The Full Story of Out of Control

A struggling Nickelodeon made a show about a fake news show, staffed it with a comedy troupe and a crew poached from a film-school "mafia," and handed the host job to a nightclub comic only after Bob Saget auditioned, got passed over, and recommended his friend. That friend was Dave Coulier, who smuggled a catchphrase he had stolen from a childhood buddy onto the air, then carried it to Full House. And the whole Alanis Morissette urban legend that still trails him traces back to these exact Nickelodeon years.

Out of Control was a Nickelodeon sketch comedy series created by Bob Hughes, hosted by Dave Coulier, that ran a single season of 26 episodes from October 6, 1984 to May 1, 1985 and reran until 1993. Built as a parody of a TV news magazine, a show about the making of a chaotic news show, it was credited by Vulture as the first major series Nickelodeon produced on American soil. It launched Coulier's TV career, birthed his "Cut it out" bit, and reran into obscurity, never released on VHS or DVD.

A show about a show, born from a network still finding itself

The premise was one level of remove weirder than a normal sketch show. Out of Control was a fake news program, and the comedy was about the crew making it: Coulier as the level-headed host trying to keep things from going, per the title, out of control, surrounded by archetypes like the plastic-fantastic stage manager Diz Aster, the clueless reporter Scoop, the caustic newshawk Hern Burford, and Waldo the mad inventor. The concept came from former Nickelodeon president Cy Schneider, who wanted a kids show that parodied the news-magazine format, and it was made by MTV Networks out in Van Nuys, California.

Creator Bob Hughes was blunt with Vulture in 2012 about how shaky the ground was. "Nickelodeon was still very much finding itself when we were making Out of Control," he said. "Biggest hit they'd had was You Can't Do That on Television. They were real happy with that. They held that up as a model. Thing is about that show: It was a bunch of young actors. We were doing a show that didn't have kids. That was automatically different from the model we were being presented."

Hughes had come up through USC film school, and he built the show out of its people, pulling much of his crew and cast from what Vulture called the school's "mafia," plus the comedy troupe Duck's Breath Mystery Theatre to write and perform sketches. The budget was nothing. "We didn't have the budget to mess around," Hughes said, "and it was very 'Go into your closet and get whatever clothes you have for a costume.'"

How Bob Saget gave Dave Coulier the job

The host almost was not Coulier at all. According to the Vulture account, Hughes had lifted the idea for the show's sped-up "Hurry Up" segments from a short film by an NYU student named Bob Saget, and brought Saget in to test as host. Hughes did not feel Saget was quite right for it, but Saget had a good friend he thought would be perfect, a Detroit nightclub comic named Dave Coulier. Hughes loved him. Saget would later return the favor on Full House, helping Coulier land the Joey role when the original casting fell through.

Coulier was a 25-year-old comic on the rise when the show found him, and he was unbothered by the kids-network label. "I had never heard of Nickelodeon," he told Vulture by email. "But, I was a grownup child, so I had no reservations about being on a 'children's' network. Cable TV was really the open frontier for television back then. They left us alone, so we had a lot of creative freedom."

What Hughes needed was not an actor but a reactor, someone who could riff on whatever happened around him, especially in field pieces like the "Let's Eat" restaurant segments. In the comedy world of the day, Hughes said, Coulier was the real thing. "For all the bad identity he has as an actor on Full House, which is kind of a sappy show, in the world of comics, in that day, Coulier was a demigod."

The improv, the chicken, and "Cut it out"

The show ran on improvisation, and Coulier's habit of chasing the funny over the script sometimes strained the man directing him. "I just tried to be in the moment and make whatever sketch we were doing work," Coulier told Vulture. "Sometimes sticking to the script seemed to make things less funny. I was always trying to get the crew and cast to laugh at something. It sounds like it may have frustrated Bob. Sorry, Bob."

The results were the parts everyone remembered. Coulier recalled a "Let's Eat" bit at a fried chicken restaurant where he turned a whole chicken into a puppet, and the collapse it caused behind the camera. "Again, it was a lot of improvising," he said. "And I can still hear Bob and Larry laughing when we were playing around. A lot of times, we didn't have a planned sketch. It was like: 'Let's come up with something funny. Okay, hand me that chicken.'"

He also voiced the show's animated characters, building each on the spot: "They would show me a character and I would come up with a voice. One of my favorite characters was named 'The Critic.' I looked at that character and the first voice that I came up with made us laugh. It was a very simple process, really."

And it was here that the catchphrase that followed him for decades first went on tape, though Coulier is careful to say it was not his to begin with. "I stole 'Cut it out' from my childhood friend, Mark Cendrowski," he told Vulture. "I told him that one day I would use that for something. Mark and I used to shoot 8mm movies when we were growing up in Detroit. He's now one of the most successful directors in television and directs The Big Bang Theory." The bit went from Out of Control to Full House and became one of the most quoted lines on 80s and 90s television.

The Alanis Morissette legend, cleared up by the man himself

No conversation about Out of Control escapes the rumor, because the show put Coulier on Nickelodeon at the same moment a young Alanis Morissette was on the network's You Can't Do That on Television, which fed years of speculation that he was the ex behind Jagged Little Pill. The people who made Out of Control mostly found the geography impossible. "I always heard that story, but I don't know how they would have been able to do that," Diz McNally told Vulture. "Her show was filmed in Canada and we were down here in Van Nuys, California. She never came on the set."

Coulier put the timeline on the record himself. "Alanis and I didn't start dating until 1992," he told Vulture. "We saw each other a couple years after Jagged Little Pill. She was a really sweet person. The two Nickelodeon shows that we appeared on were merely coincidence. It's kind of weird that this story has become such fodder for an urban legend." The two shows overlapping on one network in the mid-80s was, in his telling, nothing more than that.

The makers knew exactly what they were doing

For a kids show, Out of Control had an attitude, and the people who made it are cheerfully unrepentant about it. The writing had a stated ethos. "Our motto was that we were 'scientifically stupid,'" writer Larry Sulkis told Vulture. "We were definitely engineering stupidity and stupid situations. It was fairly anti-authoritarian."

Hughes framed the mischief as a feature. "We have no regrets about misleading children," he laughed, before adding the sincere version underneath the joke. "Bear in mind, this was not a mean-spirited show. This was a fun show. But, we were always trying to encourage people to look their own way and be their own man." The cast became a springboard well beyond its one season: Dennis Miller appeared in two segments, Joel Hodgson of Mystery Science Theater 3000 was among the hosts considered, Bill Bixby guested, and a field producer named Robert Yeoman went on to shoot every live-action Wes Anderson film.

How the telling has grown over the decades

Out of Control is obscure enough that its record is thin and its definitive telling is singular, which is worth stating plainly rather than dressing up.

• 1984 to 1985, the paper trail. The archival record fixes the facts the makers do not always remember precisely: created by Bob Hughes for Nickelodeon, hosted by Dave Coulier, premiered October 6, 1984, ended May 1, 1985, one season of 26 episodes, executive producers Bob Klein and Bruce Littlejohn, made by MTV Networks, with reruns continuing until 1993.
• 2012, Vulture. Mathew Klickstein's oral history "Getting Out of Control" is where the story actually lives. It is unusually deep for a forgotten one-season show: the creator (Hughes), the star (Coulier, by email), the stage manager (Diz McNally), a writer (Larry Sulkis), and Duck's Breath's Merle Kessler all went on the record, producing nearly every quote worth having about the show, including the Saget hand-off, the "Cut it out" theft, and Coulier's own correction of the Alanis legend.

The honest note here is about scarcity, not drift. Unlike the loud, endlessly retold Nickelodeon hits, Out of Control was reran "to death," in Hughes's words, then vanished, never issued on VHS or DVD. The two threads that outlived the show, the "Cut it out" catchphrase and the Alanis rumor, get retold constantly, but almost always in the context of Full House and Jagged Little Pill rather than the show that started them. The 2012 oral history is the one place the makers sat down and told the Out of Control story itself. Where their memories and the paper record diverge, on exact ages and dates, the record here holds the numbers and the makers hold the color.

The honest bottom line

Out of Control was a cheap, one-season, film-school lark on a network that barely knew what it was yet, a fake news show whose biggest legacy is a catchphrase its host admits he stole and a dating rumor its host says is not even true. It never got a home-video release and most people who loved it cannot find a clip. And none of that is the point. It was the room where Bob Saget handed Dave Coulier a career, where a comic learned he could carry a show by reacting to a rubber chicken, and where a network figuring itself out let a bunch of "scientifically stupid" adults make exactly the show they wanted. The hits got the DVDs. This one got the origin story.

Sources

• Vulture, "Getting Out of Control," oral history by Mathew Klickstein with Bob Hughes, Dave Coulier, Diz McNally, Larry Sulkis, and Merle Kessler, April 16, 2012.
• Wikipedia, "Out of Control (TV series)," for air dates, season and episode counts, network, creator, and production credits.

More show stories live at /full-story/. Related: the Nickelodeon show the makers held up as their model, the full story of You Can't Do That on Television.

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