Actually, don't remember City Guys. It sucked.
I barely remember it -- I think I caught five minutes of it on TV once when I was in college and turned it off because it was so dumb and offensive. But I'm "remembering" it now because it was and is a weird NYC-related artifact of late 1990s Ameriacn pop culture -- i.e. of my long ago, lost, misspent youth.
To wit: two New York City teenagers go to the same high school. One is a rich white kid, the other a poor black kid, but they are friends and engage in hilarious high jinks together while learning important life lessons and developing strong values, the racial and economic iniquities and divide between them be damned. Together, this "ebony and ivory" fantasia demonstrates that racism is a thing of the past.
In the last 1990s, we wanted to believe that. Okay, so that's the show. So why am I remembering?
Well, kids, there used to be a sitcom in the early 1990s called Save by the Bell about a bunch of wise-cracking high school kids. It aired on NBC on Saturday mornings and was one of the only things on TV that wasn't a cartoon or an infomercial. It was a real "tween" show and was very popular. Saved by the Bell ended in 1993 but it spawned a bunch of similar shows -- also on NBC on Saturday mornings -- about wise-cracking teenagers in various high school settings including Hang Time and California Dreaming and several others (I actually knew one of the girls on Hang Time but never mind). Anyway, City Guys was the "urban" version of these otherwise lily white shows -- it actually had black people! -- and instead of being set in a cookie-cutter high school in a cookie-cutter suburb it was set in NYC! And had black people!
By the late 1990s, NYC was in the middle of its renaissance so a teenage show set in the city probably made sense to the suits at NBC. At the time the Saturday morning "tween" sitcoms were at their height (there was even another Saved by the Bell show called Saved by the Bell: The New Class), and City Guys, though a little different, fit right in.
The show ran from 1997 to 2001 and was one of the last NBC Saturday morning tween sitcom to air. By 2002 these shows were gone -- its teenage audience (i.e. people like me) had aged out, ratings plunged, and the new teenage audience now had things like the Internet to distract them on Saturday mornings.
City Guys is an otherwise forgotten part of the NYC-set TV sitcome pantheon but, as mediocre as the show was, it had a very funky, very memorable, opening credits -- even though it was a laughbly dumb:
So watch below and roll with the city guys!
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