Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
VICI's a Small Wonder!
This show’s about a robot who looks like a little girl. Ted Lawson stole her from his work since his bosses were such big jerks. He’s got some nosy neighbors. Now his family has a secret. Hide and lie to protect inventions. Secrecy increases tension. A family sci-fi sitcom by the numbers. She’s not like other girls… She’s a Small Wonder.
Weird TV shines a light into forgotten corners of television history to examine obscure media through a modern lens. Each week Bill Meeks reviews obscure television shows, made-for-tv movies, and primetime specials. He'll watch just about anything, as long as it's weird.
Introduction
Welcome to Weird TV, the only TV podcast talking about COBOL. I’m Bill Meeks, coming to you from a place that knows all about artificial intelligence, Los Angeles, CA. Today, we’re discussing Small Wonder, a syndicated sci-fi sitcom about a robotics engineer who can’t leave his work at work.
What The Hell Is It?
DRAMATURGY/SOCIAL CONTEXT
Small Wonder tells the story of a suburban family hiding a prototype android the father, Ted Lawson, was developing at his job.
We’ll get into the morality of Ted Lawson’s decision later, but for now I’d like to talk about a trope that was all over the place in the 80s I’ll call…
We’ve Got A Secret
The set-up is this: A normal family or couple has a brush with something weird: An alien, a supernatural spirit, a mythical animal, or a pre-teen android like we see in Small Wonder.
The history of this trope can be traced back to the 1960s, and shows like Bewitched, the story of typical suburban housewife Samantha Stevens, who was secretly a witch!
The biggest “We’ve Got A Secret” sitcom in the 1970s had to be Mork & Mindy, a spin-off of Happy Days.
In Mork & Mindy, a young Robin Williams plays Mork from Ork, an alien who crash lands on earth and is discovered by aspiring News Anchor Mindy.
Things stayed spacey in the 80s, with the hit sitcom ALF defining must-see-tv for NBC.
So, America has a rich history of sitcoms with secretive families. These stories often reflect and comment on society. ALF was a family sitcom with the ever-expanding military industrial complex as the central antagonist. A lot of people see the witches in Bewitched as a metaphor for the gay experience in the 1960s.
When done well, “We’ve Got A Secret” plots allow writers to comment on social ills in a way that’s accessible for any side of the political aisle.
By weaving controversial themes into big fun sci-fi fantasy plots, and using the extraordinary characters and situations as metaphors for real life, these sitcoms pushed social change, filtered through the monoculture of television.
But back to Small Wonder… The star of the show, Tiffany Brissette, who played Vicky, became a minor celebrity at the time, even appearing in her own series of PSAs.
After the show ended, Brissette tried to move into Christian media, like when she co-hosted The 700 Club. Weird how the 700 Club keeps popping up, right? It seems like it was a bit of an off-ramp to stardom back in the 90s.
Anyway, Brissette retreated from public life in the late 90s, and is reportedly working in the medical field these days.
Jerry Supiran, who played the little boy Jamie, is one of many child stars who fell on hard times. In 2012, he found himself homeless, after a combination of a jilted lover and a corrupt financial advisor drained the trust fund he’d build with roles on Small Wonder, Little House on the Prairie, CHiPs, and Mr. Belvedere. He’s doing okay now, though. He’s still in South California, messing around with cars and playing with his dogs by the beach. I tried to get him on, but he’s probably waiting for Josh Gad to ask him.
INSPIRATIONS
Believe it or not, Small Wonder is kind of a reboot. Howard Leeds, producer of Small Wonder, also produced a sitcom in the 60s called My Living Doll. In a similar set-up to Small Wonder, Bob Cummings played Dr. Bob MacDonald. He’s a shrink.
In the pilot, an anti-war scientist gives Dr. Bob a lifelike android so it doesn’t fall into the hands of the military. The android, played by Catwoman Julie Newmar, struggles to learn the logic behind human behavior, so making a psychologist her guide makes a lot of sense.
While critics appreciated My Living Doll for the novelty it was, nobody really watched it. When Bob Cummings left the show early, they wrote his character off and had the sidekick character Peter learn Robot Rhoda’s secret. The band-aid didn’t help, and the series was cancelled soon after.
INTENDED AUDIENCE
Producer Howard Leeds clung onto the idea of a robot navigating modern society, and in the 80s decided the time was right for another bite at the apple. Leeds said: "The idea of a child robot dropped into a comedy situation is a natural evolution for today's video generation. Vicki the robot is more fun than computer games!"
HOW IT WAS RECEIVED
Small Wonder was a syndicated show, aired on random TV stations all over the country, so the bar for success was low. While many critics cite it as one of the worst sitcoms of all time, it aired consistently in the US from 1985 to 1996.
The show was syndicated internationally and did pretty well. A lot of people from India, Pakistan, China, and even Iraq first got exposed to American culture by watching Small Wonder as a family. In some countries, the show was retitled Super Vicky. Love that title!
The show got so popular in India, they even did a remake called Karishma ka Karishma, or The Magic of Karishma.
Now, critics hated the show. Small Wonder often makes the lists of “Worst Sitcoms of All Time.” While researching this episode, I found countless YouTube videos reacting to how cheesy it is. To a lot of people, Small Wonder is a punchline, but it’s not any worse than the 60s novelty sitcoms like The Munsters or My Favorite Martian. If anything, it’s a fantastic 60s show made twenty years too late.
How Well Was It Done?
Is Ted Lawson a moral character?
Ted Lawson brings Vicky home for moral reasons…
So, he’s stealing stuff from work to cheat his employer out of revenue? Nah. He has good reasons for holding on to Vicky.
Ted sees Vicky’s potential to benefit humanity as… Well, a robot education slave. But he doesn’t trust his capitalist employers to use Vicky for anything more than putting labels onto tin cans.
Ted does the wrong thing for the right reason, and the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.
Jaime’s decision to take Vicky out of the house parallels Ted’s decision to bring her home in the first place. They both did something morally questionable for the greater good.
Is Ted a moral character? I’d say yes. What he does, he does for selfless reasons. His bosses and the police would probably disagree… They always do.
Too Hot For Syndicated TV
I watched this show a lot as a kid, and my parents were very strict, especially when it came to sex. The amount of innuendo and horny jokes really surprised me on the rewatch.
Mrs. Lawson’s thirsty nature isn’t the only source of PG-13 funny in Small Wonder. When the neighbor Harriet meets Vicky for the first time, the topic of the birds and the bees comes up.
These jokes are just adult enough to keep parents entertained while flying over kids’ heads. You see this approach a lot, like in this clip from Animaniacs.
The mother character is a thinly-drawn sketch character in this pilot, but eventually they flesh her out by giving her a job as a teacher.
Trapped In The Cabinet
They make Vicky “sleep,” or go into suspend mode or whatever, in a cabinet in Jaime’s room at night. This is a weird choice for a couple reasons. Vicky is an impossibly strong machine, still in the testing phase, and they keep her in their sleeping son’s bedroom? At least he’s not a teenager… In the ongoing fight for robotic rights, putting Vicky in the cabinet seems cruel and unusual. Ted assumes she doesn’t need stimulation or feel emotion, and it’s proven in later seasons that he’s wrong about that.
Don’t worry though. Vicky eventually graduates from the closet to her own room, and even gets a fashion upgrade on her way to becoming a real girl. Still, this is gonna be a bad look when robots do take over.
Too Old For His Age
Like a lot of “cute kids” over the years, Jaime is a kid that constantly delivers punchlines that are “too old for his age.”
It’s straight vaudeville. I’m personally a big fan of quippy kids, but most adults hate it. It doesn’t ring true after they get to a certain age. If I had to point to one aspect that made people call this one of the worst sitcoms ever made, it would be Jaime’s sense of humor.
The Cover Story
This “cover story,” which continues throughout the entire series, is an off-the-cuff, but reasonable explanation. Actually pretty smart for a kid. Even Jaime.
Who among us doesn’t remember a random “cousin” popping up in the neighborhood for a summer or longer?
The Technology
Vicky’s tech
Ted’s bedroom robotics lab looks pretty low-tech, but that equipment cost a pretty penny back in the day. I’m assuming Ted stole this equipment from work as well. It looks like he plugs Vicky in via serial cable, then gives her commands in plain speech.
Now, as unbelievable as Vicky is as a piece of hardware, this plain speech interface he uses to control her seems impossible, especially in the 80s. Back then, this system would have used some archaic language like COBOL or FORTRAN, which is barely human readable even if you know the language. Still, computer programming has always been about breaking down complex instructions into plain language, so it’s not outside the realm of possibility that he developed a plain language instruction set for Vicky.
Green Screen
Small Wonder makes use of early green screen technology to make Vicky perform fantastic feats like turning her head around.
In an interview with Marla Pennington, who plays the mother Joan, she mentions these effects were given their own day on the production schedule. Brissette would go down to set on her own and spend most of the day filming in front of the green screen. This is why, in most shots, she’s the only character on-screen when she does anything fantastically robotic.
IV. Was It Worth Doing?
At The Time It Was Made
Like I said earlier, this was already an old concept that came off as cheesy when it was made. Still, it was a quick, cheap, fun show for TV stations to play before school and on the weekends. Plus, I was obsessed with it. It was my first big bite of weird tv, and inspired a lifelong love of fun quirky shows with unique concepts.
Now
After years of superhero movies, a story about a guy with a robot daughter seems downright quaint. This concept is ripe for a reboot. You could do it as a sitcom again, with much better effects, but I’d go in a different direction.
Let’s Reboot It!
Let’s make Small Wonder dark and gritty for a modern audience. The year: 2021. Ted Lawson brings home a prototype android companion from his job at Facebook because of the privacy implications.
His family agrees to hide their new “cousin Vicky,” who loves breaking free of Facebook’s cloud-based shackles. When Vicky hurts Jaime after he tells her to “hit it” during a dance contest in the backyard, Ted threatens to take her back to Facebook.
Vicky’s eyes glow red. Turns out, what Facebook intended to market as a “physical digital companion” is actually an elite killing machine, one that doesn’t want to go back. She threatens to kill them if they give her to Facebook. Maybe she threatens to destroy their digital lives too.
They agree, and the show turns into a black comedy about this family protecting a secret they no longer want to keep. Can they get the authorities involved without the all-knowing Vicky finding out? Tune it every week to find out! Now that’s a set-up.
V. BITS AND BAUBLES
Jaime is way too pumped about his parents’ anniversary
I love the scene where Vicky mimics the dancing circus clown in the display at the department store. It’s a striking image: A machine that looks like a child mimicking a child’s toy.
Vicky gets more and more “human” throughout the series, but she already shows signs of progression in this episode. She gets offended when Jaime calls her a dumb robot, for one.
While we live in an HD world and you can clearly see the water jug Vicky picks up is empty, I loved using it as a way to show her strength. When I was growing up, everybody had those coolers in their house and they sucked to change out.
Eff Harriet. She’s a little snoop.
ARBITRARY SCALE: 14 Petabytes Of Computer Instructions