AVC: Did you feel ripped-off when you saw South Park, with Kenny dying all the time?
CE: No, I didn't. I mean, I don't know that they got that from me, and if they did, who cares? Honestly, that wasn't, to me, the funniest part to Get A Life. Having me die was really just a way to get out of episodes that had no blow-off.
AVC: How did the idea for Get A Life came about?
CE: The first idea Adam and I had for a show was Marlon Brando as a housekeeper, and Fox didn't want to go down that road. I remember just waking up one time and thinking, "I'm the youngest in my family, and everybody thinks I'm kind of an idiot, and I haven't grown up yet. Maybe there's something in a guy that's never grown up, and he's living in a Leave It To Beaver sort of world, but he's an adult." What's funny is that what I pitched to Fox was essentially that. At the time, that movie Big was out. I sort of said it was like Big: a guy with a kid's heart, a kid's mind. What they really got was a retarded adult, who, you know, lives with his retarded parents.
AVC: Fox wanted something more heart-warming?
CE: Yeah, they definitely did. Even in the pilot, we had a couple of odd moments, you know, emotional moments——we made jokes out of it as much as we could. They required us to have a moment where my dad and I hugged. You know, that kind of thing. Then I think once they picked up the series... the first show was the male-modeling show that Adam and I wrote together in a weekend. That suddenly set the tone for the whole series. [Laughs.] And Fox realized, "Shit. This ain't what we bought."
AVC: But they stuck with it for a while, right?
CE: A season and a half. The second half-season... we had to beg to get that. It was an odd time for Fox. There was some transition in the leadership there, and the show was really not supported to any great extent. And we had no idea that people liked the show. We knew that a couple of reviewers liked it, but the ratings at Fox were impossible to gauge anything by, because even In Living Color, all their good shows, still had bottom ratings. You couldn't really look at that and go, "Those are terrific ratings." We weren't doing badly, but I think Fox was just kind of scared of the whole thing.
AVC: There's a story you've told about the première party for Get A Life...
CE: [Laughs.] Yeah, Fox had set up this huge—not huge, but in my mind, I thought it would be huge—party. But we walked in and it was in some shitty hotel, just like the opening-night party where everybody comes and watches the show and congratulates everybody and whatever. They had this big monitor set up, and we were following In Living Color. So everybody stood around with their cocktails and watched In Living Color, and everybody was laughing hysterically because it was so funny. And then Get A Life came on, and it was dead silence in the room. It was just so depressing. I remember that Lauren Bacall was there, because her son, Sam Robards, was in the show, and I remember her leaning over the table and looking at me as the credits rolled, and saying, "It wasn't that bad."
AVC: That must have been comforting.
CE: Yeah. In retrospect, Adam and I both said that they probably should have turned the TV off after In Living Color. It probably would have been a more fun party.
AVC: There seem to be a lot of grown men acting like adolescents on TV nowadays. Why do you think that's as funny as it is?
CE: I'm not sure, and I don't know that there were that many at the time Get A Life came on. I'm not saying I'm the Little Richard of this kind of stuff. I think there was a trend happening right then where people were starting to do that, and at the time, Dumb And Dumber hadn't come out... those kind of things. But it's just like watching somebody make you laugh in high school. You act like an idiot, and that makes your buddies laugh. That was the charm of Get A Life.
AVC: Does the show's following surprise you?
CE: Yeah, I am. Because honestly, we really didn't know it at the time. I wish we would have felt better about what we were doing, but we just thought, "Fuck it, nobody's watching this," or "Nobody likes it." The first season was really hard. Every show was like a big show. We did these big events in every show which most series will do once every four weeks or so: a big theme show, or some big setpiece. But that was the concept of the show, so it was really hard work. Then the second season... We were picked up for nine episodes, but we knew four episodes in that we weren't gonna get picked up anymore. So all those shows... I started feeling like, "I don't want to sit in a vat of chili. I'm sorry. The show's canceled. I'm not gonna do that." You know, that kind of shit. So a lot of it just ended with my head getting ripped off and kicked down the street, and that kind of thing, because we just were lazy.
« Previous | 1 | 2 | 3 | Next »
- Comments