Strangers with Candy Could Not Be Made Today
Watching the cult classic show today is like catching a glimpse of another dimension
Note: I’m going to spoil some great moments, so if you’re concerned about that sort of thing, go watch Strangers with Candy for the first time in 2023 like I did and come back here later.
I loved culturally anarchic comedy when I was younger. I watched Upright Citizens Brigade as often as I could. I was aware of Strangers with Candy, but I’m not sure I ever saw a full episode of the program when it was airing on Comedy Central between 1998 and 2000.
Recently I was handed a copy of the full series on DVD. Going through it was something of a revelation.
The show was executive produced by Kent Alterman, who also executive produced Upright Citizens Brigade. More surprisingly, this thing was co-created by Stephen Colbert - he gets top billing as creator in the early episodes - who in recent years has abandoned actually being funny for a successful career as a guy who’s not known for much more than harping on from a milquetoast liberal perspective about how Donald Trump is not such a great guy.
The unaired pilot that got this show greenlit is titled Retardation: A Celebration. It follows Jerri Blank - a 46 year old teenage runaway who’s returning to high school to start over after decades of life as a sometimes incarcerated prostitute who describes herself as “a boozer, a user, and a loser” - as she’s asked by her teacher Mr. Noblet, played by Colbert, to sus out whether or not her locker-mate is, as the school authorities suspect, retarded and rat her out. Colbert’s character advises Jerri to “be careful,” because if her locker-mate “suspects anything, she may fly into a rage where she would have the strength of an ape, and no remorse,” and warns her that in this heightened state, “not even a bullet would bring her down.”
Watching this today and understanding that it was the proof of concept that lead to a TV program receiving a budget to be produced and aired on basic cable feels like peering into another dimension. It’s not only something that simply couldn’t happen in our contemporary cultural environment, it’s something that’s basically unthinkable in our contemporary media environment. Sure, a lot of edgier content has moved into small online niches these days, but watching this show today and knowing that it once aired on Comedy Central is extremely jarring.
The pilot’s title comes from an educational audio tape, narrated by Wilford Brimley (unfortunately the impression isn’t particularly good), that Jerry and another student listen to near the end of the episode so they can educate themselves about the mentally handicapped.
Hi. This is Wilford Brimley. Welcome to Retardation: A Celebration. Now, hopefully with this book, I'm gonna dispel a few myths, a few rumors. First off, the retarded don't rule the night. They don't rule it. Nobody does. And they don't run in packs. And while they may not be as strong as apes, don't lock eyes with 'em, don't do it. Puts 'em on edge. They might go into berzerker mode; come at you like a whirling dervish, all fists and elbows. You might be screaming "No, no, no" and all they hear is "Who wants cake?" Let me tell you something: They all do. They all want cake.
A few elements were rejiggered for the series proper and the pilot never aired, but the pilot’s plotline was repurposed for the episode, “Who Wants Cake?” complete with the Wilford Brimley tape and the line about Jerri’s locker mate potentially flying into a rage where she would have the strength of an ape and no remorse.
The show can be pretty off-putting, and it seems like that was by design. It’s something of an acquired taste. Its frenetic energy makes up for the unevenness of the comedy. While there are moments of brilliance in the first season, it really only begins to hit its stride in the second. A lot of the episodes have a hastily thrown together feeling, but there’s significant satirical genius here and some of it is genuinely hilarious.
The show is ostensibly a sendup of old, moralistic after school special programs. In Strangers with Candy, the characters learn the wrong lessons every week.
Blank is grotesque and vulgar - she makes scatological comments at the drop of a hat and continually does bizarre things with her face - but she’s also fundamentally naive and innocent. Her racist commentary is completely unexamined, she hits on everything that moves, and she’s willing to sell out her friends at every turn if it means a chance for her to move up the social ladder might be in the cards.
She’s been living in the American underbelly for 32 years, and a lot of the show’s comedy comes from the absurdity of a woman who’s adopted the ethics of late 20th century street life being dropped into the context of being a suburban high school freshman; meanwhile nobody seems to notice that she’s completely out of place, at least not because she’s a 46 year old ex-prostitute and a (mostly) recovered junkie.
Instead she deals with all of the ordinary difficulties of high school - which the show continually implies really aren’t so different to the difficulties she experienced in prison. She’s arbitrarily judged because she seems like a loser, because her clothes aren’t stylish, because she associates with the wrong students; her debate skills are seen as inferior because she’s too fat, she’s deemed too poor to attend a party where all of the students wear the same expensive pair of shoes with the laces untied.
The primary cast of characters consists of Jerri (Amy Sedaris), Principal Onyx Blackman (Greg Hollimon), and two teachers who are having a secret affair behind their wives’ backs, Mr. Noblet (Stephen Colbert), and Mr. Jellineck (Paul Dinello).
There are recurring student characters too, like Jerri’s locker-mate, Tammi Littlenut (Maria Thayer), and her friend Orlando Pinatubo (Orlando Pabotoy).
Jerri’s stepmother is involved in an ongoing affair with her “meat man,” a guy who delivers meat to the Blank residence like a milk man. Did I mention that Jerri’s father is constantly frozen in a catatonic state with a look of overwhelmed shock on his face? Well, at least until he’s devoured by a pack of dogs at some point in the second season.
There are too many bizarre details in this fever-dream of a television show to effectively summarize the damn thing, so I’m just going to highlight some moments that stood out to me.
A particularly strong episode from the first season deals with racism. A student writes the n-word on the wall. It’s unclear who the culprit is. Principal Blackman calls in a former grief counsellor - who’s clearly excited by the drama the graffiti provokes - to handle the situation.
They shake down the student who first found the graffiti, even though he’s got no idea who did it because most of the students have the same camouflaged backpack - he only caught a glimpse of the culprit from behind - and they force him to watch a filmstrip about how racist he is. It’s one of the funniest moments of the series, and in a way it’s a strange example of comedy becoming reality.
A friend of mine described a DEI event he was required to attend at his job that sounded eerily similar to this clip. Attendees were shown an image of a Hispanic man gardening and asked what they thought his profession might be. When they predictably answered, “gardener?” they were quickly scolded and informed that in fact the man was a CEO. When I sent my friend the clip from the show he argued that the tone of the event he attended was in fact even more bizarre and overblown than the satirical filmstrip.
In season two, there’s a great double-episode about Jerri joining a cult. A lot of its brilliance rests in the way the episode continually implies that Flatpoint High is more or less as much of a cult as the cult itself is. Principal Blackman addresses the students through a speaker installed in the forehead of an image of his face, arbitrarily commanding them to stand up and sit down, and the eyes in the image twinkle at relevant moments to emphasize various points he’s making.
Another episode involves a blind student who wants to play on the school’s football team. The Board of Education lets Principal Blackman know that it’s illegal to not let him play.
Blackman initially decides that his hands are tied, no matter how much he wants a football trophy in his office, but the football coach whispers a devious plan into his ear and suggests a scheme to make the blind student feel so unwelcome on the team that he’ll simply quit playing on his own.
Ultimately the plan fails, the blind boy does end up playing, and he abruptly gets tackled by a dozen guys at once. Meanwhile we get momentary provocative sight gags about the Flatpoint High cheerleaders being more or less strippers.
I guess what’s most startling about this show, even though it wasn’t particularly popular when it aired, is that it seems to come from an American culture that wasn’t afraid to make fun of itself relentlessly, and to poke fun in provocative, intelligent ways at ordinary life, drugs, sex, sexual harassment, racism, and especially authority figures. Every authority figure in the show is hypocritical and corrupt, but we get to laugh at them and have fun with it. It’s miles away from the spate of prestige TV shows where the point seems almost to revel in the downbeat misery of the degree to which people can be so corrupt.
Viewers aren’t expected to take what they’re seeing literally; they’re expected to think for themselves, if they feel like thinking at all. If not, they can just have a good laugh at the absurdity that’s unfolding before them. The creators of the show don’t appear to have had a care in the world for the idea that audience might “receive the wrong message” or be somehow swayed to emulate the characters in the program. Instead, the whole show actively unbalances our everyday assumptions and takes the piss out heavy-handed moralism throughout its entire run.
The show’s liberal use of slurs never feels like it’s coming from a place of hatred. The old George Carlin bit about how there are no bad words, just bad intentions comes to mind here. It’s something we’ve seemingly altogether lost track of in the mainstream these days, where what seems to matter most of all is being extremely careful with ones words and keeping up with ever-shifting rules about how words should and shouldn’t be used, and where intention, context, and subtle meaning don’t really seem to be of much importance at all.
Somebody can be ostracized and socially abused, the subject of a witch-hunt, for using words in “the wrong way” (or even simply for being silent and for failing to use words in “the right way”), and we pay no mind to the intentions of the people doing the witch-hunting or the effects of these sorts of social attacks. The right and wrong way to use words seems to be shifting continually, and there never seems to be a consistent set of principals being applied when it comes to these punitive campaigns.
I think Strangers with Candy is a window that lets us glimpse a far healthier sort of culture than a lot of what we’ve been living through in recent years.
It’s possible that a lot of the shift away from these sorts of cultural ambiguities might come down to something that changed in this country after the 9/11 attacks. I think most of us underestimate the complicated psychological impacts that have been reverberating since that day. A shockwave of fear and paranoia shot through The United States and the anglosphere in more generally. Maybe it hit the conservatives first, enflaming anti-Islamic bigotry, but it made its way into most other cultural contexts too. A new emotional tenor of fear and hysteria came to define the entirety of American political discourse, and then that political discourse, supercharged by divisive social media algorithms, began to influence almost everything in our culture.
So much creativity has been hamstrung and dampened in recent years. I think a lot of what’s changed can be traced back to the way The United States, once shielded for generations from mass violence, was finally confronted with the traumatic realities of the world it played no small role in building. We’ve yet to disentangle the variety of multifaceted ways in which all of this has affected us.
We don’t see many popular comedy shows or films these days, and a lot of the comedy we know today has a bitter edge to it. Will this country be able to re-discover its sense of humor and its ability to engage in free-flowing creativity?
In the final, apocalyptic episode of the show, Principal Blackman gradually discovers that the school board is turning his school into a strip-mall, piece by piece. They don’t want to give him the straight dope and keep dodging his questions about it, but partway through the episode he discovers the girls track coach working at a Sticky Bun store called The Sticky Bunnery that suddenly exists inside the school.
Seeing that the end is nigh and that he’s clearly going to lose his school, he’s overcome with an apocalyptic fervor, and in what might be the most stunning sequence in the whole series he leads teachers and students alike in a riot that eventually results in the explosion of the whole school building.
In the aftermath of the mayhem, Principal Blackman, Mr. Jellineck, and Mr. Noblet realize that they’re probably going to jail because they blew up the school and killed a few people, and Jerry lets them know that she’ll lead them to the streets, where they can “fight like dogs for scraps of food” and ‘sell their bodies for smack.’
Principal Blackman delivers the final line of the show: “Lead on, you stupid junkie whore.”