‘MAYA & MARTY’ BRINGS VARIETY BACK TO TV
NBC takes a song-and-dance gamble on series
“If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.”
An NBC executive uses that familiar mantra when asked about
Maya & Marty (Tuesdays, 10 p.m. ET/PT), the network’s latest attempt at reinventing old-school variety series. Starring Saturday
Night Live alums Maya Rudolph and Martin Short, the show will feature a mix of comedy sketches, song-and-dance numbers, and pretaped segments, with guests including Miley Cyrus, Jimmy Fallon, Tom Hanks, Kelly Ripa, Larry David and Paul Rudd.
“It’s very much got traditional variety flavor, and that’s not something anyone here is frightened of,” says Paul Telegdy, NBC’s president of alternative and latenight programming. “We completely embrace it.”
Maya & Marty is the byproduct of The Maya Rudolph Show, an hour-long variety special that pulled in nearly 7 million viewers when it aired on NBC in May 2014. Short, 66, came aboard after he appeared with Rudolph on last year’s Saturday Night Live 40th-anniversary special and found they had chemistry.
Having known each other for about 10 years, Short says, they “have a lot of shared takes on life, that often creates a good combination. ... We both have an attitude of, ‘This is just showbiz, it should be fun.’ ” Maya & Marty’s initial six-episode order will be similarly free. Episodes will tape in front of a studio audience Thursday nights at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, right across the hall from The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. They will then have five days to edit the show before it airs Tuesdays.
“We want this to have the best possible things in it,” says Rudolph, 43. Coming from SNL, “there is a sensibility that it’s not done until it’s done. So if something comes up after the dress rehearsal and (we) go, ‘ That didn’t work, let’s trim that’ or ‘Let’s add this,’ then we will.” But what will prevent Maya &
Marty from suffering the same fate as NBC’s other attempts at variety programming? Rosie O’Donnell’s critically panned Ro
sie Live bombed in 2008. Neil Patrick Harris’ Best Time Ever, an ambitious (and expensive) gameand-variety show hybrid, was nixed after one season last fall.
Although Rosie Live predates Telegdy’s time at NBC, he says “the Rosie O’Donnell debacle, as I can only describe it creatively and from a ratings point of view, may have felt like a bold swing.” Best
Time Ever “was a bold swing of a different kind of show to Maya &
Marty,” which, if successful, likely would return next year.
Asked what Maya & Marty will do differently, and whether there’s an appetite for variety in 2016, the co-hosts turned testy.
“That’s such a loaded question, that has this expectation that it’s going to be like those shows,” Rudolph says. “It’s not like those shows, it’s its own show.”
Short adds: “Isn’t that like saying to Bill Cosby in 1981, ‘ Why would there be an appetite for a sitcom?’ ”
When it comes down to it, “I want to do this show and you want to do this show, so that’s the show we’re creating,” Rudolph says. “If people aren’t into that, they don’t want to watch us. But I do not base my career choices off other people’s successes and failures.”