I’ve spent this week covering the early careers of the Friends cast and have shown how Jennifer Aniston and Matt LeBlanc had to star in some pretty lousy sitcoms before they made it big. However, I don’t think any of them could possibly be worse than the short-lived 1987 sitcom, Second Chance, which featured a teenage Matthew Perry. I’ll let its Wikipedia article provide the summary for this show:
In its original format, the show starred Kiel Martin as Charles Russell, a deceased man, and Matthew Perry as his younger self, who is nicknamed Chazz. In the year 2011, Charles dies in a hovercraft accident, and his soul is promptly sent to the high spiritual palace of Saint Peter (Joseph Maher). It is there that Saint Peter determines that Charles is too good for hell but not good enough to get into heaven; therefore, Charles is sent back to Earth in the year 1987, to re-join his life during the teenage years in order to help himself, through the younger Chazz, make more moral choices.
Looking at this clip, you’d think you were watching a parody of bad eighties sitcoms, but, no, this is 100 % real. What’s even funnier is that after the inital ratings were poor, FOX became desperate enough to negate the entire concept of the show! They re-titled the show Boys Will be Boys and decided to eliminate the whole supernatual storyline with Saint Peter, so that they could focus entirely on the wacky misadventures of Matthew Perry and his friends. It’s kinda like when FOX desperately tried to retool Drexell’s Class by not having any more actual scenes inside Drexell’s class! Anyway, the retooling didn’t work here and the whole show failed miserably, but thankfully for Matthew Perry, he did get his own “second chance” when it came to sitcoms.