THE GOLDBERGS: Adam F. Goldberg Teases a RISKY BUSINESS Episode, Other Potential Homages

THE GOLDBERGS creative team is hard at work planning fun pop culture homages for its upcoming third season.

“The first episode is I’m doing like a big RISKY BUSINESS episode,” THE GOLDBERGS creator Adam F. Goldberg teased during the show’s Television Critics Association panel. “I kind of wanted to start with a big splash. So we’re crashing cars and we’re doing the whole thing. It’s going to be awesome.”

“It just has to happen kind of organically,” he continued. “We start with a story first. It’s not like I go, ‘I love SHORT CIRCUIT. I want to do an episode about it.’ We started talking about an episode where Murray and Adam are forced by mom to build a robot together, which is something that happened with me and my dad. And then that turned into a SHORT CIRCUIT episode….And I went online and I talked with a guy who built the robot, like a little version of it. So I bought that from him and…so it’s really kind of working from the story first.”

And while the full-on tribute episodes are delightful for viewers, the epic episodes can also take a toll on the people making the series.

“FERRIS BUELLER was our big [event in season 2]; the writers nicknamed it ‘Adam’s Folly’ because it started with THE GOONIES episode [in season 1], which no one wanted me to do,” Goldberg admitted. “And I insisted on doing, and people the writers in the room were like, ‘This is going to destroy the show. You’re working way too hard on it. It’s driving you insane.’ And then [we did] FERRIS BUELLER, so I decided once a year, I’m going to do a big [episode], just it almost operates outside of the realm of the reality of the show. It’s like a direct homage. So I am doing one a year. And we’re negotiating right now with the movie studio. We’ve decided what the movie is, but I don’t know if it’s so complicated to get these movies on the show.

“So, yeah, so ABC definitely loves the big promotable stuff,” he acknowledged. “But for me, it’s just can we do it logistically? Just because I want to do INDIANA JONES doesn’t mean I can get [Steven] Spielberg to sign off. It’s almost impossible. There’s so many stories that we want to tell, we just can’t do right now…I was told ‘Thriller’ is impossible to get. We wrote a ‘Thriller’ episode for Halloween, which I think is the best script we’ve ever written. And we were just told by the writer of the song, it’s never going to happen. He doesn’t want it to be he doesn’t want his song to be aired on television. Movies, okay, but not TV. So we just kind of have to throw away the script…So that’s just an example of, we can’t start with some huge ’80s thing and just do an episode about it, because they’re so hard to get. It’s so hard to get everyone to sign off on it, so it’s unfortunately, the ‘Thriller’ one will probably never see the light of day. It’s kind of heartbreaking.”

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THE GOLDBERGS season 3 kicks off Wednesday, September 23rd at 8:30 PM on ABC.

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