By Jonathan Klotz
| Published
For decades, HBO’s first scripted comedy series, 1990’s Dream On, has been an internet legend. The series was impossible to find anywhere. Not because of the nudity, or the swearing, but the copyrighted movie clips and music. That’s why fans were stunned when it turned up on The Roku Channel, and unlike the version that aired on Comedy Central, it’s the original, uncensored version that aired on HBO.
If you’ve never heard of Dream On, you probably know the show that its creators, Marta Kaufmann and David Crane, put together after the raunchy comedy came to an end. A small sitcom called Friends.
Dream On Took Sitcoms In A Wild New Direction
Friends defined the traditional sitcom, and it would be easy to say that Dream On went the opposite direction and bucked convention, but it doesn’t. The show follows Martin Tupper (Brian Benben), a divorced book editor madly in love with his ex-wife, Judith (Wendy Malick). Martin’s misadventures, involving getting back into the dating pool, trying to co-parent his teenage son with Judith, and navigating a stifling work environment, are all standard sitcom tropes. Except for the constant movie and television clips. And the nudity.
Dream On’s gimmick is that Martin was raised in front of the television to the point that his internal monologue comes out in old black-and-white clips. They range from the opening to “Trojan War” featuring a clip about love from Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone to Marilyn Monroe’s Some Like It Hot. During a single scene, there can be a dozen quick cutaways, sometimes showing Martin’s reactions, other times acting as his responses. It’s a gag that works, and the production team was creative with their choices, digging deep into Hollywood history to find unexpected clips.
Saved From The Dustbin Of History
The plot of each episode doesn’t always revolve around sex, but most of them do. Martin’s dating life is the most unrealistic part of the series. Like Jerry Seinfeld, he has a series of girlfriends far out of his league, but unlike Jerry, he’s shown actually having sex (sometimes with diastrous results). No one on any other 90s sitcom had to face an ethical dilemma in which they discover a video of a popular children’s clown enjoying some adult time. That’s the plot of the Season 4 double-sized opener.
HBO wasn’t yet a media juggernaut when Dream On debuted in 1990, and back then, “HBO Original Programming” was essentially documentaries. The risqué comedy series opened the door for the network’s late 90’s rise with Sex and the City and The Sopranos, and without the misadventures of Martin Tupper, Friends wouldn’t exist as it does today.
Comedy Central aired the series in a heavily edited format, for both nudity and language, from 1996 through 1999, and then that was the last of Dream On. Quietly, the series arrived on The Roku Channel, but it was missing a few episodes. A few weeks later, and even those were ready for streaming, giving everyone complete access to the entire unedited, uncensored series for the first time in decades.
