Ignoring what he learned in Reality Bites, Ben Stiller is making a Reality Bites sitcom
Although you would think that Ben Stiller would have learned his lesson—after Lelaina saw how he cut up her work for a bunch of network suits, turning it into, like, a joke, when she was just trying to make something real—Stiller is at it again, aiming to transform 1994’s Lisa Loeb-song-of-a-generation Reality Bites into an NBC sitcom. According to Deadline, Stiller will executive produce alongside original screenwriter Helen Childress, replicating the film’s early-‘90s story of a bunch of slacker-era slackers who are armed with zero ambitions, but scores of references to 1970s pop culture. But maybe they cut it up a little, because maybe the movie was a little slow.
And it’s like, okay, you have this great piece of work, and they were just trying to market it. And it's like, they have this audience, and it’s like trying to feed them meatloaf or something—and they don’t want to eat it, right? So you have to give it to them, like, “Here comes the plane! It’s coming into the hangar! It’s a 30-minute NBC sitcom about Gen-X nostalgia! Open up the hangar! It’s not That ‘90s Show!" But it’s still meatloaf, you know?
And okay, it was never meatloaf. That’s a bad… Look, Ben Stiller is sorry, all right? Ben Stiller wishes he could be like your friend Troy. He wishes he could live off of creeds and mottoes and all that shit, right? But Ben Stiller is living in the real world.