NOT QUITE WHAT THEY INTENDED...:

The strange afterlife of the After School Special: These cautionary tales for teens may be easy to make fun of, but their influence lingers on in unexpected ways (Joanna Weiss, January 1, 2006, Boston Globe)

In the beginning, there was nothing campy about them.

For starters, they came out in the '70s and '80s, so everyone had hair like that. But more important, After School Specials had yet to become cult artifacts, cultural touchstones, or anything more than what they were. After School Specials were TV dramas -- and Rob Lowe was just a guy named Rob Lowe. So when he showed up in a Buster Brown haircut in 1980's ''Schoolboy Father," flirted with Dana Plato, and yelled at a bassinet, you just watched. Maybe your eyes teared up at the end. And that was OK. [...]

Let's stop for a minute and accept After School Specials for what they were. Let's examine the legacy of Martin Tahse, prolific producer, teen TV pioneer.

Between 1974 and 1989, Tahse was responsible for 26 After School Specials for ABC, more than any other single producer. He peeked into high school newspaper culture in ''Dear Lovey Hart: I Am Desperate." He let Kristy McNichol play sassy-but-vulnerable in ''The Pinballs" and gave Alateen a plug in ''Francesca, Baby." He got thank you letters from viewers, struck up friendships with young-adult novelists. He took After School Specials seriously, and so, he says, did the teens.

''When we'd be out shooting on location, kids would come up and watch us shooting and would start talking about the last show they saw," Tahse says. ''You could tell that that really meant something to those kids."

In part, that's because the teens had little else to watch. In 1972 -- at about the time Tahse, a former stage producer, arrived in Los Angeles -- ABC executives had spotted an opportunity. Small kids had cartoons. Adults had prime time. The teenage audience was out there, untapped. So the network settled on an occasional series of hourlong afternoon dramas. Tahse aired his first one in 1974: the bully story ''Pssst . . . Hammerman's After You."

At our fraternity we made the After School Special a drinking game, the most gruesome installment of which was She Drinks a Little--though even that was staid by comparison to the Chug Boat episode in which Gopher's former fraternity roommate shows up on board after a sex change....

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 1, 2006 9:41 AM