had just left a regular role as Neil Patrick Harris’s girlfriend on “Doogie Howser, M.D.,” was brought on as Maria, who Ed meets in his bedroom when she has crashed his 20th birthday party. And Dan, a fellow “Neuro CyberNaut” (“sib”) now grown up, who also crashes the party to warn Ed about Winston and reveal the experiment, was a one episode role filled by Adam Scott (later of “Party Down” and “Parks and Recreation”) in his first television role. (This was a revelation to Sherman during our conversation, who characterized himself as a huge fan of Scott’s work. Scott did not respond to requests for comment, but has frequently celebrated “Frasier” as one of his all-time favorite programs - so Sherman, who would go on to be a longtime writer and producer on the “Cheers” spinoff, can be assured the feeling is mutual.)
Sherman was given about “$7,000? $8,000?” for the teleplay, but no “created by” credit. “Not being in the (Writer’s Guild) didn’t afford me any kind of protection, and (parent company) Viacom, and by association MTV, were doing things as cheaply as possible. ‘Well, you didn’t really create the show because you and (Campbell) had conversations about what the idea would be so he was involved with it.’ But isn’t that his job? Isn’t that every development executive’s job with writers? I don’t know what creating a show is except writing the teleplay that the series is then based on.”
The pilot was filmed in the Woodland Hills neighborhood of L.A., and a formative trauma in Sherman’s career occurred during the big party scene (where Winston ends up killing Dan, which the authorities blame on Ed, keeping him on the lam). An executive asked Sherman to talk to Noseworthy, who was having trouble buying into some of his lines of dialogue as Ed. Sherman knows how to work with actors now and change dialogue on the fly, but was terrified to talk to actors then and thought the mission was to get Nosewworthy to just say the words as scripted. His advice to Noseworthy then: “You’re a really good actor. I’m sure you can make this work.”
Noseworthy’s response, “Don’t patronize me!”
One of the pilot’s executive producers was kept on as showrunner when the pilot was picked up for 12 additional episodes, “Lizard King self-styled poet/rock-and-roll guy” Rod Taylor, brought on by Viacom due to his two season success for them with syndicated sci-fi series “Super Force.” Instead of Sherman getting to learn the ropes from Taylor, “I didn’t get any mentoring from him. I didn’t get any sense that he was super gifted. At anything… jack of all trades, master of none. I felt very much on the outside with Rod. And his large adult son.”
Taylor, and his son Bruce, often hid in their office, Rod playing guitar instead of gathering together a writers’ room, or building story and character arcs. Instead, episodes were broke with executives. Sherman says there was no unity or “cohesive vision or trajectory or idea for the show… string and chewing gum, we’re totally just patching this shit together... you just get it out the door.” But he was too new to say how things should work. “I guess this is the way TV is made?” he thought, surrounded by “a bunch of people who kind of didn’t know what they were doing or weren’t empowered to do it.” In retrospect, he says if MTV hired someone with a different style of leadership and execution, “the experience would have been educational and instructive and professional and inclusive and competent. I really found it to be a dizzying time, confusing, and felt amateurish at times. This whole thing was running entirely on momentum. It didn’t feel like there was a captain of the ship. It was a ship that was being carried by the tide.”
The show was known for its chase scenes and unrelenting 1990s “Buzz Bin” soundtrack. There seemed to always be a Nirvana or Alice In Chains or Soundgarden song playing under every scene. “Because MTV was essential to getting musicians (discovered), it was taking over for radio in many ways in the 90s. It was such a dominant force. If they had the right to play the video, they had the right to use the song on their channel. Period.” MTV was looking to “reverse engineer” a hit, says Sherman, trying to come up with a show they could use their vast library as a soundtrack for. “Here are the dots. Connect them. It seemed like a cynical way to create a show instead of organic.”
The audience followed Ed and Maria’s journey to a man purporting to be Dr. Heisenberg, creator of the “sib” program that had implanted baby Ed with a microchip (the role was played by late British actor W. Morgan Sheppard, whose career included the role of elder punk and TV pirate Blank Reg on another attempt at cyberpunk television, the short lived 1987-1988 ABC series “Max Headroom”). He turns out to be an impostor trying to access the virtual reality created by Ed and two other “sibs,” triangulating their microchips through some sort of connection. The season finale is a cliffhanger where the fake Heisenberg’s thugs appear to shoot Maria execution style, an injured Agent Winson hides on the scientist’s compound having been captured and faked his death, and Ed and two fellow “sibs” are passed out and dying on the floor after finding the real Heisenberg and his deceased daughter as their cyberspace selves (a quarter of a century before “Ready Player Two”). There were hints and hopes of Winston turning over a new leaf to rescue Ed and Maria, Maria somehow escaping the gunshots we heard but did not see hit, and Ed taking what he learned from the real Heisenberg in the digital beyond to survive.
Sherman had his own ideas for the final episodes, “But it was pretty clear, no, (Rod and his son were) taking it, they were going to do their thing. I had felt both marginalized and stiff armed by that process. But also at that point I had one foot out the door.” Blanchard had already got Sherman hired on to the Margaret Cho sitcom “All American Girl” as a story editor.
With “Dead At 21” being cancelled, the characters were as good as dead, no resurrection for Ed, Maria, or Winston to come. But Jon Sherman was finally free.
Series star Jack Noseworthy has continued to work regularly in movies and television. Lisa Dean Ryan seemingly retired from acting in 2005 in her early 30s and there is no information about her current, very private life. Whip Hubley worked regularly until about 2013 and has otherwise kept a low profile since then, but Sherman had a brief reunion with him a couple of years back and reports he seemed well.
Sherman went on to write and produce many shows, including the aforementioned “Frasier,” and another long run as a producer and writer on USA Network’s “Royal Pains.” Blanchard remained his agent for years, although he now has different representation. Sherman was most recently collaborating on an animated feature and continues to write and shop around a variety of scripts.
Adam Scott has referred to his first acting job as “silly.” Noseworthy called the show “low budget” in an interview, comparing his long hours on it unfavorably to the easier, breezier job of a small role he was filming at the same time in “The Brady Bunch Movie.” And Sherman’s first question in our first correspondence when presented with the idea of a “Dead At 21” retrospective: “But dear lord why?”
Still, it cannot be denied as a predecessor to MTV’s years of programming, nor as a 1990s grunge and cyberpunk artifact with its own rightful place in history. “I love that it happened,” says Sherman. “I love that there are people out there that it meant something to. I’m glad it exists. But it was a rocky first foray for me into writing and producing a show. Ultimately, I think the show meant something more to MTV than to me.”
Well… whatever. Nevermind.
Hub is a writer, storyteller, and performer from Magical Higley AZ, and editor at Meow Meow Pow Pow and Screenshot Lit. He can be found in his family minivan listening to the 90s alt and grunge station on satellite radio, or posting updates at http://HubUnofficial.com.
