I’m not quite in the demographic or psychographic wheelhouse to have grown up with Pee-Wee Herman as a significant part of my life. When his award-winning PEE WEE’S PLAYHOUSE was winning awards and garnering strong ratings for CBS’ Saturday morning lineup in the late 1980s I was already an adult, at least in name only. And I definitely wasn’t cool or progressive enough to appreciate it on other levels.
But when the gargantuan task of trying to find programming suitable for the fledgling FOX Family Channel that was capable of threading the desired needle of appealing both to children and adults was put before myself and my fellow executives, to a person the majority of them enthusiastically championed PEE WEE’S PLAYHOUSE as exactly what we needed to acquire. I certainly knew about Herman and the show’s impressive legacy, but I knew more about him from the more recent scandal where he was caught in a Florida adult movie theatre engaged in playhouse activity expressly forbidden in public. And when I confessed I had never seen an episode, our ever incideniary boss insisted I spend some time watching a few and add an informed opinion before he was going to decide if we were going to make what for him would have been a significant investment (which, for him, usually meant something only slightly above zero).
So I sought out the counsel of a former colleague of mine who had been with CBS during the show’s run and whom I considered an absolute expert in kids’ TV. He pointed me toward what he felt were the show’s most defining and representative episodes. And yep, I thought it was joyful, adorable, engaging and extremely creative. Playful, one might add. I also couldn’t help but pick up on what appeared to be driving the adult fandom–points poignantly expressed in a review dropped by PEOPLE’s Tom Gliatto on Saturday morning:
To love Pee-Herman was a wonderful thing, a silly and liberating thing. I’m not speaking as someone who as a child watched Pee-wee’s Playhouse — someone, you might imagine, like Greg, the boy who loved to sew on Curb Your Enthusiasm — but as an adult gay man who’d organize his Saturday mornings around watching the latest episode.
In the new HBO documentary Pee-wee as Himself, Reubens, who died in 2023 and revealed he was gay in the documentary, discusses how he’d carefully kept his sexuality hidden for decades. To be out, he said, would have ended his career, at least as a children’s personality. The show, which ran from 1986 to 1991, was rife, and knowingly so, with what we nowadays call gay or queer signifiers — you couldn’t miss them. Randy the puppet looked like a rough-trade Howdy Doody. Pteri the Pterodactyl, anxious and neurotic with a preeningly theatrical voice, wasn’t far removed from one of Samantha Stephens’ flustered aunts on Bewitched (another show that can be mined endlessly for gay subtext). I believe I already mentioned Tito the pool boy, (What children’s show ever featured a pool boy?) And there was Jambi the genie (Paul Paragon), a turbaned, disembodied head radiating light. It’s harder to pinpoint why Jambi was gay, exactly — except to say that if he’d had hands, he’d be folding sweaters.
I cautiously addressed my concern with my far more nuanced colleague, and he confessed that my instincts were accurate; CBS’ research had confirmed it. But he also insisted that his outsized popularity with that constituency had made them far more forgiving of whatever transgressions Reubens may have committed and they were likely to embrace a second chance to rediscover the show–which, of course, featured some pretty impressive co-stars, including Lawrence Fishburne and S. Epatha Merkerson. He didn’t necessarily think we’d garner good ratings–indeed, he reminded that the CBS numbers had declined precipitously even before the Reubens scandal sealed its fate. But, he allowed, if you’re wrong you’ll at least be commended for trying.
As it turned out, he was precient–the rerun ratings were awful–but, then again, so were those of just about everything else that cursed channel tried. But I had developed enough of an affinity for the show–and we had scheduled it in late afternoons when my office was usually quiet enough to multitask and half-watch so that I eventually plowed through the entire series. I can’t say I became an expert, but I did become enough of a fan to be anticipating this past weekend’s release of Reubens’ semi-auto-biographical documentary. And I echo a lot of the compliments that VARIETY veteran Brian Lowry extolled in his review:
Paul Reubens knew he was dying, and the director didn’t, as they were making “Pee-wee as Himself,” an extraordinary documentary that pulls back the curtain on the man known to the world as Pee-wee Herman. While the HBO two-part project is in ways unique, it also represents what might be called the Celebrity Exit Interview, where public figures take control of their stories while there’s still time to do so. Through that lens, “Pee-wee as Himself” joins a small but rich roster of relatively recent documentaries, including “Val,” Amazon’s 2021 look at Val Kilmer, who died earlier this year after battling throat cancer; and “Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie,” an emotional tribute to the actor’s life and career amid his three-decade struggle with Parkinson’s disease.
And with that freedom, we are treated to sides of Reubens rarely seen by the public–his unvarnished, make-up-less truth, which, naturally, had to include a deep dive into his conflict with reverting to a more closeted existence as he skyrocketed to fame in movies and on network TV. It’s raw, it’s honest, and makes you both laugh and cry. And regardless of where you might stand on the morality side one cannot help but appreciate the struggle and why the Herman personna was so essential to Reubens’ existence. In the skilled hands of filmmaker and unabashed fan Matt Wolf, the four-ish hours flies by.
Your memories of Pee-Wee may be fewer than mine, or they may even be more intense than Gliatto’s. Then and now, it was an acquired taste. But it’s a dish worth savoring at some point, and I sure hope you choose to do so earlier than I did. PEE-WEE AS HIMSELF provides you the perfect entry point to start.
Until next time…