The Harry Situation

I want to share with you a little about the show we were originally making before the sponsor entered the picture.

Our show was originally called “Adam’s Apple”, a witty one-camera adult comedy about the awkward and overwhelming sexual awakening of a young man named Adam Sawyer.

Making television is difficult even when things are running smoothly. And the first big hurdle is always casting. Even though name actors were falling over each other to star in the show, we wanted our show to have a completely different look and feel, and we held out for talent who could embody characters like none that had ever been seen on television.

And we managed to assemble an amazing cast. When they all sat down in a room together for the first time, Nancy and I had a surreal moment: these were the people we had written.

I’m not allowed to tell you who any of these actors were. With one exception, they were all very established New York theater actors with strong backgrounds in Shakespeare and puppet improv. Except for the same exception noted above, they’d all appeared before in feature films and on television. They were good. They also had the one thing you can’t teach: authenticity. Or alcoholism. I can’t remember which. Whatever they had began with an “A”. The point is: they were real actors, with serious experience, and they were right for the parts.

The odd man out was Hal Johnson. Hal was a kid who came into the open casting call without an agent. But he could act, and he had something special.

If you call me pretentious, I’ll punch you. Anyway, the point was, after five minutes of talking to him, you knew he was the character:

Look at this face.

Do you see it?

Really look at it and you’ll see the awkward blank sexuality of Adam Sawyer.

No, he hadn’t done much

But we took a chance and trusted our instincts. He looked the part. And as long as the other actors held their own, which they would, Hal would do fine.

So we were in pre-production on “Adam’s Apple” when the network dropped the bomb and introduced us to the new sponsor.

But I wasn’t worried because our sponsor said…

So they will pay for the show, and the only thing they want to control is hair? Hell, that might actually save us money on a hair person - money that could be used for beer.

Great, right?

Right? Right??

I was actually reading that email on my phone as I walked into the studio and saw this:

Hal was in the midst of doing an interview with some entertainment gossip fluff show. This confused me because no one had told me we were doing any publicity for the show yet.

And do you notice anything odd?

Yeah.

That’s an awesome shirt.

“How can I get one”, you ask? I don’t know. This one appeared like magic. I was confused because the email I was reading RIGHT AT THAT MOMENT was about how they weren’t going to do overt ‘branding’. Yet here it was. Right on his shirt. In his first interview about the show.

Maybe I missed something? Or maybe it’s not a big deal, right? Maybe I’m making a problem out of nothing?

Or maybe… it’s just the first warning sign. I think of the cold stare of The Conferbot 2000, and I begin to understand that it will be him or me.

Over the next hour I learned some important and exciting new facts about my show.

It was now called…

The lead character’s name was no longer Adam Sawyer; it was “Harry Ball.” OMBFG. This is apparently hi-larious. Get it? It’s a pun. Harry? Hairy? See? These are homonyms. Homonyms are funny. When I pointed this out to our network exec, he commented that “Harry is not a homonym. The guy is definitely straight.” Thanks network!

The sponsor had also summarily fired all the actors except Hal, and replaced them with conventional sitcom regulars.

And the show was now a traditional 3-camera sitcom on a brand new cheesy sitcom set. I was also told to standby and await the new scripts, and that the prop department was to await the box of Bold It! bottles and tubes to be placed in the background of all the scenes.

Oh, and to top it off, they even forced Hal to agree to go by Harry in real life, as in Harry Johnson. Harry Johnson? Get it? And you thought Harry Ball was funny, right? Whoo hoo.

Judge for yourself…

Did you hear that?

If this was a practical joke, it would have been brilliant. It wasn’t, so it wasn’t.

There’s more:

Get it? Harry Johnson plays Harry Ball in The Harry Situation. This was their idea of funny. Again- for better or worse, it was also very funny with the target group, who was “probably smarter than you, Ted”, according to the test supervisor.

It started with a simple t-shirt, and suddenly we’re calling our lead actor Harry Johnson.

This was very bad.

But as bad as this was, it was not the point of no return. That point would arrive soon in the shape of the biggest mistake of my career.

Oopsie. Am I allowed to tell you that?

So I guess someone important must be reading his, eh? Hello, “someone important.” Your gag order can kiss a character named Harry Ball.

It says I am not permitted to share certain pieces of information. Let’s see how close I can get, shall we?

I’ll start at the beginning and tell you how the hell I sold a show in the first place.

I was teaching creative writing when one of my students came to a play I co-wrote with my wife. That student happened to be the daughter of an executive at XXX (GAG ORDER!), a very prominent cable television network. He saw the play, met with us, drank two bottles of expensive vodka, and sexually harassed my wife. Three meetings with our attorneys later, we agreed that he should produce our show.

GAG ORDER says I can’t tell you the name of the network executive, but his name rhymes with Vermon Grundle. I also cannot tell you the name of his daughter and my former student but her name rhymes with Malice Grundle.

I can also tell you that when they greenlit our pilot, I could not have been happier.

I had a ‘beautiful’ wife named Nancy and we had just sold a show together. We did all the dumb Hollywood things like buying two new cars.

We even started sleeping with each other again, which wasn’t as awful as I expected.

I even started exercising and lost a small (but unrecognizable) amount of weight. All of these things are symptoms of a disease I had contracted called “Hope.”

I was soon to be cured.

We got busy with production and things moved quickly. Then a bomb dropped on us.

It should have been over that moment, but it wasn’t. We were told the “good news”, and then we were introduced to our new best friend:

The Conferbot 2000- A multi-functioned, multimedia, full resolution, digital video, super surround sound conferencing cam.

I would come to hate this little black machine. I dreamed of fighting it with a laser-powered sword (but feared it might also be my father). It became the symbol of all that is dark in the world. It worked really well though. I’ll give it that.

Through this device, we would communicate with our new sponsor from the dark side.

So the show was still alive, but would move to another network and would be sponsored by a “great brand.”

I couldn’t really fight it. I had stumbled into my dream due to the wandering hands of Vermon Grundle, and I wasn’t going to kill myself just because we had a sponsor. But I should have.

And I even tried their product. I was only embarrassed and self-conscious about my ‘asymmetrical’ hairdo with a ‘matte finish’ for a little while. Because I looked pretty damn good - like I actually cared about my appearance or something. And it lasted for a freakishly long time.

Dare I say that my life was going all right, even with the sponsor news?

Looking back now, would it have been better if the show just died that day before the sponsor entered the picture? Do I regret that I allowed any of this to happen? Has this experience destroyed my ability to trust another human being? Have I showered the past two weeks? Yes, yes, yes, and no.

I hate myself for believing in something and will never believe in anything again. Maybe unicorns.

I should have seen the warning signs. They were everywhere.