The Reel Review
Emmy award-winning comedian Paul Reubens, the man behind the gleefully silly, bowtie-wearing Pee-wee Herman, sets the record straight about the highs and lows of his life, in this two-part docuseries based on 40 hours of interviews that the previously private Reubens gave prior to his 2023 death at the age of 70 from metastatic lung cancer and leukemia, which he had kept secret from the public and his filmmakers.
The docuseries is filled with archival footage of a young Reubens, a wildly creative and artistic individual enamored with 1950s kitsch and the circus, who would end up in Los Angeles where he would hone his craft as a performance artist at The Groundlings improv theater. After a failed Saturday Night Live audition, he decided to create the iconic character and got his big break when HBO aired his special, The Pee-wee Herman Show, in 1981. We learn that prior to going into the closet to hide his homosexuality to preserve his career, Reubens had a love, Guy, who died of AIDS in the 1980s and had been the basis for several of the traits of his Pee-wee character. His movies and his children’s morning show were wonderfully and cleverly subversive, showcasing a surprising number of cast members who would go on to become famous in their own right.
The docuseries also looks at Reubens’ life at his Los Angeles home and his love for the surrounding wild animals, while also focusing on the career-threatening challenges Reubens had post Pee-wee – namely a 1991 arrest for indecent exposure at an X-rated movie theater in Sarasota where he had moved to help his mother take care of his dying father and 11 years later, a police raid on his Los Angeles home on suspicions of child pornography, which despite being unfounded – all he had was vintage homoerotic adult erotica – still damaged his reputation. Through this docuseries, Reubens finally gets to reveal his truth and have the last word, sharing that all he wanted to do was celebrate nonconformity and entertain based in love.
REEL FACTS
• Over the course of its five-year run from 1986 to 1990, Pee-wee’s Playhouse received 22 Daytime Emmy nominations and won 11 Emmys.
• With Reubens’ death, the main cast of the original Pee-wee television special have all now died in recent years – Lynne Stewart who played Miss Yvonne, died in February 2025, John Paragon, who played the magician Jambi and voice of Pterri the Pteradactyl, died at his home in Palm Springs in 2021, and Bill Hartman, who played Captain Carl, was shot and killed in his sleep in May 1998 by his wife in a murder-suicide.
• Paul Reubens’ final role was as Pee-wee Herman in the 2016 Netflix film Pee-wee’s Big Holiday.
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