4. Give It A Contemporary Look
One clear edge that After School Specials have on current TV fare is that the characters can hang up pictures of real people and wear clothes with real logos without some network bean-counter demanding that it all be digitally blurred. Are those posters of The Fonz and Pablo Cruise on the wall in Dear Lovey Hart: I Am Desperate? Is that the Thriller-era Michael Jackson in Face At The Edge Of The World? And does that girl in Summer Of The Swans have a sequined marijuana leaf on her T-shirt?
Yes, yes, and maybe.
5. What's Your Crisis?
Remember the scene in Barton Fink where fledgling screenwriter John Turturro agonizes over whether to pair his wrestler hero with an orphan or a dame? In an After School Special, the choice tends to be "absent parent" or "trouble in school." Unsurprisingly, given the divorce-wracked suburban milieu in which these shows were birthed, episodes like A Matter Of Time, My Other Mother, First Step, and Francesca, Baby deal with moms who are either dying or drunk, while in Summer Of The Swans and The Night Swimmers, busy fathers find out how much their kids need them when the youngsters wander off to the creek alone or almost drown in a neighbor's pool. (Jason Hervey, no!)
Educational woes factor into The 18th Emergency (in which a boy learns to stand up to a bully) and Dear Lovey Hart: I Am Desperate (in which a high-school advice columnist learns she can't handle the responsibility). And Tahse frequently brings his two favorite themes together in episodes where competitive young people pursue an interest in music, ballet, or skating—two episodes about skating!—over the objections of their parents.
6. Write At Least One Unforgettable Scene
People vividly remember some After School Specials because they were often traumatic. It's hard to forget Melissa Sue Anderson's younger sister falling out of a treehouse to her death in Beat The Turtle Drum, or future L.A. Law star Michele Greene getting into a stranger's car and hearing, "We're going for a little ride," as a prelude to being raped in the woods in Did You Hear What Happened To Andrea? Equally painful were moments of more relatable humiliation, like when Susan Lawrence gets outed as the anonymous Lovey Hart in Dear Lovey Hart, and the whole school screams for her head.
Even now, the After School Specials are reliable emotion-stirrers. There's something inescapably heady about the adolescent universe in which they take place, where every other child is a special-needs child, and legal guardians disappear or die with astonishing regularity. These aren't cartoons or I Love Lucy reruns. These shows had kids crying into their chocolate milk.
7. Wrap It Up Tight
So your mom just kicked off, your foster parents can't adopt you, you've just had to face your rapist in a police lineup, you realize you never really knew your suicidal best friend, you blame yourself for your sister's accidental death and your brother's accidental drowning, and the boy you've known since third grade has confessed that he loves you. That's rough. But we're at the 38-minute mark, so you'll have to get over it quick.
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