I first realized how popular Undeclared should be when I watched the pilot with my mother. Despite being put-off by promos that pimped the show as a wacky horndog comedy, Mom warmed up to it pretty fast. When Hal walked into the dorm party on Steven's first night, she groaned, "God, every kid's worst nightmare!" And at the end, when a glowing Steven figured he'd found a real girlfriend, Mom yelped, "Oh, he's going to get his heart broken!" Mom had connected with what's so appealing about the show -- its familiarity and relatability. If its characters or stories don't strike a directly personal chord, then they almost always bring to mind someone you knew, or a situation you vaguely remember from those fuzzy days way back when. Its humor can be broad or subtle, but either way, the show never compromises that soul. Still, Undeclared is struggling, saddled with an 8:30 PM Tuesday berth that pits it against quality hours like Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Gilmore Girls -- shows that not only pilfer ratings points but hoard viewers in the desirable youth demographic. FOX has already moved onto The Big Thing, leaving Undeclared alone to founder on a roster of comedies that are, in large part, far crappier yet inexplicably secure. It's becoming an unhappy theme for Judd Apatow that his on-screen love letters to life (Undeclared and Freaks & Geeks) aren't exactly being handled with care. NBC played the time-slot tango with F&G so long that its audience couldn't keep up, and it got cancelled fifteen episodes into its acclaimed run. While FOX has left Undeclared exactly where it started, the show's episode order was slashed from a full twenty-two to just seventeen, and FOX hasn't denied that it might pull the plug. Apatow admits he's cautious about likening his FOX experience to what happened at NBC. Rather than rail on FOX for letting Undeclared hover near death, he's enough of a politician to appreciate that FOX gave his show life at all, and in fact, he's currently working on another pilot for the network called Life on Parole, about a burnt-out parole officer (and starring Michael Bolton himself -- Dave Herman from Office Space). So, in the spirit of celebrating what's gone right with Undeclared, Apatow let me meet him, his writers, and some of his producers at the show's modest offices at Hollywood's Sunset-Gower Studios. (The only missing writers are Seth Rogen, who has already been put through the TWoP wringer, and supervising producer Rodney Rothman.) The group is as follows: Kristofor Brown, writer/producer; Jenni Konner, writer; Lew Morton, co-executive producer; Joel Madison, writer/consulting producer, Ali Rushfield, writer; Nick Stoller, writer; and Judd Apatow, creator, writer, and co-executive producer.
JA: I think that's just a strategy. They launch you very heavily, and then they launch the show very heavily. So right now, they're running promos like crazy for That '80s Show, and I'm sure in about two weeks we'll see an enormous amount of publicity for Andy Richter and Greg the Bunny. H: So that wasn't something you interpreted as, like, the first sign of doom? JA: No, that's what they do to every show -- they put the really big guns behind the launch, and then after that, it goes back to a normal level. H: When did you guys assemble as the writing team? Were you involved in writing the pilot? Kristofor Brown: We were involved in the pilot from a notes standpoint. Judd kept reworking it, with help from us. JA: They ordered six [right away], so I hired the staff as I was writing the pilot. Usually you're all alone [with the pilot], but I was able to have the staff help conceive the show. H: Has the show kept true to your original idea? JA: It basically has. We just...we have discovered what the pace of the show should be, and how funny it should be versus how dramatic it should be, and how much music to use -- all those things get worked out over the first dozen episodes. But the basic idea is the same: goofy guy goes to college, tries not to be a goofy guy. H: You guys found a perfect goofy guy. Jay Baruchel [who plays Steven] is so good. JA: He is that goofy. H: How did you find him? An open call, and you got lucky? JA: The head of Dreamworks TV said, "What about that guy from Almost Famous?" Jay had a small part in Almost Famous. So he came out, and he was really strong in the auditions he did for the network, and he won the part. I guess he's worked a lot in Canada on different kids' shows. He claims to be the star of the Wonder Years of Canada, but none of us has ever seen it. ["If IMDb is to be believed, that show is likely My Hometown, for which the only user comment is, 'Badly acted.' Ouch." -- Heathen] ["I'm Canadian and watch TV basically constantly, and I've never heard of it until this moment." -- Wing Chun] KB: Jay was basically the last person cast of our core cast. H: Who did you find first? JA: Well, we always knew we wanted Seth Rogen [who plays Ron] on the show, and we always knew we wanted to find a place for Jason Segel. The first people cast were Timm Sharp [who plays Marshall/Shaggy] and Seth, and then Charlie Hunnam [who plays Lloyd/Heath], and then we cast Carla [Gallo, who plays Lizzie] and Monica and Jay on the same day, a few weeks later.
H: Oh, so how did you find Christina Payano [Tina, a.k.a. Larice]? JA: Christina was in the [sexile] episode, and we thought she was so funny that we kept bringing her back, until we finally moved her in. JM: She started with one line. H: Is that one line from "Addicts," where she swoons over Heath's Shakespeare speech? JM: No, we shot the other one first, actually, even though I guess it aired afterward. H: Do we ever get to see her move in, or does that just sort of happen? JA: She moves in during the last episode of the season [laughs]. It's actually the tenth one we shot, but it airs last for no explainable reason. It's an episode we really like, where Steven becomes obsessed with The Bible while [Heath] becomes obsessed with existentialism. And it's about Steven rejecting Lizzie because he gets really into The Bible. That's also the episode where Tina is trying to move into the room Lizzie and Rachel share. The person door moves out, but they make a joke about how they never met that person, and Tina tries to finagle her way into getting the room. Look, I'm getting you way ahead on all your recaps. H: How far out of order will things get between now and then? JA: Everything is in order the rest of the year, except for that show airing last. H:. Wasn't the Ben Stiller episode supposed to be last? JA: Now that's airing third-to-last. And there may be a few that air out of sequence but [because of the plot] it doesn't matter whether they're out of order. H: So without saying anything bad about FOX -- because FOX is so great, FOX is like candy -- does all that bizarre out-of-order nonsense bother you? JA: Their theory is that most people only see one out of any four episodes, and that when you're launching a show, you put your favorite episodes first and have all the strongest ones air right off the bat. And for the rest it doesn't matter, because in theory, people aren't watching every single week. I don't necessarily agree with that theory, mainly because any two people would disagree on what the best episodes are. Usually what happens is, the original ones wind up not being their favorites. When we did Freaks & Geeks, our third episode was about Lindsay being invited to have dinner with Kim Kelly. She goes to Kim Kelly's house, and it's a crazy white-trash house, they're fighting and screaming, and it's about what happens when you visit The Crazy House in your neighborhood. And they didn't air it -- I don't think they ever aired it on NBC, or if they did, it was much later, after we'd been cancelled -- because it didn't feel like the same tone as the rest of the show. But that was our intention -- for any kid on Freaks and Geeks, the tone of his house would be totally different than the other person's house. But there is some validity to the idea that the first six episodes of any series should be similar to a pilot, in that you shouldn't be lost and need to catch up on what's happening. During the first six episodes, a lot of people are seeing the show for the first time, and if they don't understand what's happening with the story, it makes it harder for them to jump in. Of course, for some reason I never pay any attention to that [theory], and so this [reordering of episodes] happens every single time.
H: Ah, so it's not just a FOX thing? JA: No, every network thinks that...Every network would like all its shows to be like Law & Order, where every one stands alone. But our show is different because it's about kind of a romance, and there's some development to it. H: I remember watching "Eric Visits," which aired second, and feeling like an episode got skipped. Then later I found out my feeling was correct. And it does seem like the ones that aired first were total laugh riots, and now we're getting into more poignant stuff. JA: And now we're back into laugh riot, so it really does go all over the place. H: It's good either way, but I think people expected it to be a laugh riot all the time and were kind of startled when the shows dipped into stuff that was a bit deeper. JA: What happens is, a show evolves into its style. You try to rush a certain part of it onto the air, and then its style changes. We have two different kinds of shows in Undeclared -- a hard-core going-for-laughs show and the coming-of-age poignant stuff. We always do both, although we do gravitate a bit more toward funny ones, just because there's not enough time to flesh out a full, emotional story in twenty-one minutes of airtime. Hopefully [the duality] doesn't confuse people too much. H: I don't think it does. ["See what a witty and incisive interviewer I am?" -- Heathen] JA: Or hopefully they're all good, and people won't care. H: Yeah, they're all pretty good. Ha. I don't think I've made it a secret that I love the show. I feel no shame [mid-ramble, the mind goes blank...what to say...what to ask...I've only had one Diet Coke today...I need laundry money...Should I ask them if they have change for a five? Shit...] Um, so is it always this laid-back and comfortable around here? LM: There was a time when we did work. The board [gestures to a mostly blank whiteboard on the wall] was much fuller. JA: We're done shooting and we're finishing up the editing now. H: When do you wrap completely? JA: A week from Wednesday [so, Feb. 6]. Since we have the offices until the end of February, everyone comes in every day, as if we're writing some kind of spec movie script, which I don't think is actually happening for any of us. Jenni Konner: It's a hard habit to break. JM: We were considerably busier when we were shooting. It's been a good staff, and a good place to work.
JA: I always thought the last year of Kids in the Hall was really funny, because you could tell they'd run out of ideas and went into a completely different bizarre place, because there was nothing they hadn't done. There were so many really original, funny sketches that came out of that. So I tried to do that with the writers here. Everyone's going to write the basic drinking or romantic-comedy ideas when they first pitch, but when you have to come up with sixty ideas in three hours... JK: Remember the episode where [Shaggy] gets a bird to be the cool guy? I remember that was an early Ali idea about an Asian kid who got a snake so that he was The Asian Guy With The Snake, just to give himself an identity. Well, [Shaggy's] story came from that weird little idea and became a huge part of an episode. JA: That's how we came up with "Bill eats a peanut" for Freaks and Geeks. We'd just write tons and tons of ideas, and I remembered I had a friend who, if he ate a peanut, would die, so we could do an episode about Bill eating a peanut and dying. JM: I thought somebody pitched it sarcastically -- "Hey, so, what if Bill eats a peanut?!" H: How many of your ideas came from your own college experiences, and how many were a product of a late night, lots of caffeine and a deadline? KB: [To Judd] Well, wasn't the pilot sort of about you? Didn't you get the big news when you started college that your parents were getting divorced? JA: No, my parents got divorced when I was in junior high, although they continued to get divorced for twenty-three more years. But, you know, I thought the show wasn't personal while we were shooting the first thirteen. And then I watched them, and realized that it was about this girlfriend I had in high school who went on to go to college far away from me, and we decided to have an open relationship. A lot of the dynamics of Eric, Lizzie, and Steven are based on me trying to figure out if I should screw around with someone else, and I was allowed to but I didn't want to, and then I did and I felt guilty about it. And then I would take runs at her every summer and try to get her back. I always thought this show was based a little bit on me as Steven, but the more I looked at it, I realized I was Eric. H: Oh. I was thinking you were Lizzie. [Laughter] JA:: I definitely was Lizzie as well, in that I wasn't sure what to do, but there was also that crazy, psychotic desperation of Eric -- thinking that if he handles it right, he'll get her back when she's done learning about college. So really, the most disturbing facets of the show...