The World of Stuff .com

Is this heaven? No, it’s The Brendan Leonard Show

The summer of 2003 was kind of rough for me. I was getting ready to start high school, and I needed some way to cope with all the stress. I found comfort in two ways: by taking up blogging, and by watching The Brendan Leonard Show on ABC Family.

For several years, this kid named Brendan Leonard and his buddies had been producing a silly little TV show that was broadcast on Chicago-area cable access. In May of 2003, when Brendan was 19, ABC Family picked up The Brendan Leonard Show for national broadcast while allowing him to retain total control over the show’s production.

The show applied silliness and surreal humor to real and imagined situations, with Brendan’s friends and family members making regular appearances. Some episodes had a plot or theme; others just consisted of Brendan and pals horsing around the way 19-year-old guys do. Some episodes were made up of sketches or vignettes; others consisted of single takes, with the screen freezing before commercial breaks and unfreezing after as proof to the viewer. Each episode’s soundtrack consisted of indie rock tunes from the “band of the day.” There was nothing else like it on TV.

I mentioned BLS quite a few times during the early days of this blog. (Here was the first mention.) A reference to the show even made its way into the local newspaper article about me and the site. So, when the show ended in October 2003, I was sad to see it go. (I even tried to start a campaign to send spatulas to the network, referencing a classic sketch about clever uses for them.) Later, new episodes appeared on the Web under a different name (ABC owning the rights to the original), but it just wasn’t the same.

During that summer, the show had developed a small cult following. Fans clamored for a DVD release, but to no avail. So you can imagine how surprised I was when Brendan Leonard recently started uploading clips from the show on YouTube. Here are some of my favorites out of the ones that have been posted so far:

• Brendan hears an ice cream truck coming and tries to borrow enough money from his friends before it gets away. The sketch consists of a single take.
• Brendan and friends take a yoga class that devolves into madness. There are a lot of great lines (and facial expressions) in this one; I could still remember some of them after seven years.
• The gang spoof those morning shows on network TV with a show-within-a-show. In this clip, you can also see BLS‘s super-cool opening credit sequence.
• Brendan and pals discover random objects in the bushes and try to find out what they can do with them.
• To promote the show Switched, ABC Family has swapped one of Brendan’s friends with a girl from Texas. The rest of the guys assume their boy-band alter-egos and record a ridiculous song about her.

I think those clips make a good introduction to the show. You can check out more on The Brendan Leonard Show‘s YouTube channel.

By the way, the title of this post is a quote from a portion of the “Under the Bushes” sketch that hasn’t been posted yet. Soon enough, I hope…