Tucker, The Accidentally Pro-Pedophile Nickelodeon Sitcom

The year 2000 was a wild-ass time.

Most of my writing career has focused on conflict, terrorism, and collapse. There’s more of all that than ever going on, yet instead of writing about fascist violence or the encircling authoritarian billionaire class, I’m here today to tell you about Tucker.

No, not Tucker Carlson. This Tucker is a TV show from way back in the year 2000. It was produced by NBC, and aired on that network in the U.S. and in Nickelodeon in Ireland and the U.K. The show comes up on Twitter now and again because actor Seth Green plays himself, as a pedophile, in the series. But before we get into that, let’s have some context.

Americans are famously bad at talking about class. Most of our shared cultural myths exist to dispel the idea that there are any sort of meaningful class divides in this country. If anyone can get rich with just a little hard work, then the wealthy and the poor aren’t really separated by anything but a little elbow grease. Most popular entertainment in this country more-or-less backs the myth of the American dream, and up until the late 1980s you’d be hard-pressed to find anything on TV that seriously refuted it.

Then came The Simpsons, in 1989, after eight years of Reaganomics and the utter electoral defeat of the American left under Carter. Today the show is something of a Zombie. It plays to the worst instincts of upper-middle-class liberal Harvard types and hasn’t delivered anything genuinely subversive in decades. But when it first came out, The Simpsons was the only prime-time show to focus on the struggles of lower middle-class people who had no hope of ever being anything else.

The family struggles constantly with money, and Homer’s every attempt to improve his situation is stymied by his own incompetence and the corrupt and venal elites above him. This is a world where the police are inherently dishonest, the rich are pure parasites, and the public school teachers drink themselves to sleep at night. It was a great show.

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“Please, please, kids. Stop fighting. Maybe Lisa’s right about America being the land of opportunity, and maybe Adil has a point about the machinery of capitalism being oiled with the blood of the workers.”

But by the end of the 90s, the Simpsons was passing its prime and headed into the long darkness that brought us moments like the infamous Elon Musk episode. Lisa, who once organized a union strike at the nuclear power plant, calls him “possibly the greatest living inventor”. It’s rough.

The good news is that a whole generation of writers were raised on the old, good Simpsons episodes. And as the new millennium dawned, a new sitcom launched that would catalogue the travails of America’s working poor: Malcolm in the Middle. It’s since been heralded by some as a “socialist masterpiece”, and like the Simpsons it never pretended that poverty was a trap with any hope of escape.

Malcolm in the Middle was also a genuine hit. It won seven Emmys and averaged 15 million viewers per episode when it launched on Fox in January of 2000.

Now, Hollywood being Hollywood, the success of Malcolm meant that imitators were soon to follow. The worse of these was Tucker, which premiered in October of 2000. Everything about the show, from the musical stings to the choice of male lead, smacked of cheap rip-off.

The titular Tucker was a 14-year-old whose parents had just divorced. His mom, a former home-maker, was forced to move in with her sister’s family and take a job waitressing to survive. There are brief stabs at class consciousness here, but the show quickly gets derailed by the most deluded romantic subplot of all time.

Like most sitcoms, Tucker launched with a “will they, won’t they” romance between its male lead, Tucker, and the literal girl-next-door, McKenna. This is all well-and-good, McKenna is 14 and they go to the same school, so nothing weird there. But McKenna also has a boyfriend. That’s pretty par for the course too, but instead of dating some other teenager, 14-year-old McKenna is in a committed relationship with 26-year-old Seth Green.

I want to be very clear about this: Seth Green is not a 26-year-old man playing a high school kid, which would be weird but hardly uncommon. In this show he plays himself, Seth Green the actor. He references his performance as Dr. Evil’s son in his first episode on the series (ep2, “Seth Green with Envy”). Seth Green plays himself as a mature adult dating a 14-year-old girl.

(The actress who played McKenna was 21 at the time, so at least there’s that.)

This is a premise that could work if Tucker were a legitimate piece of satire. In the theoretical good version of this show, Tucker and his mom would still be down-on-their-luck after a divorce. They’d still move in with his sister, let’s say she works some mid-level job for a big Hollywood talent agency. Tucker falls in love with his neighbor, a 14-year-old child actress, and then finds out she’s being pursued by a semi-famous actor. He’s torn between the desire to say something and the fact that her career, and his aunt’s career, will be over if he does.

The list of famous actors and musicians who have sexually pursued children is long indeed. Charlie Chaplin “seduced” his first wife when she was 15. David Bowie and Jimmy Page both slept with the same 14-year-old girl when they were in their mid-20s. Corey Feldman and Corey Haim were both molested by prominent Hollywood insiders when they were child actors. A show that stared headlong at Hollywood’s complicity in pedophilia and the dark moral compromises made by adults protecting their careers would have been ground-breaking.

That is not the path the writers and producers of Tucker chose to take. I’m going to type out the dialogue from Seth Green’s first scene, in episode 2. In this scene Tucker has just snuck into McKenna’s room to deliver a thank-you note when he encounters Seth. The two have this conversation (which you can also watch on YouTube below):

TUCKER: You’re Seth Green!

SETH: Yeah.

TUCKER: The movie star!

SETH: Well, y’know, character actor.

The two chat briefly, Seth invites Tucker backstage at an upcoming concert, and then they get to the crux of the matter:

TUCKER: Seth, don’t you think you’re a little old for McKenna?

SETH: I’ve certainly had that discussion with McKenna’s mom many times.

TUCKER: Oh yeah?

SETH: Yeah, and she thinks I’m so silly every time I bring it up. See she insists that biological age is meaningless, that maturity and compatibility are all that matter, and she’s right of course. But I have to stand firm on my no premarital sex policy. McKenna’s really chomping at the bit on that one!

TUCKER: *moans in agony*

SETH: I figure an 18th birthday-slash-wedding should satisfy everyone.

And that’s it! The scene ends! In the very next scene, Tucker refers to Seth as the nicest guy he’s ever met. I cannot overemphasize how much Seth Green’s character is not portrayed as creepy or bad for this. In one episode Seth and McKenna break up and Tucker decides the right thing to do is to help them get back together.

Watching this show makes me feel insane, like I’ve stumbled into an alternate dimension where everyone is fine with adult men dating girls who are barely out of middle school. And in a way, I guess I have, and that dimension was apparently “the year 2000”. While Tucker only got one season on NBC, the show was sold to Nickelodeon who broadcast it for years in Ireland and the U.K. It was quite popular.

The surreality of watching Tucker is compounded by the presence of some of the most memorable voices of my childhood. There’s Seth Green, of course. But one of the female leads, Tucker’s aunt, is played by Katy Sagal, the voice of Leela from Futurama. Tucker is played by Eli Marienthal, the voice of Hogarth Hughes from The Iron Giant!

Perhaps the most bizarre thing about this show is how little of an impact it’s had on pop culture. I entirely missed its run on air, and only heard about it through occasional semi-viral Twitter posts about how fucking weird it was. If you google the show, most of your search results will be about Tucker Carlson. If you search for “Seth Green” and “pedophile show”, you’ll get a bunch of weird results about the adult male actor who accused Green of pedophilia before committing suicide.

And I guess there isn’t really much to say about Tucker, other than it’s fucking crazy that some TV weirdos started with a premise of ripping off Malcolm in the Middle and wound up having Seth Green deliver an earnest monologue about romantically pursuing a child.