Coulda, Woulda, Shoulda is a series focusing on failed pilots from comedy greats, both before and after their success, and examining whether or not they deserved to be picked up. To kick things off, we'll focus on three early pilots from one of modern SNL's greatest success stories: The Lonely Island.
"Keep your looking balls locked on the picture radio and prepare to get your nuts smashed!"
At this point, the story of The Lonely Island on Saturday Night Live is the stuff of legend. The trio, comprised of California natives and high school friends Andy Samberg, Akiva Schaffer & Jorma Taccone, were hired as writers for the show's 2005-2006 season, with Samberg additionally being cast as a featured player. That was a season that found the show in a state of serious transition: it was head writer Tina Fey's final season - along with future head writer Colin Jost's first season - and the show was bringing on one of its most ultimately celebrated crop of new cast members in its entire history, with Kristen Wiig & Bill Hader being brought on along with Samberg, and Jason Sudeikis effectively coming in with them after joining the cast in the final few episodes of the prior season. This is a featured player group certain SNL superfans still wake up in sweats over. It would be hard for anyone to not get lapped when that's the crew you're competing with to be the new stars of the show, and for at least a couple months, it looked like that might be the case for Samberg. He clearly had a certain type of charisma to him, but in those early months he just wasn't getting a ton on the show, and it seemed to many he was destined to face the fate of many a one-season wonder that's graced the halls of Studio 8H, and that The Lonely Island's time on SNL would just be something of a curiosity.
Then, on the last show of the year, they debuted a music video called "Lazy Sunday", a short so successful it not only instantly guaranteed their future at the show, but restructured the show's entire approach to comedy in the 21st century. That sketch now exists on a shortlist of about 10 sketches that fundamentally changed the show's DNA; if you remove that piece from the timeline modern SNL is, for better or worse, an entirely different show. (As a side-note, it's endlessly fascinating to me SNL legend Robert Smigel was the one person who immediately sensed what a sea change that video represented.)
Of course, you wouldn't exactly expect such lofty ambitions out of the group watching their work itself, which in their early years on the show pretty directly mirrored what they had been doing for years leading up to that: a slew of DIY parodies/pastiches that skew heavily towards the gleefully juvenile. When your early videos include a Wu-Tang-esque song about wanting to get down and dirty with a stork (one with a way better beat than it calls for), it's clear you're not taking yourself too seriously. The prevailing sensibility of The Lonely Island is the same that brought one of their clear inspirations, Adam Sandler, his endless success: 'Would this have made us laugh when we were 13?' Which sounds like I'm being dismissive, but it's enviable to be able to tap in so expertly to a generation's inner child.
This brings us to 2001. The group of longtime friends have now officially formed a comedy trio, and release their first music video,
"Ka-Blamo!", a somewhat primitive Beastie Boys pastiche. Following the success of that video (success at this point in the group's existence meaning simply "it was a finished product"), they took it upon themselves to write and produce their own pilot.
PILOT #1: The Lonely Island ("Pilot" AKA "White Power!") (Dec. 2001)
The trio's first attempt at a pilot is their least traditional. There's no big studio backing them, and it runs a scant 17 minutes compared to most network sitcom pilots' usual runtime of about 22 minutes. I don't think they really had any delusions that this would be picked up by anyone; we're early enough into the boys' career that the goal here seems to simply be creating and filming
something. This is more than anything an exercise in finding their voice; 'if we give ourselves 15-20 minutes to fill, what will we come up with?'
And what exactly did they come up with? A decently amusing after-school special riff that's by its very nature a little too aimless to really leave a mark. It isn't bad by any means, but removing the curiosity factor of it being the early work of future stars, you're left with a semi-charming but especially shaggy showcase for a group of guys who just haven't quite figured out their thing yet. That's not to say the seeds aren't planted here: there's the touches of light absurdity, the comically melodramatic shifts in mood, the very 2000's fixation with homoeroticism. The whole DIY, throwing-whatever-at-the-wall nature of the thing too does feel reminiscent (or I guess prescient) in a way of their early work at SNL. But we're missing the special ingredients necessary for things to feel like they're truly clicking. Which is fair enough, considering that, while they had known each other for years at this point, this is only a few months into them officially being a comedy team. They just hadn't fully honed and keyed in on their style the way they would have by the time they reached SNL, leading them to be more confident at that point in what their specific voice is.
Take the opening scene for example. We start with an amusing enough infomercial parody: an omniscient voice stops people from such ill-advised DIY teeth whitening solutions as brushing their teeth with white paint, downing a bunch of bleach to whiten them or just straight smashing them with a hammer. Then we get a confused joke about the initials of the ingredients used in the tooth whitener being "KKK". Unremarked upon in the background (and for the rest of the episode, despite it being the alternate title for the pilot) is the name of the product: White Power. This leads me to believe that the original premise of the scene was going to involve the company either being some sort of racist front, or at the very least continuing to inadvertently do racist things; but then they don't commit to the idea and neuter it to just one joke that doesn't really make much sense left devoid of context.
That lack of commitment remains an issue throughout the pilot. Certain moments are punctuated by cheesy canned studio audience responses, but only sporadically. The boys will sometimes adopt a sort of fay, soft-spoken way of speaking to one another (it's 2001, so we gotta get some "lulgay" in there), but only occasionally. The pilot sometimes feels like a parody of melodramatic teen dramas of the time (something that would go on to be a common point of parody for the group, as we'll see later) but again, only sometimes. It's not that these bits are all dynamo (indeed, some actively don't work), but it's odd to have them interspersed throughout as half ideas.
The main plot of the pilot is a parody of your typical "friends try seemingly harmless drug and end up falling down a rabbit hole of addiction" story, with the twist being the drug in question is literally harmless: just store-brand teeth whitener. The guys try the teeth whitener once, just wanting to see what all the fuss is about, and soon find themselves willing to do anything for a fix, including mugging an old lady in the middle of the street (in a scene that famously made Keifer Sutherland stop in the middle of the road to check out just
what the hell was going down).
As mentioned though, things get a little aimless, so really not much of the short is dedicated to their Trainspotting style downfall. We get space for several detours, some more worthwhile than others. One of the more amusing passages involves the guys slapping together a monstrosity of dough, sauce and un-chopped vegetables, only to stick it in the oven and for it to come out not only looking like a fully formed pizza, but in a Domino's box. Even more amusing, and in fact providing my biggest laugh of the short, is when the guys are sitting around waiting for their teeth to whiten and can't open their mouths for an hour. During this time they get a phone call, and the voicemail reveals a Ghostface-like figure, voiced by Jorma. "I was going to kill whoever answered this phone... But since no one's home, I guess I'll just call someone else to murder. Have a great day!"
Less worthy of inclusion is a scene dedicated to Samberg thinking about coming up with a new word to describe something cool. He ends up creating the word "ka-blamo", and then we just cut to the first minute or so of the "Ka-Blamo!" music video. I can't tell if this inclusion is down to wanting to show off this song they were proud of or just needing to pad for time, but either way it feels out of place. This may be hypocritical for me to say as a big Flight of the Conchords fan, considering that show would often practice equally tenuous links to their music videos, but it still managed to feel more of a piece in that show than this pilot short just having a minute of comedy rap dropped in the middle of things.
Among the mix we also get a subplot with Chester Tam, the guys' roommate at the time who would go on to make frequent appearances in their work (some of you may remember him as
the dancing guy in
Hot Rod). Tam has never been the most natural presence on camera, but as evident by his
Hot Rod cameo he's one of those guys with a unique kind of charisma that just captures your attention when he's on screen. Still, his inclusion here is a bit odd, playing a fictionalized version of himself who Jorma falsely promises a flat-screen TV to as a birthday present.
The plot thread doesn't really amount to much more than...they don't get him the TV. Maybe it's supposed to be a sign of their carelessness since becoming dependent on teeth whitener, but it's clear in the initial scene Jorma isn't really committed to following through on his promise, and that scene happens before the characters ever take any of their drug stand-in. It's just a strange thread, and ends in two callbacks that don't really work: as Jorma leaves Chester's birthday party he pushes Chester into his pool, and we hear the canned laugh-track from earlier, again playing to shrugs from me more than anything. Chester then gets a call from the
Scream-esque killer from earlier, telling Chester he's the killer's new target, which causes Chester to let out one of the least threatened "oh my god"'s I've ever heard.
Following the party scenes the short wraps up pretty quickly, with Andy & Akiva seemingly all better and cheerfully saying how easy it was to get over teeth whitener. "I wish I could say the same for Jorm," Andy chuckles, and we pan to Jorma writhing in agony on the floor in a fit of withdrawal. Andy & Akiva playfully mock him, and then Sarah McLachlan's "I Will Remember You" (one of many rather obvious needle drops in here, including "Girls Just Want To Have Fun", "I Wanna Be Your Dog" and the Dawson's Creek theme) plays over a montage of clips from the episode. It's a real "we're not sure how to end this" ending. Boy can I relate! (Ends whole blog here)
It feels a bit unfair to come at this thing and look at it with too harsh a critical lens, as again I doubt any of these guys had aspirations about this being picked up by NBC or even Comedy Central or whoever. This was just something they wanted to have in the bag so they could have something to show people interested in what they were doing. Having said that, it's still clear no matter watching this that these guys have a certain talent and charisma to them, and that this is just a very raw version of that. If I were an executive, or really just any comedy fan, seeing this for the first time in 2001, it might not immediately put me in the Lonely Island business but I would definitely make note of whatever they were up to in the future.
CONSENSUS? Wouldn't have worked as a long term series, but charming enough that you'd keep your eye on these guys.
UP NEXT: Almost 2 years later (in the group's timeline, the actual review is already written and will be up in a couple days) the guys make another, more traditional, attempt at a pilot, this time for Comedy Central.
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