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MUST G. TV: JOE GIACOBELLO FINDS HIS SITCOM BLISS ON PCTV
In Pittsburgh Lissa Brennan January 6, 1999
Tuesday is one of the best nights of the week to park yourself in front of the tube if you’re a sitcom fan. ABC offers Home Improvement, The Hugleys, Spin City and Sports Night; NBC gives up their best with Third Rock from the Sun, News Radio, Just Shoot Me and Will and Grace, and Fox even follows—and improves on—the formula with the brilliant King of the Hill. But by 11 p.m., the major networks have given themselves over to the primarily unfunny news broadcasts (though local anchors’ mispronunciations of Third World countries can occasionally bring a chuckle). Apart from reruns of the hyper-annoying Buchmans of Mad About You or the severely dated and never really that entertaining to begin with M*A*S*H, the magic box becomes a humor wasteland. That could change. As of earlier this week, public access cable station PCTV now fills its eleventh hour slot with Mr. G., a new half-hour production veering away from their standard fare of Christian praise and shoddy rock videos. Joe Giacobello stars as Mr. G., and also as the show’s writer, producer, director and founder. The series will air weekly, with a new episode each month. January, February and March are already shot and ready to go, and production will begin on the April episode next month. The thirtyish Giacobello, who with his conservative short dark haircut, ordinary dress and quiet manner more closely resembles a banker than a comedian, moved to Pittsburgh two years ago from Erie, where he did a lot of community theater—"always the comic roles," he says. He also worked in improv and stand-up.
That was it for his comedy career, until "all of a sudden it came into my head—why not try this?" He developed a concept for a sitcom and started working on scripts. Having worked as an English teacher before joining the communications department of Fisher Scientific, he felt his former occupation would provide good comic fodder. He invented Mr. G., a character that builds on the actor’s own experiences. Though both men share a last initial and stumble upon similar roadblocks along the dating highway, the show, as Giacobello says repeatedly, "is not autobiographical." Before he realized there was a venue for his writing, the actor’s nephew asked why he didn’t try working with the local community access channel. Giacobello, who remained unfamiliar with the concept even after a second Wayne’s World, looked into PCTV. He went through the station’s orientation process, learned how to operate the equipment, placed casting notices in local papers and got to work. "I don’t even really watch that much TV, believe it or not," he says. Oh, come on. "I watch Seinfeld. I like movies a lot." Yeah, okay. So with so little time spent basking in the pixilated glow, how does one come up with a premise and style for a sitcom of one’s own? "I think I was picturing every sitcom I’ve ever watched, then taking experiences I’ve had and exaggerating the hell out of them," he says. "I thought that maybe I could create something so bad it’s good, maybe so ludicrous that people would watch, say ‘This is so dumb,’ and keep watching because it was making them laugh." Which, if you think about it, is the basis of every successful sitcom. Since the Dick Van Dyke Show went off the air, television comedy has made a mint appealing to the lowest common denominator. Occasionally shows with a little bit of savvy somehow manage to snag some faithful viewers, but they’re the exception rather than the rule. And if you polled steady viewers of Frasier, you’d find a lot more people who watch it for the cute dog than the quips that reference 18th-centurey Russian literature. But for every Frasier or Drew Carey Show, there are a few dozen cookie-cutter turnouts like Gilligan’s Island or Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place. Giacobello hopes to make Mr. G. exceptional in its unpredictability. "In a typical sitcom, the audience can take the first episode and pretty much predict where the entire series will be going," he says. "With this, I want everything to take a different turn each time you watch it." Mr. G. is a high school teacher, and you’ve seen the type before—zany, wacky, constantly in trouble with the higher-ups for the unorthodox teaching style he’s developed as the best way to reach the kids. Along with cataloging the trials and tribulations of his academic life, the show focuses on his adventures in the '90s dating scene as well. This is not new, as anyone who’s seen TV or a movie in the past few decades can tell you. But instead of trying to pass off the tried-and-true blueprint as new invention, Giacobello has stuck to the basic structure and added a few twists. Getting specific would give too much away, but his goal of taking the audience unaware in each new scene has definitely been fulfilled thus far. The first scene of episode one, which begins with an extended shot of Mr. G. as the show’s suitably hokey theme song plays, takes place in a reasonable facsimile of a principal’s office, where Mr. G. is being chastised for his outlandish classroom antics. The sympathetic but befuddled principal warns Mr. G. to get it together while a truly hilarious laugh track guffaws along. Scene two takes us to his apartment, where we meet his roommate and his roommate’s girlfriend, while Joe (Mr. G.) agonizes over the lack of response to his personal ad and his persistent bachelorhood. When friends ask, "Have you tried church?", Mr. G. counters with, "Do you think I could meet a woman that way?" She responses, "No, to pray." Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk. Ouch, yeah, but you’d probably keep watching. Scene three finds Mr. G. visiting a church not for divine intervention but to attend a support group for separated and divorced Catholics (Mr. G. is neither the first nor the second, and doesn’t seem to be the third to try to meet women.) Instead he meets a sundry assortment of wallowing divorcees, which quickly deteriorates into full-blown misery, and ringleader Sister Laurie, played by noteworthy stage actress Sara Gaille. The acting is inspired—which doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s what would ordinarily be described as good, and it would hardly hold up in any other format. But as far as sitcoms go, it’s perfectly appropriate—over the top, to be sure, melodramatic, and even crossing blessedly into camp at moments. But in this case it works. The original soundtrack by Love Bubble adds to the ambiance, as does the atrocious laugh track. "I want to keep that cheap atmosphere," says Giacobello. "I don’t want it to look too polished." Rehearsals are kept to a minimum in order to achieve this, and while the end result is definitely not burnished to a perfect sheen, it’s high-spirited rather than amateurish. New episodes will proceed until July, as per PCTV’s mandatory six-month season. Then Joe Giacobello will rest, regroup, and prepare for another season next January. "I’d like to learn the technical end of it more," he says of the taping, which is currently handled by PCTV technicians. Along with that, he’ll work on his writing in the hope of making Mr. G. exactly what he wants it to be. "I want to keep it simple," he says. "Something that’s perfect for late at night when you’re in a weird mode, a little spaced out. I want something that you can turn it on and it puts you into a weird frame of mind." |
When he moved to town, he dropped out of performing for a while, only taking the stage for a few weeks during amateur night at the Funny Bone. "I never really excelled at stand-up," he says. "You start dying and you just go down."