Flying Blind

1 9 9 2 – 1 9 9 3 (USA)
22 x 30 minute episodes

This short-lived FOX sitcom featured Alicia Smith (Tea Leoni), a freelance artist and fashion model, who had attended the Zurich Academy for Girls in Switzerland and now lives at 386 Bleecker Street in New York’s Greenwich Village.

Alicia is beautiful, wild, unpredictable and almost totally preoccupied with sex. She loves to wear clothes that reveal her breasts in sexy bras and claims that her most embarrassing moment occurred when she was dating a UN dignitary “who stole a pair of my panties and sold them to a Third World country as their flag”.

When jobs were scarce, Alicia went to Mexico to star in the movie Bride of the Marsh Monster. It became such a hit in the Philippines that the government issued an airmail stamp with Alicia’s picture on it.

Alicia has an uneasy relationship with her somewhat psychotic father (Peter Boyle), a man of mystery who has no name and works for some ultra-secret government agency. When Alicia wants to visit him, she has to be blindfolded and stuffed in the trunk of a car (a Fiat).

Neil Barash (indie movie darling Corey Parker) is the shy repressed guy who dates Alicia. He met her at a restaurant (the Madison Bistro) and is her complete opposite.

He was born in Hartsdale and works with his neurotic father as an unexceptional marketing assistant in the advertising department of Hockman Foods (a snack food company).

Ted Sharperson (Marcus Giamatti) is his unscrupulous officemate who would do almost anything to get ahead.

When he is laid off during a downsizing at Hockman, Neil moves in with Alicia and her two loft roommates – Jordan (Robert Bauer), a throwback to the hippies of the 1960s, and Megan (Clea Lewis), the heiress to a laxative-company fortune and an artist’s model who falls for men she thinks hate women.

Megan is not as glamorous as Alicia and was the inspiration for a famous painting called ‘Depression Ascending a Staircase’. She also posed topless for two lithographs of her nipples: “One is on tour in Paris; the other is on display at Milt DeLeon’s Steak House in Oceanside”.

Away from the watchful eye of his father, Neil tries to become more adventuresome by getting a job working for Dennis Lake (Charles Rocket), the sleazy owner of a B-grade horror movie company called Scepter Films (producers of such “classics” as Revenge of the Ozone Mutant Mermaids, Panic at Three Mile Island, Massacre at Cleavage Farm, Frosty the Maniac and Beverly Hills 9021-Dead.

Alicia Smith
Tea Leoni
Neil Barash
Corey Parker
Dennis Lake
Charles Rocket
Jeremy Barash
Michael Tucci
Megan
Clea Lewis
Jordan
Robert Bauer
Ted Sharperson
Marcus Giamatti
Ellen Barash
Cristine Rose
Dennis Lake
Charles Rocket
Alicia’s father
Peter Boyle