A cancer survivor pursues her home shopping star in ‘I Love That for You’
It’s probably safe to assume that few little girls dream of being a home shopping channel host when they grow up. But that is indeed the career aspiration of one woman at the center of a comedy series on Crave 1.
In “I Love That for You,” a half-hour series premiering Sunday, May 1, Vanessa Bayer (“Saturday Night Live”) stars as the character in question, Joanna Gold, a survivor of childhood cancer, who seeks to shed her label as “the cancer girl” by moving away from her parents, beginning a relationship and forming a meaningful friendship with her idol Jackie (fellow “SNL” alum Molly Shannon), the star of the network, in the hopes of ingratiating herself with the powers that be and moving up.
But it turns out that life in the employ of a shopping channel isn’t as cheerful as it appears onscreen. Rather, it’s a snake pit full of backstabbing co-workers and led by an icy CEO (Jenifer Lewis, black-ish) who is not at all impressed by Joanna’s wide-eyed optimism. Still, Joanna perseveres.
The series is co-created and executive produced by Bayer and “SNL” writer Jeremy Beiler and is inspired by Bayer’s own story of overcoming childhood leukemia. “Something that I really discovered during that time,” Bayer explains, “is, aside from obviously it was very difficult ... I was able to get a lot of perks from it, which I really think we explore in that show. I got to come into school late and there were no consequences; I couldn’t go to homecoming with someone because I was getting chemo that week. I mean, I used it as an excuse all the time. “And I think there was just something about that that really I wanted to bring into this show,” she continues.
“And when Jeremy and I were creating the show, we were talking about how for anyone, when you’re going through any kind of a hard time, obviously, you’re dealing with the difficult aspects of that. But also there is this nice thing about being treated so well.” Bayer and Beiler, both fans of QVC, wanted to build something around that world. Toward that end, they toured the QVC campus outside Philadelphia, met the people involved and even turned on QVC when they needed writing inspiration. But they soon found something else developing.
“And at first we’d kind of watch it for entertainment,” Beiler says, “but then we were like, ‘I might want to buy that,’ you know?”
“That’s the thing that we kept finding,” Bayer adds with a laugh, “was we would watch something for two minutes and we’d be like, ‘Yeah, this is fun to watch,’ and then we’d be like, ‘Are we both getting this?’ ”