Few shows have ever so accurately portrayed the absurdity of Hollywood as “Episodes.”
But the Showtime comedy “Episodes” is almost entirely shot 5,000 miles away.
“Episodes,” starring Matt LeBlanc as an American actor inserted into an imported British sitcom that is changed beyond recognition, is shot almost entirely in London.
The comedy by David Crane and Jeffrey Klarik is a co-production with the BBC, but the latter takes charge with locations meant to represent Los Angeles, often though the magic of special effects.
“The first season, we did all of it in England, and it was all green screen, which I think is amazing,: Klarik says. “I couldn’t believe it.”
The show’s second season featured a week in Los Angeles for the first time, “just to get exteriors and stuff,” he told reporters at the TV Critics Association winter press tour in Pasadena Thursday.
For the current third season that began Sunday on Showtime, fully half the footage will be in Los Angeles, Klarik says. “But we’ve been told that next season for Season 4 it’s going to be mostly over there because of costs.”
There is a bit of hardship connected with the long commute. “It’s difficult to be away from home for four months,” Klarik says. “Your life stops.We wake up at 5:30 in the morning, and we come home at like 9:30 at night.
“Everybody goes, “Oh, London!” and it’s like there’s no London. We could be in Burbank. It doesn’t matter. We hardly ever go outside.”
The two, who first earned fame on “Friends” (where LeBlanc also first started), write all of the season’s nine episodes at once before taking the trip. Then, Crane says, “we’ll shoot out all the scenes at the network offices in all nine episodes in one batch, and then we’ll move to a new set, which is why we have to have everything written in advance.”
It works for the actors.
“To have all the episodes written in advance before we start each season in production is a huge luxury because you can see the arc of the whole season,” LeBlanc says. ” You can map out your performance and plan where you want your character to go and have all this time to think about big moments that are coming up.
“In things I have been involved with in the past,” he says, “Even on ‘Friends,’ you would get it week to week, and it would be sort of hard to maintain your consistency sometimes, and you would think, oh, I wish I would have played that last bit last week a little differently, but this has a real linear feel to it as a result of that.”
Sometimes the more outrageous things on “Episodes” seem to some as exaggerations – such as the premise that a “History Boys” like British screenplay would be adapted in the U.S. as one about a hockey team. Or how crazy the people are.
“Yeah, I’ve worked for nut jobs before,” Klarik says. “I worked for a guy who kept a gun in his drawer. I mean, he’s the head of the show, head writer, and he had a gun in his drawer. And he kept all the curtains closed and he would call me in to have a talk and he’d put his head in my lap and cry. So we’re not that creative.”
And then there are stories from friends working on other networks’ shows. “If we wrote it, you guys would probably say, oh, come on,” Klarik says.
But, he persisted: “There was this one friend of ours who pitched a show about herself and her mother. They were both from India, and it was about her coming to this country and being raised by an Indian lady. And they said, ‘We love it. We love it. We’re going to buy it. Can we just do away with the mother? Is there a way we could do this show without the mother?’
And she’s like, ‘I guess, except it’s really about me and my mother.’ And they said, ‘Yeah, but I think it’s better without the mother.’ So she took out the mother, and then they said, ‘What if she’s not Indian?’ I swear. “What if she’s black?” And she said, ‘I guess, if that’s if that’s what you want.’
“Anyway, long story short, it’s now about three black guys raising a baby.”
“Episodes” runs Sundays at 10:30 p.m. on Showtime.