Deadly Games – Nostalgia Central

1 9 9 5 – 1 9 9 6 (USA)
13 x 60 minute episodes

This short-lived American science fiction comedy aired on the UPN network from 5 September 1995 to 16 January 1996, blending classic 1990s video game tropes with live-action campiness.

Dr Gus Lloyd (James Calvert) was a brilliant but frustrated antimatter physicist and video game designer (a common combination!).

To vent his anger over a recent divorce and the everyday people who made his life miserable, Gus developed a custom Virtual Reality video game in which he was the hero (“The Cold Steel Kid”); his ex-wife, Lauren Ashborne (Cynthia Gibb), was his sidekick; and they fought a villainous army together.

Unfortunately, one of Gus’s antimatter lab experiments went haywire, and the machine read the game’s villain files, accidentally materialising the digital bad guys into the real world.

Gus, Lauren, and his colleague Peter Rucker (Stephen Kay) were forced to team up and play the game for real to save the world.

Every villain introduced on the show was based on someone who had traumatised or annoyed Gus in real life. Because they were bound by literal video game logic, each villain had a ridiculous superpower and a highly specific, mundane weakness.

The final boss and master villain, Sebastian Jackal (Christopher Lloyd), was a combination of Gus’s own father and the Devil.

Dressed in a sleek white suit and fedora, The Jackal could manipulate fire with his cane.

His ultimate vulnerability was getting hit with a specific baseball autographed by Bobby Mercer . . .

Other villains included The Garbage Man (based on a trash collector who wouldn’t let Gus look for his wife’s lost wedding ring), who shot toxic sludge, but could be destroyed by household cleaning products; The Boss (based on Gus’s former employer), who had steel hands that fired explosive “termination pink slips” (his weakness was red ink); The Orthodontist, who shot novocaine darts and was instantly defeated by processed sugar; a camp counselor who was vulnerable to fast-lighting charcoal; an ex-girlfriend whose weakness was gold; and a Perfect Woman character played by supermodel Kathy Ireland.

Other guest stars included Shirley Jones, Anthony Michael Hall, Jimmie Walker, Jerry Stiller, and LeVar Burton.

The Executive Producer was Star Trek legend Leonard Nimoy

Deadly Games struggled with its high special-effects budget, dwindling ratings, and a predictable formula. Unsurprisingly, UPN cancelled the series after its first season of 13 episodes.

Dr Gus Lloyd – “The Cold Steel Kid”
James Calvert
Lauren Ashborne – “The Girl”
Cynthia Gibb
Peter Rucker
Stephen T. Kay
Sebastian Jackal – “The Jackal”
Christopher Lloyd

Episodes

Killshot | One Mean Mother | The Boss | The End of the Jackal | The Camp Counselor: Part 1 | The Camp Counselor: Part 2 | The Practical Joker | Car Mechanic | Divorce Lawyer | Motivational Speaker | The Trash Man | Dr Kramer | The Ex-Girlfriend