We all know how it ended for Drexell's Class. By October 29th 1992 the ephemeral Fox sitcom had been consigned to the murky wastelands of cultural oblivion, its final gasp of recognition consisting of a backhanded send-off in The Simpsons' "Treehouse of Horror III", where it was depicted as lying six feet under at the Springfield Cemetery. But let's backtrack a year to October 31st 1991, when things were a little rosier for the Dabney Coleman vehicle, and it had the honor of rubbing shoulders with The Simpsons' preceding Halloween offering, "Treehouse of Horror II", aka The Greatest Treehouse of Horror Installment of All Time (not a universal opinion, but one I'll gladly stand by). As we reach the 30th anniversary of "Treehouse of Horror II", it remains as fresh, intelligent and as fiendishly delectable a Halloween special as it's ever been. One day I hope to have a crack at giving it the full and loving coverage it richly deserves. In 2022, maybe. This year, for whatever reason, I feel the urge to throw a curve and pay tribute to the smaller, forgotten program forever destined to languish in its shadow. "Best Halloween Ever" is is!
The premise behind Drexell's Class is that the protagonist, Otis Drexell (Coleman) was a convicted tax dodger living in Cedar Bluffs, Iowa, who was forced into a teaching post at the desperately understaffed Grantwood Elementary as part of the conditions of his suspended sentence, and now spends his working days trying to make a decent impression on his fifth-grade charges. Do they respect him as an authority figure? Hell no. Drexell found even greater antagonism among the school staff, particularly fellow teacher Roscoe Davies (Dakin Matthews) and Principal Francine Itkin (Randy Graff), who was swapped out for Principal Marilyn Ridge (Edie McClurg) later in the series' run. Drexell was also a bitter male divorcee, a common protagonist archetype in 1990s situation comedies (see also Friends, Frasier, The Critic, Stressed Eric), and had to cope with the challenges of being a single parent and raising two teenage daughters, Melissa (A.J. Langer) and Brenda (Brittany Murphy).
My curiosity regarding Drexell's Class was piqued by the aforementioned reference in "Treehouse of Horror III", but due to the relative obscurity of the series I have thus far been limited to whatever tidbits the VHS crowd have been merciful enough to upload to YouTube. At the time of writing I have seen exactly three and a half episodes out of a total eighteen. Which admittedly represents a very limited sampling of the series overall, but is still sufficient for me to have formed a decent impression of the basic set-up, what works about the show and what doesn't. The one really obvious thing Drexell's Class has going in its favour is that Coleman is a charismatic actor, and with the right material, one can imagine him finding quite a nice little niche for himself in television (some would say he'd already found the right material a decade prior with NBC's Buffalo Bill, which despite being warmly received and nominated for numerous Emmys did not get further than two seasons). The series' biggest weakness, IMO, is that the interplay between Drexell and his titular class isn't terribly compelling, in spite of Coleman's charisma. His young co-stars aren't to blame, either - it has more to do with how the characters are written, in that Drexell's pupils don't talk like real kids. Rather, they talk the way a cynical, middle-aged sitcom writer envisions children would talk when they need them to act as mirrors to cynical, middle-aged anxieties. For every would-be authoritative statement that exudes from Drexell's mouth, these kids always have some kind of slickly calculated, withering one-liner to knock him down a peg and get the laugh track hollering, and that gets wearisome quickly. I don't want to be overly critical of Drexell's Class, because it is, at its worst, fundamentally watchable; seldom laugh-out-loud funny, but it does make for a perfectly pleasant time-filler. At the same time, I'm not massively surprised by its failure to leave much of a dent in contemporary zeitgeist. Coleman aside, it doesn't have many truly outstanding qualities (Matthews, maybe).
I will, however, credit "Best Halloween Ever" with this much - it follows a similar format to the early Simpsons "Treehouse of Horror" installments, in having Drexell relate three different horror-themed stories to his incredulous pupils, and it does so in a manner that honestly makes better sense, in context, than at least half of those early Treehouse of Horrors, back when they felt obligated to incorporate some kind of framing narrative to account for their looser reality. Don't get me wrong, The Simpsons always had the superior product, but I've mentioned before that I always felt there was something intrinsically hokey about the implication that the family were telling stories about themselves (one reason why I'll got to bat for "Treehouse of Horror II" - having the characters dream their nightmare scenarios instead of voluntarily vocalising them bypasses that whole contrivance). Drexell shares the Simpsons' vanity - he casts himself in two out of three of his spooky stories, the remaining tale being a grisly bit of character assassination levelled at those aforementioned staffers with whom he does not get along. Like the original "Treehouse of Horror", "Best Halloween Ever" rounds things off with its own personalised tribute to a work from Edgar Allan Poe, "The Cask of Amontillado" in this case. All three stories have an obvious running theme, in that they reflect those cynical middle-aged anxieties with which Drexell grapples every day, the underlying joke being that the realities of adulthood are far more terrifying than the cliched yarns his guileless audience request about serial killers with hooks for hands. No, if schlocky stories detailing the kinds of gruesome smoothie recipes favoured by cannibals are enough to make your stomach churn, you're in for one heck of a shock when it comes to the horrors of work, marriage and the impending threat of empty nest syndrome.
The set-up for "Best Halloween Ever" is that the episode takes place on a particularly wet and windy Halloween - traditional recess has been cancelled and the reluctant Drexell is charged with keeping his restless students entertained indoors. Drexell also has Itkin on his case for parking his car in her designated spot, and she forces him to venture out into the storm during one commercial break to move it, causing Drexell to gripe that some higher power clearly has it in for him (as always in scenarios like this, it's not altogether clear if he's talking about a deity or the show's production crew). The kids demand that Drexell fill the time by telling them a few scary stories, although Drexell's horror palette is evidentially more nuanced than theirs - he hints there's plenty more horror located in life's banalities when he suggests that they try reading the ingredients list on their Twinkie wrappers. It's pointed out to Drexell that Mr Davies is telling scary stories to his class, to which Drexell responds, "Oh great, who wants to listen to a two hour lecture on why he never got married?" I'm not entirely sure what to take from that. Is the implication that Davies is gay (in which case Drexell is a bit of a homophobe - I note that he did earlier mock Davies for having a pedicure), or that Drexell anticipates that Davies is currently airing a wad of dirty laundry about the women in his life? If the latter, then how ironic, because Drexell will end up doing much the same thing soon enough. Eventually, he decides to bite, and tells a triad of stories that draw from the horrors of his own humdrum existence. I actually really like the premise of an older character attempting to explain adulthood to a young, barely receptive audience through a series of coded horror stories, but how does "Best Halloween Ever" rise to the potential?
The least interesting of the vignettes is the first one, a take on the creation of Frankenstein's monster that has Davies concocting an even greater abomination against nature, ie: Itkin. There's not much of a purpose here, other than to emphasise how much Drexell detests both characters' guts, although it does allow Matthews to partake in some reasonably enjoyable hamming. The kids aren't overly fazed by this story, so Drexell ups his game by telling them the story of his first marriage, and how Mrs Drexell transformed into a shrieking overbearing monster seemingly overnight - right about the point that the spark went out of their sex life and it dawned on him that their union actually meant signing up to contract of never-ending compromise and accountability. The idea here is to filter Drexell's embittered misogynistic grievances through the iconography of slasher pictures - so we have Mrs Drexell debut wielding a meat cleaver and wearing a Jason Voorhees hockey mask, and later still an in-law surfaces in the guise of Freddy Krueger. It's an inventive enough metaphor for the death of the honeymoon phase, the main shortcoming being that the writing is so stuffed full of corny one liners and trite caricatures regarding the banalities of marital strife - the compromise that proves to be Drexell's breaking point is that he leave the toilet seat down, for eff's sake - that it's difficult to say whether they're supposed to have quotation marks around them or not. It's not as though the rest of Drexell's Class is overwhelmingly devoid of corny one liners, after all. At least there's a fair amount of kitsch value to be found amid the frugally-budgeted nightmare visuals. Despite Drexell's blatant biases as narrator, I think that my sympathies are ultimately with Mrs Drexell - if you ask me, Drexell made the crueller demand of the two, in that he apparently insisted on a pet-free household. The monster! Drexell shortly discovers that his grudging disillusionment is no match for the jaded indifference with which these children are accustomed to living - the real punchline to Drexell's marriage story comes not from the Freddy Krueger-dressed in-law, but the reaction from the pupil who points out that, "How's that story supposed to scare me? I see stuff like that every day." Touché.
Drexell's third attempt to scare his class witless involves how he allegedly dealt with a teenage menace named Chad whose interest in his daughter Melissa had woken up his jealous paternal urges. This is a call-back to a scene at the beginning of the episode, when we saw Chad show up and forwardly court Melissa at the breakfast table, to Drexell's evident disapproval. So he took care him, so he claims, the same way Monstesor took care of Fortunato, by luring him down into the basement and sealing him behind a wall of brick and mortar. In Fortunato's case, it was never made clear quite what he'd done to warrant such a grisly retribution from Monstesor. Here, Chad's crime is two-fold - he seeks to supplant Drexell, not merely in Melissa's affections, but as the household's dominant male, a point he makes by brazenly draping himself across Drexell's territory and insinuating that he's getting past his prime ("I respect my elders, and frankly you're overqualified"). But he also makes Drexell uncomfortably aware of his teenage daughter's changing physique - at one point, Chad shares the bold observation that Melissa has a "great body", with which Drexell hastily agrees before self-awareness has his teeth gritting. His entombment of Chad thus comes off not merely as a measure to deny Melissa her developing sexuality, but an attempt to repress his own latent stirrings, so squeamishly personified by the smug little challenger stretched out on his recliner. Initially, Drexell counters Chad's defiance by returning home with a copy of the then-recently released The Little Mermaid on VHS; Disney, naturally, signifies the realm of sanitised childhood innocence to which Drexell would love to permanently regulate Melissa and Brenda, a yearning he weaponises more brutally when he has Chad sealed behind that wall - unlike Monstesor, who dropped a burning torch through the last remaining gap before sealing Fortunato in for good, Drexell throws in a live rat with the allusive name of Mickey (no rats were harmed in the making of this episode; the one Drexell is holding is visibly made out of rubber). I actually think the entire arrangement is highly unfair on Mickey, a point that Drexell at least remorsefully acknowledges. (I also note that, despite the very obvious "Cask of Amontillado" allusions, the segment is apparently not, at the time of writing, considered notable enough to be listed in the list of adaptations in the story's Wikipedia page.)
On this occasion, the children are vaguely unsettled by Drexell's story, pondering if he might actually be twisted enough to have pulled something like that. Their ruminations are interrupted by the storm outside, which reaches its apocalyptic climax in bringing down a tree upon the school's parking lot. Drexell is certain that this was an act of divine judgement directed at him (either from a deity or the show's production), but is elated when he realises that he outwitted it on this occasion - it struck too late, and wound up flattening Itkin's car in place of his own. It's almost as if the universe was aspiring to take Drexell down a peg, as a counterbalance to the alleged assertion of dominance in his story, but had momentarily overlooked how the pieces had just been rearranged. This leaves Drexell emboldened enough to take his good fortunes a step further. At the end of the episode, a sample of his class show up to his house for some trick or treating; they find it apparently deserted, but there is a note helpfully directing them to the basement. There, they find a bowl of Halloween candy set out before, of all ungodly things, a brick wall. The kids decide to call Drexell's bluff, and go up to the bowl and start helping themselves to candy, not twigging that they are blatantly being set up; sure enough, they hear moaning from behind that wall and immediately flee in terror. We cut behind the wall to reveal - who else? - Drexell standing there and puffing a cigar, defiantly blowing smoke into the stupefied cosmos, delighted to have it quaking in terror at him for a change.
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