Inside the Big-Time Ambitions of ‘Big Time in Hollywood, FL’

At first blush, Comedy Central’s newest scripted series, Big Time in Hollywood, FL, may seem like another entry into the category of Young Slackers Getting into Wacky Daily Misadventures. But the show’s creators, Alex Anfanger and Dan Schimpf, have a much grander scheme in play. With the successful web series Next Time on Lonny under their collective belt, Anfanger and Schimpf set out to finally create a show six years in the making. Big Time is a serialized comedy about two wannabe filmmaker brothers who get caught up in multi-layered plot that forces them into adulthood for the first time in their lives. The show boasts a heavy dose of action and drama, backed by a season full of notable actors including Ben Stiller, Michael Madsen, Cuba Gooding Jr., Kathy Baker and Steven Tobolowsky. I talked to the series’ creators about the new show, their writing process and how comedy is finally catching up to drama on television.

How did you guys get started working together as a writing team?

Dan Schimpf: We actually met at NYU. We were paired together freshman year in a dorm. Alex was in the acting program and I was in the filmmaking program. Right away we had a similar sense of humor, which I feel at NYU can be super dark and dramatic. We both had a similar love for comedy. We hit it off and kept working together all through college.

Alex Anfanger: At the end of NYU, we weren’t living together. We were doing these random…

DS: We had to go out into the workforce.

AA: I was working with the sketch group BriTANick, who were really good friends of mine. They were building a huge audience online and around the same, time Dan and I really wanted to start working together again. We wrote a really early version of what later became Big Time. We decided that because it was difficult to get that made, we would try to do something for the web. Out of that came Next Time on Lonny.

How did you get your web series discovered and eventually picked up?

AA: Nick and Brian from BriTANick had already established this relationship with Cracked.com through the sketches that they had done. They knew me as an actor and I had gone in after Dan and I… Dan made the first three episodes and we wanted to give it the best opportunity possible to be seen. We had Nick in it and we had Beck Bennett in it – who was pretty big from Good Neighbor – and we went in and pitched it to Cracked, but initially, they didn’t want it. They said, “We like it, but we’re only doing one web series and it’s produced in house. We would like you guys to do sketches.” We didn’t want to do that. We were interested only – at that point – in doing a series. We felt like Lonny was a great thing for the web. So they agreed and let us put it on their site.

DS: They gave us a home and a place for people to discover it and honestly, sites like Splitsider reposting or writing stuff about it was really the most helpful sort of push for it. From that point, we started getting emails from managers and other places…

AA: It’s totally true. Splitsider was a pivotal moment. I remember Brian Stern at Brillstein Entertainment contacted us from New York after his assistant saw the Splitsider article that linked to those first three episodes and was raving about the show. They brought us in and pretty much right away – after we signed with them – they introduced us to Debbie Liebling, one of the executives at Ben Stiller’s company. We’ve been working with that team since that point.

Ben Stiller has personally helped you promote Lonny and he has a large role in the series premiere of Big Time as well. What’s been your experience working with him?

DS: Debbie Liebling passed Lonny along to Ben. Ben really, really liked it and contacted us directly to tell us that he liked the show and wanted to see how he could help us produce the second season and whatever else we might have. He’s been nothing but supportive since then.

AA: After that, he gave me a small part in Walter Mitty. Dan and I both went to New York to meet him. It was so surreal, meeting him and knowing that we were going to be working with him.

Regarding Big Time, Ben Stiller told the press, “Audiences might say, ‘What the hell is this?’ when they see it for the first time.”

DS: We were there when he gave that quote.

Do you want to put it in context?

AA: I think he was saying that what we’ve done with the show is very different. There’s not really anything like and it’s very hard to understand without sticking with it for a few episodes. I think his point was also that it’s so important to make things that are different, discovering new voices and pushing comedy in a different direction. Big Time does that. At first, even if audiences are saying, “What the hell is this?” it’s at least something refreshing and different. If nothing else, you can at least acknowledge that you haven’t seen anything like it before.

When the premiere started, I thought, “I get where this is going.” Some of the dynamics reminded me of Stepbrothers. Then, the show took quite a turn. I was really surprised by some direction shifts that I didn’t see coming at all. With those twists came some of the biggest laughs in the episode.

AA: That’s what happens throughout. I think one of the major things that will stand out is that it’s serialized and there are consequences for all of the insane things that the characters do. The story keeps building around them. I think that’s how Dan and I operate a lot of the time. We don’t want to make the obvious choice.

DS: The way you described how you watched it is kind of the way we’ve always felt about it. On one hand, we want to get you in the door with a little bit of familiarity, like the way you referenced Stepbrothers, that comparison gets drawn a lot. It opens where you think it’s going to be this goofball comedy – and it has those elements – but the overarching thing that we really wanted to explore is the idea of playing with expectations. People are so used to what the comedic beats are supposed to be. Over the course of a couple of episodes, hopefully people will kind of let go of what they think is going to happen and just enjoy the ride. I don’t think you’ll be able to predict where this thing goes, both plot-wise and tonally.

AA: It gets very dramatic in the middle of the season.

Even by the end of the premiere, the viewer gets a sense of some mystery and intrigue. There are questions raised that will have to be answered in future episodes. The cliffhanger aspect will keep people coming back.

DS: We hope so. We wrote it like a drama. When we talk about the show, we pretty much only talk about it in dramatic terms. Obviously, we fill in the crazier aspects of it, but it’s important that it hits all the right notes so that you’re invested in what’s going on as much as you are with the jokes themselves.

AA: You write the most dramatic structure and put the dumbest characters in those situations and you know you’re going to get the comedy just from that. From that point, you take the dial and turn it one notch above reality. That’s kind of where we’re sitting.

Your cast can really pull off that slightly heightened sense of reality. Alex, you play Jack. Lenny Jacobson plays your brother. Your parents are played by Kathy Baker and Steven Tobolowsky, who are just incredible.

AA: I can’t even tell you how much I love them. They’re unbelievable and so excited and game to do everything. All the twists and turns we take with their characters they embrace fully.

DS: Similarly, a lot of our casting choices were governed by not always picking specifically comedic actors for these roles. That was important for Alex and I to balance out all of these tones. Stephen and Kathy have a very diverse portfolio of performances. They’re not just comedic actors, but they can do comedy very well. They can give a depth to the characters that is more than would be expected.

AA: And more to the universe of the show as well. You’ve got Ben and Jack, who are these idiots at the comedic heart of the show. Then around them, we populated the world with some more dramatic things with the hope that it would lift the show and make it funnier and more believable.

Why did you choose Florida for the setting of the show?

DS: We had a lot of discussion early on in the writing process. We started writing the script about six years ago. Over that time, it transformed a bunch. We initially set it in the suburbs of real Hollywood, like somewhere in Burbank. But we felt that it was becoming too much “inside Hollywood” and too many jokes about Hollywood. It started to drift away from where we wanted it to actually go. We started talking about making it somewhere far removed from the real Hollywood and then we landed on Florida. I think I pitched the idea of Hollywood, Florida because my grandparents live around there. It clicked because of the obvious joke in the title of the show. These characters couldn’t be literally or geographically further away from the entertainment industry. The idea of Florida was really attractive visually for me. I’ve love the way it looks. Everything feels bright, warm and sunny. We shade the show with dark tones. The setting allows you to laugh at things that are a little darker than if we made it in a more gritty suburb.

Comedy Central seems to be making a concentrated effort to put out more scripted comedy series. What do you attribute that to?

AA: Honestly, we have no idea. I’m sure that there are a bunch of reasons, like whatever the numbers are that point them in the direction to do more scripted series. But I don’t think they were necessarily looking for scripted shows when we pitched to them. They certainly weren’t looking for serialized stuff at the time. But they responded well to our pilot and the pitch we gave them for the season.

DS: I’m going to speculate on the question. It feels like we’re in a golden age of scripted shows that you can really get immersed in. It seems like comedy was kind of lagging behind in terms of catching up to what dramas were doing over the past ten years or so. That’s kind of what motivated Alex and I; that ability to build big plots and an immersive world that people can get lost in. Even though comedy may be a little bit behind in the game, there’s still a lot of room for growth in the genre.

Inside the Big-Time Ambitions of ‘Big Time in […]