It's Your Move

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For other uses, see It's Your Move (disambiguation).

It's Your Move was a short-lived NBC sitcom starring Jason Bateman (before The Hogan Family and Arrested Development), Tricia Cast (who was later on The Young and The Restless), Caren Kaye, Ernie Sabella (The Lion King's Pumbaa), and David Garrison (who would later play Steve Rhoades on Married... with Children from 1987-1990.)

The show centered on Matthew Burton (Bateman), a teenage scam artist who lived in a Van Nuys, California apartment with his older sister Julie (Cast) and widowed mother Eileen (Kaye). Matt ran various underhanded dealings with his high school friends (chiefly his sidekick Eli (Adam Sadowsky) such as term paper sales, exam answer keys, and blackmail.

The status quo of Matthew's world changed forever in the series' pilot, when Norman Lamb (Garrison) moved into the apartment across the hall. A quick-witted but perpetually impoverished writer from Chicago, Norman struck up a friendship with Eileen and the two were soon dating. Dismayed that his mother had chosen someone so far beneath her, Matt set upon sabotaging their relationship, but soon finds he has met his match -- Norman reveals himself to be cut from the same cloth as Matthew, and foils plot after plot.

Matt and Norman's cat and mouse game continued and escalated for thirteen episodes, fighting relentlessly while always shielding the aggressively gullible Eileen from one another's true nature. In episode 14, the series was retooled via the plot device of Eileen finally catching Matthew red-handed during an ambitious (and, somewhat unusually for the show, purely illegal) scheme to prove Eileen's value to her boss. In the remaining five episodes of the series, Matthew's scams were almost completely excised from the show, and It's Your Move became much more of a conventional sitcom. These changes did little to improve the ratings, and the series was cancelled.

Producers/creators Ron Leavitt and Michael Moye would go on to create Married... with Children for FOX.

It was produced by Embassy Television. The show aired from September 26, 1984, until August 10, 1985.

Trivia/Question Am I right in thinking that there was a two-part special where a rock-band of skeletons became 'The Dregs of Humanity' with a more than coincidental passing resemblance to the The Grateful Dead?