The Point Radio: Bill Lawrence Makes Being UNDATEABLE Funny
He gave us SCRUBS and COUGARTOWN, now Bill Lawrence is back as EP on a comedy that owes a lot to the great shows that came before. UNDATEABLE takes some of the high pointed of TV production to give us something new in a sitcom, and Bill shares how it all came together. Plus Showtime promises us more a lot more PENNY DREADFUL.
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The Point Radio It's Mike Raub, the guy who gave us Cougar Town and Scrubs is back with a new comedy. Bill Lawrence says he's created Undateable to be a throwback to the kind of shows we used to enjoy. And he explains that coming up as well.
In the meantime, Josh Trank goes from the Fantastic Four to Star Wars and plenty more Penny Dreadful is on the way. Let's give you The Point. This is The Point. The Point Radio.
Get The Point Radio. Get The Point Radio. He gave us Scrubs, he gave us Cougar Town, now Bill Lawrence is back. Bill is brought to NBC his new comedy called Undateable. One that he put together carefully and started to get from several different directions.
One of the most important though was choosing the right cast and the right roles for each of those cast members as well. For example, he wanted to be sure that when he added a gay character, it didn't come across as a standard comedy cliche. You know what, I think he's always nerve-wracking when you do a show is that you don't want
to ever be somebody that is like, oh, you know, you have this cliche, you have this gay character or something that people have seen before. The important thing, one of the other producers of this show is a guy named Randall Winston. He's my largest adult relationship. He's a gay man himself.
I'm not outing him as he's married and has kids. But one of the things that we really like the idea of talking to him about that I don't think we've seen on the show is, or in a comedy, is we all hit him up for stories about when he was first coming out and how awkward it was to deal with his buddies and kind of how awkward and weird it felt for him to be part of a gang of friends when in his head everything
had changed and their head things hadn't changed. It was just kind of a funny story generator for us. And you know, we have a couple of people working on the show that can just kind of funnel in their own personal stuff and we put them all right on the show. Then there's the overall chemistry of the cast.
It's part of the battle in a sitcom is making it seem like people are friends and have chemistry. Part of the idea behind the show is casting people who are friends in real life and on the modern landscape and you'll have a couple episodes to establish that. It kind of helps that all these guys and girls hang out anyways. Shot before a live studio audience, Bill wanted to be sure that Undateable's cast consisted
of people who were used to working in that kind of environment. We went out and scouted comics. I will stand up. I'm an absolute fan. And the first two people we met were Brent and Rick Glassman, Brent Warren, two guys
that not only have very specific voices comedically and different from each other, you know, so you could tweak the parts to them. But at the end of the show, drive home together and live in the same apartment and had an easy chemistry that we're like, wow, if those guys can act at all, it'd be great to ask them to part.
A funny part of that was so we cast Brent and Rick and Ron Funchett, who all knew each other first. And we didn't have the lead of the show. And Chris D'Alessio was still on the show with me at the time. And Brent made the mistake of saying, my mentor in comedy is Chris D'Alessio.
And we made the decision to go ahead and give Chris the part. He didn't have to audition. He was offered it to him, you know, and had to wait and see if his other show kept going or didn't keep going. It was going to be good for Chris either way.
A fun part of that story was, you know, this is Brent's first job ever. And there's about three days at the comedy store that Brent got to go up to Chris and say, hey, Chris, you know, we're kind of finally on equal footing. I've got a TV show now, too. You know, and then and then we gave Chris the part of the lead and Chris, you know,
we went out to the comedy store to see those guys. And Chris was like, hey, Brent, remember your TV show? It's my TV show now. And then on the poster, it's like Chris walking with Brent over his shoulder and just seeing Chris torture Brent that way immediately became the big brother, little brother dynamic
on the show. Again, the style of the show and the experience of the players involved was very important. You know, when I I've been in the business for a long time and when I started out, there were comics in every show, you know, because the multi-camera skill set involves first and foremost being funny.
Secondly, being able to vibe off the audience a whole collapse and third, you know, acting, you know, and obviously know these guys, the girls who have gotten the parts that they couldn't also act that for some reason, not only we got away from that, but as there's a Western Alliance multi-camera sitcoms, it's the skill set that comics have more than most people, you know, that you can cast a young actor or actress right now.
And most of them have not been in front of a live audience that way. Stand up far every night. So I had no reservations. You know, I was a fan of on improvement of Seinfeld, Drew Carey show, Roseanne. Those are the multi cameras I grew up on.
And, you know, one of the things I've noticed with the second you get comics, if a joke doesn't work, they sense it and they just change it on their own. And it's the ultimate gift. Bill emphasized not to let the title fool us. Undateable, not just a show about being, well, undateable.
Well, anybody that's seen episodes of the show, see that we did 13 episodes and maybe one or two about getting somebody a date, you know, with the show. And that was really about and it'll probably sound way too deep. But it's a multi camera sitcom. Is Adam and I's, you know, probably like everybody, everybody on earth, men and women go through
an undateable phase in their life, do the bad jobs or insecurities or money or the way they dress. And most of us get out of it. And there's about a group of friends and people that are stuck there a little bit. And what is predictable or story, you know, searching for something, even Chris's character,
somebody that can't hold on to things. And so when we pitched this show, we brought pictures of ourselves along of our most undateable for me. I procsied blonde hair and earrings. I just looked testively like a kid from Connecticut who said badly wanted to be cool with that
procsied hair and earrings. Who's with that? But to me, what the show is about is a group of people that would probably be very sad and lonely with it, not for each other. You know, ultimately my favorite multi-carrier sitcoms Cheers and Seinfeld friends, you
know, all that. They're all shows that you would say, hey, these characters are kind of sad if they didn't have each other to lean on. Unlike Scrubs and Cougar Town, the characters on Undateable are at a different stage in their lives.
I don't, I think if people are wrong and in sadness, yeah, I think that there's a burden for these people to, you know, to have some victories and to hopefully be funny. But, you know, if I went and pitched Cheers tomorrow and said, hey, what's it about? It's about an alcoholic bartender who can't stop having empty relationships and the people that habitate his bar that hate their lives so much, they just want to sit on chairs all
day. You know what I mean? I think it would be a hard sell. You know, and for me, there's something very identifiable about this point in time in their life.
And I think one of the reasons that it's not that big of a tight web act is A, these guys and girls are all funny, and B, they're all very young, you know, and I hope that everybody kind of remembers the struggle of their youth, you know, to kind of get a toehold. Catch back-to-back episodes of Undateable Thursdays on NBC and see what you may have missed right now at NBC.com.
Summer's getting underway, everybody's a little busy, but we'll take some time for the latest in pop culture. Josh Trank, who's busy right now rebooting The Fantastic Four for 20th Century Fox, has been chosen as another one of those directors who'll be doing a standalone Star Wars film for Disney.
As you know, these films will alternate with the regular new films in the new Star Wars reboot. Trank, of course, known for Chronicle, but he also did a Star Wars fan film back in 2007 called Stabbing at Leia. By the way, you can catch that on YouTube.
Josh is the second director announced for the new standalone Star Wars films. The first was Gareth Edwards, who also just completed the Godzilla film. Penny Dreadful's getting a second season from Showtime. It'll be an even bigger one than this one, with 10 episodes in the second season. The show's been doing about 4.8 million viewers since its launch a few weeks ago and so far
as the most watched new show ever on demand for Showtime. I want to make a note about a new series called The Almighty Johnsons. It's actually a hit in New Zealand, but it's been picked up here by the Syfy Network and it begins a run on Syfy in July. It involves four typical guys, at least that's what they say, who inherit the powers of the
Norse gods. Almighty Johnsons begins on Friday, July 11th at 10 p.m. Eastern on Syfy. It might be missing the white and the blue, but there'll be plenty of red for an American Psychos movie marathon. It'll take place on the Epics channel on July 4th.
Among other things, it'll include the world television premiere of the 2013 version of Carrie, along with films like You're Next, Break Down the Frozen Ground, The Usual Suspects, Silence of the Lambs, and Primal Fear. You can see more and get the entire lineup at epics.com. Check your local cable provider to see if you get the Epics Network.
Archie is reviving Sabrina the Teenage Witch in a little bit different way. They're following the success of their other hit Afterlife with Archie using the same creators to bring back Sabrina in a new series called The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. Done in a much more realistic fashion than any other previous Sabrina series, The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina will debut with a few variant covers and be in stores in October.
An interesting mix when you look at the top 10 best-selling graphic novels in May in the bookstores. Starting at number 10, it's Batman Volume 4's Zero Year the Secret City Hardcover from DC. Monster Mizumi from Seven Seasons at number 9, Sex Criminals first volume from Image is
at number 8. Also from Image at number 7, Saga Volume 3. And again, Walking Dead Volume 20 hits at number 6 spot. The Marvel Encyclopedia updated and expanded his number 5 best-selling graphic novel in bookstores.
Naruto Volume 85, The Perennial comes in at number 4. Godzilla Awakening the Hardcover from Legendary Comics is at number 3. And two volumes of Attack on Titan hold the number 1 and number 2 spots. Attack on Titan Volume 1's number 2 and the first best-selling graphic novel in bookstores for the month, Attack on Titan Volume 12.
Marvel's moving ahead to get Doctor Strange on the big screen by announcing a director and that is Scott Derrickson who you know from films like The Exorcism of Emily Rose and Sinister as well. Gives him some pretty big credentials for the film which so far is not on the schedule of Marvel movies.
However that's expected to change sometime by the end of the summer. That does it for the podcast. We're back every week, twice in fact, on websites like ComicMix.com and MichaelDavisWorld.com and of course the iTunes podcast directory as well. But you can keep up with Pop Culture 24-7 right now.
Listen free to the world's only pop culture network, The Point Radio. Get The Point Radio dot com and on any mobile device with a free app called iNet Radio. Get that at iNetRadio.com. Get back here to see us again in a few days.
