The Quarantine Stream: ‘Heat Vision And Jack’ Was Ahead Of Its Time
By Ben Pearson/Oct. 2, 2020 9:00 am EST
Let’s break down some of the talent here, all of whom were still many years away from the peak of their careers. Ben Stiller directed the pilot, a few years after The Cable Guy but still before Zoolander. Jack Black played the lead, a year before his breakout film role in High Fidelity. Owen Wilson lent his distinctive voice to Heat Vision, after Armageddon and The Haunting but before Shanghai Noon and Meet the Parents. Stiller’s wife, Christine Taylor, appears here long before starring in Dodgeball. The only actors you could argue had better days behind them than in front of them were Timecop actor Ron Silver as the villain (what a great concept of having him play himself), and recognizable oddball Vincent Schiavelli (Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Escape to Witch Mountain) as the diner cook whose body is taken over by an alien lifeform.
Rob Schrab (The Sarah Silverman Program, Monster House) and Dan Harmon (Community, Rick and Morty) wrote the script, marking what would have been the first mainstream, significant project of either of their careers. Robert Greenblatt, who would go on to be the president of entertainment for Showtime, the chairman of NBC Entertainment, and the chairman of WarnerMedia Entertainment, was an executive producer.
But Heat Vision and Jack would have been nothing more than a forgotten IMDb credit if all of those talents didn’t come together to form something special. Thankfully, they did: the pilot, which falsely claims on screen that it’s the 14th episode of the series, is a tight, hilarious piece of writing that perfectly sets up this heightened world, the dynamics of its characters, and a case-of-the-week structure that had a heartbreaking amount of potential. Stiller perfectly walks the line of a cheesy, 6 Million Dollar Man-style sitcom with a comedy that felt subversive in 1999 but firmly entered the mainstream years later.
Heat Vision and Jack was probably about a decade ahead of its time, but you can catch up with its one and only episode below.
