The Point Radio: Michael And Sara Make IMPASTOR Magic
After his long run on SMALLVILLE, Michael Rosenbaum is back on series television with the new TV Land project, IMPASTOR. He, and adorable co-star Sara Rue, talk about the show and show off the amazing chemistry that makes it work. Plus we begin our look at JUSTICE LEAGUE GODS AND MONSTERS, DC’s daringly different new DVD.
More in a few days with more on JUSTICE LEAGUE GODS AND MONSTERS. Be sure and follow us on Twitter now here.
Transcript
The Point Radio It's Mike Proub. Michael Rosenbaum is back on series TV and he's brought along Sarah Roo. Together they have impastor the new TV Land series they're more than happy to sit down and talk about. And we begin our two-part look at Justice League Gods and Monsters. Different? Yes. Unique? Yes. Will you like it? Well, we'll find out. Let's get to the
point. This is The Point, The Point Radio. Get The Point Radio. You probably don't Michael Rosenbaum from his long run as Lex Luthor on Smallville and doing some great voice work on the DC Comics direct to DVD features. Now he's teamed up with sitcom vet Sarah Roo for a new series on TV Land called Impastor. What's it all about? You know, it's Fish Out of Water. It's a guy who's a con man, buddy Dobbs, who I play. Bad upbringing on the streets.
He steals this guy's identity and the guy turns out to be a gay pastor and so now I'm thrown into this little town, kind of like a, what I say, northern exposure sort of eccentric little town and it's a balancing act. It's like one of the best scams he's ever pulled. Kenny pulled off and so it's a dark edgy comedy that TV Land's really trying something new and that's sort of what the show's about. Maybe a story of redemption. Where does Sarah fit into this?
I played Dora who is the church assistant, so the pastor's assistant and I'm the only full-time employee of the Lutheran church and Dora is obviously a very devout person. She's very religious but she's also very open and accepting of all and very progressive and she wants to put some of those qualities into the church, into the community and so that's why she hires this guy who is an openly gay pastor. She speaks with him over the phone and through emails
but never sees him face to face until he shows up at her door. She's got the wrong guy. It's not him. It's this sort of ne'er do well low life, smoking low life prostitute hanging out with sort of not a great guy but based on Michael Rosenbaum's real life. What? I've never been with a prostitute. Among Michael's experiences or writing and directing. After all he's done that before and may do it again. Yeah I mean I directed a movie back in the day like a year and a half ago. It was
a low-budget launching comedy and had the most fun and it got, was fortunate enough to direct like small episodes and short films and plays. Sure I mean I'd love to maybe you know maybe direct an episode of this and I'm going to do some more movies. I really fell in love with that aspect of it for sure. I like to be creative. Being an EP on this is, it's called the executive producer, which EP stands for. He wields his power and fails. I just have a lot of fun and I like, I look out
for everybody including myself. We all really look out for each other on set so but it's fun to be able to watch you know review the episodes and they're rough you know when they're really rough and you know they need a lot of editing and giving your notes and your input. You want me to be in every project that you do for the rest of your life. Yeah. I thought so. That sounds like an iron clad deal to me. Among all the roles that Sarah has done over the years and some great sitcoms,
I asked her if there was any she'd like to well revisit one more time. I loved my arc on Big Bank Theory. I would love to go back. It never really got closed up like they never resolved the storyline really. It just kind of dissipated. So I'd love to go back and do something there. That was really really fun. But the truth is I'm really enjoying playing Dora. Like this has just been a really great experience doing a single camera comedy as opposed to multi-cam. You just
have a lot more freedom in single cam to improv and to play and to make things better you know. You don't have the audience there. You know I always felt a lot of pressure when I was doing multi-cam because you have the audience you know 200 people sitting there waiting for you to finish the team and with us with single cam it's basically just me and Michael being like we can make that better. Let's do it again. We're entertained. We're not bored of our stuff.
That's really fun. So I've actually really been enjoying this process. Yeah but also what's great is Mike that you know when you're on network television there's 500 cooks in the kitchen. And everybody's these guys mostly like marketing guys in college. You know what the hell they're doing and now they're making all the decisions. And when you do a cable show which is great TV Land really only had a couple of people involved and
these cooks in the kitchen were like real chefs and they gave us great great notes. We're so supportive. Wanted the script to be what it was. I wanted to shoot what was on the paper and that's one of the reasons why we did it. We wanted to do something something different edgy and fun. So we got to do that with Impastor which is uh you know we have there's a lot of there's a lot of edgy stuff. Catch two episodes of Impastor every Wednesday on TV Land. Call it the post comic con
blues. Things slowing down a little bit but still plenty to talk about in the world of pop culture. The latest direction in Marvel's ongoing release of Varian Covers is hip-hop. In fact it's a dedication to the iconic album Covers for the past 30 years that helped shape pop culture at least that's what's according to a Marvel press release. The titles will appear in comic stores in October on various books including Amazing Spider-Man number one, The Astonishing Ant-Man number one,
Doctor Strange number one, and lots of the reboots of the Marvel characters that are on the way for the fall. Some of the work will be done by artists like Dennis Cowan, Sanford Green, and Phil Nodow as well. Keep in mind there might be some restrictions here on what your retailer is allowed to order so if you want to pick up some of the variants check with them as soon as possible. Streaming TV is definitely here to stay and the Emmy nominations certainly put the stamp on that.
Netflix reeled in some 34 Emmy nominations. Amazon picked up 12 all together including for series like House of Cards, Daredevil, Orange is the New Black, The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, and a lot more. The Emmy nominations all turn into actual awards on the night of September the 20th. That's when the broadcast takes place at the 67th annual Primetime Emmy Awards hosted by Andy Sandberg. Well-known science fiction author Robert Silverberg is coming to comics and maybe to the big screen
as well. He's signed a deal with LA publisher Humanoids and the first graphic novel to hit shelves will be the adaptation of Downward to Earth and from there there's talk of bringing more of Silverberg's work to live action. Part of the team at Humanoids does include Vince Girardis who's the co-executive producer of Game of Thrones. As we head into the fall it looks like Walking Dead Mania has not slowed down one little bit. There were two trailers that were
released at Comic-Con both have gotten well millions of viewers. Walking Dead the trailer that has a little bit of a tease toward what will be happening when the series returns in October to television picked up some 13.8 million views and the companion series Fear the Walking Dead which premieres in just a few weeks in August has had over 8 million views as well. Sometimes it's hard to tell the real stuff from the humor but it is true. Hannah Hart and Grace Elvick will be doing
a reboot of Electro Woman and Dyna Girl. The initial announcement came out at Comic-Con. There should be more on this coming up over the next few weeks. Turn Washington Spies will be back for a third season on AMC. They recently ended second season managed to pick up some 1.6 million viewers for AMC. Not quite the same numbers of Walking Dead does but still a decent showing on the network. Good month at comic stores all around and for graphic novels a pretty good month too. They
finally woke up and had a jump this month when compared to June of 2014 the growth was about 18% which is pretty good. When you look at 2015 as a whole in the second quarter graphic novel sales are up about 5% almost 6% when you compare them to last year. All that being said what did sell in the comic stores on the graphic novel rags in June at number 10 Marvel Universe the Ant-Man Digest at number 9 Odec volume 1 at number 8 the House of Ham at number 7 Saga volume 4 and then
Saga volume 1 hung in there again for another month this time at number 6. Civil War for Marvel was at number 5. Ms Marvel volume 3 was at number 4. East of West the volume 4 came in at number 3 at number 2 Thanos the Infinity Relativity and Witches volume 1 was the number one best-selling graphic novel in comic stores in June. Justice League Gods and Monsters is a very diverse tale on those iconic characters we all know so well. The concept started with Bruce Timb who'd actually
been away from the DC product for a little while. It was just kind of I mean I took a little bit of a breather I developed a couple different properties that uh original ideas that weren't superhero related um developed them for a while pitched them nobody bought them so it's like okay well I gotta do something because I you know I like food I like I like having a roof over my head and it was just right around that same time that I came up with this idea and uh as I as I mentioned
before it's originally an idea for um an animated series for television and everybody kind of thought well it's a really cool cool idea but it's probably we probably want to go a little bit more traditional and mainstream for an ongoing series for tv but it would make a good dtv so that's what we did. Recently most DC directed dvd projects have taken a much more adult and darker tone. I talked to Bruce a little bit about how that differs from producing a regular television
series. Just the nature of it being a directed video uh knowing that all the directed videos we've been doing are definitely marketed to a little bit older audience than traditionally for tv which is much much more of a seven you know six to eleven year old audience uh so it kind of changes the kind of stories that you're allowed to tell and it's not so much that we necessarily want to go dark all the time but I mean I've always kind of graduated gravitated towards more
adult subject matter anyways even back in the batman animated series so um so it definitely kind of opens up you know different parts of my brain it's like okay we can do this because I know we can get away with it we can't you know somebody never correct you know broadcast standards isn't gonna go oh you can't do that you know like for instance batman being a vampire you know we actually pitched that way back when in batman batman the animated series and fox television at the time
said there's no damn way you're doing a vampire batman on kids television so but here it's like okay so Bruce took his concept a long time collaborator Alan Burnett. Bruce one time showed me these drawings he had done of batman superman and wonder woman and he wanted to do he wanted to do darker versions and these were darker versions and they started telling this story the backgrounds and where superman came from and where batman came from batman was a vampire
batman and so um so so he presented this also to home video the home video people and we were at a point where we wanted to try something different and they said go they were done home for it as as soon as he was presented and I ended up writing it and we've worked together on it Bruce and I go back 25 years we started on batman the animated series so uh so uh we uh so we wrangled with it we talked to other people about it and and then it all started to come together and in writing it
it was kind of it was it was easier than you know good things come quickly sometimes when you're struggling and struggling you know something's wrong and and suddenly the world suddenly opened up and uh and we ended up with the script and and that's how it happened again the emphasis here is difference and that was especially apparent to actress Tamara Taylor who got the part of Wonder Woman get this they didn't tell me they just said they want you to be the voice of Wonder Woman I
kind of I said is this a joke are you serious I mean they're they there's already an established Wonder Woman they said no they're doing they're doing something new that's all I heard was new and I said okay great and then got the script and realized that maybe she wasn't the nicest but all in all Tamara said the job was amazing beyond beyond I don't know one little girl that didn't want to be Wonder Woman so it was kind of a surreal call to get we've got more coming up on
Gods and Monsters including talks with Padgett Brewster and C Thomas Howell from the cast and the driving force behind all the DC direct the DVD projects Andrea Romano in the meantime see Justice League Gods and Monsters available in video on demand and on DVD blu-ray that does it for the podcast for right now more on Justice League Gods and Monsters coming up a look at the new Jim Gaffigan show and a lot more and all you got to do is follow us well
wherever we like which usually is on websites like ComicMix.com get the point radio.com and of course in the iTunes podcast directory follow us too on social media on twitter facebook and instagram under the point radio have a good weekend enjoy seeing Ant-Man and we'll see you back here in a few days. Get the point radio.com
