Last week, Hulu began promoting Strangers With Candy, the cult classic that ran on Comedy Central for three short and tragically underwatched seasons from 1999 to 2000. (It first streamed on Hulu in 2013).* Rejoice, millennials, for you, too, can witness the exploits of Jerri Blank (Amy Sedaris), the sartorially challenged, openly perverse, and willfully illiterate 46-year-old high-school freshman who has resumed her life exactly where she left off before she ran away to become “a user, a boozer, and a loser.”
As much as Strangers With Candy was a product of its time—a cornerstone of the renaissance of Comedy Central original programming, which also included the early South Park, a rebirthed Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Upright Citizens Brigade, and Viva Variety—it is also timeless in its own bizarre way. Its premise dates it off the bat to the Nixon era, a period that most of its original audience (not to mention today’s) probably did not experience. Specifically, Strangers With Candy was a riff on a television show that began in the ’70s, the ABC Afterschool Special.
Co-developed by Sedaris, Stephen Colbert, Paul Dinello, and Mitch Rouse, Strangers With Candy billed itself as an “after-hours after-school special,” a twisted homage to the those low-budget, atrociously written made-for-TV movies that ran in the afternoons starting in 1972 and running until 1997. The shows—which sometimes featured pre-fame superstars, acting terribly—were a wondrous occurrence, because they dealt with such thrilling and risqué subjects as drinking, drugs, and sex.
Sure, these episodes dealt with such subjects under the guise of getting children and teens not to do those things, but this was also the only time many children and teens were able or allowed to watch those things on TV, so many of the show’s lessons were lost in the glamour of seeing a young Michelle Pfeiffer pound beer out of a can (and thus immediately become a drunk-driving alcoholic), or the low-grade titillation of two teen characters getting dangerously close to hot and heavy (and therefore immediately becoming pregnant).
This kind of overwrought moralism is the core of Strangers With Candy’s satire—even reflected in the title, which describes a situation about which 1970s parents were always warning their children. SWC took that warning and then inverted the villain into a fanny pack–wearing, overbite-sporting, recovered-sex-worker antiheroine.
And although the lighting, camera angles, music, acting, and even the font and rolling speed of the title cards and credits are a dead-on imitation of the Afterschool Special milieu, the educational value was turned on its gray-streaked head. The show contained no likable characters, meta-plots rather than actual plots, and the worst possible life advice deadpanned over a treacly soundtrack.
At the end of the pilot, Sedaris (who wore aging makeup and padding to affect Jerri’s trademark look) reveals her first great lesson directly to the camera: “I might still be doing all the wrong things,” she says, “but at least I’m doing them in the right way.” This is after she’s inadvertently killed a popular classmate after dosing her up on a home-cooked drug called “Glint,” believing she’s followed the advice of Mr. Jellineck (Dinello), the touchy-feely art teacher who’s suggested that the way to gain friends is to “go with what you know.”
The show’s brilliance also lay in its merciless literalizing of old tropes. For example, in “A Burden’s Burden,” the requisite teen-pregnancy episode, Jerri’s P.E./Sex Ed teacher—in a perfectly twisted twist on the old flour-sack exercise—hands the menopausal Blank an actual live infant to care for. Most episodes end with Jerri proclaiming, in the manner of broadcast-network teen drama: “I’ve got something to say!” That “something” is then, invariably, the most ridiculously inappropriate thing anyone has ever heard.
Strangers With Candy was more than gnarled parody, more than absurdism, more than the occasional gross-out gag (Jerri has a voracious and perverse sexual appetite, and her unattractiveness is played for laughs)—it was the earliest showcase for a particular brand of straight-faced bombastic satire that should now be rather familiar to mainstream audiences.
If SWC feels at times like The Colbert Report’s take on a preachy teen drama, that’s because it is—or, rather, it’s the opposite: Colbert’s later personality could seem, in some ways, like a news-satire version of Strangers With Candy. For even though SWC was a collaboration, and Sedaris its ingeniously irredeemable star, its particular humor—bluster and faux didacticism pretending very convincingly to be earnest—is now a cultural staple.
In the end, what makes Strangers With Candy a bit harder to get into this time around is not that it feels dated. It’s also not because its jokes have now morphed from meta-offensive to regular-offensive, though some surely have. (Jerri is, among a litany of other qualities, an unrepentant racist, and jokes that had me laughing in 1999 have me cringing now.) It’s that this great show, even in its most outrageous moments, now seems like the one thing it never used to be: predictable.
Correction, May 25, 2016: This post originaly mistook Hulu’s recent promotion of Strangers With Candy for its premiere on the service. It first premiered on Hulu in 2013.
