Alex Anfanger and Dan Schimpf were just a couple of friends making funny little films on YouTube until they got this idea.
“We were doing these just horrible, horrible things in New York, and we decided that we wanted to start working on something,” Anfanger, left, says.
Speaking to reporters at the TV Critics Association’s winter press tour, he said he and Schimpf, who he met at NYU, “had been working together through that time, and we decided to go to my parents’ house in Los Angeles, get away from New York and write something. And so while we were there, we came up with these characters. And they’re kind of like us, I guess.”
In addition to writing and producing, Afanger co-stars as Jack Dolfe; Schimpf, who writes and produces, stays behind the camera to direct, so his role is filled by actor Lenny Jacobson, pictured right above, who plays his brother Ben Dolfe.
The brothers are deluded would-be filmmakers who live in their parents’ basement and make bad films. What happens in “Big Time in Hollywood, Fla.” (Comedy Central, 10:30 p.m.), which premieres tonight, is that huge, unexpected adventures fill the days.
“It’s really our first foray into a scripted show that’s so serialized,” says Kent Alterman, president of content development and original programming at Comedy Central. “And we’re really excited about that.”
“Mostly when I’m at home I watch a lot of dramas,” Schimpf says. “And over the past decade or so, you started to see these drama really start to use the form in a way where they expanded worlds. It wasn’t just like one episode or another. It was like these big story arcs, these big storylines, and you started seeing dramas doing that. I always had like a comedic sense. I loved what they were doing in terms of filling their universes.
“Alex and I both have a mutual love for telling big stories and trying to bridge that gap into comedy,” he says. “I had these sort of like idiot characters that kind of go on an odyssey, and really, like, each episode just keeps growing and growing and expanding and expanding. And that, to me, was sort of like why I thought the idea would be fun. If you start small and you keep building the universe.”
It got attention from big names, fBen Stiller for one. He stepped up to executive produce the show.
“When I saw what Alex and Dan were doing on the Internet and this little show they made for no money at all called ‘Next Time on Lonny,’ which just blew me away in terms of the tone, the comedy, the production value, and what they were doing, which had an element of satire and parody, but in a different framework where it wasn’t just, ‘Here’s a sketch, here’s a sketch,’” Stiller said.
“That, to me, was something that I just felt was very fresh, and yet a different way of doing it, and I think for another period it has its own tone,” Stiller said. “What I’m most impressed with are these young people who have these incredibly specific and unique voices and self realized work that they’re doing.”
The show in turn got some pretty big names in the cast too, including Cuba Gooding Jr., Michael Madsen and, as the put-upon parents, the familiar faces of Stephen Tobolowsky and Kathy Baker.
“I really don’t think I have experienced a comic voice like their comic voice, that kind of hits you in the way it hits you,” Tobolowsky says of the creators. “It kind of hits you in three different levels. There’s this kind of character thing of the family that’s happening at the bottom, like at the bottom of the rain forest, and then in the middle there’s this absurd economy that happens above that that’s connected to the family drama, and then it has this stratospheric, operatic, satiric feel that covers the whole thing, and they’re able to keep it all in the air at the same time. And it was something that’s so exciting as an actor to think like, ‘How on Earth are they going to pull this off?’ And it was thrilling.”
“They’re the ages of my sons,” Baker says. “For such young people to be able to write a marriage like this and make it funny and grounded and meaningful, I was just real happy to see that.”