Written 8/16/20-8/17/20
*origin*
-I was 14 when I first started working on Thank You, Heavenly. I don't remember where the idea came from, but Sparky was the first character I created back in late 2011. I wanted to make a sitcom based around him called Sparky. In this show, Sparky was going to have a little sister, Manny and Will as his friends, his parents would be living with him, and he would have a crush named Lisa Bennett. I wrote two short stories for Sparky: One where he gets ostracized for never eating ice cream, and a parody of 12 Angry Men, which was really me taking the idea from the Hey Arnold! episode "False Alarm" (years later, this ended up becoming the episode "12 Angry Kids"). For whatever reason, I lost interest in it quickly and months later, I created Buster, RK, and Wade.
-I don't think Sparky was interesting enough to sustain itself for that long, and definitely not for eight years. Eventually, I would have wanted to focus more on other characters. Thank You, Heavenly gave me an ensemble cast that I could use for multiple situations. An episode that works for Buster might not work for Wade, and vice versa. I was able to write episodes based on who the characters were and how they would navigate through the problem, instead of creating a problem and just randomly inserting a character into it.
-From the beginning, Thank You, Heavenly was meant to reflect my experiences, from the people I knew growing up to the TV shows I watched. I remember writing back in 2012 that I didn't think television was what it used to be and I wanted to change that. I wanted to make a show that I wasn't seeing at the time. Looking back, what I said was obviously stupid and poorly thought out. Television might not be what it was back in the day, but that's okay. There will always be shows out there that could have never come out back in the day. When I said that, I was referring to shows on Nickelodeon and Disney Channel. In my mind, I felt like things were getting worse and I had less options to choose from. And eight years later, I still feel that way when it comes to those two networks. The quality of the shows has gotten even worse since 2012, and if I'm being honest, 2012 wasn't a bad year in hindsight. I just didn't appreciate what I had when I had it. I'm a nostalgic person by nature, so I'm always looking back at the way things used to be.
*what "made" the show*
-I've said multiple times that I'm not a fan of the first two seasons of this show, and even parts of the third season are hard for me to look at. I used to be disappointed by this, but when I was making those episodes, I wasn't trying to make random nonsense. I honestly thought what I was doing was good, and I was giving the show my best effort. I shouldn't be looking at the episodes I wrote in ninth grade as my best work, because that means I never evolved. I should be proud of the improvements I made. I knew what I wanted the show to be, but I didn't understand what it took to write a sitcom. That only came from experience, research, and looking at outside opinions. My go-to sources for guidance were the A.V. Club, Mr. Enter reviews on YouTube, Me Blog Write Good, and Boy Meets World Reviewed.
-What made Thank You, Heavenly important to me was the fact that the main characters were all different parts of myself. That was my mentality when I created them, and although they might come off as self-inserts, I never intended for them to be that way. It's just that I've felt like Sparky, a neurotic leader that people admire and respect. I've felt like Buster, an innocent kid that's insecure and doesn't understand simple things. I've felt like RK, a weirdo that people don't gel with in the beginning. And I've felt like Wade, an intelligent guy that keeps to himself and sometimes likes passing judgment on others. All of these different personalities helped drive a lot of the show's conflicts. And even though the boys were reflections of me, I never wanted any of them to be me. For example, RK hates Friends, but I love it. Wade was a member of the Five Percent Nation at one point, but I never have been. I wanted to have some separation between the characters and myself, so they felt like their own people.
-It helps that several of the recurring characters were based off people I went to high school with. I wouldn't have been able to write characters like Anja or Ashley without understanding the nuances of the people who inspired them. They were able to provide a more human element to the show. In the same show where you have an alcoholic drug dealing ex-con alarm clock living with Sparky, you have Halley and Sanna and Gilcania. They were never exaggerated (for the most part) and you could see them existing in real life.
-But the biggest example of this is Jaylynn. While she became more exaggerated over time, the template was always the person that inspired her. I met her in late 2012 and at the time, I thought she was one of the coolest people I had ever talked to. Eventually, she became a character on the show. I dealt with some issues regarding her name, but the fact is that Jaylynn helped improve the show. She was less cartoonish than the boys were, she had a real-life personality to draw inspiration from, and she was someone that already had many difficult experiences. Jaylynn had to grow up quickly and take care of herself, which led to conflicts with the boys because she was from a completely different school of thought. Eventually, she softened up, but she never forgot the essence of who she was.
*the peak/winding down*
-I still think the third season is where the show began finding its true voice. Season two was definitely a progression, but it was this season that I really felt like I was coming up with more original ideas and not just trying to imitate the shows I was a fan of. The "Slice of Fantastica" two-parter, "The Life and Times of Diana Katanova," "Young, Stupid, and Pseudo-Religious," "The Field Day from Hell," "Sparky Inflates the Grade," "The Seattle Cycle," "Thank You for Being an Enemy." I also started studying The Simpsons during this time and seeing what made that show work in the 1990s. The more Thank You, Heavenly felt like its own thing, the more motivated I was to keep working on it.
-While I enjoyed writing the show, I was always worried about doing it past the point of no return. I made that joke at the beginning of the season three premiere ("14 Candles: Up All Night") about the show declining in season four because I genuinely thought I didn't have much time left. The plan was to do three seasons or 100 episodes, then end it all with a movie. But once I started thinking about The Simpsons and how it was able to maintain its quality for as long as it did, I thought I could do the same thing. Plus, I had a lot of ideas I was coming up with at the time, so I realized it didn't make any sense to stop when I was at my peak creatively. That period was between seasons 3-5.
-For a long time, I thought season four was as good as the show was going to get. It was the season I was chasing because that was when the show had become fully comfortable in its own skin. Despite procrastinating multiple times and only putting out 17 episodes, I feel like season four was part of that creative period when Thank You, Heavenly was in its purest form. There was enough to look back to, but more than enough to look forward to. "To Be or Not to Be a Role Model," "The Halloween from Hell," "My Thanksgiving with the CimFam," "Super Bowl Cum-Day III: The Story Box," "The New Sparky MacDougal," "KG the Carnegie," "Night of the Radioactive Hamsters," "The Code," "The Project from Hell," "The Trouble with Militants." I named more than half the season, but a lot of memorable episodes came between 2015 and 2016.
-Looking back, I don't think I fully hit the mark with "The Trouble with Militants" and I wouldn't write it the same in 2020. My problem with it now is that I feel like made the Freedom Crew the villains for the wrong reasons. They were extreme in their actions, but the writing makes it seem like them being a black revolutionary group is a problem in and of itself. That was a really tone deaf way to write them. I should have exaggerated them more instead of playing them as straight as I did. I still think the subplot holds up. I think "The Trouble with Feminists" was a better version of what I was trying to accomplish with "Militants."
-Because of the way season four turned out, I was highly motivated to make season five even better. Everything that was going on in my life and the world at the time helped make season five what it was. For one, I graduated from high school in 2016, so I could categorize the first four seasons as the "high school years" and the last four seasons as the "college years." This was when I hit 100 episodes. This is also when certain things became traditions, like having multiple Halloween episodes a season and multiple cover episodes a season. I think I really leaned in on the absurdity here ("The Homework Machine," "Savi's Revenge," "The Zombies Come Out at Night," "Heterosexuality 101," "You're Welcome, Hellish," "The Greatest Party That Never Happened," "Girl Meets the Express"), more than any season before or after. I don't know if this is the best season, but it's definitely one of my favorites, and in a different world, this could have even been the last season.
-I was definitely hard on season six when it was over. I just remember being disappointed with the season finale because it was something I had set for months. It was going to be this big adventure covering The Simpsons Movie and it ended up being decent, but not as good or as memorable as I was hoping for. Looking back, there were a lot of good episodes here. "The Space Program" was a great way to open up season six because it carried the baton from season five in terms of how weird things could get. A week later, you have "It's My Party (She'll Sneak Out If She Wants To)," one of the most normal episodes of the series. That was the direction I wanted to take season six and I think it shows up in most of the episodes.
-Including "The Space Program," some of my personal highlights were "For Your Playground Only," "Wade Goes to Junior High," "RK's Monster," "The Real Thank You, Heavenly," "The Thanksgiving from Hell," "Don't Curse (for 22 Minutes)," "Another Thank You, Heavenly Christmas," "Table for Five," "Super Bowl Story Box V," "The RK Feline Fiasco Remix," "12 Angry Kids," and "War of the Salehs." I think it was for the best that I tried making more "normal" episodes because then I would have went overboard going for the outlandish plots, but if I had another shot, I would have replaced "The Simpsons Movie: Thank You, Heavenly Edition" with "TYH TakeOver: Brooklyn '18" and "Y2RK."
*closing thoughts*
8/17/20
-Even before I started writing season seven, I knew the eighth season was going to be the last one. At that point, I felt like the show would have said everything it had to say and I would start rehashing ideas just to make more episodes. That huge list of stories I had back in 2016 was getting smaller every year, and whatever stories I had left weren't interesting enough to justify going past this season. I know I've talked about this already, but I really chose the perfect time to end things. 2020 has been a really exhausting year for multiple reasons.
-At the end of the day, I don't think there's much that you can learn from Thank You, Heavenly. I always meant for the show to be written for an older audience, so there was no need to teach morals. Many episodes just ended with sarcastic comments or the characters making fun of the possibility of a lesson. I also tried not to turn the show into my soapbox for sharing personal opinions and politics, but sometimes, I couldn't resist ("These Are Our Heroes").
-I always wondered how the show would have turned out if it gained any kind of a fan base. Other than the occasional comment or an episode being put in the "favorite" section, Thank You, Heavenly existed in a vacuum for all eight seasons. I was really just writing the show for myself. That wasn't the plan in the beginning. I wanted Thank You, Heavenly to be known and paid attention to. In season two, I sent several episodes to Eric Thurm, who worked for the A.V. Club at the time. I started a Facebook page for the show. I even thought about putting up fliers in my neighborhood to promote the season three premiere. After a while, I accepted that it wasn't happening and just focused on telling stories.
-Having the show exist in a vacuum did have its benefits. I was able to do whatever I wanted with it. There were no restrictions or people to cater to. As long as the episodes were up to my standard, I had all the freedom in the world. There were ideas I came up with that sounded stupid or bizarre at the time, and they became episodes. "Thank You, Heavenly's Relapse" was a concept that I could have easily thrown out after getting bored with it, and I was fully prepared to change plans if it failed. But I was surprised at actually completing it. "Girl Meets the Express" was three years in the making, and it almost didn't happen. "The Space Program" is still the wildest season premiere I ever did. And I couldn't have done episodes like "The Life and Times of Diana Katanova" or "The Field Day from Hell" at any other point in the series.
-The thing I'm trying to get across is that when it came to Thank You, Heavenly, I wasn't afraid to try anything. Even if it didn't make sense to some people, I didn't care. Everything, good or bad, was part of my creative vision, and that's what really mattered. Sometimes, I would write dialogue knowing it was odd, knowing it wasn't something most people would say, but if it was funny enough, I went for it. I had to embrace my weirdness and my imagination for this show to last eight years. If I didn't, I would have stopped a long time ago.
*some more closing thoughts*
-If there's anything I would want someone to take away from Thank You, Heavenly, it would just be to embrace friendship. Value the people in your circle and enjoy your time with them while you can. No matter what, I always wanted Sparky, Buster, RK, Wade, and Jaylynn to have each other's back. They would look out for each other and recognize the importance of their friendship. I hope that came across in the writing.
-Before I go, I just wanted to give a shout out to Sykadelix, if she ever sees this. When we started talking, I was in a bad place and I was wondering if the show even belonged on FanFiction anymore. You showed me that my writing was reaching somebody, and you understood everything that I was trying to do, good episodes and bad. I wouldn't have came up with the subplot for "Grandpa's Hands" if it wasn't for you, I wouldn't have been able to finish "20 Years Later" if it wasn't for you, and you gave me "The Blackout from Hell," an episode I'll always remember. Thank you for being a true fan and sticking around until the very end.