As a result of both heavily hyped events occurring in the same week, the nation may now be facing a serious has-been shortage for the first time in its history.
“People thought that our supply of has-beens from such old TV series as ‘The Brady Bunch’ and ‘The Partridge Family’ would last forever,” says Professor David Bagwell of the University of Missouri. “We’re now learning that this is most definitely not the case.”
America, with its annual influx of failed sitcoms, bomb movies, and one-hit recording artists, has long been seen as a dependable supplier of showbiz castoffs and freaks. But the rising popularity in recent years of such programs as VH1’s “Behind the Music” and “Where Are They Now?” has taken the nation’s has-been reserves down to perilously low levels, Dr. Bagwell says.
“The Minnelli wedding and the Harding-Jones boxing match posed a particularly grave threat because they happened just one week after [1980’s recording artist] Tiffany appeared naked in Playboy,” Dr. Bagwell says.
Possible beneficiaries of America’s has-been shortage, Dr. Bagwell says, include the cast of the ’80s sitcom “The Facts of Life,” as well as the remaining women, thought to number in the thousands, who claimed at one time or another to have been harassed by former president Bill Clinton.
