Not everything turned out gold for me after the 80's, and I moved to Simsbury, Connecticut because of my father taking a new job in the summer of 1993 as headmaster of The Westminster School (where actress Lake Bell is Class of '97) but I always have considered myself both a product of my very New Jersey background and of that era. It took me 17 years to move back but two years after moving back home to Lawrenceville, my life was progressing in a much different direction. I had burned out from my last job in Connecticut and so out of desperation, I placed an ad on Craig's List (I had actually used the site plenty of times before) about doing some work for any businesses or artists. Writing, blogging, special projects, social media, or anything else I could do or servicably pull off was on the table. I got a response from a produciton company in Willingboro, New Jersey and soon there after I found myself watching the reality singing show competitions at a ferocious pace that I had never done at before.
As an artist myself, I had mixed feelings about them. I felt they were both great and counterproductive at the same time but there I was getting more and more emphatically sucked into scouting talent for this production company to sign. The X Factor was no different. During the first season of The X Factor, there were four extremely talented young ladies auditioning as soloists. Cari Fletcher (of my home state of New Jersey), Dani Knights of California (via South Africa), Paige Elizabeth Ogle of Maryland, and Hayley Orrantia of Texas. I quickly found myself rooting for these women. First off because I found them to be immensely talented but even more passionately because in the entertainment media and on social media they were also taking a critical beating (rather unfairly in my opinion and way too much of it was blatantly sexist).
I quickly developed a rather rabid loyalty to the musically impressive foursome and after they were eliminated I was determined to keep up and in touch with them on social media. I also secretly wanted to help them launch a grassroots movement to keep them nationally relevant and help them promote their music. Then two things happened less than a year after their departure from The X Factor. The first was that Paige left the group to pursue a different career path and go back to school. The second was that I saw that Hayley had posted on her official fan page on Facebook that Lakoda Rayne would be coming to Rider University here in Lawrenceville to perform in September. I was floored.
I reached out to the girls and they had already known who I was online, so it probably helped convince them to agree to meet with me at Rider (which is not even eight minutes from where I live and was even closer when I still lived on campus at Lawrenceville). I met with them and some of their family members for an hour or so and they graciously listened to all of my insane ideas of how I would attempt to help them by launching some experimental grassroot initiatives. They had released a song called "Emergency Brake" and through a friend of Cari's named Ryan Hutchins, a promising young filmmaker, they shot a very impressive video for the song in Cari's neck of the woods in Wall Township, New Jersey. (I personally love it when Hayley belches at the end of it. I always replay that part.)
The ladies and their families were extremely gracious as I rambled on through about fourteen zillion powerpoint presentations on how I would go about helping them but what genuinely impressed me about them was how they were so willing to indulge me and were so generously openminded enough to take a chance on one of their own fans to give an hour's worth of their time, give or take, on hearing out some incredibly unconventional ideas and possibilities. When I asked them how many of them were interested in pursuing acting, which is something I was going to encourage them to do anyway, every single hand went up. They just got it.
What I hadn't anitcipated was that one of them would end up on in an ABC pilot with Jeff Garlin, Wendi McLendon-Covey, Troy Gentile, and George Segal. I was busy bouncing back and forth between practical ideas and shoot-for-the-moon pie-in-the-sky theories and initiatives so my more humble advice was for all three of them to offer their services to local businesses for celebrity endorsement advertising opportunities. I was thinking more along the lines of car dealerships and local community festivals and organizations and then working up from there. I felt very pragmatic in this moment and really felt very much in the zone at this point.
So I was floored once more when I saw Hayley tweet that she had landed a spot in this sitcom pilot about an 80's family. On top of this, one of Jeff Garlin's publishing contacts is a childhood friend of mine due to our parents being colleagues at Lawrenceville. She was four years ahead of me at Lawrenceville and graduated with my brother. Her brother was two years ahead of them. The convergence of all these events coming together could have only been taken as a sign from the entertainment industry gods that many ships were finally arriving. I am still trying to carve out my own niche (hopefully niches though, to be perfectly honest and honestly greedy) and so naturally I allowed myself to read way too much into all of this.
I am a far more secular person than Hayley but I had no choice to take all of this as an omen and not just an omen of Hollywood awesomeness but on a more grandious scale of the universe trying to tell me that possiblities were once again endlessly abound, not unlike the fast moving times of the 1980's. Surely, these themes and realities, both scripted and unscripted, were to be taken as a sign of greatness in the midst and I for one was not going to be left behind. The premise of the show didn't just sound promising enough but the time for a retro-styled sitcom poking fun of and simultameously celebrating the homestretch decade of the Cold War, Miracle on Ice, breakdancing, big hair scale, cartoons, cola wars, and cocaine was perfect because the onscreen adults were young during that era and now a younger generation of Americans will now get an intoxicating taste of what it meant to live in ridiculous times and to both be in on the joke and be the butt end of it all at once.
And make no mistake about it because this show is intoxicating. I have already seen the pilot and it is unsurprisingly hilarious. Jeff Garlin is his usual brilliant self, Wendi-McClendon-Covey is going to become a household favorite, and Troy Gentile is the spitting image of Garlin both physically and in terms of talent and mannerisms. Additionally, Sean Giambrone is the perfect vehicle for which the show is seen through and the legendary George Segal adds his own layer of gravitas as well. Finally, I obviously have an extra layer myself of appreciation for Hayley Orrantia and for me, and perhaps I'm too biased, she is the true breakout star of the show.
I remember REO Speedwagon. I had Gobots, Transformers, G.I. Joe, and Star Wars toys and lunchboxes. I had crazy relatives like everyone else. I remember the feeling of everything feeling so incredibly possible. It was the era of Reagan (love him or hate him) and my favorite childhood actor, Michael J. Fox. The sensibilities of our culture back then might have been routinely absurd but it was also equally routinely spot on in reflecting the more uplifting mood of the times and the spirit from within us. There were plenty of major problems back then and many of our citizenry were undoubtedly left behind but we weren't consumed with the threat of terrorism the way we are now, the constant fearmongering of even the most minor health scares on the nightly news, and worrying about how we would turn out ten, twenty, or thirty years down the road the way we are so obessively preoccupied with these days.
No, we were consumed with John Hughes films, Marty McFly and Alex P. Keaton, and making sure we were strategically using all the current slang. (Spoiler Alert: Tubular was always insanely stupid. And why the hell did I ever slightly roll up my jeans at the bottom? This was stylish? Seriously? How did this ever become a thing?) By then we knew that the Soviets weren't going to nuke us and that we were not just winning the Cold War but running up the scoreboard in the process. We had turned our attention to looking towards Molly Ringwald for leadership on how to deal with and eventually triumphantly overcome all our insecurities of youth and youthful rebellion and navigate ourselves towards happy endings all in about ninety minutes, give or take. Gorbachev? Pfft. What the hell do I have to do to land an American-style girlfriend around here?
It's important to look back to that time period and it's even more important to do so through a comical lense. If I want a fantastic Cold War thriller set in that era, I will continue to watch The Americans on FX, which is indeed amazing as well. It's important to note that we can't be satirical and lighthearted all of the time but given the endlessly dour seriousness of our current times, it's no surprise or coincidence that we are enjoying another golden era of television and cinema and are all investing in our own entertainment both as an entertainemnt industry complex and as consumers of it. We're doing so because we have been scared into thinking that the world is a dangerous place and that we are all on the edge of catosphere. Our technology has exploded and our ways of communicating with each has expanded in unprecedented ways that we couldn't have antcipated back when Tom Cruise was becoming the biggest movie star on the planet and the Iran-Contra scandal was breaking.
The world was a dangerous place back then too. It always has been and always will be. We might not have still been doing duck and cover drills at this point but we were still aware of our threats; we just weren't losing our minds and perspective over them. Perhaps, just perhaps, for half an hour every Tuesday Night on ABC this fall, we can still end up on the floor from laughing instead of nuclear scares, and maybe, just maybe regain our perspective of our more contemporary times and learn to roll with the punches once more. Perhaps we could just, that's right - go back in time? (Please forgive the obvious Back To The Future reference but the series is a hallmark of my childhood. That'd be totally rad. And did I mention that I had a scotch with one Huey Lewis last October because he indeed is a Lawrenceville alum as well? Sorry, that chance meeting is still fresh on my mind as well.)
My name is Jamie Cole and I will be watching and writing about The Goldbergs on ABC this fall on Tuesdays at 9:00 PM. I hope that you will join me.
Here is The Goldbergs cast member Hayley Orrantia of Lakoda Rayne in the "Emergency Brake" video, which was directed by Ryan Hutchins:
