“I took a gummy, and I watched it and I was very confused,” comedian Rob Anderson excitedly recounted in a video about the ‘80s Canadian kids’ movie “The Peanut Butter Solution,” in which a boy puts a spreadable solution on his bald head, grows luscious locks, is kidnapped, then forced to grow his hair for paintbrushes. “So I watched it again without a gummy and it made even less sense. I was more baffled.”
It’s a weird premise to be sure, but that Anderson is baffled by any millennial media is both charming and part of the fun.
The New York-based comedian has been posting recaps and take-downs of television shows and films from the ’80s, ’90s and early 2000s — with a few Hallmark and Netflix Christmas movies thrown in for good measure, along with the occasional bizarre design show — since 2023, and has developed a significant following on social media. Nothing is sacred: “The Princess Diaries” and “Coyote Ugly” are dissected for verisimilitude; “Big” and “Never Been Kissed” checked for their statutory-adjacent plotlines; “Saved by the Bell” is posited as classist; “Annie” is reconsidered as anything but a kid’s musical.
“They’re all movies that I have watched before,” Anderson, 38, says of his dozens of comedic recaps. “That’s the real enjoyment: You’re watching it simultaneously from what you remember as a kid, and then also as a grown adult going, Oh my God, this makes no sense.”
Anderson is here for the melodrama, the special lessons and the climaxes that fall flat. “There’s something so great about a big moment that is supposed to be enormous for this person who is so successful at singing or dancing or whatever they’re doing. At the time [of release], we’re like, This is great. And then watching it back, you’re like, Wait, what?”
Rob Anderson has been posting recaps and take-downs of television shows and films from the ’80s, ’90s and early 2000s since 2023.
(Max Bronner)
And while this dressing-down of beloved works might seem like another bummer in a world of doomscrolling, @heartthrobanderson is anything but. “It’s not acidic or negative. I genuinely love doing this,” he says. “That comes through in the videos.”
The proof may be in Anderson’s millions of followers on TikTok and Instagram, which include ’90s queens such as Rose McGowan, Busy Philipps and members of the cast of “7th Heaven,” as well as Rihanna. He’s bringing his social platform to the stage with “Are You Afraid of the ’90s?” — a 90-minute, one-man musical/stand-up that melds his recaps with original songs and theatrics. The tour arrives at the Belasco on March 7.
Marketing, social and ‘Gay Science’
Although he’s made his mark online, Anderson studied theater in college and did sketch improv in Chicago before moving to New York. Anderson’s TikToks for restaurant reviewer the Infatuation (where he was head of marketing) went viral — “It was basically just my personality and my humor, and then attaching food” — and he soon began making his own comedy videos. He was signed to an agency just before the pandemic.
Anderson went viral again for his “Gay Science” series, which took a satirical and graph-heavy approach to queer stereotypes and behavior. Across 50 episodes, Anderson unpacked everything from why gay men prefer iced coffee to whether bottoms would survive the apocalypse (the answer is yes).
The series became a bestselling book, increasing Anderson’s profile as an incisive commentator with biting wit but very little malice.
Breaking through with ‘7th Heaven’
Anderson grew up watching and rewatching movies — sometimes multiple times in a row — but today is the “type of person that can’t do the same thing for too long.” After exploring all of the gay science he could imagine, Anderson found a new calling in revisiting television from his youth. Enter the moralizing family drama “7th Heaven.”
“[Recapping] ‘7th Heaven’ really was my stepping stone into finding this voice. I can take nostalgic things that people love, or don’t love, and bring them back up in a way that roasts them lightly,” he says. “It’s my hyper-critical Virgo mind: Instead of being the downer at a party that points out all the things that suck and why we should leave, I’m still pointing them out, but in a way that makes us want to stay.”
Regardless of whether you grew up with the show, many episodes of “7th Heaven” have plotlines worth revisiting, if only for their insanity and cultural obsolescence. Just see Anderson’s thoughts on plotlines about Black allyship, the time the youngest Camden child became xenophobic, the dangers of hickeys, and a very special MLK Day episode where a white guy becomes a victim of racism. Members of the cast have seen Anderson’s reels, and Beverley Mitchell (Lucy) even collaborated with Anderson on a video where her character goes to therapy.
As he’s expanded his recaps into other television and film series, Anderson has found fans in the actors themselves. “It’s roasting something they did, and they still appreciate the perspective of it all.”
Rob Anderson on stage for his one-man show “Are You Afraid of the ‘90s?”
(Varun Mummadi)
The nostalgia king
Anderson’s niche of nostalgiacore is uniquely millennial: His generation can look in the rearview sooner than ever before and grew up with an incredible amount of targeted media that’s ripe for dissection.
“The reason why I started revisiting these things is the same reason why people enjoy what I’m saying about them. It’s a walk backward into a time that was pleasant. … Nostalgia is a real powerful drug,” he says.
Anderson typically watches at least two films or shows a day, though he told People that he can watch up to 10 hours of media daily. He has lists of shows and films from childhood to revisit, and regularly scans his DMs — he gets 50 to 100 a day — for suggestions. Shows of the era, Anderson finds, often tackled difficult subjects in the worst way possible, but “they really meant well.”
“There were so many sitcoms being aired at one time, and they were all trying to be the thing that people talked about,” Anderson says, adding that today’s media landscape is more fragmented. “We watched them because that was what we had, and so it brings us all together.”
In “Are You Afraid of the ’90s?” — which is segmented into themes about alcoholism and drug addiction, teenage pregnancy, racism, LGBTQ, age gaps and power dynamics — Anderson reviews an episode of the beloved “Boy Meets World” where Cory and his best friend Shawn drink alcohol for the first time.
“Twenty-four hours later, Shawn is a full-blown alcoholic. He gets kicked out of school for being drunk. They have an intervention that they staged for him all in one day,” Anderson recalls. “When you’re a kid, you just kind of assume that’s how it works.”
Anderson will wrap his tour and promotion of a comedy special in the spring but says he doesn’t think more than a year or two into the future. The stage, social, and commentary opportunities are all possibilities rooted in Anderson’s ability to hone his voice and perspective.
“It’s really eye-opening to be myself entirely and have people appreciate it,” he notes. “I’ve created characters and sketches. To see my thoughts on things be the thing that people love most [has] been really, really exciting.”
