Getting a Piece of the Pie
In a television year that has seen midseason shows downed like ducks in a shooting gallery, the fact that “Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place” is still on the air after eight weeks is a feat in itself. While less than a clear-cut hit, the comedy has done well enough in the Wednesday night slot behind “The Drew Carey Show” to have bolstered ABC’s resolve to cancel the series that used to be there: the controversial “Ellen.”
“That’s sort of the scariest thing--that people might look at us as the show that killed ‘Ellen,’ ” said Ryan Reynolds, who stars as Berg, the loopiest of “Two Guys’ ” three title characters. “But when our show was birthed on the writers’ stoop way back when, they weren’t thinking, ‘Let’s come up with a show to kill “Ellen”--it’s time for heterosexuals to take back TV.’ It’s just that we got put in that spot and we’re reaching a broader audience. We’re retaining more of the men who like ‘Drew Carey’ than she did.”
“We are not responsible for the end of her show. If it were still doing well [in the ratings], it would still be there,” agreed Danny Jacobson, the co-creator of “Mad About You” and executive producer of “Two Guys.”
“Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place” wasn’t really supposed to be there either--at least on ABC. Jacobson, who has a $20-million production deal with 20th Century Fox Television, originally developed the show for the Fox network. But last December, midway through production of the first 13 episodes, the network tried to cut the order to eight because it didn’t have a place on its schedule to put a relatively traditional sitcom.
Realizing the show was in peril of never getting a chance at Fox, Jacobson went to executives at 20th Television, which is part of the same Rupert Murdoch-owned conglomerate as the Fox network, to lobby for a different tack.
“The network and the studio always had some concerns about the appropriateness of the show for Fox, and as we came closer to the launch date, it became clearer and clearer that we needed to deal with the inevitable: that this show really didn’t have a place on the Fox schedule,” said Sandy Grushow, president of 20th Television. “Anybody who looks at the previous successes Fox has had in comedies realizes pretty quickly that this show doesn’t really contain the values of shows like ‘The Simpsons,’ ‘King of the Hill’ or ‘In Living Color.’ It’s not loud. It’s not form-breaking. It’s not genuinely distinctive. It’s just a bloody well-done little show.
“And obviously there was some trepidation at the network to let it go somewhere else where it might hurt them, but the senior people at this corporation are very pragmatic,” Grushow continued. “They realized an asset like this could potentially be worth lots of money, and if it’s not something the network is capable of embracing, why hold it hostage? Why not allow it to go elsewhere?”
Elsewhere was hit-starved ABC, which was fishing for a show that would fit with the popular “Drew Carey.” The minute Fox released the show, ABC reeled it in.
“It was the one show of all the pilots at the other networks last year that I kind of wistfully thought would really work well on our schedule,” said Jamie Tarses, president of ABC Entertainment. “It has a very youthful, vibrant, vivacious tone to it. It’s young in its attitudes to things. It has a seize-the-day attitude toward life, and Berg is really a guy who has a very inventive mind and is relatively fearless. He will do anything, no matter how foolish, and that gives the show a plausible way to get into some ludicrous situations, and that’s what makes it more youthful, I think, than many of the other ensemble comedies out there.”
Rick Wiener and Kenny Schwartz, both 30 and both assistants and then staff writers for Jacobson on “Mad About You,” created the show by writing about themselves. Schwartz went to college in Boston, the show’s setting, and worked in a pizza place there. He is the model for the character Pete, played by Richard Ruccolo. Wiener is the basis for the wacky Berg, and the duo’s best friend in real life, Sharon, is the inspiration for the show’s “girl,” also called Sharon and played by Traylor Howard.
The appeal of the program, the creators and stars agree, lies in the fact that the audience can identify with these characters, even if it’s been years since they were last floating aimlessly in their early 20s.
“It’s a show about growing up, and people usually don’t really want to do it,” Howard said. “That limbo time, that year right after college, is really the toughest year. You don’t know what you really want to do with the rest of your life. You don’t have the security of going to school. You don’t live with your family, and so you really have to be close to your friends.”
It also has helped, all concede, to be following “Drew Carey.”
“ABC is smart to see that our appeal and content works well with ‘Drew Carey,’ ” Reynolds said. “They’re a bunch of drunks in Cleveland, and we’re a bunch of drunks in Boston.”
Tarses hasn’t yet guaranteed that the series will be on her network’s fall schedule, wanting to see how it holds up against tough competition in the May ratings sweeps. But that she was willing to be interviewed about “Two Guys” suggests that it has a future, although not necessarily in its present spot.
“We love being in that time slot because it seems like a perfect match,” Jacobson said. “But personally, I would like to see us on earlier. I’m convinced that younger kids really love it. My 7-year-old daughter can’t get enough of the show. Every time I get a rough cut or a new tape or anything, she’s begging me to let her watch it, and I couldn’t pay her to sit through an episode of ‘Mad About You.’ She just loves Berg and Pete.
“So for me, it’s not a problem that it’s about young adults and their romantic yearnings. Little kids aren’t going to understand that part anyway, and besides, if they are really worried about what people see, then they should take the local news and edit that. We don’t need to see eight different angles of a bloody stretcher being removed from some murder scene. So that’s my position on that. I don’t put anything on the air that I’m ashamed to have my kids see.”
* “Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place” airs Wednesdays at 9:30 p.m. on ABC (Channel 7).