Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! This Thursdays, I will be reviewing America 2100, which aired its only episode on ABC in 1979. The show can be found on YouTube!
Episode 1.1 “Pilot”
(Directed by Joel Zwick, originally aired on July 24th, 1979)
In 1979, it appears that the comedy team of Chester Barnes (Jon Cutler) and Phil Kreese (Mark King) are on the verge of breaking up. Tired of not finding success and struggling to pay the bills, Chester is thinking of moving home and working for his uncle’s refrigeration company. Phil begs Chester to reconsider. Chester finally agrees to sleep on it. To help him sleep, Phil suggests warm milk and sleeping pills. Chester and Phil go to bed in their small apartment….
….and wake up in 2100!
As the cheery Dr. Karen Harland (Karen Valentine) explains, Chester and Phil died in 1979 but, through the use of science, they’ve been brought back to life! What is 2100 like?
It’s a lot like the 70s, just a little bit tackier.
The Future!
At first, Chester and Phil claim that there were the leaders of America in 1979. When Karen says that the mysterious Max takes a dim view of lying, Chester and Phil admit that they were two unemployed losers. When they ask who Max is, Karen explains that Max is in charge and that everyone has to do what Max is.
Max is a robot, though it’s not a good idea to call him that. He prefers to be called a — wait for it — “computer.” Max speaks with the voice of Sid Caesar. Every child is brought before Max and told what they’re going to do with the rest of your life. “You’ll be a microbiologist,” Max says to one child. “You’ll be a female impersonator,” he says to another. Eventually, Chester and Phil are brought before Max.
“You two will be museum exhibits,” Max says.
Chester and Phil are not happy about that. They want to be in show business! Back at their apartment, they explain to Karen that she’s living a life where there is no freedom and, without free will, life is meaningless. Karen admits that she secretly wants to be a tap dancer. She then shows off a few of her tap dancing moves and the audiences goes wild and the end credits roll.
Wow, I wonder what type of wacky adventures Chest and Phil had in the future!?
Well, they didn’t have any adventures. This pilot aired once and it didn’t lead to a series. Watching the pilot, I could see why the show didn’t work. The two leads were miscast and they both played their roles very broadly. When you’ve already got Sid Caesar providing the voice of a rolling computer, you really don’t need anyone else in the cast to go overboard. It also didn’t help that Chester and Phil seemed to be pretty much interchangeable as characters. The only thing that really distinguished one from the other was that Chester was the one with dark hair.
That said, I am a big believer in personal freedom and I appreciated that this show attempted to make the case for allowing people to be creative and to even screw up occasionally. An America where everyone compliantly takes orders from a computer may have seemed unbelievable in 1979 but it’s a bit more plausible in 2026. Max is basically a less cranky version of Bernie Sanders so it was fun to see someone tell him off, even if it was just Chester and Phil.
Through the Shattered Lens 