Last year, The A.V. Club conducted a Random Roles interview with Paget Brewster, an occasion which led to the uncovering of a video clip believed to have been lost to the ages, one which featured Brewster wearing a self-described “homemade fur bikini” while grinding and lip-syncing her way through a performance of “Killing Time,” by Gun Bunny.
While its importance in the pantheon of pop culture may be negligible, the video—an artifact from the 1994 San Francisco cable access show Strange America—nonetheless helped to paint a picture of Brewster’s career in the days before she successfully pried her way into prime-time, but even at that, it only told half of her pre-breakthrough story. In the wake of Strange America, Brewster found herself in the middle of a decidedly more mainstream television endeavor: hosting a talk show, a gig which she more or less lucked into, as she explained to The A.V. Club:
I was bartending at a bar called The Slow Club in Potrero Hill, and a guy hung out in my bar—because he lived around the corner—and he was a manager. So I said, “Manage me!” And I just kept bugging him to manage me, as I was going to acting school at the Actors’ Lab in San Francisco, and I think I plied him with a lot of martinis and free French fries, but he said, “Okay, I’ll send you on three auditions.” But I didn’t understand that he represented on-air talent like anchor people, correspondents, and journalists. So I went on three auditions to host stuff… and I got a pilot to host a show! [Laughs.] I had no intention of hosting a show. I just made a video of me at the supermarket juggling, I think, and interviewing people in the street, because I had nothing to lose. I was 24 years old, maybe 25, and I was, like, “Well, why not?” And I got a show!
Sadly, efforts to hunt down even so much as a clip of Brewster’s talk show—the cleverly-named Paget—to accompany her Random Roles interview proved unsuccessful. This was no surprise to Brewster, who admitted to The A.V. Club that she’d also tried and failed when she’d embarked upon her own search while also acknowledging that the swing and miss didn’t exactly break her heart:
I can’t find The Paget Show on YouTube anywhere, either, which is probably good, because I looked like Ralph Macchio—I had a flattop—but they dressed me in, like, Cosby sweaters. So it was just a bad look all around. Oh, and lots of rings! [Laughs.] You know, it was the ’90s. And a San Francisco Giants hat. I mean, I looked ugly.
In closing, Brewster added, “Oh, God… I hope you don’t find it!”
And we didn’t, because it wasn’t out there to find… until February 27, when it suddenly was, thanks to the YouTube channel Bay Area ’90s TV.
There’s a temptation to play conspiracy theorist and suggest that Brewster somehow played puppet master and made sure that the one episode of her talk show to surface featured a topic that would make it very, very difficult to point and giggle at the none-more-1995 elements of the show: “Triumph Over Tragedy,” as the installment is called, features interviews with the widow of one of the victims of the 101 California Street shooting, a doctor who rescued a child that had been trapped under the body of his dead mother in the wake of the Loma Prieta earthquake, and other stories which in no way qualify as “a laugh a minute.”