JUNE AND CHLOE IN ‘APT. 23’
Creator envisioned role as a modern Holly Golightly
It has a vaguely threatening title, but the ABC comedy Don’t Trust the B - - - - in Apt. 23 is good, mean fun.
The series, premiering Wednesday (9:30 ET/ PT) after Modern Family, opens as wide-eyed Indiana transplant June (Dreama Walker) loses her job and New York apartment when her company is raided for embezzling clients. Enter Chloe (Krysten Ritter), a roommate from hell who sees her as easy prey (“another smalltown trusting doormat”), overcharges her rent and is first seen messing around with June’s fiancé — on her birthday cake.
Despite the title, the hard-partying, unfiltered con artist is “not a villain,” Ritter insists. “She’s somehow likable and too damn fun. She’s an amazing force of nature who’s in total control” — as when, in need of an assistant, she takes in a foster child.
“Everybody thinks the show was written for me; I’m not sure how to take that. It does play to my strength."
Krysten Ritter
And though they’re “complete opposites,” Walker says, eventually June “tries to be more like Chloe and be more persuasive, but it fails miserably.”
Apt. 23, the latest in a string of female-led comedies, has been kicking around since 2009, after series creator Nahnatchka Khan ( American Dad) was inspired by a favorite movie, Breakfast at Tiffany’s. “Holly Golightly was a classic character,” she says. “I wondered what the modern version of that would look like, someone existing on Champagne and ball gowns, (with) a normal roommate who was paying bills and watching CSI.”
But the show’s first home proved inhospita- ble. “It was set up at Fox, and they couldn’t find the right (title character) to get the show greenlit,” says Ritter, who played Jesse’s tough recovering-addict girlfriend on Breaking Bad.
“Everybody thinks the show was written for me; I’m not sure how to take that,” she says. “It does play to my strength. But I don’t play it like a b - - - -. I make everything she does positive.”
ABC was sold on the show when James Van Der Beek surfaced as Chloe’s celebrity pal. The former Dawson’s Creek star had done self-parody videos for humor website Funny or Die, “and we were really looking for someone who could play himself with a great sense of humor,” Khan says. His presence was funny for “what it says about Chloe, that a girl running a small-time grift on Craigslist, scamming roommates for money, is somehow best friends with James.”
As Chloe breezily explains: “We weren’t really compatible genitally. Now, he’s like my gay BFF, but straight.” Both are “complete narcissists; that’s why they’re best friends,” says Van Der Beek. “Having played the moral center of a show for six years, I have the longest leash possible to go out and do crazy stuff.”
And while he and his character share a name, “by the second episode, it stopped seeming like me in any way. He became this character who was our way of lampooning celebrity worship and pop culture.”
It was Van Der Beek who proposed the story arc in which James preps for Dancing With the Stars, facing rivals including Dean Cain, and bickers over details like the size of his dressing room. Dancing offered the real Van Der Beek a slot, but he declined. “It’s more fun the way we did it on the show.”
In another episode, he’s cast in a fatherdaughter body-swapping movie alongside the actress who plays Mad Men’s Sally Draper.
“One of my favorite scenes was trying to learn how to be a 12-year-old girl by imitating Kiernan Shipka,” he says.
Van Der Beek says the show is biting but not bitter. “None of the characters are pessimistic, none of them are cynical. They do some amoral things, but always with the expectation that it’s all going to work out. I hope there are as many people out there with our warped sense of humor.”