In March 2006 I posted a stellar clip from the first episode of Chevy Chase’s defective 1993 talk show. In that clip, Chase pals around with his first guest, Goldie Hawn, and then the two of them engage in some ill-conceived slapstick shenanigans. It was truly unfortunate for all involved.

This morning I discovered another clip from that debut episode, and it’s even better than the one I originally shared here on Panopticist. The Chevy Chase Show’s misguidedness was evident in every frame of the clip I posted last year, but at least Chase had his good friend Hawn on stage with him to act as a buffer. This new clip is the first 10 minutes of the show, and Chase is entirely, existentially alone. The phrase “deer caught in the headlights” is a cliche, but it really applies here. He rubs his hands together; he repeats himself; his eyes dart around. After he’s introduced, he doesn’t have the slightest idea how to silence the crowd’s applause so he can begin his monologue; he’s almost angry that they won’t shut up. He seems acutely aware that the next hour is going to go very very badly.

This is fantastic. Pay attention to his hands.

[via YouTube member MrSitcom2.]

In 1993, some very dumb Fox executives had a very very dumb idea: Let’s give an over-the-hill hack comedian his own late-night talk show! And let’s do it right at the peak of the talk show wars, when the competition will be even fiercer than usual!

The stink bomb that was The Chevy Chase Show first wafted over the airwaves on September 7, 1993, a week after David Letterman’s CBS debut and a week before Conan O’Brien took over as the host of Late Night. If you blinked—or if you were rubbing your eyes because you couldn’t quite believe the awfulness of what you were seeing—then you missed it: The show was cancelled after only five weeks. The end came when the show was ambushed by a Murdoch-funded black-ops team whose members hung Chase upside down from a par can before riddling his sad, humor-free body with automatic weapons. As the stagehands were mopping the blood off the floor and picking up all the tiny bits of Chase’s flesh and brain matter, I turned to my companion and said, “This is the only funny thing that has ever happened on this show.” I was almost sorry to see him go.

I watched The Chevy Chase Show that first night, and the scar on my chin is still healing. Everything about the show screamed “Unprepared! Unwise! Uncomfortable!” Chase was unprepared, the producers were unprepared, the writers were unprepared. Chase twitched so much that he almost transformed himself from a solid into a gas. The four-minute clip below contains part of Chase’s interview with the show’s first-ever guest, Goldie Hawn, as well as their truly unfortunate attempts to get the audience dancing—to “La Bamba”—as the show went to commercial break. Sandwiched in between is a humiliating episode involving a birthday cake and Hawn’s then-adolescent son, Oliver Hudson, who was sitting in the front row of the audience. Notice that Chase can’t even be bothered to put his heart into the obviously planned pratfall with the cake.

(This clip is from one of my Media Shower tapes.)

[UPDATE: In July 2007, I posted another clip from the debut episode.]

See this page for a related 1998 story from The Onion.

The thought of being interviewed on live TV scares me, because I’d probably end up doing something like this:

As far as I know, it was not a prank. But prank or not, it’s compelling viewing. The slow, dull buildup only adds to the soul-crushing horror at the end.