It's Your Move

Thanks to Zack Smith for calling my attention to the availability of this ’80s cult flop (well, it’s not a big cult) on YouTube. This show was created by Michael Moye and Ron Leavitt, who had worked together on shows like The Jeffersons and Silver Spoons. For their own show, they pulled Jason Bateman off the cast of Silver Spoons and made him the star of a show that was, at the very least, an attempt to do something a little different from other comedies of the era. Bateman played a kid who is an old-fashioned con-man and scam artist, a Tom Sawyer type of character who used to be ubiquitous in kids’ fiction but is now mostly absent. (He was sold as kind of a cross between J.R. Ewing and Alex Keaton, only younger.) The main conflict of the show was between Bateman and his single mother’s boyfriend (David Garrison) who is essentially an older version of Bateman’s character, and can sometimes foil his scams.