GET A LIFE (Fox, 9:30-10 p.m.) Chris Elliott has returned as Chris Peterson, the arrogant, indolent, smirky, "yammering halfwit" (as someone described him on a recent episode) and "representative of albinos everywhere" (as Chris described himself in the same show). After being yanked from Fox's Sunday-night schedule in August for weak ratings, Get A Life is back, on Saturdays, with even weaker ratings—Nielsen says it's frequently the least-watched show in America. Hard to believe, but there are more people who would rather watch Sam Kinison bellow banalities in Charlie Hoover than see Elliott's hypnotizing sneer-and-squirm act in this surreally masochistic sitcom.
   Most bottom-rated shows struggling to stay alive would make drastic changes to attract new viewers; all Life has done upon its return is move Chris out of his folks' house (where he resided with his perennially pajama-clad parents, Elinor Donahue and his real-life dad Bob Elliott) and into an apartment overseen by his perennially pajama-clad landlord (Brian Doyle Murray).
   Other than that, it's business as usual, which means, as it did recently, a scene devoted to Chris finding a dead rat in a carton of milk and deciding to become a restaurant health inspector. When he sees another inspector take a bribe to ignore a roach-infested eatery, Chris says solemly, "I simply cannot condone a system that allows insects to go careening through our small intestine as if it were a really cool water slide." He vows to go to the police, but then someone offers him a bribe—five whole dollars!—and he happily shuts up like a clam.
   No TV series has ever combined idiocy and cynicism with more conviction than Get A Life.

from Entertainment Weekly December 20, 1991.
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