Autumn House Press, October 23, 2023, 166 pp.

Chapter 27: Li’l Einstein’s Final Fate 

Gina Sorrentino, Writer: 

After the holiday break in ’87, the network informed us we only had four episodes to wrap up the show. I wasn’t surprised. My agent had been hinting about it for weeks, and after the head writer jumped networks for Night Court and Ed Sheridan left Hollywood to grow mushrooms in Idaho, I knew the jig was up. The network never replaced them, so it was just me and Clark Francis in the writing room, and he was a fossil even back then. He’d burned himself out writing Update on the first season of SNL and would pitch a few lines to the group maybe two, three times each week. I had no clue how we were going to end the show with only the two of us, but it was obvious I was in charge. I was thirty years old and felt like I’d accomplished nothing. It was my final shot in Hollywood. 

Benjamin Whitmore III, Former Network President: 

There’s no conspiracy, all right? I’ve read these bloggers who try and claim I had some vendetta against Mr. Buttons, the monkey who played Li’l Einstein on Monkey High School. That’s just not true, all right? I have a long record of being pro-monkey. I love putting animals in shows, just love it. I greenlit Monkey High School, Donkey Hospital, even Oink Oink’s Playhouse. The ratings just weren’t there. The show pulled a decent share in the first season when the original showrunners stuck to the tried and true formulas, what we in the business call the T and T’s. Your bully episodes, your befriending a nerd episodes, your first crush episodes. But when those veterans abandoned ship, the season two folks crawled up their own assholes with obscure political agendas. It was a show about a super intelligent monkey who goes to high school. We didn’t need commentary on the Iran Contra affair. But Christ, if we only knew what Sorrentino would pull in those final four episodes. In hindsight, the Iran Contra episode gets lumped in with the good old days.

Gina Sorrentino, Writer: 

The whole reason I moved to Hollywood is I wanted to tell this personal story about leukemia. I had this best friend growing up in Rochester: Maria Aiello. We were inseparable, and people told us we looked like twins enough that it kind of sunk in. We both did ballet and poetry camp. We were both extroverts. Our parents bought us these huge stockpiles of sparklers each July, and we’d use them all year. We’d hold them above our heads and pump our bikes through the neighborhood. I started thinking about us as a unit, more like clones than twins. We lost touch during college, but we both ended up in Boston after graduation. I was working on an advanced degree, and Maria was bartending at this hole in the wall, the Sweetwater Tavern. I still go there whenever I visit  Boston which isn’t too often these days, but anyway, I’m getting sidetracked. I’m kind of nervous. I’ve never told this story to the press before, but it was thirty years ago so what the hell? In Boston, Maria came down with the flu, or at least what she thought was the flu, but she didn’t kick it. She did some blood work, and surprise, leukemia! Twenty three years old, and she had leukemia.

Clark Francis, Writer: 

Did I know our leukemia arc was based in reality? Look. If we’re being honest here about the whole Monkey High School fiasco, it wasn’t exactly a bright period for me. I was still kind of reeling from Belushi’s death, and I thought maybe Sorrentino’s leukemia episodes drew some inspiration from Gilda’s diagnosis a year or two earlier. I don’t know. I was fifteen years older than Sorrentino. We didn’t run in the same circles. She wasn’t into my lifestyle. Do you see what I’m saying? Look. Once I did a line off Mr. Buttons’ butt cheeks. It was a dark time. Praise above I eventually found the Quakers.

Gina Sorrentino, Writer: 

Now you’re probably expecting me to tell you I was the perfect best friend and by Maria’s side for her entire illness. But that’s not true. I avoided her. Sure, I visited her in the hospital a few times. We even went out for steaks once, and near the end, we went to the movies—it was Amadeus, a movie I still can’t bring myself to rewatch—and I remember that Maria had to wear these paper slippers over her shoes and this mask over her mouth, and after we said goodbye, I cried all the way home on the green line. So, eventually Maria dies, and I endure this long introspective period. I’m talking like three weeks where I keep imagining what it would be like if I’d been diagnosed instead of Maria, instead of my clone. I didn’t even go to her funeral in Rochester and made some excuse that I was too busy with classes, but really I was probably just drinking Shiraz and thinking vaguely romantic thoughts in my studio. So after these three weeks I realize how selfish I’ve been. How I never really grieved for Maria or even thought about her suffering. It was an odd realization, to understand firsthand how selfish you could be, how easily you could leave someone behind you’ve known your entire life. I wrote a screenplay about it, and that’s what landed me an agent, and that’s what led me to Hollywood. I moved at twenty-five and felt so stupidly confident in my own abilities that I assumed my screenplay would be optioned within the first three months. It never happened. I jumped from one fledgling sitcom to the next, and by the time I was writing for Monkey High School, I was thirty and thinking pretty heavily about moving back east. If I didn’t tell my story right then it was never going to happen. 

Felix Brown, Animal Handler: 

I am not a fan of those final four episodes, no sir. Neither was Mr. Buttons. We hated them because Gina Sorrentino, this self-obsessed east coaster who thought she’d landed herself on a serious drama, shifted the focus away from Mr. Buttons’ character Li’l Einstein and put it on the two kids: Riley and Melissa. Remind me. What’s the name of the show? Oh, that’s right. It’s Monkey High School. Not Human High School. Monkey High School. If the monkey’s not front and center, then what are we even doing? 

Chaz Eagleton, Agent: 

Yeah, I remember where I was when Sorrentino called and said she wanted to use her leukemia script for the final four episodes of Monkey Whatever: downing oysters with Emilio and Andrew at Spago. We were hammering out this project with a cokehead executive from Paramount that never materialized. It truly would’ve been tremendous. Emilio and Andrew as turn-of-the-century farmers who inherit their father’s land only to see their simple lives devastated by industrialization. It was a metaphor for what happened to Emilio and Andrew after they got big, and it would’ve been something all right. Would’ve altered the trajectories of their careers, you can count on that. Hard to imagine Weekend at Bernie’s II or Mighty Ducks if that farming picture got made. What I’m trying to say is that Gina Sorrentino wasn’t exactly a priority. She was damaged goods by ‘87. Came to Hollywood on the prestige train but five years later and she’d produced nothing but a handful of forgettable episodes on even more forgettable shows. I didn’t see much of a future for her, and I figured, sure, let’s do this Viking funeral style. Let’s do a cancer arc on a show about a talking monkey! I was planning on dropping her as a client anyway.

Clark Francis, Writer: 

So the writing room’s down to me and Sorrentino, and she comes in one day in January and shows me this leukemia screenplay that’s clearly been gathering dust in her apartment for years. Trust me, I know. All writers have those scripts. And it’s about this teenage couple where the girl gets leukemia and instead of being a supportive partner, the guy just gets introspective before realizing what a selfish prick he is a month after she dies. I guess the idea here is that we’re all selfish pricks. It was bleak, and I had no idea how we could translate it to a kids’ show about a talking monkey, but I was jazzed. We were going to get real with the kids just like back on Update with Chevy. I even tossed out the idea of casting Chevy as a new social studies teacher. He wanted to do it, I’m sure. He was probably just busy or something. Scheduling issues. You know how it is with Chevy.

Gina Sorrentino, Writer: 

In my screenplay, I turned Maria and myself into a couple instead of best friends because I wanted to distance myself from reality. I wasn’t ready to admit it was about Maria Aiello. I still don’t like talking about her. Luckily, that synced perfectly with the show. Riley and Melissa were Li’l Einstein’s best friends at Jane Goodall High, and they were also a couple. It felt like an omen

Tommy America, Actor, from an interview in 1992 before his death: 

We got the scripts late. Like there’s a cutoff point where if the principals don’t get the scripts, the show doesn’t get made. And Gina Sorrentino handed me the script like five minutes after that. She never personally gave us the scripts. Never. That was always our producer Vanessa Remington. But Gina told me she had to turn in the scripts late because she wanted to do something edgy, and if the network got hold of it too early, they’d demand all these changes. I was stoked. I was twenty-eight and playing a fifteen-year old. I’d known Kirk Cameron from some commercial work in the late seventies, and he kept rubbing the success of Growing Pains in my face. He used to send me every teeny bopper rag he made the cover of. I was like, hell yeah, I’ll do your prestige arc about leukemia. I was Melissa’s boyfriend. I had all the meaty parts. I’d finally stick it to that Kirk Cameron once and for all.

Jenny Fingers, Actor: 

I was ecstatic when I read Gina Sorrentino’s cancer scripts. We all knew the show was ending, and my team’s goal was to transition me from a teen sitcom actress into a pop star. I’d recorded my album, Hair Party in the Year 2000 with Jenny Fingers, the previous fall, and the label was planning on dropping the single that summer. The timing was perfect. I finally had something to do on the show that wasn’t just shaking my head at Mr. Buttons or Tommy America. Oh, and Gina didn’t make me say my catch phrase even once. I really appreciated that. People still come up on the street and say it. They might as well carve that garbage onto my grave.

Brodie McKinnon, Head Moderator of the Monkey High School Fan Association Reddit: 

The leukemia arc is the most divisive topic in the Monkey High School fan community. We actually had to make a sticky on the boards for it, otherwise we’d need a whole sub reddit to funnel all the Li’ls and RiLissas to. Oh, yeah. We call fans who prefer the first one-and-a-half seasons of the show Li’ls because those episodes focus on Li’l Einstein, and we call the fans of the leukemia arc RiLissas because those are all about Riley and Melissa. It’s a divided community. There was even talk about MonHighCon being separated into two different conventions to placate the fanbases. It’s a goddamn shame.

Dr. Claudia Fuhrmann, Professor of Television Studies at the University of Pittsburgh: 

A postmodern reading of Monkey High School reveals the final four episodes to be willingly complicit in their social critique of the universe of the simulacrum while also being entirely schooled in Marxist film theory. Curiously, these episodes make use of the modernist practice of calling attention to the materiality of the text by exposing its means of signification—a typically Brechtian critical technique.

Brodie McKinnon, Head Moderator of the Monkey High School Fan Association Reddit:

So those last four episodes, right? In the first one, Melissa’s acting weird and distant, and Riley thinks it’s maybe because she’s cheating on him with McGoober, the class clown. He goes to Li’l Einstein for advice, and this is really the last time Mr. Buttons has anything relevant to do on the show. That’s why Li’ls hate the arc so much. It never resolves the thread about the CIA trying to find Li’l Einstein after he breaks out of Area 51 in the pilot. But yeah, Riley finally confronts her, and Melissa tells him she has leukemia. Then boom! Credits! And that’s just the first episode of the arc. It’s a total roller coaster! 

Molly Reagan, Live Studio Audience Member: 

Yes, I was there when they recorded “Melissa’s Secret.” My entire family was. Our daughters were six and eight at the time, and we’d flown in from Carmel, Indiana, on vacation. Our youngest Jenny was obsessed with TV, and we thought it’d be really encouraging for her to get a peek behind the scenes. The whole audience was shocked during the taping. Where was Li’l Einstein? Why didn’t Melissa say her catch phrase? And that leukemia bit? Jeepers. Try explaining what leukemia is to a bunch of kids on their vacation. It was a show about a talking monkey, and not a very good one I might add. My two cents is the writers should have been blacklisted. 

Brodie McKinnon, Head Moderator of the Monkey High School Fan Association Reddit:

So then the leukemia arc jumps forward in time. Melissa’s undergoing chemotherapy, and Riley’s there every step of the way, but he’s distant, you know? He thinks he should carry out this big, romantic gesture, but his heart isn’t in it. He tells his dad he’s totally positive Melissa loves him, but he isn’t sure he loves her. But he can’t tell her this because he’s afraid it’ll crush her. The third episode is the real tear jerker though. Riley and Melissa go to the movies, and Mel has to wear these paper boxes over her shoes and this weird surgical mask. The show transforms this super common high school experience into a total nightmare. But the worst part is when the movie ends. The darkness lifts and the show pans to all these teens chatting about football or prom, and Melissa turns to Riley and just matter-of-factly tells him that the doctors said she has to freeze her eggs otherwise she can never have kids even if she survives the disease.

Benjamin Whitmore III, Former Network President: 

I’m not going to sit here and tell you I did my due diligence during the final four episodes of Monkey High School. I didn’t. I never reviewed the scripts. I didn’t watch the dailies. I was up to my balls in some serious problems. Fox had just come online, and the battle with cable was really heating up. All the head honchos were basically hunkered down working on a relaunch of our major IPs for the fall of ’87. We knew Monkey High School wouldn’t be part of the rebranding. It fell through the cracks. Just for a month though. That was all Gina Sorrentino needed to ruin everything. 

Vanessa Remington, Executive Producer: 

Everybody always wants to blame me for the last four episodes of Monkey High School. If network wasn’t paying attention, I must have been, right? And yeah, I knew what Sorrentino was planning and that the network would be irate when word leaked. But you need to remember that the vast majority of the staff had defected over winter break and that everyone left behind knew they weren’t going to be part of the fall ’87 rebrand. They were cutting us loose, and really, everything that happened with Gina Sorrentino was the network’s fault. They never should have given us those four final episodes. What did we need to wrap up? It was a kid’s sitcom! But our original order was for twenty-two episodes, and they’d already cut us to eighteen by the third week of the second season. I think they really lacked programming for the spring and didn’t want to scramble to fill our time slot. Our mid-season replacement was over-budget and late.

Brodie McKinnon, Head Moderator of the Monkey High School Fan Association Reddit:

“Doubt Thou the Stars are Fire” is the final episode, and it again jumps a year forward in time to Riley’s graduation. Melissa doesn’t appear for the first ten minutes, and for the first act the audience has to wonder whether or not she died offscreen between episodes. But then, right after graduation, Riley drives to a pawn shop and buys two wedding bands. We don’t know what’s happening, but then he goes to Melissa’s house, and holy crap is it a shocking moment. Melissa is bald, thin, yellow, looks like she’s about to die. This is supposed to be a kids’ show!

Jenny Fingers, Actor: 

My only complaint about the leukemia arc was the last episode. Did makeup really have to make me look so… sick? 

Brodie McKinnon, Head Moderator of the Monkey High School Fan Association Reddit: 

So Riley pops the question, and his voice is just empty. And Melissa says yes, but she doesn’t look too psyched either. The two of them drive to Atlantic City which is another move the Li’ls hate because in the season one episode “Li’l Einstein and Death Valley,” the show pretty directly states that Monkey High School takes place in Nevada, which makes sense when you start asking yourself just how far Li’l Einstein could have gotten after escaping Area 51 in the pilot. In “Doubt Thou the Stars are Fire,” Atlantic City’s only an hour away, so Sorrentino clearly disregards canon in the last episode which is a giant smoking gun for the Li’ls. Anyway, there’s a flashback to Riley looking up into the stars and he just delivers this monologue where he says he doesn’t want Melissa’s death ruining the rest of his life, and he only knows one way to fix it. Then it cuts to their wedding in one of these shabby boardwalk chapels, and then the last scene of the entire series is on the beach. It’s night, Riley and Melissa are alone, and both of them lookabsolutely miserable. There’s this long silence, and for a moment, the viewer really thinks this is the note the show’s going to go out on. But then Sorrentino really twists the dagger. Melissa turns to Riley and says… 

Excerpt from Monkey High School, “Doubt Thou the Stars are Fire” script:

          MELISSA
Let’s not tell anyone, ok?
          RILEY
What?
          MELISSA
I don’t want to tell anyone what we did here. Let’s keep it a secret.
          RILEY
There’s legal documents.
          MELISSA
I want it kept a secret. This isn’t what I imagined for my life. I don’t mean the cancer. I mean you. I mean us. I mean us getting married.
          RILEY
What’s that supposed to mean? We talked about marriage even before.
          MELISSA
I know that. But we’re just kids. Do you realize how long the average life is? I might have lived till I was a hundred. You still might. I wasn’t totally sure about us. I’m still not the person I might have grown into. Who knows if those people, our adult versions, would have been right together? I wanted so much more from my life than this. I had hopes and dreams totally independent from you.
          RILEY
Melissa. I love you.
A long pause.
          MELISSA
I love you too, but we’re not soul mates. I never really believed we’d get married. You should know that. I’m cold. Take me home.
Pan to stars. Credits.

Gina Sorrentino, Writer: 

I rewrote the final scene of “Doubt Thou the Stars are Fire” an hour before we filmed. In the screenplay version, the Melissa/Maria character is completely grateful that the Riley/Me character marries her even though they both know she’s going to die. It ends with Riley/Me feeling like he made a valiant gesture but also a mistake that’s going to gnaw at him for the rest of his life. I wrote that when I was twenty-four, maybe twenty five, and for the final episode, I just copied the final bits of dialogue. But then I really started looking at it and thinking about it and realized I still wasn’t grieving for Maria Aiello, for everything she had lost. All I’d done was regurgitate my own introspective narcissism. I had to let Maria speak, allow her to claim that moment as her own, put all of her regrets on the table. And that’s what I did. I know it sounds really stupid especially since it’s a show about a talking monkey, but I put my heart on that fucking page. When I wrote the last line I was crying. I’d never cried for Maria before. It felt significant.

Felix Brown, Animal Handler: 

“Doubt Thou the Stars are Fire” is a disgrace.

Tommy America, Actor, from an interview in 1992 before his death: 

What did I think about the final scene? I thought that when Kirk Cameron saw my acting chops he was going to shit himself with envy.

Benjamin Whitmore III, Former Network President: 

I finally caught wind of Sorrentino’s insurrection a month before sweeps. I’d been in Chicago scouting improv groups for something to rival NBC’s stranglehold over Saturday nights, and when I got back, my secretary told me all these complaints had flooded in because of a Monkey High School episode. Now we never got mail for Monkey High School. Don’t let the revisionists tell you it was a popular or important show. It wasn’t. It was designed to be second or third tier. Something we could produce on the cheap to fill up a time slot until a better property came along. The first episode of the leukemia arc had just aired, and all these parents were complaining it wasn’t an appropriate topic for a show aimed at kids in the 8pm timeslot. So I watched the final four episodes, and trust me, it was not a difficult decision. I yanked the final three and scheduled game show reruns in their place. So what if Monkey High School ended on a cliffhanger? Garbage is interchangeable.

Clark Francis, Writer: 

I didn’t really care one way or another if the final three episodes were pulled. That was really Sorrentino’s pet project, and I got paid either way. I do remember my reaction when Vanessa Remington called and broke the news. I consumed a few too many ‘shrooms and wandered out into the valley where I ran into Franken. He was pretty pissed at the networks in those days, and we got to talking and ended up buying these hogs and racing all the way to Vegas. I came to a week later naked on the shores of one of the Great Lakes. Can’t remember which. So yeah, Monkey High School. Not a great time for ol’ Clark Francis.

Gina Sorrentino, Writer:

My reaction was that I’d failed. I felt like my entire life had been leading to that arc, and then nobody outside of a few dozen studio audience members ever saw it. I went into a tailspin after that and gave up writing, Hollywood, everything. I didn’t even tell my agent. I just booked a flight back east and took a job as a guidance counselor at my old high school in Rochester. There’s a Maria Aiello memorial plaque in one of the hallways. I’ve been here ever since.

Brodie McKinnon, Head Moderator of the Monkey High School Fan Association Reddit:

If Whitmore hadn’t pulled the final three episodes of Monkey High School, I don’t think our fan community would even exist. I was nine years old when Monkey High School was canceled, and I remember crying when I realized we’d never learn what happened to Melissa or Riley. I even wrote my own ending where Li’l Einstein discovers a cure for cancer. We talked about it on the playground all the time. Why was this mostly forgettable show pulled off the air the very moment it introduced a serious plot line? What I didn’t know then was that there were pockets of people all across the country wondering the exact same thing. We don’t keep exact numbers on the Reddit, but by my guess, there’s at least two thousand of us Monkey High fans out there. Richie Bell started the first fan club via mailer, and he was the one who tracked down a master of the final three episodes at a studio auction. Bell was the one who transferred them to VHS and started selling copies at pop culture conventions.

Gina Sorrentino, Writer:

Every few years I hear about the Monkey High School fan community and how they rescued the final three episodes and hand-distributed them. And then when the show was released on DVD last year, the producers included the last three episodes as bonus material and invited me to do audio commentaries. I didn’t respond. What do I think about the fan community? Well, I know the last four episodes are divisive, and I know it’s not really that large of a fanbase. I guess I should be comforted that they’re out there and some people like them, but I’m not. The most important work of my life is only enjoyed by a niche within a niche within a niche. When I’m honest with myself, when I really step back and evaluate everything that happened to me and what my goals were when I started, I can almost admit the truth. I never should have tried. That’s what I honestly think. I never should have tried.

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Salvatore Pane is the author of two novels and a book of nonfiction. His short story collection The Neorealist in Winter will be released on October 23rd, 2023. His shorter work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Indiana Review, American Short Fiction, and elsewhere. He is an associate professor at the University of St. Thomas.

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