Parker Lewis Can't Lose

Parker Lewis Can't Lose debuted on the young Fox network on September 2, 1990, produced by Clyde Phillips Productions with Columbia Pictures Television. CBS had developed the show and passed; Fox picked it up. Corin Nemec, who had earned an Emmy nomination the year before for the miniseries I Know My First Name Is Steven, played Parker Lewis, a student at Santo Domingo High School "for whom nothing is impossible." The debt to Ferris Bueller's Day Off was open and obvious — Parker narrated his own episodes, outsmarted every adult in the building and dressed in shirts that could be seen from orbit — and the show outlasted the official Ferris Bueller TV spin-off by a couple of seasons.

Every plan began with the command "Synchronize Swatches," and the answer to every crisis was "Not a problem." Parker's crew was Mikey Randall, a rock-and-roll rebel who spoke in song quotes, and Jerry Steiner, a nerd in a trench coat said to have been made by NASA, from which he could produce almost any object and who addressed everyone as "Mr." Against them stood Principal Grace Musso, who shattered the glass in her office door with a single thumb gesture, her vampiric sidekick Frank Lemmer, who could apparently teleport, and Parker's little sister Shelly, whose every victory came with the cry "My brother is a dead man!" Larry Kubiac, a 270-pound bully whose footsteps caused tremors and whose vocabulary ran to "Eat now?", softened within a few episodes into a gentle giant and ally. Parker's parents ran a video store called Mondo Video. The show played like a live-action cartoon, with pop-culture gags and surreal camera transitions — toned down in the third season, when it was retitled simply Parker Lewis and Parker himself broke the fourth wall to cancel one of the transitions.

It was also one of the first television shows with an organized internet fandom, through an email list called The Flamingo Digest, and some of its members were invited to the set. The series ended on June 13, 1993, after 73 episodes, went straight into reruns on USA that September, and reached DVD through Shout! Factory in 2009 and 2010.