Anne Beatts ‘Square Pegs’ Needs To Be Put On Streaming

When Anne Beatts died on Wednesday night (April 7) at age 74, she left behind a rich legacy as a pioneering woman in comedy. We can enjoy her contributions as an editor for the original National Lampoon magazine, as one of the original writers of Saturday Night Live, and even as a co-executive producer on the first season of A Different World. We can even watch Natasha Lyonne portray Beatts on Netflix in the 2018 film about the Lampoon, A Stupid and Futile Gesture.

But why, oh why, can we not yet stream perhaps her greatest achievement? I speak, of course, of Square Pegs.

Square Pegs remains available only for rental or purchase now via Amazon Prime Video or Apple TV. It may only have run for one season on CBS. But for Generation X, those 20 episodes from 1982-83 defined us in real-time, before any John Hughes teen movie and a full generation before Paul Feig and Judd Apatow paid homage to us with their own one-and-done wonder, Freaks and Geeks.

To wit: The cast included the earliest big breaks for Sarah Jessica Parker and Jami Gertz. SJP starred as nerdy Patty Greene, while Gertz played the preppy, peppy head cheerleader, Muffy Tepperman. The cast also included Tracy Nelson (daughter of musician Ricky Nelson), Claudette Wells (who has gone on to a lengthy voice-over career), and Merritt Butrick, who played New Wave music fan and musician Johnny Slash, and went on to play James T. Kirk’s son in two Star Trek movies before dying in 1989 at age 29 of complications from AIDS.

Beatts, who appeared in two episodes as Miss Rezucha, also paid it forward with her almost all-female writing staff, which included Janis Hirsch (Anything But Love, The Nanny, Murphy Brown, Frasier, Will & Grace) Marjorie Gross (Newhart, Get A Life, The Larry Sanders Show, Seinfeld) and a young Andy Borowitz, who was then only two years out of Harvard and not yet the creator of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.

And those 20 episodes covered a lot of cultural and comedy ground.

• Episode three featured a character with Pac-Man addiction (in 1982!), with the character’s exorcism coming courtesy of Father Guido Narducci (Don Novello).
• DEVO performed in primetime for the first time, playing “That’s Good” for Muffy’s Bat Mitzvah, with an uncredited cameo by a then-unknown Jerry Seinfeld!? The Waitresses performed the theme song.
• Paul Shaffer was a musical consultant, and other episodes featured music from Kim Carnes, The B-52s and The Motels.
• Tony Dow, aka Wally Cleaver from Leave it to Beaver, played Sarah Jessica Parker’s estranged dad.
• Martin Mull showed up as host of quiz show. Bill Murray swooped in as a substitute teacher.
• And the 1983 Los Angeles Dodgers even made time for an episode.

Sony Pictures Home Entertainment released the entire series on a 3-disc DVD set in 2008 with eight featurettes, while Mill Creek re-released the series on a 2-disc set in 2014. But still, not on a major streaming platform.

You can find a few episodes ripped to YouTube, but we deserve better. Beatts deserves better.