‘Strangers With Candy’ changed TV’s rulebook
Comedy nerds still embrace cult classic 25 years after debut
When Amy Sedaris makes appearances around the country, she finds it easy to identify the “Strangers With Candy” fans in the audience.
“They’re ugly,” she says with a cackle. “They’re misfits and outcasts.”
Stephen Colbert tells a similar story.
“If you’re walking on the street and you see somebody wearing a trash bag and talking to themselves with shaved eyebrows, you know that’s probably a ‘Strangers With Candy’ viewer,” says “The Late Show” host. “And you’re often right about it.”
Twenty-five years ago, the show — a warped spoof of the heavy-handed “ABC Afterschool Specials” of the ’70s and ’80s — premiered on Comedy Central and hardly anyone noticed. It starred Sedaris as Jerri Blank, a 46-yearold high school freshman and semi-reformed drug addict who returns to her hometown after decades on the lam and tries to pick up where she left off as an adolescent. For guidance, she turns to her factually challenged history teacher, Chuck Noblet (Colbert), who is having an illicit affair with insecure art teacher Geoffrey Jellineck (Paul Dinello). Each episode dealt with an issue of the week with Jerri learning almost nothing along the way.
Though it debuted in the time slot after the white-hot hit “South Park,” “Strangers With Candy” never found much of an audience in its original three-season run.
But over the years, through cable reruns,
DVD boxed sets shared
with friends and clips that circulate on social media, “Strangers With Candy” grew into a cult favorite. Comedy nerds and oddballs of all stripes embraced the show, especially its singularly off-putting heroine, a woman with a garish overbite, a sordid past and a strangely infectious nasal drawl.
“For 32 years I was a teenage runaway,” says Jerri in a direct-to-camera monologue in the show’s first episode, in which she accidentally kills the most popular girl in school with a homemade batch of a drug called “glint.” “My friends were dealers, cons and 18-karat pimps. But now I’m out of jail, picking up my life exactly where I left off: back in high school, living at home and discovering all sorts of things about my body.”
Although the creators of “Strangers With Candy” — Colbert, Sedaris, Dinello and Mitch Rouse — never set out to influence anyone, the show has inspired younger writer-actorcomedians.
“A lot of people come
up and say that it changed everything, that it changed the rulebook,” says Sedaris, speaking by phone from her home in New York. “I think we broke the rules because we didn’t really know what the rules were.”
The story of “Strangers With Candy” began in Chicago, where Colbert, Dinello and Sedaris were members of the Second City improv troupe. They later moved to New York and a few years later, Colbert and Dinello were close to clinching a deal with Comedy Central for a show called “Mysteries of the Insane Unknown” — a quasi-parody of “In Search Of ” cobbled together from found footage.
“Our pitch was that this is going to cost you $1.25 to make,” says Colbert. “They literally said, ‘Let’s cut you guys a check.’ We were like, ‘Oh, my God,’ because we were only mildly employed back then.”
Then Sedaris called Dinello and asked for their help with a pitch for an update on the “Afterschool Specials” they’d all grown up watching.
“Paul told me the idea. And I said, ‘Paul, goddammit, that’s a better idea,’ ” recalls Colbert, who worried that Comedy Central might prefer it to the idea they had just sold. This turned out to be the case, and “Mysteries of the Insane Unknown” never came to fruition. But the concept for “Strangers” was dramatically retooled before the show made it to air.
Sedaris originally imagined a straight re-creation using the original scripts. But Dinello had gotten a copy of an educational film called “The Trip Back.” The PSA featured Florrie Fisher, a motivational speaker, lecturing a group of high school students about her struggles with drug addiction using colorful terminology. Fisher happened to bear a resemblance to Sedaris.
“I said, ‘Amy, you should be that character,’ ” says Dinello, who is now a writer and supervising producer on “The Late Show.” “Then Stephen had the idea that it would be an ‘Afterschool Special,’ but we’d always teach the wrong lesson.” They shot a pilot that was “really bad,” according to Sedaris, and never aired.
But with help from programming executive Kent Alterman, they reshaped the series. The cast included Deborah Rush as Sara, Jerri’s cruel stepmother; Roberto Gari as Jerri’s beloved father, Guy (who, in a running gag, always appeared motionless on camera); Maria Thayer as Tammi Littlenut, Jerri’s redheaded classmate and crush; and Greg Hollimon as Onyx Blackman, the formidable principal of Flatpoint High School.
Although they tried to find other writers on the series, Colbert, Dinello and Sedaris churned out virtually all the scripts themselves, using a free-form method informed by their years in improv.
“We purposefully would never write an outline,” says Colbert. “Because we started off as improvisers, we believed that discovery was better than invention. And if you do an outline, you’re just sort of filling in the slots of the thing you want to invent.”
They imagined all the scripts were written by a middle-aged woman named Jocelyn Hershey Guest. “In the world where she’s writing, these are the right moral choices,” Colbert says. “That’s why in our mind, they all have an internal consistency. And also it freed us up from thinking that we were writing this bad stuff. It was all Jocelyn doing it.”
Their creative approach also meant embracing mistakes and moments of serendipity. They couldn’t decide on Jerri’s last name so they just left a blank space where it would go in the script. Someone read it aloud as “Jerri Blank,” and everyone burst into laughter. “Like so many things in the script, the universe would accidentally go, no, you actually wrote the right thing. Don’t try to make it better,” Colbert says.
Sedaris had a specific vision for Jerri’s appearance and physical demeanor, starting with her face — overbite, furrowed brows, crossed eyes. Then came the outfits. Jerri wore lots of turtlenecks and long sleeves because “she was riddled with track marks,” says Sedaris, who told the “wardrobe department I wanted to look like I owned a snake.”
Over three seasons produced in less than two years, Jerri learned to read, joined a cult and was sexually harassed, among other challenges.
But the show continued to air in reruns, and its following grew. Fans rewatched on DVD, perfected their Jerri grimaces and clamored for more tales from Flatpoint. “Strangers With Candy,” a movie prequel, came out in 2006. Now, the series can be streamed on Paramount+ and Comedy Central’s website, for those with a cable subscription.
More recently, Sedaris and company have been approached about a revival. Sedaris says she has dreams of doing a “Strangers” Christmas special. Her friend John Early had an idea for a revival where Jerri goes to college.
Thus far they have declined to bring it back, but haven’t sworn off the possibility.
“Nothing has felt right so far,” Colbert says. The late-night host continues to encounter fans of the series — not all of them are dressed in trash bags.
“If someone says, ‘I really like “Strangers with Candy,” ’ I usually say, ‘I didn’t know you were mentally disturbed.’ Our fan base is deeply troubled,” he says. “And I’m happy for them, because I’m deeply troubled too.”