Jason Bateman has starred in quite a few sitcoms over the course of his 45-year career, three of which were canceled before he could celebrate his 10th anniversary as an actor. Bateman started rising in the ranks after appearing as Derek Taylor on NBC’s Silver Spoons, and soon found himself playing the lead role on the network’s short-lived 1984 series It’s Your Move. Conceived by Married… With Children creators Ron Leavitt and Michael G. Moye, It’s Your Move centered around Matthew Burton, a teenage con artist, as portrayed by Bateman. The character was known for his underhanded dealings, including selling prewritten term papers to his schoolmates and engaging in blackmail.
Though It’s Your Move was well-reviewed when it first hit the airwaves, it got canceled after just a single season of 18 episodes. According to Bateman, this stemmed from complaints the network was receiving from angry parents. During a 2018 career retrospective, Bateman told Vanity Fair, “NBC was getting notes from parents across the country that their kids were starting to do the same things that they were writing my character to do.”
The character’s schemes ultimately proved to be a little too influential, and the network decided to pull the plug.
Jason Bateman Says His Short-Lived NBC Sitcom Was Canceled After Parents Complained
It probably didn’t help that It’s Your Move was also given what was then referred to as a “killer timeslot.” In other words, it was on at the same time as ABC’s popular prime time soap opera Dynasty, which ran for nearly a decade. Before the first episode of It’s Your Move even aired, the Observer-Reporter predicted it would be a bomb. Little did they know that impressionable children would play a role in its fate.
However, Bateman’s brief stint on It’s Your Move wasn’t the first time the young actor inspired someone to write an angry letter. While speaking with GQ in 2013, Bateman recalled hanging out with his Silver Spoons co-star Ricky Shroder at Universal Studios, where the two would wade into the water near the Jaws attraction and catch goldfish. The people responsible for the tram reportedly got so fed up with them doing this that they wrote their parents letters saying, “Can you please have your kids stop wading in Jaws Lake? They’re ruining the effect. You know, ‘cause people are supposed to be afraid of this great white shark.”
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