Full House star David Lipper was given the role as goofball rocker Viper as a consolation for a pilot dropped last-minute by NBC, the actor told his former costars Jodie Sweetin and Andrea Barber on their How Rude, Tanneritos! podcast.
“The president of Warner Bros. at the time — Warner Bros. Television — he said to me, ‘Look, we’re fans. I’m a fan. We’re going to put you on another show,” said Lipper, who appeared in the final season of the family comedy. “And that’s when they put me on Full House.”
The unaired pilot was originally titled The Secret Life of Harry Greene before being renamed Reality Check, according to Lipper.
“It was an unbelievably funny show that starred me, and then my costars were these little people who kind of had decent careers,” he explained facetiously. “Giovanni Ribisi; Hilary Swank, who may have won a couple of Oscars; Tiffani Thiessen played my girlfriend; and my little sister was played by somebody who really went nowhere, Kaley Cuoco.”
The unaired pilot episode of Reality Check can be viewed in three parts on YouTube. It is quite funny, shows off already well-balanced character dynamics, featured peak-’90s needle drops like The Breeders’ “Cannonball,” and of course, is packed with then-and-future A-listers. So what went wrong?
Reality Check was the brainchild of the producing team of Kevin Bright, Marta Kauffman, and David Crane. Bright, Kauffman, Crane happened to have another show being tested by Warner Bros. for premiere that season: Friends.
“This was like a big, big — they actually thought this had a better shot than Friends because we had huge test scores,” Lipper said, referring to screenings studios conduct with test audiences before ordering series in order to gauge how well they’ll play.
“We ranked the highest Warner Bros. pilot,” but after “Fox got the rights to football over the summer,” the studio pulled Reality Check off the schedule “at the last second” because, as Lipper put it, “we were going to be on Sundays between Married with Children and The Simpsons.” That’s the nature of broadcast programming: You can be the highest rated series at the network, but if it’s Sunday Night Football you’re programmed against, that’s enough to knock you out.
The series no doubt would have changed Lipper’s career, not to mention Cuoco’s, Swank’s, and Ribisi’s, who ironically went on to play the stepbrother of Lisa Kudrow’s Phoebe Buffay on Friends off and on for nine years.
But if football hadn’t knocked Reality Check out of rotation, Lipper would’ve never made it onto Full House as Viper, the memorably rowdy yet lovable bandmate to Uncle Jesse (John Stamos) and sometimes boyfriend to D.J. (Candace Cameron Bure).
“Well, we lucked out because of that,” Barber said to Lipper. “Although I feel bad that you lost out on that. What an amazing opportunity.”
Elsewhere on the podcast, Lipper discussed another role he nearly won: that of the affable meathead Cody on Step By Step.
“It came down to me and Sasha Mitchell for this role of Cody, the cousin who lives in the van,” he said. But Mitchell hadn’t shown up to audition yet. The producers told Lipper, “‘Listen, Sasha’s still not here. If he doesn’t show up in five minutes, it’s yours because we absolutely love you.’”
But “at four minutes and 50 seconds, in walks Sasha Mitchell,” he recounted. “And he goes, ‘Dude!’ He’s like, ‘I got so lost, this place is so big!’ I’m like, ‘I’m not gonna lose to this idiot, am I?’ Then like, ‘Wait a second, the character’s an idiot.’”
Mitchell finally won the part, and Lipper learned the cold, hard truth why. “The casting director — I’ll never forget this — told me the final decision was a marketing person who said they thought Sasha would sell more lunch boxes. And that was the end.”
Lipper reflected on the early 1990s boom time in scripted broadcast television. “It was just a much more profitable, easier business in those days,” he said. “You only had four channels, really four main channels. You had most people watching television and not diverted now to social media and all these other places.”
