OFFBEAT FUN,
Amy Sedaris back with new season of offbeat, twisted fun
The inventive, offbeat and ridiculously funny TruTv series “At Home with Amy Sedaris” begins its third season Wednesday.
A Writers Guild of America Award nominee and twice Emmy-nominated as Outstanding Variety Sketch Series, “At Home” has critics praising it as “Deeply, joyously twisted,” and “Cozy and kooky, with a side of depravity.”
“It’s a hard show to describe. You can’t put it in any one category,” Sedaris, 59, said last week.
Each show revolves around one subject, often with celebrity guests. Jane Krakowski, Josh Hamilton and Justin Theroux are in the season’s premiere “Babies.”
“Sometimes we know who’s coming and write specifically for them. We had Justin for just three hours,” Sedaris explained. “So we did that little bit where he looks like Janeane Garofalo. That was all his idea and he is flawless in it!”
With topics like a baby’s room, maternity clothes and, for Sedaris with a pregnancy pad strapped around her waist, being “pregnant,” “Babies” is fearlessly demented. When Sedaris gives birth to, yes, a monkey doll, the show invokes the bunny boiling scene in “Fatal Attraction.”
“You want to pump the character. It’s tricky,” Sedaris, who is among the show’s writers as well as its guide, said. “This season we took more of a psychological approach because last season everyone wanted to kill me — that’s cool, that’s fine. This season we wanted to get into people’s heads a bit more.
“I always knew for the ‘Babies’ episode I had that monkey doll and I was just dying to use it for something.
“I was watching ‘Fatal Attraction’ at the time so I thought it would be perfect, Josh Hamilton as Michael Douglas! You know we all just love that kind of acting.”
That’s definitely one bizarre, strange doll.
“It came into my life seven years ago,” Sedaris said. “It comes in a kit — you bake it in the oven! And you put his hair on. You have to sew it on.
“Once I got stuck at an airport because it was in my carry-on. I put it on for the X-ray machine and I heard people laughing and I turned around and said, ‘Oh, that’s my baby.’
“So I guess I was attached to it.”
As far as threatening to kill her “baby”: “When we thought about having it put into the boiling pot we were debating. Somebody came to the set that day and saw that scene.
“I asked, Do you think that scene’s too dark? And she was, ‘No! It’s hilarious.’ And just by her saying that we were like OK. It was perfect.”