There’s a real Ben behind the character of the same name in the new Fox sitcom “Ben and Kate.”
Show creator Dana Fox describes her brother Ben Fox as “sort of this Ferris Bueller type guy. Growing up he got into so much trouble. He’s a really, really smart guy who intentionally does incredibly dumb things all the time and would get us into so much trouble.”
Speaking to writers at the TV Critics Association summer press tour, she thought for a while to come up with a few examples.
“I’m trying to just, like, flick through the ones that were actually illegal and that I probably shouldn’t say,” she began. “When he was really, really little, he did a lot of stuff that really challenged my parents. Like my mom came home from work one day, and the whole house smelled like a dead animal in, like, a very serious, intense way. And my mom kind of followed the smell into the kitchen and opened the microwave. And he had put his down pillow in there for, like, 10 minutes on low because he wanted to heat it up because he was cold.”
Another time, Fox says, “we babysat for a dog named Pancho, who was, like, a little poodle. And I came home from school, and my brother and his friend Tommy” – there’s a best friend in the show who is also named Tommy – “had trapped the poodle underneath the couch where they could see him through the little slats. And they were feeding him –well, throwing Cheerios at his head and spraying whipped cream on him. And so I, of course, wanted to let the puppy out, so immediately let the dog out.”
The dog, she says, “chased us to high holy hell all the way into the kitchen.”
They stood atop a kitchen table for three hours “until my mom came home from work… and the dog just, like, was wandering around, like, ‘Never again will I let these people treat me like this.’”
It wasn’t unusual. “It was just, like, every day. I mean, every day, Fox says. “As an adult, he came to visit me at Stanford, where I was an undergrad. And he showed up and, within one night, had convinced me to move out of my single so that he could stay there. So I just slept with someone else, just went to sleep in a friend’s room. And he lived there for two months in my single at Stanford because he didn’t have a job. And so he started going to the career center at Stanford with his resume, which said Skidmore, which, luckily, starts with an S. So he would sit out in the waiting room, and he would wait for all these snooty Stanford kids to, like, decide they were too good to show up for their interviews. And he would just go in in their spots, and he would just interview with whatever company he could get in with. And he got a great job. And he got tons of money. And they were like, ‘That’s exactly the kind of initiative we’re looking for! It’s a little bit creepy and a little illegal, but we like it!’ It was right around the time of, like, the tech boom when everything was crazy.
Today, Ben Fox is, she says, “very much employed. And he’s very much pulled his life together, unfortunately, which makes it more boring for me.”
He’s an ad man.
“He works for a company that monetizes online advertising,” she says. “And he travels around a lot. I see him go to Europe and other exciting places. By the by, he totally speaks full fluent German and, like, a lot of French. You just would never expect it if you met him.”
Everybody on the show got to know him, executive producer Neil Goldman says. “When he came into the writers’ room so that we could meet him and sort of get to know him and write to him and write to his voice, we asked him what he does, and he said, ‘You ever see, like, an Internet banner ad?’ We said, ‘Yeah.’ He goes, ‘That was me.’”
“Yeah, he basically created online advertising, is pretty much what he does,” Dana Fox says.
“So yeah, that’s the kind of stuff my brother did all the time throughout my whole life,” Fox says. “That’s why I figured I could write a hundred episodes about him because I never ever run out of stories.”
Still, Ben did some grownup things too. “He met this amazing woman and they had two children together,” she says. “And the thing that I noticed was that he was the world’s greatest father. And I thought, like, in a million years, if you had met my brother when he was younger, you would never think that he could have kept two children alive, much less actually kept them happy and well adjusted. And I mean, I give a ton of credit to his wife who’s a psychologist. “I realized that this character who was so inherently goofy himself and so young at heart he could talk on the same level to this kid,” she says. “And when they talk, it’s like two grown ups talking. He doesn’t talk down to her. He really thinks that she’s just his kind they’re kind of best friends.”
In the comedy, Nat Faxon plays Ben; Dakota Johnson plays his sister Kate. Maggie Elizabeth Jones portrays her precocious child.
And the real Ben couldn’t be happier about the new sitcom about him.
“He is so happy that the world finally revolves around him in the style to which he’s always been accustomed, honestly,” his sister says. “At the Upfronts this year, he happened to be in New York, working on some sort of important business deal of his.
“And he called me up and he’s like, ‘Phlegmer,’ which is what he calls me, which is totally disgusting and super humiliating, not at all professional. He’s like, ‘Phlegmer, I want to go to the Upfronts.’ And I said, ‘You know, I don’t have a ticket for you, dude. Like, you can’t just call me up on the day of or whatever.’ He’s like, ‘All right. I’ll meet you at your hotel in 20 minutes.’ I’m like, ‘Oh, god. All right. Fine. We’ll see what happens.’”
Sure enough, he ends up inside, in the one seat nobody claimed. “I don’t know how that happens,” she says. “He’s just there. And he watches the whole Upfronts.”
“He also doesn’t seem surprised that he has a TV show,” executive producer Jake Kasdan says.
“Not in the least,” Dana Fox says.
“It’s more of a feeling like, yeah, it’s happening. It’s the inevitable television show about me,” Kasdan says.
As if: “I’ve been waiting for this my whole life,” Fox says. “It’s so weird that it hasn’t happened before now.”
“He sometimes calls himself ‘The Real Ben Fox,’” Kasdan says.
“Yeah. I’m going to get him a T shirt that’s says ‘The Real Ben Fox.’ It’s going to be amazing.”
“Ben and Kate” airs Tuesdays at 8:30 p.m. on Fox.