LIFE GETS REAL
‘The Big Leap’ goes deep into dance show’s turmoil
Scott Foley has spent most of his life watching reality TV: “Top Chef,” “Project Runway,” “The Challenge,” “some f--king gold mining show on Discovery.” He’s even hosted his own, “Ellen’s Next Great Designer.”
So naturally, to play a fictional reality TV director, he took lessons from some of the most successful showrunners in the business.
In “The Big Leap,” premiering Monday on Fox, Foley stars as Nick Blackburn, the director of a show-within-a-show reality dance competition that ends with a live performance of “Swan Lake.” His cast is a motley crew of high school dance captains, people having midlife crises, football players trying to prove themselves and even a few actual dancers.
Everyone, including Nick, is looking for a second chance.
Nick, coming off a disastrous last show, needs to prove that he can be a success again. In the reality TV world, that means squeezing every last bit of drama out of his contestants in order to lay them out for America to watch, laugh, sympathize and maybe even hate.
“I think there was an opportunity for me to take what I’ve learned from my years on television and working with showrunners and executive producers and put that to use, twist it up a little bit,” Foley, 49, told the Daily News.
“From JJ Abrams on ‘Felicity’ to Shonda Rhimes to David Mamet and Shawn Ryan to Bill Lawrence, I’ve worked with some of the best, most talented, nicest, empathetic showrunners in the world.”
“At the end of the day, as nice as they all are and as close friends as I am with a few of them, they all have a job to do when it comes to it and that job is to produce the best episode of television that they can,” he added. “If there’s a line I don’t want to say, sometimes they’ll make me say it and it doesn’t mean we’re not friends, it doesn’t mean they’re wrong and I’m right, it just means that’s their job.”
Nick isn’t handing his cast lines, but instead manipulating them into scripting their own drama.
For Gabby, a single mother who gave up her teenage years to raise her son, the show represents a chance to live out the dreams she never thought she’d be able to have again.
“Whatever Gabby does, she does 100%,” newcomer Simone Recasner, 29, told The News of her character. “When life threw a change that she didn’t expect with getting pregnant and deciding to have Sam, she decided to go 100% and be the best mom she can be. Sometimes that’s not good enough, but she’s always trying.
“She goes full force into this dream that she thought wasn’t going to happen in her life.”
Her enemy, Recasner said, isn’t Nick or the judges, or even the bratty dancer trying to steal her partner.
“The true antagonist in the show is everybody’s own inner demons,” she said.
Paula (Piper Perabo) has already battled her own demons in the form of breast cancer, a fight that saw her lose her job.
“When you lose your job and you’re in your 40s, you’re like, ‘now what the f--k am I going to do?’” the 44-year-old actress, who grew up in New Jersey, told The News.
“For Paula, this is all gravy. Yeah, people are all competing and they want to be the best one and yeah, she wants to be good, but really she’s just so happy to be there and be a part of that.”
Even Perabo admitted how simplistic that sounds. But, she said, if Lawrence’s “Ted Lasso” can be a nice show about soccer, why can’t
“The Big Leap” be a nice show about dancing?
Foley was able to skip the dance rehearsals that went on for nine, 10 hours a day and over Zoom during the pandemic, an experience that both Perabo and Recasner described as bizarre. Instead, he got to sit around while everyone else got whipped into shape.
“I have it on good information that the writers are trying to get Nick to dance in some way, shape or form,” Foley joked. “I am fighting it tooth and nail for the sake of America and television viewers everywhere. I have a feeling that I’m going to lose that battle at some point.”