Austin Stories

[destroya 380]

We miss the Austin of our youth because we miss our youth. But it doesn’t hurt that the Austin of our youth was smaller, cheaper and had less traffic. 

But, yeah, Austin Stories. My then girlfriend’s roommate was on the show. It was pretty bad, but it’s a nice time capsule of the last days of old Austin. 

[wood 11268]

5 hours ago, Ollie Slatt said:

That is actually the simple explanation for all of the Austin used to be better sentiment.  People associate their college years with Austin.  Then when they have a real job, kids, no free time, crushing responsibilities, etc.  . . . Austin seems to have changed and isn't quite as much fun anymore.  

Nah. It might be the simple explanation, but it isn't the correct one. Definitely not in my case anyway. I graduated from UT before Austin hit its peak in the 90s, lived here all through it unmarried & generally unencumbered. It started going downhill late in the 90s while I was still having single fun, & then started accelerating downhill in the 2000s.

Anyone who says Austin hasn't changed massively since then is either full of shit or just clueless. Maybe some of y'all are just too young to remember when it was really so easy to do so many amazing things in Austin on a tiny budget and with zero planning. Not everything can be explained away by "You're just old". Of course everyone misses their youth, but Austin started going downhill long before I got old. It's still awesome, but not nearly as great as it was. 

Edited June 7, 2019 by wood

[drewcifer 33]

15 hours ago, Continental Op said:

20 hours ago, TornACL said:

I don't know man, I can still spend a sleepy lazy afternoon on the patio at Crown & Anchor. Or any of another couple of dozen bars I can think of off the top of my head. 
 

You can spend a sleepy lazy afternoon at any bar if you apply yourself and have a can do attitude.

Saturday afternoon is my favorite time to go to bars, in general. 

[drewcifer 33]

12 hours ago, wood said:

Anyone who says Austin hasn't changed massively since then is either full of shit or just clueless. Maybe some of y'all are just too young to remember when it was really so easy to do so many amazing things in Austin on a tiny budget and with zero planning. Not everything can be explained away by "You're just old". Of course everyone misses their youth, but Austin started going downhill long before I got old. It's still awesome, but not nearly as great as it was. 

Not trying to be a smart-ass... I'm genuinely curious... what were these amazing things that one could do in the 90s that cannot be done now?

Maybe I wasn't doing amazing things at that time so I completely missed out and have no context, but except for playing Madden for hours on end I don't know that a lot of what I did in the late 90s isn't still available to do now.

[Judge Roybeanbag 11821]

20 hours ago, wood said:

We, err I mean some people I knew, used to sneak into Hamilton's Pool at 3am, climbing the fence & descending the old steel stairs that were falling apart & were probably dangerous as shit. Good times.

Yeah I moved here in 1984 and went a few times before it was a park.  Nobody could stop you from jumping off the waterfall.

[wood 11268]

39 minutes ago, drewcifer said:

Not trying to be a smart-ass... I'm genuinely curious... what were these amazing things that one could do in the 90s that cannot be done now?

Maybe I wasn't doing amazing things at that time so I completely missed out and have no context, but except for playing Madden for hours on end I don't know that a lot of what I did in the late 90s isn't still available to do now.

Pretty much the same ones you can do now, but now you're accompanied by 100x as many people doing them as you were then, with tons of traffic, higher cost, trouble parking, more red tape, etc, etc. All that stuff eats into your day and your wallet, big time. I didn't say they were things that you can't do now. It's just that they are much more difficult to do now, & crowded AF,  & you have to plan them out in advance and allow much more time to do them. Swayze's Hamilton's Pool example is a great one. Traffic, parking, overcrowding, lines at restaurants, cost, etc weren't issues at all, so you could spontaneously zip from one thing to the next on a whim ... and we did, often.

 

Edited June 7, 2019 by wood

[utee94 15863]

Look people, just get off wood's lawn, and everything will be MUCH better.  Mmmmkay? ☺️

Here's something that's way better now, than it was in the late 90s-- lines at boat ramps to put-in or get off the water.  There was a peak in maybe 1999 where it was just horrendous.  Every 20-something thousandaire working for a dot-com felt like he just had to spend his money on a brand new boat.  No matter how bad I've seen it in the last decade, it's nowhere near as bad as it was from about 96-2001.

So THERE.

 

[Brisketexan 105366]

Look people, just get off wood's lawn, and everything will be MUCH better.  Mmmmkay? 
Here's something that's way better now, than it was in the late 90s-- lines at boat ramps to put-in or get off the water.  There was a peak in maybe 1999 where it was just horrendous.  Every 20-something thousandaire working for a dot-com felt like he just had to spend his money on a brand new boat.  No matter how bad I've seen it in the last decade, it's nowhere near as bad as it was from about 96-2001.
So THERE.
 

Also, back then, there was NO good bbq inside the city limits. Seriously, you drove to Lockhart etc. County Line was our prize joint.

[utee94 15863]

3 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

Also, back then, there was NO good bbq inside the city limits. Seriously, you drove to Lockhart etc. County Line was our prize joint.

And in 1997 we only had 2 breweries and maybe 4 brewpubs in the entire city.  

[tx 3 putt 77442]

And you liked it !!!!!

[utee94 15863]

Well, I liked the 2 breweries that's for sure.  The brewpubs were... ummmm... present, I guess?

[Judge Roybeanbag 11821]

Yeah there is good and bad.  As mentioned though the crowds and planning required and rules and regulations kinda sucks.  Back in the mid eighties the Fabulous Thunderbirds would put on a sort of mini ACL called Riverfest.  My buddies and I didn’t have enough money for both admission AND expensive vendor beer.  But we did have a couple of canoes and some coolers, so we dragged them down to Congress bridge and paddled down behind the stage.  Security said they wouldn’t hassle us as long as we didn’t get out on the bank.  So we hung out with our feet in the batshit water and enjoyed the free show and our own cheap beer.  I doubt you could get away with that now, or if you did it would be so crowded it wouldn’t be fun.

Edited June 7, 2019 by Judge Roybeanbag

[oSuJeff97 3435]

Wow this brings back memories. I watched this on MTV when it first aired.  

[wood 11268]

20 minutes ago, Judge Roybeanbag said:

Yeah there is good and bad.  As mentioned though the crowds and planning required and rules and regulations kinda sucks.  Back in the mid eighties the Fabulous Thunderbirds would put on a sort of mini ACL called Riverfest.  My buddies and I didn’t have enough money for both admission AND expensive vendor beer.  But we did have a couple of canoes and some coolers, so we dragged them down to Congress bridge and paddled down behind the stage.  Security said they wouldn’t hassle us as long as we didn’t get out on the bank.  So we hung out with our feet in the batshit water and enjoyed the free show and our own cheap beer.  I doubt you could get away with that now, or if you did it would be so crowded it wouldn’t be fun.

Yep.  Riverfest was kind of an attempt to revive AquaFest iirc. Also, remember when well-known bands used to play downtown clubs on like Tuesday night under assumed names? I remember walking along 6th Street once & hearing Texas Flood coming from 311 Club. Walked in & yep, there's SRV up on stage. Paid my $5 & ordered a drink. Place wasn't even full. Or imagine if Stevie Ray was still alive and played a free concert at Auditorium Shores now, like he did back then...

Look guys, I'm not saying there's nothing good here any more. Clearly there is. But if you can't see how much harder, more expensive, more crowded, and time-consuming most of that shit is to do now, then you probably just weren't here when it really was easy. And there's nothing wrong with that. But it's silly to argue with some of us who were here & know what we & you are missing from that era. We're not just making the shit up.

[MAUFRAIS 6638]

Laura was at UT.  We were acquainted.  I found out later that she had a crush on me (to be fair, I wasn't very clued in to reading the signs, and while she was nice and funny, I wasn't interested).  CSB.

Don’t like fatties. Understood.

[JimmyJames 12271]

In 1991 alone, you could have watched nirvana at liberty lunch, Pearl Jam at the back room, smashing pumpkins at Emos, and the replacements at the Union.

And you could have driven home after just a couple beers in a few hours and not be worried about a trip downtown.

The 70’s and the armadillo I’m sure were great but nothing beats Austin in the early to mid 90’s. 

[Deej 76933]

Late 80's, early 90's were prime Austin. So much great music, cheap living, cheap beer, and easy to navigate.

Edited June 7, 2019 by Deej

[JimmyJames 12271]

5 minutes ago, Deej said:

Late 80's, early 90's were prime Autin. So much great music, cheap living, cheap beer, and easy to navigate.

No cover on 6 street ever. Dollar beers and dollar shots.

No traffic. 4 bedroom apartment on south first street next to Barton springs road was $400 a month in the summer, went up to $700 in the fall and spring. 

Its frankly not even fair. 

 

[CoTex 1162]

9 hours ago, drewcifer said:

Not trying to be a smart-ass... I'm genuinely curious... what were these amazing things that one could do in the 90s that cannot be done now?

Maybe I wasn't doing amazing things at that time so I completely missed out and have no context, but except for playing Madden for hours on end I don't know that a lot of what I did in the late 90s isn't still available to do now.

I got you.

can you leave work on Thursday at 5, go to the District to drink tequila with nurses, break up a fight between your boss and Leslie, go to kerbey lane on the drag, watch your boss puke in your truck, make out with a nurse on the bench outside while you wait for your table, eat, drive your boss home at reata on 183 and then take the nurse home in south Austin for fun and games?

 

No, you cannot.  too Much fucking traffic.  It’s not the same.  Trust me.

[Deej 76933]

Had a three bedroom house in Hyde Park in '88 for $300 a month. Not the nicest house, but still...

[destroya 380]

15 hours ago, CoTex said:

I got you.

can you leave work on Thursday at 5, go to the District to drink tequila with nurses, break up a fight between your boss and Leslie, go to kerbey lane on the drag, watch your boss puke in your truck, make out with a nurse on the bench outside while you wait for your table, eat, drive your boss home at reata on 183 and then take the nurse home in south Austin for fun and games?

 

No, you cannot.  too Much fucking traffic.  It’s not the same.  Trust me.

If you’re gonna talk 90s Austin smack, which I fully support, you should know that what is now Kerbey Lane on the drag was a Conan’s in the 90s. 

[wood 11268]

Remember that big-ass Lone Star sign next to Conan's? It made the craziest noises when you'd hit its steel beams, esp if you hit it with a rock or something. Never missed a chance every time I walked by it. /csb

(This is the kind of quality, useful info you come to surly for, right?)

Edited June 8, 2019 by wood

[CoTex 1162]

4 hours ago, destroya said:

If you’re gonna talk 90s Austin smack, which I fully support, you should know that what is now Kerbey Lane on the drag was a Conan’s in the 90s. 

I’ll spot you that my memories of that time are imperfect, but I was dating my now wife in 2001, which means many of the shenanigans had curtailed and I was focused on grad school.

i would wager that KL on the drag was open by 12/31/00.

 

[Deej 76933]

5 hours ago, destroya said:

If you’re gonna talk 90s Austin smack, which I fully support, you should know that what is now Kerbey Lane on the drag was a Conan’s in the 90s. 

As much as I loved Conan's, late night spot was GM Steakhouse. They also delivered.

[Patricio Swayze 17058]

Remember that big-ass Lone Star sign next to Conan's? It made the craziest noises when you'd hit its steel beams, esp if you hit it with a rock or something. Never missed a chance every time I walked by it. /csb

(This is the kind of quality, useful info you come to surly for, right?)

Haha, actually it kind of is, when we are talking nostalgia. My freshman year (1995) my roommate and I would go eat at Players most Thursday nights. We would walk down the drag on the UT side and knock on the lamp posts as we past. The ones with the big white globe looking glass. Every so often one would go out when we would hit it.

[4th&Five 41590]

22 hours ago, JimmyJames said:

In 1991 alone, you could have watched nirvana at liberty lunch, Pearl Jam at the back room, smashing pumpkins at Emos, and the replacements at the Union.

And you could have driven home after just a couple beers in a few hours and not be worried about a trip downtown.

The 70’s and the armadillo I’m sure were great but nothing beats Austin in the early to mid 90’s. 

Still pissed at my mom for not letting me go to this show at City Coliseum in ‘92 because she said I was too young. Had to wait 3 more years to finally see PJ and four more to see SG.

[destroya 380]

2 hours ago, CoTex said:

I’ll spot you that my memories of that time are imperfect, but I was dating my now wife in 2001, which means many of the shenanigans had curtailed and I was focused on grad school.

i would wager that KL on the drag was open by 12/31/00.

 

I'll match your imperfect memories of the time and raise you that we could both be right.  It was a Conan's though at least 97 when I was living in Taos coop.  

What those new to Austin don't get is that the biggest change in Austin is the people it's attracting.  It used to be a bunch of college students and slackers who moved here because it was a cheap and easy place to live a good life.  Now it's 'cool' people who are moving here to do 'cool' stuff.  A lot of those folks make a shit ton of money, too.  I'm not dogging on them, because Austin's been a great place to grow up with. 

[MAUFRAIS 6638]

Still pissed at my mom for not letting me go to this show at City Coliseum in ‘92 because she said I was too young. Had to wait 3 more years to finally see PJ and four more to see SG.

Was that 95 show the one with the KNACK bumper stickers that all the cool guys put on their Broncos?

[Patricio Swayze 17058]

I'll match your imperfect memories of the time and raise you that we could both be right.  It was a Conan's though at least 97 when I was living in Taos coop.  
What those new to Austin don't get is that the biggest change in Austin is the people it's attracting.  It used to be a bunch of college students and slackers who moved here because it was a cheap and easy place to live a good life.  Now it's 'cool' people who are moving here to do 'cool' stuff.  A lot of those folks make a shit ton of money, too.  I'm not dogging on them, because Austin's been a great place to grow up with. 

Very good point about who is moving there now. Or perhaps starting in mid 90s to now.

[billfromlaketravis 11524]

3 hours ago, MAUFRAIS said:

 

Was that 95 show the one with the KNACK bumper stickers that all the cool guys put on their Broncos?

 

Holy s***, what a show. I would have loaded up on beers during Soundgarden and enjoyed Pearl Jam.

Edited June 9, 2019 by billfromlaketravis

[billfromlaketravis 11524]

The show definitely gets the being poor in Austin vibe. Jokes on you Californians! 

[JimmyJames 12271]

On 6/7/2019 at 9:29 AM, drewcifer said:

Not trying to be a smart-ass... I'm genuinely curious... what were these amazing things that one could do in the 90s that cannot be done now?

Maybe I wasn't doing amazing things at that time so I completely missed out and have no context, but except for playing Madden for hours on end I don't know that a lot of what I did in the late 90s isn't still available to do now.

By the late 90’s things had changed. Not as much as they have now of course, but I could tell when I moved back in ‘99 after leaving in 96 that the place was different. Prices on everything were shooting up and it was getting way more expensive. Compared to the east and west coast, of course, it was still nothing but it went from super cheap to just average price.

The movie Slacker as it went turned out to be the greatest time capsule ever created for Austin. Filmed in ‘89. It captured a time in Austin that will never happen again. If you want to know how Austin was in the late 80’s until the mid 90’s, just watch that movie. It will tell the story far better than anything anyone can write on the net. 

In summary everything was super cheap, there was no traffic, you could park anywhere downtown, 6 street was in its heyday, South by southwest was just starting out, anything went and did, and basically we all didn’t realize at the time how lucky we were and how good we had it. 

Its true food is better here now, including BBQ. I guess you take the good with the bad.

Edited June 9, 2019 by JimmyJames

[wood 11268]

5 hours ago, MAUFRAIS said:

 

Was that 95 show the one with the KNACK bumper stickers that all the cool guys put on their Broncos?

 

K-NACK was a helluva radio station. I miss it quite a bit.

[wood 11268]

5 hours ago, destroya said:

I'll match your imperfect memories of the time and raise you that we could both be right.  It was a Conan's though at least 97 when I was living in Taos coop.  

What those new to Austin don't get is that the biggest change in Austin is the people it's attracting.  It used to be a bunch of college students and slackers who moved here because it was a cheap and easy place to live a good life.  Now it's 'cool' people who are moving here to do 'cool' stuff.  A lot of those folks make a shit ton of money, too.  I'm not dogging on them, because Austin's been a great place to grow up with. 

 

5 hours ago, Patricio Swayze said:

Very good point about who is moving there now. Or perhaps starting in mid 90s to now.

Yeah that's absolutely huge. Attitudes have changed so much. 

[chainsaw 9873]

https://www.austinmonthly.com/an-oral-history-of-mtvs-austin-stories/

An Oral History of MTV’s ‘Austin Stories’

Twenty-five years after its debut, the cast and creators behind the cult sitcom sit down to discuss the show that threatened to 'Hollywood-ize' Austin.

Boston had Cheers. Chicago had The Bob Newhart Show. New York had Seinfeld, Friends, and about a thousand others. For a moment, it looked as though Austin might plant its own flag in TV Land with Austin Stories, an MTV sitcom about a trio of aimless twentysomethings muddling through their post-college years. When the show premiered on Sept. 10, 1997, it was a critical smash, even if some of the locals remained predictably suspicious. But despite that acclaim and a loyal following, the show lasted just twelve episodes before it disappeared, another casualty of MTV’s frequent generational shifts. Twenty-five years later, Austin Stories feels like yet another thing about the town where, well, you kind of had to be there.

The fact that Austin Stories happened at all is, in itself, a total fluke. Creator Jim Jones and executive producer Lisa Berger first descended on the city in 1994, arriving as part of a nationwide search for talent MTV could build its first real sitcom around. Jones had recently been in Houston, working on Ben Stiller’s Gen-X rom-com Reality Bites, when he first started hearing buzz about Austin. Convincing Berger to add the city to their itinerary, they set up a showcase for local comics, where they immediately homed in on three young unknowns named Brad “Chip” Pope, Laura House, and Howard Kremer. In a gamble indicative of the freewheeling times, MTV then asked this group to come up with their own show, turning them loose on the streets of Austin to essentially do whatever they wanted.

On the 25th anniversary of Austin Stories’ premiere, we talked to its cast, its creators, and others who had a part in its history about the show’s unlikely existence, its untimely death, and the reason why its memory has endured beyond that idle, idyllic Austin it immortalized, however briefly.

Brad Pope (“Chip”): I moved to Austin in 1987 to go to UT, and I did my first set at The Laugh Stop in the fall of ’88. There weren’t people who had moved to Austin to try to make something of themselves in comedy. There was still just New York and Los Angeles, as far as comedy was concerned.

 

Laura House (“Laura”): I’m from Grand Prairie, so I’m a suburban Texas kid with normal parents. No one was like, “Follow your dream.” Everyone was like, “Well, everybody likes comedy. You’ll be a good teacher.” So, I went to UT. The irony is that I got an English degree, which is not any more useful.

 

Howard Kremer (“Howard”): I’m from Matawan, New Jersey. I went to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York, and the head of the school was a guy from Texas, and the place was just filled with Texans, and they all talked about Austin. Later I moved out to be a waiter on a mountain in Colorado. There was a huge snowstorm, and that’s when I turned to the guy I was with and said, “I have friends in Austin.” And that was it. I drove into Austin three days later, in January 1991. I was a waiter at TGI Fridays at the Arboretum, a doorman at a club on Sixth Street, and I just started doing stand-up. I laid on my friend’s futon and I just prayed it would all work out.

 

House: I got hired at the Laugh Stop selling tickets, and that was how I got into comedy. I ended up getting a job teaching seventh grade, just like my mom, but I did stand-up at night and on weekends. I was always afraid I was going to get in trouble at school for having this weird secret life.

 

Pope: I met Howard in ’93. We both liked hip-hop. Also, there were only a few people doing stand-up in their early twenties in Austin that were any good. That’s really what we bonded over was being younger.

 

Kremer: I saw Chip one night at the Velveeta Room and he was doing a character called Record Sleeve Head Boy. He had a record sleeve on his head. And I thought, Wow, this guy’s funny.

 

House: Howard was a big hero of mine—I mean, no offense to Chip, who’s great. But Howard seemed to understand comedy. He had theories about comedy that I was fascinated by.

 

Pope: It was February ’94 when MTV had the showcase. And there were a lot of good comedians around then, but again, they were considerably older.

 

House: In my mind—and possibly in reality—I had no business being on that stage. It didn’t even occur to me to try. Except, little thing about me, I’ve always been boy-crazy. So, there was a boy comedian who said, “You’ve got to get on that. There’s only one other woman, and she’s middle-aged. You’re in your twenties, you’re cute, and you should be on this MTV showcase.”

 

Kremer: I was leaving for a tour right when the Austin Stories thing happened, so I had to bail and take a 25-hour bus ride from Minnesota back to Austin just to do that. And it was the night that the Cowboys won their first Super Bowl, so we’re rolling through Dallas and it was pandemonium.

 

Pope: That afternoon, I was substitute teaching at Travis High School, and I was writing my setlist for the night. I remember drawing a picture of Martha Quinn’s face on it for some reason, just to get psyched up.

 

House: I remember I went first. My goal that night was to not throw up and run off stage. We weren’t even sure if the MTV people had arrived yet. I was basically introduced to the local scene that night as well. And, at the end of the night, somebody from the audience was like, “I’m Jim, with MTV.”

 

Jim Jones (creator): There was another comic there, Johnny Hardwick—you know, from King of the Hill. And out of that group, we ended up selecting Chip, Howard, Laura, and Johnny. They were the funniest, and they told the best stories. And they were kind of unique and interesting-looking.

 

House: I taught seventh grade the next day, and when I went to work the next night at the comedy club, Margie [Coyle, the owner] said, “You have to find someone to cover for you tonight.” I thought I was in trouble. And she said, “Because MTV wants to take you to dinner.” I don’t know why she needed to make it so dramatic. So, it was me and Chip and Howard and Johnny, and Jim and Lisa [Berger] took us to dinner at Kerbey Lane. We ended up going to Sixth Street and walking around. Joe Rockhead was playing somewhere. We just kind of showed them the town. And MTV called two weeks later and said, “We want to do a show with you guys.”

 

Pope: At first there really wasn’t a concept. We got together with Joe Stillman, who wrote the Beavis and Butt-Head movie with Mike Judge, and he wrote some scripts based on our lives, and we filmed some little vignettes in 1995.

 

Kremer: Laura was doing poetry bits. Chip did a cooking show. We did some bits messing with the drive-thru people at the Jack in the Box down on Barton Springs.

 

Pope: It was maybe like a year from filming these little sketches to the time when they said, “Well, we’re not going to go forward with that.”

 

House: I was a little relieved because I kind of didn’t feel ready for anything anyway, to be honest. So, I continued teaching seventh grade.

 

Kremer: I figured lightning is never going to strike twice in Austin, so I moved out to L.A. I was being a background actor, just sleeping on couches. It was basically the same life I had back there [in Austin], except I did, like, Pacific Blue.

 

Pope: Maybe a year and a half later, these MTV executives went on a retreat to Hawaii, and our tape ended up in a bunch of things they were looking at. I’ve always heard that they weren’t even supposed to watch our tape. It was put in there accidentally. And by now, Lisa Berger was in a higher position at the network. She saw the tape and was like, “Whatever happened to those Austin people?”

 

Jones: I was producing MADtv, and out of the blue, Lisa Berger called me. She needed somebody to come produce Jenny McCarthy’s sketch comedy show. So, I got out of my contract and went over to MTV. Then my agent planted a story in Variety about me producing Jenny McCarthy’s show, and her boyfriend-slash-manager got really pissed because he was a complete control freak. He was so pissed, they no longer approved of me producing her show. Which is one of the luckiest things that’s ever happened to me. So, then I got to develop the Austin show.

 

Pope: We started working on a different version in ’96. We were supposed to do these video wraparounds, like a Beavis and Butthead-type thing. But Jim had the great idea to just take the money and make a pilot.

 

Kremer: Jim brought index cards and basically taught us how to put together the beats of a show. We just holed up and started learning the whole process of writing and coming up with storylines.

 

Jones: At that point, Johnny Hardwick was already doing King of the Hill. I remember him being really upset, because on King of the Hill he was just a voice and he really wanted to be on camera. But in the end, he couldn’t get out of his contract—which was lucky for him, because he made a really good living for probably 10 years.

 

Pope: We shot a 20-minute presentation in the winter of ’96 at, like, Flightpath Coffeehouse and Half Price Books. By March of ’97, they said they wanted to do a series.

 

House: This time they flew us to L.A. We met at a giant building next to Universal Studios, and they were like, “Let’s try to make a show.” And this is so dumb, but I was like, “Can we go ride rides at Universal Studios?”

 

Pope: This is how young I was: When we found out we were supposed to come out to Los Angeles, I just remember going, “I hope it’s not before March 5, because that’s when I’m going to see Luscious Jackson and the Eels at Liberty Lunch.” You’d think you’d care more about a TV show based on your life more than getting to see Luscious Jackson. But just as a side note, Luscious Jackson was great.

 

Pope: We were just thrown in, feet to the fire, to write and produce a TV show—which, of course, none of us had ever done.

 

House: To say I had imposter syndrome would be accurate. I had never even seen a script in script format.

 

---

 

The group holed up for several months, figuring out how to make a show. Their core concept was something unconventional for the ’90s: shooting on a single camera, using 16mm film, and eschewing the jokey punchlines that still dominated the networks. They wanted to blur the line between satire and documentary, with an aesthetic that had more in common with indie film.

Because the cast had very little experience with acting, it was decided they should more or less play themselves, even using their own names. Pope’s “Chip” became an affable doofus, bouncing from one non-job to the next. House’s “Laura” would be the group’s de facto mother, the only one holding down a career at the local alt-weekly. And Kremer’s “Howard” would be a schemer from New York—a “slacker Fonzie,” as House describes him, who was always squiring beautiful women around.

 

---

 

Jones: One of the reasons we set it in Austin is that I really loved the movie Slacker.

 

House: It was the ’90s in Austin, so yeah, we liked Slacker.

 

Kremer: That was a new idea at the time: the slacker. When I went to Austin, I thought, This is a retirement community for twenty-somethings.

 

Jones: I remember somebody saying at the time that there were more college graduate waiters in Austin than anywhere in the rest of the country.

Pope: Slacker definitely was in the blueprint, but it was also for MTV, so you’d have your footage, and then they would put in a Smash Mouth song. Slacker is a pure piece of from-the-heart filmmaking, whereas our show was a more corporate version. But as far as TV influences, for me, it was The Wonder Years, because it was shot on film, and it also was about young people trying to figure out their way in the world. The other big influence was The Larry Sanders Show.

 

House: Larry Sanders walked such a cool line of, Oh, it’s scripted. No, wait, is it? We really wanted it to feel like, “Is this a camera following these people around in Austin? Or is this a scripted show?”

 

Jones: For me, the show was always Slacker meets Seinfeld. Single people who are friends, and it’s basically about what they do when they’re not working.

 

House: Our unofficial title in house was Slackfeld. I think it encapsulates the essence.

 

Jones: One of the challenges is that they weren’t actors, so the trick was to just let them play themselves and do stories that felt pulled straight from their lives.

 

Pope: These were the heightened versions of ourselves. If I were really as dumb as the character I played, I wouldn’t even be able to get out of my car. Howard and Laura were very close to what they were doing in stand-up.

 

Kremer: I’d never been to a place where everybody is so friendly. So, for me, Austin was just, like, this place ripe for a carpetbagger to exploit it. Like, “I’m from the sophisticated big city, and you guys are rubes.” Like Green Acres.

 

Pope: I always think of Howard and myself as the id and the superego. I liken it to Ferris Bueller and Cameron—you know, to quote classic Greek literature. You need the one guy who’s not afraid to do anything because that’s who people want to be. But, in actuality, most people are like Cameron.

 

House: I do remember them saying, “This is MTV. We’re not putting a seventh-grade teacher on the air.” So, they adjusted my life to something a little less boring—like, “Why don’t you write for the local paper?

 

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Rounding out the main ensemble was Matt Bearden, another Austin comic who was brought in to play the group’s obsequious, oddball friend Quinton. Heather Kafka, an Austin native who’d already clocked several TV movies on her résumé, also joined the show as Chloe, a whip-smart hipster who was stuck waiting tables at the gang’s regular hangout.

Pope: Matt Bearden and I became friends in college. We lived at the Taos Co-Op, and he would tell me crazy stories about how, as a little kid, he would go out with a stuffed bunny rabbit and wait for the garbageman. I just remember thinking, This kid is pretty trippy.

 

Matt Bearden (“Quinton”): After I graduated UT, I was selling shoes at REI. I had no money, no friends, no girlfriend. It was a really sh*tty existence. A friend of mine had gone to see an improv show, and he was talking about how hot this girl was in this troupe—and this is how scuzzy I was as a young, lonely guy. I saw they were having auditions, and I was like, Maybe it’s the way to meet this girl. Literally, my whole life came from a woman I had never even seen.

 

Pope: One night in his improv group, Matt was doing an impression of Quentin Tarantino.

 

Bearden: People said that I looked like Quentin Tarantino. I don’t wholly see it. And I don’t think my impression was that good. I think all I did was yell a lot of curse words and get really close to the N-word.

 

Pope: When we started writing Austin Stories, I was like, we could get Matt to come do this Quentin Tarantino energy, and I named the character “Quinton.” But, uh, Matt did not want to do that.

 

Bearden: I got fired from REI because I said, “Hey, I need time off to film this pilot.” And I remember my boss saying, “You really need to consider your priorities here.” I was like, “I have! I would rather do a television show than sell shoes.” And I literally took a pay cut. I made less money a week shooting Austin Stories than I did selling shoes. So, lesson learned.

 

Heather Kafka (“Chloe”): Chloe reminded me of the overqualified intellectual down on the Drag who could definitely win in a war of wits. Like you would find in Slacker, just sitting over some chips and queso, having deep intellectual conversations.

 

Pope: Her character was named after Chloë Sevigny. I was obsessed with that movie Kids. This show could not be more ’90s.

 

Kafka: Chip always said I was the only actor on the show, which, maybe he meant “classically trained.” They were always asking me about acting, and I was always like, “There’s nothing mysterious about it. You’re doing it already.”

 

Brad Pope: Howard is a good actor. Laura and I had not had any experience. But that never entered anyone’s mind. I remember a week before we started, I read this Michael Caine book on acting. And one of the things in there was, if you blink, it makes you look less strong as a character. So, I just tried not to blink. I just look like a zombie when you watch it now.

 

House: There was another teacher at the junior high where I taught who was like, “There’s this great acting teacher who comes to town sometimes, named Stanley Zareff.” So, I tried to cram acting. Like, Oh my God, I’m going to be on TV. Like when we go to the dentist, we all floss, right?

 

Pope: Nobody even had the idea to bring in an acting coach until the seventh or eighth episode. Candy Trabuco. She was Mick Jagger’s acting coach on the movie Freejack. But you know, whenever I was in doubt, I would just think of Bob Newhart—being nervous and trying to think of what to say. It’s a helpful delivery when you can’t remember your lines.

 

Bearden: They would say, “I don’t know how to do these lines,” and we would all just try to figure it out together. I mean, that doesn’t happen in any other project I’ve been on. First of all, if you can’t figure out how to make a scene work, usually you’re not hired.

 

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While most of the storylines were hashed out by the main cast, drawing from their own experiences, they still needed to find a writing staff who actually knew how to turn them into scripts. The search was hampered not only by the show’s limited budget, or the production being located entirely in Austin. There was also the fact that the kind of comedy they were aiming for was so far removed from everything else on TV at the time.

 

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Pope: I have always been a nerdier type, so I read all the spec scripts. I mean, Howard definitely didn’t read 40 spec scripts. And they were all for existing shows, so you really couldn’t tell if someone was talented or not, because the shows at the time were these network shows. There was just not very much stuff that hit the tone.

 

Jones: Because it was a non-Writers Guild show, it was kind of tough getting writers. They also had to agree to move down to Texas for several months.

 

Pope: We found a few people that were young, that wanted a break. We had Charlie Shannon, who was a comedian that was in the show as Lester. Jim hired Jeff Kahn, who he’d worked with on The Ben Stiller Show. Jeff is quite a character. I love Jeff.

 

Jeff Kahn (writer): My first impression of Texas was getting off the plane and saying, “Well, this is way too hot, and I have to go back.” There was a lot of barbecue, and I don’t eat meat, so everybody remembers me going, “This is all cheese and beans and meat! There’s nothing for me to eat here!” As this was going on, my wife and I found out that we were going to have a baby. So, I really found myself to be an outsider there, sort of just in a room alone, writing for seven months.

 

Jones: I brought Patton Oswalt and Blaine Capatch in to be the head writers because we were all working at MADtv at the time, and I don’t think they were particularly happy. But as talented as those guys are, they really just never got the voice. Their material was much jokier than what we were going for.

 

Brad Pope: This is why show business is so insane, because we have to go to Patton Oswalt and be like, “Well, this isn’t working out.” At the time, it was like the worst thing that ever had happened in my short career. I mean, thank God I didn’t have to f*cking do it. Jim did it. I remember going to Patton and going, “This sucks,” and Patton just went, “They popped your showbiz cherry!”

 

Jones: Michael Panes was one of the writers that we brought in who really did get the tone, and then the main director was a guy named Danny Leiner, who went on to do Dude, Where’s My Car? and Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle. The actor who played Laura’s boss at the paper, Andy Brown, he was a good writer as well.  But in the end, the show really came out of Chip and Laura and Howard sitting down and just sort of writing the scripts together.

Filming on Austin Stories commenced in June of 1997, centered on a soundstage constructed inside a former gym on Riverside Drive that housed most of the show’s interior sets. The crew also made judicious use of real-world locations along South Congress and the Drag, filming at everything from Barton Springs to the Capitol lawn to the notorious swingers’ club, Anchovies, and even using Kremer’s actual house as the residence of Laura’s character. Unfortunately, right as it began, the production was waylaid by a personal crisis.

 

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Jim Jones: We spent about three months working on scripts, and then we found out my son had cancer. So, we shut down for about four weeks, and Lisa Berger pushed to bring in another producer. She wanted somebody that she had worked with before, so we brought in George Verschoor.

 

George Verschoor (director): I was the showrunner on the first four seasons of The Real World, and I wanted to get into the scripted world. So, it was a dream come true for me, and it was perfectly aligned with what we had done with The Real World. I had come from more of a documentary approach, where we’d use real locations as much as we could, to not make it feel too closed-in, like a sitcom. So, we tried to get on the street and use the community.

 

House: I remember it was very hot. I don’t have to tell you. It was hot.

 

Kremer: It was just 100-degree days, three, four days a week, just going out into the teeth of the Texas summer and grabbing shots around town. That was a struggle, just to keep the hydration and the energy level up.

 

Pope: We shot at the Capitol. We shot at that weird little runoff thing next to Barton Springs, where everybody brings their cigarettes and their dogs. People would come in and pitch ideas, and it would be, like, “That doesn’t really feel like Austin.” It was pitched that we hung out at a Vietnamese restaurant, and that’s more Houston, really. So that became a Mexican restaurant.

 

Verschoor: I’ll never forget getting an armadillo and running it down the railroad tracks for the opening title. We brought in an armadillo that jumped straight up in the air and escaped and ran away. We were on that bridge over the river and [the City] was, like, “Just make sure the trains aren’t coming.”

 

Pope: I applied to work at Sound Exchange every year that I was in college, and they never even had an interview with me. Ever. So, I remember filming a scene at Sound Exchange, thinking, So, this is what it took for me to look like I work here.

 

Jones: I doubt we ever paid much, if any, of a location fee. That’s a huge difference with shooting somewhere that’s not Los Angeles, because out here, people don’t want you to shoot. Same thing in New York. You’ll just have people coming up, threatening to disrupt the set if you don’t pay them.

Verschoor: We’d say [to the City], “Hey, we want to shoot on Sixth Street.” Oh, yeah, sure. Here’s your permit. You guys want to close down that street? Go ahead. You want to shoot at night? You want a garbage truck? I mean, we’d just flag people down. No one took us that seriously, so we were able to stay under the radar. And all of the crew was Austin-based.

 

Jones: I can’t speak highly enough of the dedication of that Austin crew. Our budget was like $275,000 an episode. Nobody was being paid overtime. Most of the actors got paid very little, if they got paid at all. Once, I went over to HBO, who was interested in developing stuff with me, and they asked, “How did you shoot that show for $275,000?” And I said, “Well, they just didn’t pay anybody.”

 

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Austin Stories didn’t just take advantage of the city’s landmarks. It drew upon its people as well. Locals like KLBJ deejays Dale Dudley and Bob Fonseca and Austin Chronicle writer Tim Stegall turn up in supporting roles; even future-Mayor Steve Adler’s young daughter, Sarah, makes a cameo. Meanwhile, the show also gave several Austin bands some of their earliest exposure to an MTV audience, whether they were actually contributing music, like the Sixteen Deluxe-penned theme song, or just having their posters and T-shirts pop up in the background.

 

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Jones: Everything probably came from Richard Linklater, but we started casting non-actors in speaking parts. We were very open to not having them read lines, to just be in a conversation. I felt it created a texture to the show that made it feel partly like a documentary.

 

Pope: It caused quite a stir because it was the only game in town. I remember feeling bad because I couldn’t put everybody that I knew in it. And then people that I thought would be good for it, the producers didn’t like them. Sometimes it got a little tricky.

 

Kremer: If my friends got a show, I mean, I wouldn’t lobby too hard, but I’d hope they’d put me in it. But there’s just not time to fit everybody in. I’m sure some people were angry.

 

Pope: We had very few people who came in from outside. We wanted it to have that homegrown feel to it.

 

Benjamin Hotchkiss (musician, The Real Heroes/Bongo Hate): I was working at Waterloo Records. A friend of mine that worked there told me she’d been cast on a sitcom being made by MTV, and they were looking for local band posters to hang in one of the character’s bedrooms. I just showed up at the location with a few posters. I remember a girl taking the flyers and then asking me if I’d like to read for a role. A couple days later, someone called and said I got the role of “Pouty,” this Andy Warhol wannabe, in the episode where one of the characters is putting together a band. Anyway, they must have liked me, because later when they needed a band for the house party episode, they called me.

 

Pope: It’s a weird criteria for a show about Austin, but I always thought, If this sounds like it could play outside of Austin, that’s what I want in the show. Like, I wasn’t even sure about the Sixteen Deluxe song being the theme. I wanted DJ Shadow or Brand New Heavies or something. Thank God smarter heads came in and said, “Why wouldn’t we have an Austin band do this?” Bongo Hate came about after listening to their tape and me going, “Well, they sound good, and they’re not a twangy country band.” Because that really was what Austin was associated with back then, that kind of Continental Club stuff. I’d go see Junior Brown every Sunday, but you know, he would not be the theme for an MTV show.

 

Hotchkiss: The Austin music scene, especially back then, had always been very insular. I remember that I didn’t tell anybody that I was going to bring my posters down there. I suppose I feared that people I knew would think it was cheesy. But I didn’t mind if MTV wanted to shake up the status quo a little. Bongo Hate were extremely jazzed to be a part of it. Our drummer decided he would go have a custom bass drum logo made, and in the scene where we’re setting up, you can see he walks in last, very slowly, with the bass drum facing the camera to get as much airtime as possible.

 

Britt Daniel (musician, Spoon): Someone from our label asked me about the show using some of our posters and a T-shirt, and my thought was, Why are they asking me permission to use our merch? Surely there ain’t a law that says you can’t use whatever you want as a prop. But I was happy to hear that our stuff was getting used.

 

Pope: I’ve always loved Spoon, and I had seen them at Hole in the Wall and Liberty Lunch. You hear certain bands where you’re like, That’s my band. They just happened to be in Austin at the same time, and I just happened to be part of this TV show where I could be like, “Can we get some stuff from Matador [Records]? Can I get a shirt?”

 

Jim Eno (musician, Spoon): I remember watching it to see our posters, and Chip wearing that Spoon shirt with Carlos the Jackal on it. I never thought our stuff would be in a TV show. At that point, our first music video had done maybe a couple plays on 120 Minutes, but to get a poster or a shirt in a show, to me, was mind-blowing. It’s just a whole other level, like the first time you play late-night TV or your song is in a commercial.

 

Daniel: It did feel unreal to know that a show on MTV was blasting Spoon merch. Nothing like that had ever happened for the band. And it probably did something for our profile outside of Austin, in a time when very little else was going on for us.

 

Hotchkiss: At the time it did help us. We sold a lot more records locally. It gave us all a little boost. It didn’t land us any label interest, but it was a nice thing to put in a press kit. And, quite frankly, if anyone ever remembers Bongo Hate, it won’t be for our masterpiece record, or for our should-be-legendary, fearless live performances. It will probably be related to that show.

 

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Austin Stories premiered on Sept. 10, 1997, while the show was still in mid-production, arriving on an unusual wave of critical hype. The New York Times called the show “an amiable, unslick alternative to conventional sitcoms,” likening it to the films of Jim Jarmusch. Similar raves poured in from The Los Angeles Times, USA Today, and Entertainment Weekly. Almost every reviewer, it seemed, gave Austin Stories their full endorsement.

But while the national press fawned, the cast found a much chillier reception back home. Many locals didn’t like seeing an MTV-ified version of their town—and some of the more disgruntled had no problem letting them know.

 

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Pope: We were in TV Guide several times as a “Show to Watch,” and that was nuts. In TV Guide there was kind of a timeline of the show’s “DNA” that was like John Hughes, Kevin Smith, and then Richard Linklater—all these pop culture moments that I loved. I just remember thinking, This is it. You’ve peaked at 27.

 

Jones: I don’t think I’ve worked on a show that’s gotten such positive reviews from everywhere. There was this incredible feeling all around the set when those reviews came out. And then, then of course, we all got cocky and thought we were the most brilliant television producers and writers and directors on the planet.

 

Pope: Every once in a while somebody would make fun of it. I have a vague memory of a graph in Spin that was four quadrants of stuff that was “cool and annoying,” or “annoying and not cool” or whatever. And Austin Stories was “annoying and not cool.” But I was just like, “Oh, but we’re in Spin, so that’s cool.”

 

House:  I was so afraid. I had never had this kind of attention. I was just so afraid of a national critic saying, “Why is Laura House in the show? She is the worst one and hideous to look at.” One review called me “zaftig” and I was, like, “Does that mean fat?” And I looked it up and it does! Anyway, it felt good that we were well-received, but I was mostly relieved that no one was specifically starting a petition to get me off the show.

 

Pope: A really good review in The New York Times, that kind of thing back then could keep a show on the air. It was like, OK, we’re on the right track. We haven’t been doing this in a vacuum. This could be enough.

 

Bearden: The [Austin] Chronicle hated the show. It was a real affront to the people who wanted to be the arbiters of what was cool. I don’t know if they felt like they were losing the power to write that story or what. But it was much maligned.

 

Kafka: The Chronicle gave us some sh*t. I got my hackles up and wrote something to them a couple of times, like, “Listen, there’s a lot of artists here who are getting employed. Knock it off. We’re good people. Let us work.”

 

House: We all lived in Austin, and it was filmed in Austin, and we used Austin actors, so there was an Austin-y thing there. And I guess it’s ironic because it’s called Austin Stories. But it wasn’t ever like, we want to make the Austin story.

 

Kafka: It was always emphasized to us that it was about these three comedians. It wasn’t necessarily about Austin. And then at some point something changed at MTV, and they called it Austin Stories.

 

Kremer: That was Lisa Berger’s idea—which I thought was a great idea, but it wasn’t our intention to fully represent Austin. Once it came out, there was definite pushback. The people who weren’t represented in that show, a lot of them were angry about it. One time in H-E-B, a guy came up to me and goes, “You think that’s Austin?” You know, this, like, yuppie guy who had a regular job. He didn’t even recognize that as Austin, some guy from New Jersey yelling at Texans about where he could save a quarter on lunch or whatever.

 

Bearden: Nobody saw it as a love letter or a documentary about Austin. A genius somewhere at Viacom decided Austin was a thing. They wanted to start branding Austin, so they called it Austin Stories. It meant that the show was very well received everywhere but Austin. And that kind of sucked because we lived here.

 

Pope: Mostly it was favorable. And then sometimes there would be comedians on stage, like, “Yeah, I don’t watch that f*cking show.” There was a bit of professional jealousy, which I understand. I remember at a bar someone coming up to me and going, “You’re on that Austin Stories show, right?” And I was like, “Yeah,” and she said, “Do you like that show, though?” And I was like, “Yeah, it’s pretty much been my life’s work up until now.”

 

Bearden: You’d go out to eat and people were really f*cking mean to you. I remember going to my favorite bars and just having strangers berate me. It wasn’t fun to go out in your own city.

 

House: We were always like, “We’re just some idiots that got asked to do a TV show, and we don’t know how to do it, and we’re doing our best, and I’m sorry.” We’re just making up a story, you know?

 

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Although Austin Stories had started off strong, skepticism was growing at MTV as well. The ratings—while they would be considered phenomenal today—had been sliding since the debut. To make matters worse, Lisa Berger, the executive who had championed Austin Stories from its beginning, was on her way out at MTV, leaving amid a regime change of network brass.

 

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Kremer: The premiere was optimistic. Once the baseball playoffs started, it started to get a little bit un-optimistic. We started going up against live baseball games that people cared about, and the ratings started to go down.

 

Jones: The truth is, if we had the audience that we had then now, it would be considered a huge success. It had a strong and loyal audience. But it wasn’t Beavis and Butthead. I was always trying to get them to promo the show, to put it on at times that people might actually tune in.

 

Pope: We were paired up with Apartment 2F, the Sklar Brothers’ show with Zach Galifianakis. We were also coming off the lowest interest season of The Real World in Boston. Nobody cared about any of those people.

 

Bearden: I don’t remember which magazine, but one of them had a blurb saying that one of the networks needs to buy the show immediately—that this needs to get off MTV and get to a bigger audience right away.

 

Jones: Right before we were about to start shooting, they brought in a guy named Brian Graden, who went on to run MTV for some number of years. When Brian came in, basically, Lisa was gone. Quite honestly, I think that the plan was to let us shoot it out, assuming the show would fail, then just cancel the show.

 

Pope: When we’d met with Lisa, she said, “This is the kind of show that’s going to take a while to build word of mouth. People are going to find it, but it’s going to take two or three seasons,” And then, you know, that person gets axed.

 

House: We were signed for 13 episodes, and then they said we were maxing out the budget, so it became 12. I think anyone who’s worked in television could tell you: “Well, you’re dead.”

 

Jones: Part of me knew that that might be it, even when we were doing the last episode. Which is why when we were writing it, I tried to bring back all of the memorable supporting actors. I tried to make sure everybody who had had a small part over the course of the season came back. So, I feel like, could we have done a second season? Absolutely. But I don’t know that there were things left unsaid.

 

Kafka: There was feedback that people were responding to Chloe, and loving this tension between her and Chip, and wouldn’t that be cute if there was a weird little crush thing happening there? Then it ended before we really got to figure out whether that would have worked. It also got to be where it was nice for Laura to have another female presence that wasn’t one of Howard’s “McBubblies” that she could speak some truth to. I think that was a really nice dynamic that was growing there with Chloe. Again, didn’t really get to flesh it out.

 

Bearden: We started having talks, and Kafka and I were being invited to those talks. We were being elevated from also-rans to full-fledged cast members. I thought, Oh my God, if I can go from $500 a week to $600 a week? Here comes the money, baby! I really thought the career was going to just be a hell of a trajectory from there. And when it wasn’t. It was a real f*cking kick in the d*ck.

 

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Austin Stories aired its twelfth and final episode on Jan. 7, 1998. Shortly thereafter, Pope, House, and Kremer were asked to come out to Los Angeles again to talk about a potential second season. This time, however, it was without creator Jim Jones, who had already been let go. Those meetings turned out to be an empty gesture: By May, Austin Stories was officially over, soon to be replaced in its time-slot by the low-budget puppet series, The Sifl & Olly Show.

 

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Jones: Brian Graden basically fired George, Danny, and myself, so none of the core group of creative people were still with the show. And then they brought back Chip, Howard, and Laura, and they brought in some sitcom writers.

 

Pope: We developed two extra scripts with these writers who had worked on Wings. And I just remember thinking, “Is this really going anywhere?” I have scripts from that meeting that I just wrote imaginary Belle and Sebastian lyrics on.

 

Jones: Austin Stories had received such great reviews, and Judy McGrath, who was the head of MTV Networks at the time, really liked the show. I think they had to find a way to kill it off slowly.

 

Jones: They played all the episodes back-to-back over the Christmas holidays, and I remember getting so angry, because there were scenes that played out through the credits and they were cutting them off. I remember calling Van Toffler, who became one of the powerful executives at MTV, and saying, “You guys are killing this show.”

 

Pope: I didn’t see it with any kind of poignancy at the time. But the last time it ever aired, it was the middle of May of ’98, and I was at my mom’s house in Huntsville, Texas, and I was watching it on the same TV where I had watched MTV as a teenager.

 

Kremer: I found out from a girl that I had dated, that worked at MTV on a different show, just kind of offhand. Like yeah, they’re not bringing it back. It wasn’t like there was ever any official word. It was just like, All right, it’s over, I guess.

 

Verschoor: Look, a lot of this is economics. The record labels were catching up and saying, “You can’t have any more free content.” So, the business model had changed at MTV. [Austin Stories] just wasn’t as cheap to do as a reality show or Total Request Live. MTV wanted home runs, not singles and doubles.

 

Jones: More than anything else, it just wasn’t part of the vision that Brian Graden had for the network.

 

Pope: To his credit, Brian Graden turned MTV around. When we were on, it was kind of their lowest viewership point for them. He came in brought more of the jiggle back. Boy bands and Britney Spears—I mean, that was when MTV blew up and had its second renaissance. All that stuff was Brian Graden. It sucks not to have been a part of that. But he hit on something that kept them alive.

 

Kahn: In reality, I don’t think that MTV was quite ready for it. [Austin Stories] might have just been ahead of its time in general. Now you could see it on IFC, it could have been on AMC or Netflix. But how do you position it around MTV Spring Break and Pauly Shore? I think MTV missed something great with Austin Stories.

 

Pope: It’s just odd that it happened at all, because on MTV at the time, it was like Sandblast, Jenny McCarthy. Very looks-oriented. Music was still a place where you didn’t have to be totally good-looking. But television? Friends, all those shows, you had to have good-looking people, even if they were playing characters that didn’t have their sh*t together. They still had to look like models. Especially on MTV. The State was a comedy show, but Ken Marino is really a good-looking guy, you know? Michael Ian Black. It’s not like they looked like mutants.

 

Jones: Nobody was classically good-looking, but that was always the whole idea. We had hoped it would be sort of an anti-sitcom. But then MTV became about reality shows. Even starting with The Real World.

 

Kremer: I totally get it. It’s incredible that we ever got it on the air in the first place.

 

Pope: When the first Real World happened, there were applications at Waterloo Records, and I remember filling one out and nothing ever happened. And then, after the first time we were on MTV and under consideration, I made a tape to be a VJ and also got rejected. That was the thing: You wanted to get on MTV. If you loved music, and you’re not a musician, the only game in town was MTV. So just to think that MTV would move away from doing music and do shows, and somehow you’re in Austin, Texas in 1996, where nothing’s going on, just doing stand-up in a weird vacuum, and MTV comes and gives you a show? It’s just insane.

 

House: There was this one freakish, stars-aligning moment in time where I had done open mics for a year, and a cute guy tells me to get on a showcase, then this person rises to power! I’m on a show! Now that person is out of power. Picture something porous, like a cinder block. A little hole opens, and you run through it, and then it closes again.

 

Kafka: And then we got replaced by sock puppets.

 

Bearden: It’s much cheaper to produce sock puppets. Those actors do exactly what you tell them. But I just remember thinking, F*ck. When they don’t like you, they don’t like you.

 

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Although Austin Stories had been canceled, it remained a cult favorite, particularly among a certain comic cognoscenti in Hollywood. The cast relocated to Los Angeles to discover that the show had some powerful fans. Meanwhile, the influence of Austin Stories can still be felt in many other modern comedies, some of them created by people who were directly inspired by it.

 

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Jones: [Austin Stories] made my career. Even when I was in Texas, my agent was saying, “You’ve already got several pilot offers.”

 

Kremer: I was already getting calls from CAA and Brillstein-Grey. So, I was like, “I’ll be able to go out [to L.A.] and do something.” The last time I was out there, I was sleeping on couches. Now I’m going out with representation. We’d kind of established ourselves.

 

House: In entertainment, no one wants to be the first to sign off on an unknown. Austin Stories alleviated that. Someone had stamped us. MTV had said, “They’re all right.” The idea that the head of casting at Fox wants to meet with you because he likes Austin Stories? At the time I didn’t know, but that’s not normal.

 

Pope: Because it was such an odd little show, people you admired really warmed up to it, and you would get meetings because of it. If one person likes the show and that person is Bob Odenkirk, then that leads to doing a couple of things. Or if that one person is Matt Groening—I mean, he loved Austin Stories.

 

Bearden: I remember going to the Directors Guild for a party, and people who I really looked up to were crossing a room to come talk to me, saying, “Man, I loved your character on that. What else are you working on?” I remember a very young Judd Apatow, who’d just done Freaks and Geeks, coming up to talk to me about how original the show was.

 

Kahn: I met Larry Charles, who was working with Larry David on Seinfeld, and he was like, “I’m so honored to meet you. I saw Austin Stories. I loved it. Larry David and I want to make a show like that for Larry. We want to do a show that’s single-camera, that doesn’t have formulaic stuff.” And what do you think that became? Curb [Your Enthusiasm], right?

 

Verschoor: You know, Wes Anderson almost directed a couple of episodes. I was a huge fan of Bottle Rocket, and I called him. He saw some footage and loved it. Then he got the green light to do [Rushmore] and said, “I’m sorry, I just can’t do it.” One of the reasons I feel the show maybe didn’t take off is that Wes Anderson’s sensibility had not really become part of the culture yet. Had Wes Anderson’s career preceded us a little more, the show would have gone on longer. That’s how I chalked it up—like, this show is about five years too early.

 

Kahn: In hindsight, you can see that this is a show that would be on Netflix now. Did you see Reservation Dogs? That kind of reminds me of it a little bit—the pacing and the storytelling. They really take their time telling the story, and it’s not just about the jokes. For that time and space in the mid-’90s, that was really innovative.

 

Bearden: The magazines got so excited about it because the only things you were seeing with comics in the ’90s were all filmed before a live audience, three walls. It was the first of its kind in that way. And I think it’s why a lot of audiences were confused as f*ck by it.

 

Verschoor: Those guys, I wish they’d had taken off. That was the biggest heartbreak, for Chip, and Laura, and Howard, and Heather Kafka, and Mark Mix, and all those guys who were in this. I wish they had exploded. You know, they’re doing fine. I’m not saying they’re struggling. They’re doing fine. But they’re not a household name. Those guys deserve that recognition, and it’s unfortunate for them.

 

House: I felt like, ideally I’ll be a side character on a network show, and then I’ll have my own show. I’ll just keep doing stand up and get in line in L.A. I got in a sketch group out there, and the sketch stuff led to some writing jobs. And I guess that’s ultimately what worked out. A few years later, I wrote for Blue Collar TV and my dad was pretty impressed by that. Oh, and I was on a Sprint commercial. My mom bragged more about that than me being on a show on MTV.

 

Brad Pope: Howard and I sold a bunch of pilots to a bunch of different companies, and then we worked with Jim a lot. And then I went to grad school, and Jim Jones was one of my professors. I still talk to Howard and Laura regularly. I talk to Heather and Matt Bearden all the time. It’s just crazy that those kinds of friendships were formed from it. It’s not unlike being in a band. Even if you lose touch with the people you played with, there’s still that experience that isn’t diminished because it’s so unique to that time and space.

 

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Today, Austin Stories is nowhere to be found, save for on YouTube and bootleg DVDs, and in the VHS-warped memories of those who caught it during its original run. But ironically, for a show that was once accused of sullying Austin, the show ended up preserving it, creating a time capsule of a city that has similarly vanished, and one that remains powerfully meaningful to the people who lived in it.

Hotchkiss: Austin Stories did about as good a job of capturing that little time period as they could have. The show had a DIY vibe that typified the people I knew back then. Austin Stories is to television what the four-track homemade cassette was to a major-label record.

 

Bearden: To me, if something wasn’t perfect, then it wasn’t great. But I think some people can overlook the really rough edges of that show. You know how you can feel about a sort of DIY band where you’re like, “Look, I understand that you don’t have a producer, and you don’t have all the equipment, but I love the sound you’re going for.”

 

Kafka: It felt like a very accurate representation of Austin to me. Eating Tex-Mex all the time and going to thrift shops, and just the kind of things that you could get away with doing in Austin.

 

Kremer: To people who still watch it, the comedy can almost be secondary sometimes to just like, “Thanks for filming Austin for me.”

 

Bearden: There are things that are captured in there that don’t exist. The buildings themselves have been knocked down. Right after the show, that’s when dot-com happened, and the flavor of the city changed very quickly.

 

Kremer: It’s kind of an interesting lens for just examining where Austin was at in the ’90s, going from being this really well-kept secret. When I got there, it was all about, “Don’t make Austin bigger. We don’t want development.” We were just a fun snapshot of Austin, right before all hell broke loose.

 

Kafka: They gave us this photo album when we wrapped, and I was looking through it, and it’s like I can feel that silent space in between the moments. There was time to sit with your creativity and pontificate about life. It was when we were the biggest thing in town—the people. Not the shark fin building or Lululemon or the sushi chains. It was the people.

 

Pope: More than one person would come up and say, “I moved here because of that show.” And that’s crazy to me, because it made me feel like, well, we captured the spirit of the place. But it also made me feel bad because everybody was already complaining about how overcrowded it was.

 

Kremer: We were part of the problem, for sure. But at least it was counterculture, and it was from a place of life. We wanted to do good comedy. We all lived there. It was semi-organic.

 

Kafka: It wasn’t like a bunch of outsiders came in and plunked down here, like, “We’re going to make a show about Austin!” These are legitimate Austin people making a good Austin thing. It just so happens to be brought to you by MTV. It’s going to have to be brought to you by someone corporate, you know?

 

Kahn: I would talk to people in coffee shops and stuff, and they were not fans of us doing a show about Austin. Like we were going to Hollywood-ize what they felt very protective of. And yet, now all that’s gone. And this is what’s left to remind them.

 

Bearden: It’s not like there’s Austin Stories Week in the city or Austin Stories quote-alongs at the Alamo Drafthouse. There is no legacy. And people in the city don’t really know what it is. I used it as a credit at my stand up—“You saw him on Austin Stories!”— and then I very quickly realized, no, they didn’t. Nobody knows what the f*ck they’re talking about. I think it wasn’t long after that that there was a show on PBS called Austin Stories. It became all these other things. It just disappeared overnight and it was gone. My wife’s never even seen it. I don’t think she’s ever really shown an interest.

 

Jones: I don’t even know if people remember it. I always wished that MTV would put it on its website, so people could still see it. But that never happened.

 

Bearden: The only reason a DVD exists is because somebody stole the masters one weekend and f*cking dubbed them and then replaced them on a shelf again. I mean, that’s a cool story.

 

Pope: But I think that’s what keeps it alive, too—the scarcity of it. You’re not able to go back and go, “I watched that show again. it really wasn’t as good as I remembered.” The people who do know it have such fond memories of it, because it isn’t something that got ruined somehow. Do I wish it would have been more successful? Sure. But maybe there are advantages to being totally obscure.

 

House: It holds a special place in the Gen-X heart, the way I loved Reality Bites and Slacker. For people who knew Austin Stories, I think it felt like they were seen. And I think it’s more special that a lot of people don’t even know about it—which again, is the ultimate Gen-X thing.

 

Jones: To me it’s the project most near and dear to my heart that I’ve ever worked on. Everything about it was magical. I mean, there was a lot of conflict and tension and hard work, and it was grueling, and a lot of people didn’t get much sleep. But working on a show that you really like and people think it’s good? You maybe get to do that a few times in your career.

 

Pope: I could show someone an Austin Stories episode today and I wouldn’t be embarrassed by it. I would be embarrassed by my own acting, but I wouldn’t be embarrassed of it as a show. It’s still very unique and interesting, what we were trying to do. It’s very optimistic and sweet, and it just hearkens to a more innocent time. Not just in Austin, but in television.

 

Bearden: It may still be one of my favorite things that I’ve ever done in my life, which is maybe sad to say. But it’s something I was really proud of.

 

Pope: Austin Stories still feels special to me, in a way that a lot of things don’t.