"Episodes" - Tamsin Greig / Stephen Mangan / Matt LeBlanc vehicle

[DuncanC]

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/arts/television/25joey.html

LIKE the husbands of cliché whose wives announce during the honeymoon, "You're perfect; now change," people in British television are often blindsided by the embrace-then-rip-apart torture that is the Hollywood remake machine.

The veteran British producer, writer and actor Jimmy Mulville, for instance, once suffered through the doomed Americanization of "Game On," the 1990s BBC comedy starring Ben Chaplin as an agoraphobe, someone who never leaves the house. After showering the show with praise, Mr. Mulville said, the Fox network executives who bought it then questioned its very premise.

" 'Can't he maybe leave once, to go down to Foot Locker?' " he said, mimicking the executives. (The remake died after the pilot.)

"This is quite a common experience," Mr. Mulville said. It is also the basis for "Episodes," a new hall-of-mirrors comedy series about Hollywood that stars Matt LeBlanc. Mr. Mulville is co-producing it in a Showtime-BBC collaboration.

"Episodes" follows the travails of a British husband-and-wife screenwriting team hired by an American network to remake their hit series, which stars the distinguished British actor Richard Griffiths as the headmaster of an old-fashioned boarding school. The network adores the show. At first.

Hmm, the network executives say. On closer study Mr. Griffiths seems too English, "too butlery." No one will like him, so how about hiring someone else? How about Matt LeBlanc? How about losing the headmaster idea, and having Mr. LeBlanc play a hockey coach? How about changing the name of the show, from "Lyman's Boys" to "Pucks"?

"Then they watch the show they love go away," said David Crane, who wrote the "Episodes" script with Jeffrey Klarik. The program is scheduled to begin on Showtime in January.

The humor lies in the relationship between the couple and Mr. LeBlanc, and also in Mr. LeBlanc himself. He is, of course, nothing like Mr. Griffiths, not being English, 62 years old, or extremely large. Nor is his character his real self, but a variation. He is more "Matt LeBlanc" than Matt LeBlanc, just as the "Larry David" on "Curb Your Enthusiasm" is some evil-twin approximation of the real Mr. David.

That allows Mr. LeBlanc the fun of getting to riff on his complicated, post-"Friends," post-Joey Tribbiani celebrity.

"It takes the whole Joey persona that I have and meets it head-on," Mr. LeBlanc said. "It's really liberating. When you get pigeonholed as one character, people tend to think, 'That's all he can do.' " (That is the case in "Episodes," in which the network insists that the faux Matt LeBlanc stick to type and play the hockey coach in "Pucks" as, essentially, Joey on Ice.)

Mr. LeBlanc, who turns 43 on Sunday, was hanging out recently in his trailer in East London. He had just filmed a scene set at a Hollywood charity benefit dinner for rape victims in which he, or rather the fictional he, becomes ostentatiously bored.

The fictional Matt LeBlanc "is a little more damaged emotionally than I am," he said, has two sons and is going through a nasty divorce. (The real Mr. LeBlanc is also divorced, but the details are different, and he has no sons, just a daughter.) The fictional Matt LeBlanc collects fine art, has a jet ("I wish I had a jet," the real Mr. LeBlanc said) and is swaggeringly pleased about his big house and fancy car.

He — the fake one — speaks a little Thai ("I call it 'get-by Thai,' " Mr. LeBlanc said) and is also more calculating than his nonfiction counterpart.

"The Matt LeBlanc in the show uses the fact that people assume I'm dumb because I played the dumb guy on 'Friends' — he uses that to manipulate situations to his advantage," Mr. LeBlanc said. "He manipulates the writers so that the show is more the way he wants it to be. Not that he's right, but it exposes his insecurities about his ability."

If it is surprising to hear Mr. LeBlanc correctly using words like "manipulate," then it is also surprising to find that he is, in reality, kind of quiet.

"People will come up to me and speak slowly," Mr. LeBlanc said. "Or they'll ask me if I'm O.K., because I'm a lot more low-key and subdued than Joey Tribbiani was. He was very high energy, high key. He talked loudly. But I'm not really like that. I had to have a lot of coffee when we were shooting 'Friends.' "

The British actress Tamsin Greig, who plays Beverly, the wife in the husband-and-wife writing duo, said she found the dichotomy fascinating. "It's almost like there are two of these people in the world — the one who is on telly and the one you get to work with."

She added: "The show makes a really interesting comment on the nature of celebrity, the fascination with trying to understand people's lives. It's all fabrications and falsities. This is a show that you think is about Matt LeBlanc, but at the end of the show you won't know him any more than you do now."

Beverly and her husband, Sean (played by the British actor Stephen Mangan), have different reactions to the Hollywood culture and to the celebrity in their midst, leading to further tensions as they wrangle over how to keep their jobs while clinging to the last shreds of their artistic vision.

"She can't stand it," Mr. Mangan said. "But for him it's a total bromance. He falls in love with Matt. He can't get enough of L.A., of Matt, of the whole thing."

"Friends" ended in 2004, and its six main cast members have had varying degrees of success in the second acts of their careers. Mr. LeBlanc starred in the only "Friends" spinoff, the ill-fated "Joey," from 2004 to 2006. He won't say much about it, only that it wasn't a great experience.

"I wasn't prepared for the pressure," he said. The weight of expectation, he added, was driven home during the presentations for advertisers before the first season, when "Joey" was billed as a replacement for "Friends," and Mr. LeBlanc had to stand onstage in front of an enormous poster of himself. "I thought, those are big shoes to fill — six pairs of shoes."

Since then, he said, he has been spending time with his daughter, now 6, and other family and friends, aggressively avoiding the Hollywood celebrity scene. He said he was regularly sent scripts, but after all the frenetic years with "Friends" he has not been interested in returning to work until now.

He was lured back to television, he said, by the chance to work with Mr. Crane, a creator, producer and writer of "Friends," and Mr. Klarik, who also has extensive comedy writing experience, including "The Class" and "Mad About You." The pair have written all seven episodes of "Episodes" (there is an option for more), and were recently in London while filming was going on. In a happy divergence from the world they are describing, they have had little creative interference.

"We've been talking to friends who have pilots going on back home and you just hear the horror stories," Mr. Crane said.

Mr. Klarik asked, "What was that political show?"

Mr. Crane said: "We have to be careful what we say. A friend developed a show that took place in Washington and apparently, we heard, the note came back after the show had been bought, read and shot: 'There's too much politics.' "

Mr. LeBlanc said, "At the risk of damaging my career, I'll say that it feels like in the process there are a lot of people who have to voice their opinion to justify their paycheck."

And that meddling is particularly true in adapting British hits. For every "All in the Family" ("Till Death Do Us Part" in Britain) and "The Office," there's a "Coupling" and "Life on Mars" that are lost in translation.

"If it was a hit there, why not just remake it the same way here?" Mr. LeBlanc said. "Is it that a British audience is smarter than an American one? Is it the other way around? Why does it need to be tinkered with so much?"

As the banquet scene was being filmed in a large auditorium in East London, the two writers watched the proceedings on monitors in an adjoining room. The actors played it again and again, making minute timing and reaction changes with each take. Mr. Klarik and Mr. Crane laughed at their lines. As in "Friends" there is little room for ad-libbing or freelance off-reservation wandering by the actors.

"We don't love hearing just the gist of what we wrote," Mr. Crane said.

Mr. Klarik added: "We're sticklers for getting words right. There's a reason why we wrote it the way we wrote it. But we're O.K. hearing pitches if they come to us and if it's funny."

Finally everyone was satisfied. Back in his trailer later Mr. LeBlanc was musing about Joey Tribbiani, who will forever follow him — not that he minds, for instance, that strangers call him Joey more than they call him Matt. Walking down the street with Gary Oldman while the two were filming "Lost in Space" in London some years ago, he was struck by how bystanders were wary of Mr. Oldman, known for playing deranged characters, but excited to see himself.

"I look at it as a compliment," he said. "And at the end of the day it beats digging holes."

He means that literally. He grew up in a blue-collar family in Newton, Mass. "I wouldn't be able to call anyone in my family and complain, 'Oh, God, it's such hard work.' It wouldn't feel right to me. They'd be like, 'Oh, yeah, cry me a river.' "

[DJ Solid Snail]

"It takes the whole Joey persona that I have and meets it head-on," Mr. LeBlanc said. "It's really liberating. When you get pigeonholed as one character, people tend to think, 'That's all he can do.' "

Well it hardly helps if the next show you do is as the exact same character, does it?

Anyway, it's an interesting premise, and surely worth a look if David Crane's writing it. I just hope it's one of those shows about TV that actually has some genuine insight, rather than just pointlessly cloning the Sanders/Curb celebrity-sending-themselves-up formula.

[SavageHedgehog]

It's a good premise, but to me it does reek of Kirsty Alley's Fat Actress and (crucially) Lisa Kudrow's The Comeback both of which (to my understanding) flopped (although I quite enjoyed them), so I kind of wonder how it got greenlit.

From Matt LeBlanc's AmIAnnoying.com page

People who know him say he is 'NOT' acting dumb.

Hmm...

[Jemble Fred]

Sounds like a superb idea for a film.

[Jack Shaftoe]

I've seen a few bits of this, and there's a weird disconnect between the mannered, one-linery writing style, and the quite naturalistic filming style. Although it may well work when you see the entire episode, I dunno.

[SavageHedgehog]

Sounds like a superb idea for a film.

I get this feeling about a lot of recent high concept American TV series. Pushing Daisies comes to mind. Actually, I think that would have been best as one carefully planed out series with a clear beginning, middle and end. But at any rate it felt rather repetitive and thin even at 22 episodes, whereas it would have made a pretty fine high-concept movie (with maybe a sequel).

[Madison]

Sounds like a superb idea for a film.

YES! Was just thinking that.  How is this a sitcom? What's the status quo that's returned to every episode? What happens in series 5?  (and other cliches from the big how to write a sitcom book that are actually true).

[Jack Shaftoe]

I'm not sure how it would work as a film exactly - the premise is that the creators (and the show's really more about the married British creators than it is about Matt Le Blanc from what I've seen) are trying to push through their version of the internal show, the integrity of which gets further and further destroyed by the sacrifices they end up making to satisfy the US producers' shallowness, and the star's ego. Ideal for a sitcom, I'd have thought, as you just keep popping in every couple of weeks or so as the internal show moves through various stages of production. I suppose you could do that as a film, but it feels more naturally televisiony to me.

[DJ Solid Snail]

Plus they've already made that film. It stars David Duchovny, it's Called 'The TV Set', and it's rubbish.

[Tiny Poster]

Yeah, an early Apatow misfire, that.

[SavageHedgehog]

At least it was a trendsetter then.

I don't know, while I guess a TV series is a bit different from a film as subject matter, when you think of how well The Strike did this kind of stuff in 50 minutes, and even The Player in one of its sub-plots, I can't help feeling that the threshold for this kind of humour will be strained over the course of a TV series. How many "artistic vision destroyed by hilariously inappropriate low-brow addition/change" gags can you do before it becomes really monotonous? And then there's the probably inevitable development into wanky Extras series 2 territory when the show takes off... the more I think about it the more I think it would be a nice little film, and a quite likely overstretched TV series. Still, I'm probably wrong and I'm going to watch it anyway.

[Madison]

I'm not sure how it would work as a film exactly - the premise is that the creators (and the show's really more about the married British creators than it is about Matt Le Blanc from what I've seen) are trying to push through their version of the internal show, the integrity of which gets further and further destroyed by the sacrifices they end up making to satisfy the US producers' shallowness, and the star's ego. Ideal for a sitcom, I'd have thought, as you just keep popping in every couple of weeks or so as the internal show moves through various stages of production. I suppose you could do that as a film, but it feels more naturally televisiony to me.

But... surely the show eventually gets made? There's an end point, one way or another? Or is each series them writing a different project?

I'll be interested to see this, there seems to be a spate of sitcoms that have a finite life-span being made at the moment (like Home Time (she either fits back in, or goes back to London, surely? Lizzie and Sarah, though the 'pilot' ep was meant to be the last in the series, ends with a bloodbath that means the show's premise can never be reset.))

Think it's saying something terribly something or other about the commitment BBC have to sitcoms. "I love it! I reckon it'll last, ooh, at LEAST 8 episodes! Why would you want to do more than that, Ricky Gervais says you should only do two series etc bleeding etc"

[Jack Shaftoe]

But once it's made, as in up and running, the makers need to keep the ball in the air, so there's a continual battle against cancellation, with all the new compromises you have to make (working with guest stars, the star wanting to take his character in 'new directions' and so on), so it could run forever really.

[Jack Shaftoe]

Anyone else listen to Rob Long's 'Martini Shot' podcast, by the way? http://www.kcrw.com/etc/programs/ma He's the writer of an excellent book called 'Conversations with my agent', all about working in Hollywood trying to get various sitcoms on the air (he was a producer on Cheers at one point). Worth tracking down (I think it's out of print now), and the podcasts, although very brief, are well worth a listen - lots of stuff about production and development and working with executives, all that stuff.

[Jack Shaftoe]

Think it's saying something terribly something or other about the commitment BBC have to sitcoms. "I love it! I reckon it'll last, ooh, at LEAST 8 episodes! Why would you want to do more than that, Ricky Gervais says you should only do two series etc bleeding etc"

Me again, sorry - I think it's more that sitcoms are terribly expensive to make, or even part fund, so you don't want to over-commit. Also, it might be rubs.

[Madison]

The Martini Shot podcast is excellent, I tend to let about 10 pile up in itunes and save for a long journey cause they're only about 4 mins long.

Agree with your point that sitcom is an expensive business, compared to, say,  a reality show, but surely the idea is to come up with a show idea that could conceivably run for years and years, and is a 'jewel in the crown' despite not getting the viewers/ad revenue of Embarrassing Cock Problems?  eg Peep Show doesn't turn a profit for C4 but is a 'prestige brand' (the term they use in publishing to justify putting out a fashion magazine that sells to 286 people, but the 'right' 286 people, while the Cage & Aviary Birds and Real Life Astrology-and-Tumours mags makes the actual money for the publishers)

Investing in sitcom premises that have a definite story arc of 2 series max seems to be admitting there's no faith in sitcom any more and no one's looking for an Only Fools and Horses/Peep Show/Last of the Summer Wine etc

(obviously, this Episodes show could run forever, I haven't seen it -  but why would a sitcom writer work on a US adaptation of their show for like, ten years if they hated it and were making big, hilarious compromises every week? A sitcom about Stephen Moffat's funny adventures adapting Coupling would wear thin, even if it was a hit.) Anyway, I've digressed, my gripe certainly doesn't just apply to this one show, it's just food for thought.