TV LEGEND: Jennifer Aniston was a cast member on a short-lived sketch comedy series that “killed off” the cast every episode.

When Friends made its debut in 1994, basically the entire cast became instant superstars, but an interesting thing about the cast is that while none of them were “stars” before Friends came out, pretty much the entire cast WERE familiar faces to the viewing public. Courteney Cox, of course, was the most famous of the six, having a number of notable roles (perhaps most famous being Alex’s girlfriend on the hit TV series, Family Ties), but Lisa Kudrow had a recurring role on the hit series, Mad About You, Matt LeBlanc received two separate spinoffs from Married… with Children, David Schwimmer had just done a notable story arc in the first season of NYPD Blue, and Matthew Perry and Jennifer Aniston were routinely being cast in new sitcoms. Therefore, while they all became household names with Friends, they were all already relatively in-demand performers beforeFriends.

However, being “in-demand” is not always that helpful when the shows you get cast on keep getting canceled, and Jennifer Aniston was on a LOT of canceled shows. She never let it get her down, though, telling Howard Stern in 2019 that at the time, she never was too worried when the shows she was on kept getting quickly canceled, as she enjoyed waitressing, she enjoyed acting, she was confident that eventually she would “arrive.” And obviously, she DID. On the way to arriving, though, was an unusual TV show that she did for a season in 1992-93 called The Edge, in which the whole cast would be killed off almost every episode!

What was The Edge, the sketch comedy show featuring a young Jennifer Aniston, about?

David Mirkin was a longtime sitcom writer who became the showrunner on the hit series, Newhart, in the 1980s, earning his first Emmy Award nomination in 1987 for the episode, “Co-Hostess Twinkie.” Mirkin’s interests, though, were not really in the multi-camera format, and he left Newhart in 1988, freelance writing for single camera series like It’s Garry Shandling’s Show and The Tracey Ullman Show. In 1990, Mirkin launched the surrealistic comedy series, Get a Life, with Chris Elliott, for Fox (one of the most notable “cult classic” sitcoms of all-time). Someone out there obviously felt that Mirkin’s distinctive sense of humor would mesh with the comedy of Julie Brown, the comedian best known at the time for her “valley girl” comedy songs, and her parodies of Madonna.

Mirkin co-created The Julie Show in 1991 with Brown (and Brown’s longtime collaborator, Charlie Coffey), but the series was not picked up by NBC. NBC liked Mirkin and Brown, though, so the network commissioned a concept for a sketch comedy series by Mirkin, starring Brown. NBC ended up passing on the concept, but Fox picked it up, and The Edge debuted on Fox in 1992.

The concept behind The Edge was to do, well, you know, edgy sketch comedy (I’ll write a future legend about one sketch in particular that was TOO edgy for a major TV creator), while also moving at a very fast pace, constantly moving from sketch to sketch. The talent on the show was amazing. Brown was the star, but the cast included a pre-Spongebob Squarepants Tom Kenny, a pre-Mr. Show Jill Talley, a pre-Seinfeld Wayne Knight, a pre-blockbuster movie director Paul Feig, plus, of course, Jennifer Aniston.

Aniston, then in her mid-20s, was often treated as the token “hot girl” on the show, doing sketches as a bikini model, or in a sketch where the audience dictates what the characters do based on electrodes attached to the performer’s brains, and the audience wants her to undress in front of everyone. Stuff like that…

However, the weirdest part of the show by far was how they killed the cast off in every episode!

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How did the cast of The Edge, including Jennifer Aniston, get “killed off” repeatedly?

In the first episode, Brown and the rest of the cast introduce themselves, right before the set collapses on them, crushing them to death…

In the second episode, after assuring the audience that they would be safe, their heads were all sliced off by a gigantic sword…

In the third episode, things looked promising, until they learned that there was going to be an archery demonstration, and they were all killed by arrows…

In the fourth episode, they escaped from the set, only to run over by a truck….

In the fifth episode, they got out of the set, and wore helmets and body armor, but failed to notice that their clothes were all drenched in gasoline, which was set aflame…

For Halloween, the cast all had some candy that turned out to have alien eggs in them, and the aliens burst free from their chests…

In the seventh episode, a possible audience Q&A goes wrong when Tom Kenny mentions “Who Shot Jr?,” and the cast it all shot one by one…

In episode eight, a man they think is a safety engineer turns out to have actually installed a portal to hell…

In the ninth episode, the cast is hung by their necks (hanging is always really hard to depict realistically without putting the actors in huge danger, so it always looks kind of hokey like this)…

Finally, in the tenth episode, the cast hides in the dark, but a shooter has night vision, and they pick the cast off one by one in the dark (this sort of thing would NEVER fly nowadays, even on an “edgy” sketch show)….

By that point, I assume Mirkin just got tired of the joke, as it was dropped the rest of the way. Mirkin actually left the show during its first season due to the studio cutting the show’s budget (he became the showrunner on The Simpsons, heading the show in two of its most beloved seasons, Seasons 5-6), and the show was canceled after Season 1 (Mirkin came back to edit together a “Best of” episode to try to get the show renewed).

Hilariously dark stuff!

The legend is…

STATUS: True (well, for the first ten episodes)

Be sure to check out my archive of TV Legends Revealed for more urban legends about the world of TV.

Feel free (heck, I implore you!) to write in with your suggestions for future installments! My e-mail address is brian@poprefs.com