Adapting a popular comedy movie into an animated series aimed at adults rarely works out, but it's still something Hollywood has been trying after decades of failed projects. In the 80s and 90s, there was a trend towards turning movies into Saturday morning cartoons, with Ghostbusters, The Mask, and Beetlejuice, amongst countless others, serving as the basis for successful kids shows. But when it comes to adult series, these animated adaptations always fail, with cartoon versions of Spaceballs, Clerks, Friday, and most recently, Napoleon Dynamite all being quickly canceled, all in 13 episodes or less. Despite the lack of success in the field, numerous comedy writers and studios have [...]
"Lost Roles" is a weekly column looking at "what might have been" in movie and TV comedy, exploring alternate casting possibilities that almost happened but didn't, for one reason or another. This week, we turn our attention to The Graduate, director Mike Nichols's revered comedy-drama, which celebrates its 45th anniversary tomorrow.
As with any movie, casting was the key to The Graduate's success. Obviously, Mike Nichols's superb direction, and the tight, well-executed screenplay by Buck Henry, were a big part of that too, but with another cast, Nichols and Henry's vision wouldn't have been anywhere near as effective. Nichols and his team went through an arduous casting process to [...]
Lost Roles is a weekly column exploring “what might have been” in movie and TV comedy as we take a different actor, writer, or comedian each week and examine the parts they turned down, wanted but didn't get, and the projects that fell apart altogether.
This week, I interviewed Eddie Pepitone, a much-loved stand-up comedian who's been performing for decades but has only recently seen his star starting to rise in the entertainment industry — an industry that he's awfully fond of lambasting in his act. A regular on Conan (where he plays a heckler), The Sarah Silverman Program (where he played a cook named "Eddie Pepitone"), and Marc [...]
News came in this week that NBC isn't picking up The Farm, the spin-off of the network's departing show The Office based around Rainn Wilson's character Dwight Schrute and his wacky family's wacky beet farm. While it seems odd that NBC cast and filmed a pilot for The Farm (that'll be airing as a standalone episode of The Office later this season) and made it so into the process only to get cold feet, this is a fairly common occurrence in the comedy world. Some of the most successful shows of all-time have been spin-offs, but for every Frasier, there's a show about Dr. Crane's bar bros Norm [...]
"Lost Roles" is a weekly column exploring “what might have been” in movie and TV comedy, as we take a different actor, writer, or comedian each week and examine the parts they turned down, wanted but didn’t get, and the projects that fell apart altogether. This week, I interviewed T.J. Miller, star of S
he’s Out of My League,
Cloverfield,
Yogi Bear, and the upcoming Fox sitcom
The Goodwin Games. Miller's inventive new show, the Comedy Central standup/video hybrid
Mash Up, premiered earlier this week and airs Tuesday nights at 12:30am. Miller was nice enough to chat about some of the parts he’s missed out on, including the epic tale
[...]
