At the tail end of the 1980s, ABC introduced what they called the TGIF block, a three-hour window of programming on Friday nights that, despite being on one of the worst days for a TV show, became home to several key sitcoms over its existence. Some of the shows that were key to the success of TGIF included Full House, Family Matters, Perfect Strangers, Step by Step, and Boy Meets World. Despite the overwhelming success of the TGIF block, it wasn’t without its duds, and truthfully, one of its biggest failures is the series I remember the best. It is my curse.
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One TV series that technically belonged to the TGIF line-up, and which has no cultural relevance and perhaps almost no one remembers, is the 1996 sci-fi sitcom, Aliens in the Family. Thirty years ago today, March 15, 1996, exactly, to date myself, marked the premiere of the first episode of Aliens in the Family, and unlike most of America, my family was seated and ready. We even came back for Episode 2, and after that, Aliens in the Family was over. Despite this, I remember Aliens in the Family and thirty years later still quote one of its characters.
Aliens in the Family Was Clearly Trying to Be the Next Dinosaurs
As the title implies, Aliens in the Family starred John Bedford Lloyd as Doug Brody, the human man who (as the animated opening credits reveal) was abducted by an alien woman (the late Margaret Trigg as Cookie Brody) who immediately fell in love with him. The pair gets married and moves their now blended family into the same suburban home, bringing two human kids (Paige Tiffany and Chris Marquette) under the same roof as three aliens, all of whom have chuckle-worthy names and slightly funnier habits.
Spit, the eldest alien, is like a typical lethargic teenage boy, but one who can expose his brain and spit his lungs out of his mouth; he’s designed to not only deliver grossout humor to the series but also some of its drier jokes as he mocks Earth culture. Snizzy, the middle alien child, has a knack for science like her mother. Finally, there’s Bobut, the infant alien who is clearly the Henson’s next attempt at replicating the success of Baby Sinclair from Dinosaurs. The tiny alien, revealed to be the next “Emperor of the Nertron Galactic Federation,” is smart and devious, while also maintaining some infant-like behavior. For further comedic value, the family hires a nanny (Julie Dretzin) to look after Bobut, naturally leading to major differences between Earth culture and the aliens.
Bobut is one of the only remotely memorable things about Aliens in the Family. For the cold open of the second episode, he wakes up in a panic after delivering some standard baby babble. “The world is coming to an end, the center will not hold, the unthinkable has happened,” Bobut says. After finding his stuffed animal tucked inside his sheets, he sighs and laments, “All is well.” This is the line that has been burned into my brain since I was a kid. Is it really that funny? Not especially, but it made an impression. It’s a good example of the dichotomy of the character; he’s both a pure infant who loves pudding and having Pat the Bunny read to him, but also claims to have read Tolstoy in Russian and decoded Stonehenge.
Aliens in the Family has a premise that makes perfect sense, a bizarre combination of The Brady Bunch and its blended families, with the puppetry of Dinosaurs used to bring the alien side of the family to life. Despite these clear influences and the fact that the series was produced by The Jim Henson Company, the show failed to take off and was met with mixed reviews and even worse viewership upon release. The official numbers for its ratings appear lost to time, but I know for a fact I was among them.
Aliens in the Family May Have Actually Been Ahead of Its Time
It’s not hard to see why Aliens in the Family failed to launch. The series premiered on TGIF while sandwiched between hit sitcoms like Family Matters, Boy Meets World, Step by Step, and Hangin’ with Mr. Cooper, with the short-lived Muppets Tonight as the only remotely similar series on at the same time. The fact that Aliens in the Family was sitcom-shaped made it seem like a good fit, but the trouble with the series is that it had a bizarre and inconsistent tone.
The first episode alone has a typical sitcom structure, with the main plot being that the dad, Doug, wants a promotion at work in order to provide more for his family. To get his dad what he wants, Bobut hypnotizes his boss, who continues to promote Doug to the point that he’s working too much to spend time with his family. Par for the course as far as the sitcom form goes, but Aliens in the Family‘s first episode also has a subplot about Adam, the human son, accidentally killing his class’s pet frog. Snizzy then brings the frog back to life using plutonium, which causes it to grow to kaiju-like sizes and attack their town. It even eats a mailman in one scene and has to be detained by the National Guard (off-screen).
Those two things combined should have been a warning sign before the series premiered that it wouldn’t fit alongside TGIF’s other programming. The same night that Aliens in the Family debuted, Family Matters debuted an episode where Laura learned her plans to attend Harvard University wouldn’t work because her father, Carl, couldn’t afford the tuition. Meanwhile, Aliens in the Family made a joke about how Newt Gingrich was actually an evil alien named Krog whom Spit thought had been imprisoned in the Phantom Zone. The targets for the humor that it was operating in were, pardon the pun, in a totally different galaxy from the rest of TGIF.
Aliens in the Family was cancelled from TGIF after just two episodes, with the remaining six episodes that were produced instead relegated to Saturday mornings. Thirty years later, though, and having revisited the series, Aliens in the Family feels like it was decades ahead of its time. In a world where shows like Rick and Morty and Solar Opposites are popular animated sci-fi shows, Aliens in the Family feels like a forgotten precursor to a lot of the humor that permeates TV now. Cutaway gags like one of the lead characters eating a toaster, so he could get all of the breadcrumbs at the bottom; plus the infant alien using his alien rattle to lock a human baby in a closet are the jokes that would not play at all to mainstream TV audiences in the 1990s, but now, they feel tame by comparison to what we see.
Is Aliens in the Family worth watching now, or was it cancelled and thrown to the dustbin of history for a reason? The answer to that can only be found in the heart of a true pop culture deviant, one whose curiosity can only be satisfied by witnessing bizarre media for themselves. Even if you decide it’s not worth it, I am afraid I will continue to think about Bobut the alien baby from the series for the rest of my days, and I can’t be held responsible if you find yourself under his spell too.
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