It's Your Move
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It's Your Move was a short-lived television sitcom starring Jason Bateman, Tricia Cast, Caren Kaye, Ernie Sabella and David Garrison. The show originally aired on NBC from 1984 to 1985.
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[edit] Premise
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.
[edit] Beyond episode 13
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 canceled.
[edit] "The Dregs of Humanity" episode
Many fans consider the two-part episode "The Dregs of Humanity" to be one of the classic moments of '80s television. In this episode, Matthew crafts the rise and fall of a band--The Dregs of Humanity--posing as their manager, booking them for his high school dance, selling them to MTV, the Palladium, and Rolling Stone magazine, and finally sending them to a watery grave over a cliff into the ocean--all the while never letting on that the "band" in fact consisted of four skeletons stolen from the biology lab.
[edit] Cult following
The show gained a cult following chiefly due to being rerun (albeit in heavily edited form) on the USA Network from 1989-1992, and its hardcore fans remain hopeful of an eventual DVD release of the unedited episodes.
[edit] Influence
The Matthew Burton character was both controversial and revolutionary in an era of sweet-faced TV teens in that it championed, essentially, a cutting-edge, teenage hustler (at the time considered "a pint-sized J.R. Ewing"). Some have seen him as the forerunner (conscious or otherwise) of such later characters as Ferris Bueller and Parker Lewis.
[edit] Producers
The show's creators were Michael G. Moye and Ron Leavitt, who some years later would take the harder tone of the It's Your Move concept and put it in an entirely different context--Fox's Married...With Children, in which Garrison starred for four seasons.
It's Your Move was produced by Embassy Television. 18 individual episodes aired from September 26, 1984, until August 10, 1985.
