ByJennifer M Wood|Jun 2, 2023, 11:49 AM EDT
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21 Jump Street, the late ’80s teen crime series, made big stars out of several of its cast members—including Johnny Depp—and gave early credits to a slew of soon-to-be stars with names like Brad Bitt. Here are 19 of them.
1. Brad Pitt
Season 2, Episode 20
Just a year after earning his first official screen credit on Another World, Brad Pitt put his pretty boy looks to good use in the second season of 21 Jump Street, in which he has a brief exchange with the show’s breakout star, Johnny Depp. Pitt must have made an impact. While promoting The Tourist in 2010, Angelina Jolie—Pitt’s then-partner—commented that she had never met Depp before production on the film began, but noted that “Brad and Johnny had worked together years ago so he said, ‘He’s a nice guy. You’re going to like him.’”
2. Josh Brolin
Season 1, Episode 5
Josh Brolin wasn’t exactly a newcomer when he played the unfortunately named Taylor Rolator in the first season of 21 Jump Street—he’d made his acting debut with Goonies and also starred in Thrashin’—but he was hardly a household name. Which allowed him to play the preppy slimeball to perfection.
3. Christina Applegate
Season 2, Episode 15
Christina Applegate was already playing Kelly Bundy on Married… With Children when she landed a guest spot on 21 Jump Street in 1988, hence the hair.
4. Jada Pinkett Smith
Season 5, Episode 21
Six years before she added the “Smith,” Jada Pinkett played a girl gangster with a heart in the series’ penultimate episode.
5., 6., and 7. Vince Vaughn, Robyn Lively, and Donovan Leitch
Season 4, Episode 9
Vince Vaughn is barely recognizable as a high schooler dealing with the murder of one of his teachers. That’s him in the burgundy mock-neck at 4:58. Grieving alongside him is Robyn Lively, just a few months after she made pop culture history as Louise Miller in Teen Witch.
The official star of this Vaughn-Lively episode is Donovan Leitch, but the real star is the gigantic box of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cereal he can be seen chowing down on in the episode’s opening sequence.
8. Bridget Fonda
Season 3, Episode 17
Her last name may have been famous, but Bridget Fonda was not yet a star when she nabbed the role of Molly “Moho” Chapman, a homeless hustler, in the series’ third season.
9. Thomas Haden Church
Season 4, Episode 3
Thomas Haden Church has made a career out of playing likable (if not always bright) guys like Lowell Mather on Wings and even earned an Oscar nomination for his role as Jack Cole in Sideways. But one of his earliest parts, and his first appearance on a television series, came in a 1989 episode of 21 Jump Street, as the trusty—and unfortunately coiffed—assistant to a drug dealer.
10. Jason Priestley
Season 1, Episode 12 // Season 2, Episode 4
The man who would be Beverly Hills, 90210‘s Brandon Walsh must have dug the vibe on Jump Street, as he made two appearances, as two different characters, in the first two seasons. The latter appearance featured a 1987-approved mullet.
11. Shannen Doherty
Season 4, Episode 12
Not to be outdone by her fictional twin brother, Shannen Doherty also did the 21 Jump Street thing, though not until the show’s fourth season. And yet again, she’s playing an annoying sister (in this case, to Keith Coogan, a familiar character actor with more than 80 credits on his filmography).
12. Peter Berg
Season 2, Episode 17
Before he stepped behind the camera to write, direct, and produce projects like Friday Night Lights, Battleship, and The Leftovers, Peter Berg made his living as an actor—a career that began as a smartass teen with a penchant for varsity jackets in 21 Jump Street’s second season.
13. Blair Underwood
Season 1, Episode 6
Blair Underwood is typically known for playing good guys. But that wasn’t the case in this 1987 episode, “Gotta Finish the Riff,” from the series’ first season. The episode premiered just a few months before Underwood joined the cast of L.A. Law as Jonathan Rollins, a fresh-faced Harvard grad who held the distinction of being the first Black president of the Harvard Law Review. While rumors have long swirled that Rollins was based on Barack Obama, who really was its first black president, that simply is a rumor. Obama wasn’t even a Harvard Law student until 1988, a year after Underwood joined the cast (though he did meet Obama a few years later, when some of the show’s cast and producers met with a group of Harvard law students).
14. Rosie Perez
Season 4, Episode 16
A year after dancing her way through the credits of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, Rosie Perez made her television debut playing Rosie Martinez in just her second credited role.
15. Pauly Shore
Season 2, Episode 4
Pauly Shore had not yet adopted his “Hey Buddddyyy!” catchphrase when he made his acting debut in 21 Jump Street’s second season (in the same episode as Jason Priestley’s latter appearance). And that’s a good thing.
16. Sherilynn Fenn
Season 1, Episode 8
Sherilyn Fenn’s single-episode appearance in 21 Jump Street’s first season shouldn’t really be surprising, since she was engaged to Johnny Depp. The two began dating after meeting on the set of a student film, Dummies, in 1985. But a walk down the aisle wasn’t in the cards; they split up after three and a half years.
17. Larenz Tate
Season 3, Episode 11
In the decade before Larenz Tate landed his breakthrough role in Menace II Society, he kicked around with bit parts on a number of sitcoms, including a throwback third season episode of 21 Jump Street in which he plays a younger (and much geekier) version of Captain Fuller.
18. Peri Gilpin
Season 3, Episode 3
Though she’ll always be best known as Dr. Frasier Crane’s producer/sidekick extraordinaire Roz Doyle, Peri Gilpin’s first real acting job was as the simply named Fitzgerald in 21 Jump Street’s third season.
19. Dann Florek
Season 2, Episode 18
For nearly 25 years, Dann Florek has played the same character—Captain Donald Cragen—on Law & Order, Law & Order: SVU and Law & Order: Organized Crime. But he cut his policing teeth on earlier crime procedurals like Hill Street Blues, Hunter, Matlock, and “Brother Hanson & the Miracle of Renner’s Pond,” a 1988 episode of 21 Jump Street.
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The Real-Life Serial Killer That Might’ve Inspired ‘Dexter’s Dark Passenger
Brazil’s most notorious killer of killers has been called the real Dexter for years, but ‘Dexter’s’ creator tells a different origin story.
ByMatt Hoffman|Oct 30, 2026, 9:00 PM EDT
Back in July 2004, Jeff Lindsay introduced readers to Dexter Morgan, a Miami police blood-spatter analyst who kills only people who deserve it, egged on by a voice in his head he calls the “Dark Passenger.” Two years later, Showtime turned Darkly Dreaming Dexter into a hit series with Michael C. Hall.
Somewhere along the way, the internet decided Dexter had a real-life model: Pedro Rodrigues Filho, a Brazilian who claimed to have killed more than 100 people, most of them criminals. Entertainment sites now call him “the Brazilian Dexter,” and ScreenRant describes the show as loosely based on his crimes. No quote from Lindsay or the show’s producers backs that up, but the similarities are hard to miss.
The Boy Who Settled Scores
Filho was born in 1954 on a farm in Santa Rita do Sapucaí, in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, with an injured skull: his father, he said, had kicked his pregnant mother during a fight. He told the magazine Época in 2003 that he first wanted to kill at 13, when he shoved an older cousin into a sugarcane press. A year later, after his father lost his job as a school guard over accusations that he was stealing school lunches, Filho shot the official who had fired him, then shot the guard he believed was the real thief. (Accounts disagree on who that first victim was: some Brazilian outlets say the mayor of his hometown, others the deputy mayor of Alfenas, also in Minas Gerais.)
He fled to Mogi das Cruzes, outside São Paulo, where he robbed drug dens, killed traffickers, and took over a dead drug boss’s business. When his pregnant girlfriend was shot dead, he went looking for the man who ordered it and, with four friends, hit a wedding party, leaving seven dead and 16 wounded, according to Época. He was arrested shortly after turning 18 and entered prison on May 24, 1973; in the van on the way there, he killed a fellow prisoner he said was a rapist.
Where the Comparison Holds
Like Dexter, Filho had a code, or said he did. He told Época he killed only people who were no good, and that he never killed children, women, or family men. He also had a father story to rival Harry Morgan’s, though a much darker one: Filho claimed he killed his own father in prison, in revenge for his mother’s stabbing, and chewed a piece of his heart. (Época noted that he gave a psychiatrist a completely different account of how his father died.)
The resemblance mostly ends there. Dexter’s code, as Mental Floss has laid out before, includes “don’t get caught,” and Filho spent roughly four decades behind bars, much of it bragging. He had “Mato por prazer” (“I kill for pleasure”) tattooed on his left arm. He claimed 47 victims inside prison alone, though Época found just 18 charges against him on file in 2003; by his death, Brazilian outlets counted 71 homicides on his record.
What Dexter’s Creator Actually Said
Lindsay has told his origin story many times, and it starts nowhere near Brazil: at a Kiwanis Club lunch where he sat at the head table waiting to speak and, as he told BookPage in 2005, “the idea just popped into my head that sometimes serial murder isn’t a bad thing.” He then built the character out of research: he collected books on sociopaths and murderers, interviewed psychologists and crime scene investigators, and got cop friends to turn him loose in their dead-files room. He also rejects the very label that made Filho famous: “Dexter’s not a vigilante,” he told Middlebury Magazine in 2011. “Vigilantes are trying to perform an act of justice. Dexter just likes to kill people.”
The Ending Dexter Survived
Filho walked out of prison in 2007, went back in 2011 for crimes committed during his sentence, and was released for good in 2018. Within months, he had reinvented himself as a YouTube personality who commented on crimes in the news and lectured about his past. On the morning of March 5, 2023, he was on a sidewalk in Mogi das Cruzes holding a small child when men in a black car opened fire, according to the news site G1. The child was unhurt, but according to the police report, one of the attackers stabbed Filho in the throat as he lay on the ground. He was 68.
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Every Season of ‘The Twilight Zone’ Ranked From Best to Worst by Rotten Tomatoes
There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man, and it holds a ranking of every ‘Twilight Zone’ season.
ByLogan DeLoye|Oct 31, 2026, 8:00 AM EDT
You unlock this door with the key of imagination; beyond it is another dimension where Rotten Tomatoes has ranked all five original Twilight Zone seasons.
The Twilight Zone took over television screens from 1959 to 1964, inviting the people of Earth into “a dimension of sound, a dimension of sight, a dimension of mind,” of “both shadow and substance, of things and ideas.”
The science-fiction series, hosted by Rod Serling, spanned 156 episodes, each with different characters and plots that drew you deeper into The Twilight Zone. Just when viewers thought they had the story figured out, a supernatural (sometimes horrific and psychological) plot twist transpired, leaving you with a moral lesson.
The series as a whole received a 92 % on Rotten Tomatoes, earning top praise from the review site. They also ranked each season individually, with a few scoring higher than others. But which season was the best, and which fell short on the Tomatometer?
SEASON 1 – 100%
The first episode of The Twilight Zone premiered in October 1959 and immediately captivated viewers with a storyline they would never forget, though not the case for the main character. Mike Ferris wanders into the small town of Oakwood, with no idea who he is or why he is there. Hours go by, and he realizes he is entirely alone, but is it all just a simulation?
The season continues with favorites like “Mr. Denton on Doomsday,” “The Four of Us Are Dying,” “The Fever,” “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” “Mr. Bevis,” and “A World of His Own.”
Rotten Tomatoes gave Season 1 of The Twilight Zone a perfect rating.
SEASON 2 – 100%
Rotten Tomatoes also gave Season 2 a perfect score, which upheld the horror and speculative appeal of the first season.
The second season of The Twilight Zone opens with “King Nine Will Not Return,” in which World War II pilot James Embry is on a plane that crashes into the desert. When he wakes up, his crew is gone. Wandering through the desert and seeing strange visions in the sky, he wakes up in a hospital 17 years later, triggered by news headlines of the incident. Was Embry experiencing PTSD, or was there actually something supernatural occurring in his hospital room?
The season proceeds with “Eye of the Beholder,” “A Most Unusual Camera,” “A Penny for Your Thoughts,” “Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?,” and the finale, “The Obsolete Man.”
SEASON 3 – 90%
Premiering in 1961, the third season of The Twilight Zone begins with an episode about an apocalyptic battle and two enemy soldiers. Throughout the episode, the soldiers, a man and a woman, learn to like each other despite being on opposing sides. With no one left on Earth, they must work together to survive, though hostile and tense.
Other episodes from this season include “The Shelter,” “The Mirror,” “It’s a Good Life,” “To Serve Man,” “Little Girl Lost,” “Nothing in the Dark,” and “The Changing of the Guard.”
Rotten Tomatoes gave the third season a 90%, with the Critics Consensus being that the season “manages to overturn an uneven structure with some superb writing that borders on profound and some of the finest half hours in the series’ history.”
SEASON 4 -86%
Season 4 of The Twilight Zone ranked lower than previous seasons with an 86% on the Tomatometer (tied for last).
The first episode of this season, “In His Image,” follows 35-year-old Alan Talbot, who struggles with homicidal urges and memory issues. He discovers he is actually an android with a malfunction. In the end, Alan is deactivated, and the scientist who created him assumes his identity… and his fiancée!
Other episodes in Season 4 include “Valley of the Shadow,” “Printer’s Devil,” “On Thursday We Leave for Home,” “No Time Like the Past,” and “The Bard.”https://www.youtube.com/embed/SXapeCPpyeo?feature=oembed
Season five of The Twilight Zone premiered in 1963 with “In Praise of Pip,” which follows bookie Max, who learns his son has been wounded at war. Max becomes mortally wounded himself and finds his way to an amusement park where he relives happy memories with a younger version of his son and prays to God to spare his son’s life in exchange for his own. Pip recovers and finds himself in the same park by the end of the episode.
Rotten Tomatoes scored this season an 86%, like the fourth season, once again tied for last, saying that “portions of these episodes are diminished by unfortunate clichés.”
Other Season 5 episodes include “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” “Living Doll,” “The Old Man in the Cave,” “Ninety Years Without Slumbering,” “The Masks,” and “The Bewitchin’ Pool.”
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Quiz: Which ‘Little House on the Prairie’ Character Are You?
Find out which pioneer best matches your personality with this eight-question quiz!
ByNitya Rao|Jul 18, 2026, 8:00 PM EDT
Before we had the “tradwife” trend, we had Little House on the Prairie, where living off the land was the norm rather than the niche lifestyle it is today. The sweeping plains of Independence, Kansas, from Laura Ingalls Wilder’s original novel to the 2026 Netflix adaptation, remain the same. Yet, somehow, the world was an entirely different place. It was a world where survival required just as much pluck as it did positivity.
In the series premiere, Pa tells Laura that “hope is everything,” a profound sentiment she eventually echoes back to him by the season finale. And while the unpredictability of life on the prairie probably calls for a prayer or two, Ma reminds us that it isn’t always a bad thing. In Episode 4, she insists that “an uncertain life is full of possibilities.”
Maybe you relate to Ma’s realism, or perhaps you’re more like Pa, rose-colored glasses and all. Then there are the Lauras of the world who would rather be traipsing through the tallgrass than thinking about the perplexities of pioneering. Dr. George Tann’s charisma, Mary’s perfectionism, and John Edwards’ mysteriousness fill in the blanks. We may have evolved from bonnets to baseball caps, but each of us has an inner pioneer personality that persists.
Are you ready to find your place within the covered wagon? Take this quiz to discover which Little House on the Prairie character captures your true colors.
Which pioneer mirrors your personality the most? Each and every member of the community is resilient, passionate, and inspiring in their own way. Share this personality quiz with your family and friends to find out if you’re the same Little House on the Prairie character, or if you have the perfect balance of traits to brave the frontier together!
The Evolution of the Little House Legacy
If you were raised on Little House reruns, odds are you have a favorite memory of life on the prairie. But before it became the next big thing to stream, Little House on the Prairie was a product of pen, paper, and fuzzy frontier flashbacks. That was roughly the recipe that Laura Ingalls Wilder used to craft the autobiographical book Little House in the Big Woods in 1932.
It was this coming-of-age tale that gave readers a tiny taste of the family’s cozy yet chaotic world of handcrafted log cabins and homemade maple sugar. Much like the staple pioneer sweet, one bite—and book—simply wasn’t enough. Over nearly a century, that opening chapter spawned eight more original novels, a 1970s TV series, and, most recently, a Netflix series offering a visually richer, realistic take on frontier life.
Along the way, generations of fans hitched their wagons to Laura’s fiery spirit and Mary’s quiet strength, while looking to Ma and Pa as the blueprint for making a house a home. From the page to the screen, this timeline traces the Little House on the Prairie legacy, showing how each installment puts its own spin on the Ingalls saga:
The Original Book Series
Little House in the Big Woods (1932)
Farmer Boy (1933)
Little House on the Prairie (1935)
On the Banks of Plum Creek (1937)
By the Shores of Silver Lake (1939)
The Long Winter (1940)
Little Town on the Prairie (1941)
These Happy Golden Years (1943)
The First Four Years (1971)
The Screen Adaptations
Little House on the Prairie, NBC Series (1974–1983)
Beyond the Prairie: The True Story of Laura Ingalls Wilder, CBS Movies (2000-2002)
Little House on the Prairie, Disney Miniseries (2005)
Little House on the Prairie, Netflix Series (2026)
We might swap out the actors or change the cinematography, but the heart of the Ingalls family never fails. We keep coming back to them because watchable resilience is rare, whether they’re braving a brutal blizzard or just fighting to keep a roof over their heads. Every reimagining reflects the respective era it was made in, but the overarching theme of holding onto hope through hardship is timeless.
Next: Join Mental Floss’s Geography Quiz Competition
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