Issues

STELLLAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!

God damn it.

God damn it.

I want to tell you a story. It’s a story about two ostensibly heterosexual dudes who, after doing their time writing brilliant scripts for a terrible public access Reno 911 ripoff, decided to abscond with most of the cast to create a show of their own design, starring them, about them. It was a show about writers who never actually wrote anything, who were utter and abject failures in most ways it’s possible to be a failure, and who spent most of their time squabbling and trying to one up each other. It was a show called Writers, and man, did Mike and I ever feel clever.

But then there’s THIS shit.

Michael and Michael Have Issues is a show starring Michael Showalter and Michael Ian Black, veterans of the vastly underrated Stella (which influenced Writers in its own subtle ways), as two guys named Michael Showalter and Michael Ian Black who host a variety show and spend most of their time squabbling and trying to one-up each other. Yeah, there are some differences, but it’s basically the same fucking show.

Well, come to think of it, there are quite a few differences – for example, their show has a cast of professional actors anchored by two legitimate TV celebrities. They have access to far more advanced equipment, and have a full crew to operate all of it. They have a budget. Their show is being watched by more than 15 people. They are getting famous. They are getting paychecks. They are happy right now because they are receiving positive reviews.

It is the same show. And what’s worse is that it’s really, really good. In one of the scenes, Michael and Michael come to blows over what a butterfly fart sounds like. It’s a scene of such elegance and beauty that I honestly am embarrassed that Mike and I didn’t come up with it first. I mean, butterfly farts – if genius gags were snack foods, farting butterflies would be Funyuns.

I don’t know if there’s a feeling quite like what this feeling is. There were parts of making Writers that were fun, yeah – I can remember maybe two distinct times that I wasn’t riding on the cusp of a spastic stress dookie. But I’d say that the majority of making the show was definitely not something we did for our own personal enjoyment. By its very nature, filmmaking is not a relaxing experience – this is why there are no filmmaking classes at resorts or day spas. The whole business of shooting something is about setting up cameras and focusing them, and white balancing them, and getting the lighting right, and blocking the actors so that the lighting is right on the actors, and framing everything, and then, provided that they did everything right, you repeat the process for the next shot. And it will take all day, and it will go over schedule, and something will break, and somebody will go to the bathroom and not come back. And then, after that, you’ve still got to edit everything. Fortunately, we delegated – Mike was in charge of shooting and editing the entire series, and I bought pizza one day.*

*Actually, Mike paid for the pizza.

Through the whole thing, though, we reminded ourselves that our show was original and a breath of fresh air, and that some kind producer would find it and give us a TV show, and then we’d be so fabulously rich that we could spend our days drinking expensive bottled water and playing Supermodel Polo.* It’s what kept us going through the arduous seven month process of cranking out high quality entertainment; that is, as high as quality can be when your show is running on a station that broadcasts maybe 50% of the time due either to technical difficulties or apathy.

*You may be wondering if that’s regular polo played while riding around on supermodels’ backs, or water polo played with supermodels, or water polo played in a pool filled with supermodels instead of water. I leave it up to you to decide.

But now, with all this hard work done, it turns out that other, more famous, more talented people had come upon the same basic concept and successfully pitched and marketed it. It’s like if you busted your ass to paint a pretty cool picture on your ceiling, and then, right when you were hoping that the hard work would pay off, you find out that Michelangelo just painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and his painting has much higher production value and better comedic timing than yours. Sure, maybe what you painted was pretty cool and good for you, but when you’re up against Michelangelo, it doesn’t look quite as good anymore. In fact, it makes you start to look like a poser.

Mike pointed out to me earlier that there’s a lot of overlap on TV - 90210 and The O.C., Full House and Family Matters, Fox News and Triumph of the Will - but that’s because those are markets with broad appeal. Everybody wants to watch shows about sexy teenagers and middle class families haphazardly raising their kids, but the “antagonistic losers competing against one another in order to regain some long lost sense of manhood” genre is pretty narrow. It’s the white chocolate of TV genres. There’s about enough room in this genre for one show, and it isn’t the one created by two guys in Oregon who nobody in Hollywood has ever heard of.

Of course, this is far from the end – Mike and I are doing other revolutionary shit that will doubtless transform us into bold new American gods – but Michael Ian Black and Michael Showalter appear to have beaten us to the punch on the TV show angle. So I guess our only option at this point is to sue Comedy Central for stealing our idea – sure, Michael and Michael was probably in pre-production long before Mike and I had even met, but that’s the thing: Those tricky bastards copied our show before we’d even thought of it.

Truman Capps and Mike Whitman also have issues, but nobody ever talks about them.