Stay Tuned

A husband and wife are sucked into a hellish TV and have to survive a gauntlet of twisted versions of TV shows they find themselves in.

• Director: Peter Hyams
• Genre:Comedy / Fantasy
• Runtime:88 minutes

Cast

John Ritter : Roy Knable
Pam Dawber : Helen Knable
Jeffrey Jones : Spike
David Tom : Darryl Knable / Narrator
Heather McComb : Diane Knable

John Ritter (of Three’s Company fame) plays Roy Knable, a couch potato and struggling Seattle plumbing salesman, and Pam Dawber (of Mork & Mindy fame) plays his neglected wife Helen, a senior Vitamin product manager. After a fight (which involved Helen throwing one of Roy’s fencing trophies into the family television, smashing the screen and matrix as a wake-up call to reality), Mr. Spike (Jeffrey Jones) appears at the couples’ door, offering him a high tech new satellite dish system filled with 666 channels of every program you can’t get on the four big networks (CBS, NBC, ABC, and Fox).

The dish soon sucks Roy and Helen into a hellish television world, full of satirical shows and movies. In some shows, the Knables are transformed into various roles and forms that fit the plot of the movie they happen to be in at the time. If they can survive for 24 hours, they’re free to go, but if they get killed, their souls will go to Satan. They are pursued by Mr. Spike (also known as “Mephistopheles of the Cathode Ray”) who enters some shows along with the Knables in order to halt their advance; he too takes on alternate forms that reflect the themes of the various shows. Roy and Spike continue to fight throughout several shows, even in a cloak-and-dagger scenario where Roy displays a long-buried talent as college fencer.

Salt-n-Pepa make a cameo appearance near the end of the film in a “Hell TV” (MTV) segment. Mr. Spike, the DJ in that segment of the film, throws bladed-records at Roy Knable (dressed in a satirical Prince outfit). However, Roy dodges them all and confronts Spike, winning back the remote, and uses it to save his wife from being run over by a train. At the end of the movie, Spike is succeeded in his soul-gaining job by a new upstart employee and gets torn apart in one of his hellish TV scenarios for punishment. Roy, who had learned a very valuable lesson after his adventure, has dramatically cut back on his TV viewing time and has taken up teaching in a fencing class. Read more

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