The real-life cuckold
Judd Apatow’s new comedy is based on a friend’s experience of being cheated on, writes TV Guide’s
DJulie Eley.
id you hear the joke about the youth pastor who found his wife in bed with another man? Judd Apatow did and helped turn it into SoHo’s new comedy series Crashing.
Except the ‘‘joke’’ was no laughing matter for comedian and show star Pete Holmes, who pitched the idea based on his own real-life experiences as a man whose cheating wife forced him to re-evaluate his priorities as he couchsurfed through the New York comedy circuit.
It was an idea Apatow initially laughed off as ‘‘too depressing’’ before signing on as executive producer and director for the eight-part series, which also features comedians Sarah Silverman, Artie Lange and Silicon Valley‘s TJ Miller as versions of themselves.
The show draws heavily on Holmes’ childhood influences when he was raised as an evangelical Christian in Massachusetts.
‘‘I think the funniest thing about evangelical Christians is that because you take that garment and you wear it, you find yourself acting in a certain way,’’ says Holmes, as he sits down with Emmy-winning producer and writer Apatow to talk about the show.
‘‘So you’d see people that are furious because you banged into their car, but it’s in a church parking lot, so you have to be like, ‘ha, ha, well better call a (towie)’ and then you get into your car and you’re like ‘motherf**ker’.’’
It’s a background at odds with Apatow’s upbringing as one of a three children in a Jewish but ‘non religious’ New York family.
‘‘We never mentioned religion,’’ says 49-year-old Apatow, whose resume includes films like The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up and Trainwreck.
‘‘I said I wanted to be bar mitzvahed at one point, and my parents said, ‘Oh you just want the money.’ The only religion we had in our house was every once in a while one of my parents would say, ‘Nobody said life was fair.’. That was our doctrine.
‘‘I never did get the bar mitzvah. I did not get the money.’’
But religious differences aside, both men agreed on the need for a compelling story ‘‘of how to keep your soul in a world that keeps trying to negotiate for pieces of it’’.
Holmes says he never saw his comedy career, which includes the self-titled Pete Holmes Show and the podcast You Made It Weird, as being at the expense of his marriage but Apatow sees it differently, joking:
Jim: The James Foley Story Thursday, 8.30pm, Rialto
2016 documentary that provides an indepth look at the life and work of American journalist James Foley, who was killed by Isis terrorists in 2014. ‘‘At once an intimate portrait of a restless spirit and a family’s journey to understand him, as well as a treatise on the state of international conflict journalism and world news in today’s market. It’s an incredibly moving film that encompasses a wide scope of global issues through the intimate remembrance of one life,’’ wrote The Playlist‘s Katie Walsh.
Country Calendar Tonight, 7pm, TVNZ1
It’s back to the future for the longrunning Kiwi lifestyle series as it shifts to ‘‘Unconsciously, you were asking for it. You were a terrible husband.’’
But telling the story of a man made homeless by infidelity is not without its problems.
‘‘There is no home base of the show,’’ says Apatow, who at one point stands up saying, ‘‘My Fitbit just told me I haven’t walked for the last half hour. So now I gotta get 92 steps. I got 250 an hour ... that’s been one of the fun challenges.’’
Also challenging is finding the funny in a world where Trump is president. ‘‘It’s hard to do comedy when what’s happening is so weird,’’ says Apatow, Sunday nights where it was a staple last century. Tonight’s first episode visits North Canterbury after the November 2016 earthquake, to see how the people who lists his comedy likes as fashion models tripping and emu attacks.
‘‘We’ve really passed the point where daily events would be logical if I was writing a movie. And so it’s hard to, I think, to be funny. You could talk about what you’re frustrated about, but life has gotten very scary and absurd.’’
Almost as absurd maybe as a youth pastor carving a career as a stand-up comedian after his college sweetheart leaves him for another man.
'The only religion we had in our house was every once in a while one of my parents would say, 'Nobody said life was fair'. That was our doctrine.' Judd Apatow
starts on SoHo, Wednesday, February 22.
Crashing
Monday, 8pm, TVNZ1
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