Fun
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Nostalgic
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Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
One lesson we can already take away from 2020 is that even when us mere mortals are asked to pause our lives and stay inside, there will be still endless streaming entertainment available for us. Yes, even when we are asked to stay inside for nearly eight months with no end in sight. Our patience has run out, but the content keeps comin’. The content is not only not running out…it feels as though there’s somehow more than ever that social media and fellow binge-watching pals demand we are prepared to discuss.
So where are all these pre-pandemic shows coming from? Well, some have been hanging out in a place I can only call streaming purgatory. They haven’t been banished to the hell that is cancelation, but they also haven’t made their way through the pearly gates of a streaming platform yet either. And while dozens of Quibi shows have now entered streaming purgatory since the platform announced it would be shutting down, perhaps one of the best examples of this is Now We’re Talking, a comedy about two athletes-turned-broadcasters that was originally a short-form series on go90 (remember that?), which finally saw its second season land on CW Seed in September. Except Season 1 launched in September 2016… so where was Season 2 hanging out this whole time?
Creators, writers, and stars of the series Tug Coker (The Office) and Tommy Dewey (Casual, The Mindy Project) perched themselves in front of their best Zoom locations (fancy wine bottles in the background for Coker, a wooden library ladder for Dewey) to explain the long journey their show has taken, and though this one results in a happy ending, buckle up for the ride.
Now We’re Talking launched on go90 in September 2016, comprised of seven episodes around 10 minutes long, which packs a lot of comedy into short installments as the series follows the two guys as they transition from playing football on the field to chatting about it on the sidelines as they pursue careers in sports broadcasting. “I think the show did pretty well for that platform, whatever that means,” Dewey said, also pointing to the show’s WGA nomination for Original Short Form New Media, which lead to a Season 2 pickup announcement in December of that year. But while the platform wanted more short-form episodes, Coker and Dewey asked if they could instead make it as a half-hour series, after being inspired by High Maintenance’s journey from web series to HBO series. “Ideas are ideas, no matter what size they are,” Coker said. “To think of 20 short-form ideas is still a lot of creative brainpower. We were like, ‘Let’s just see if we could make eight nice, funny, tight half-hour [episodes].’”
Go90 agreed, and then came the hard part: the actual production of the season. “We were shooting 14 pages a day,” Dewey said (hint: that’s A LOT). “Just flying through the week to get it all made. Luckily, because Tug and I wrote it and were starring in it, we could improvise and keep things moving with our incredible director Laura Murphy, who had essentially storyboarded the whole thing so we could move at lightning speed.” But ultimately, this decision “really saved us,” Coker explained. “Because when go90 implodes, I don’t know if short-form has a life outside of it. So thank goodness we did scale it up because it landed us to CW Seed.” We can only hope you learned this lesson a long time ago, former Quibi content creators.
So the duo gathered a crew and a team of fellow comedic actors and made the Season 2 they wanted to make. They wrapped in the spring of 2018, and in June it was announced that go90 would be shutting down that July. But there was some good news: “We had one advantage, where we had actually shot the thing,” Coker said. “It wasn’t an idea for the next season; we actually made the thing.” In fact, as Dewey added, “It was fully cooked. We’d gotten through [post-production]. It was a fully-finished, ready-to-go show.” And in more good news, instead of hanging on to the rights themselves, go90 gave the show back to the guys and their production companies, SpringHill Entertainment and Warner Brothers. As Dewey said, “They knew the ship was going down, and I think were very gracious. When these entities get broken up, just getting the legal rights back to your stuff can be hard. That part actually was the one thing that went smoothly. They were like, ‘We’re toast. Here’s your show back.'”
And in even more good news, Coker recalled, “Tommy got wind of the issues that go90 was having, not dissimilar from what Quibi is experiencing now. As we were navigating the waters of go90 and dealing with these people, we said, ‘Uh oh. This endeavor of go90 may be in trouble.’ So what we did was made the second season a satire of not only sports media, but our experience with go90.” So as their former football player characters transition into sports broadcasting, “They start at this small, digital platform — and we just wrote in the things that we were experiencing. It was really fun to skewer and get notes from the network about them. Like, ‘Oh no no no, we’re actually making fun of you. That’s our experience, as we make the show.'”
“Yeah, that piece was a very meta experience,” Dewey agreed. The guys also pushed back when the Verizon-owned go90 asked them to shoot the show with lots of close-ups and as Dewey described it, “stuff that we didn’t feel was very cinematic,” intending for viewers to be watching on their phones. Instead, he said, “We wanted to make the show look really cool. Laura had a great aesthetic design for the show.” They stood their ground and are awfully glad they did, as Dewey said, “Especially given budget-wise, it looks really good on a nice, big screen. I get why you’d want to do that on a telephone. “But,” he joked, “We always hoped that it would end up on at least a 70-inch.”
Coker added that, “So much of the way people consume media these days is via phone. You can still watch great TV on your phone,” and is thankful that he and Dewey made the show they wanted to make and how they wanted to make it. “If anything, it’s a lesson for other creators out there. Really support your own idea. Otherwise, people will take it away from you.”
So they made what they wanted to make, but certainly not for it to sit on a dusty hard drive somewhere. But as Dewey said, “Tug and I couldn’t do whatever we wanted to with it,” when it came to just dropping the eight episodes on the internet. So they led the charge shopping the show around to other platforms. They were getting nibbles but it soon fell into a pattern with each potential home for the show. It was Coker who kept detailed notes on the timeline, but as Dewey remembered, “It would go: we’d pursue a deal, it wouldn’t work out. Then we wouldn’t hear much for a couple months. Then we’d go back to the table. It was a matter of keeping your foot lightly on the gas for well over a year, maybe closer to two.”
“Some people really liked the show, but it was more important to start their shows from the beginning. They wanted to conceive of the shows, and have them be their babies,” Coker said. “The frustration for us was: everyone talks about, ‘There are so many platforms! There are so many platforms! You can put content anywhere.’ That’s what we kept hearing. We’re just like, ‘Guys, it’s not that easy. People have certain things that they want to do.'”
However, the opportunity did afford Dewey and Coker to become not just actors, but business people and lawyers and content creators that quickly had to learn every corner of their industry. They educated themselves on the different streaming platforms and the way advertising and subscriptions come into play. They learned the business from all sides: as creators, as studios, as platforms. At one point, Coker even found himself on the phone handling guild disputes with the WGA and DGA. But it was a tweet from a guy who is probably pretty familiar with the process that stuck in Coker’s mind. “Mark Duplass has a tweet that I always come back to, where it’s like, ‘If you don’t take care of the things you love, they will go away.’ That is the thing I think about the most. If you don’t care about the show, no one else is going to care about the show more than you. It was really just Tommy and I having a belief that we think the show is good. We had to jump through a lot of hoops and over a lot of hurdles, and we still think we pulled off something that people should see. That was the driving force to go through so many headwinds. Everything possible that could go wrong, did go wrong. And we still turned the show into something we’re really proud of.”
And while Dewey recalled having their budget slashed about a week before production began, he also felt the “But there are so many platforms!” frustration, and said that doesn’t make it easier to sell things. What ultimately helps is “that viewers are more platform-agnostic now,” pointing to smart TVs and Apple TVs that can mean viewers, “don’t even know where they’re watching stuff.” Without the snobbery of dedicating yourself to one platform or network, Dewey said people are more likely to think, “’Hey! I like the first season of that show.’ And then find it wherever the hell it is. That’s working in our favor, currently.”
Also working in their favor was not only the TV domestic sales department at Warner Brothers, who were able to use their relationships to find the show a home, but also the fact that we are a) currently in a pandemic and so people are (hopefully!) staying home and watching more; b) production is currently awfully tricky to pull off; and c) as Dewey put it, “We were in a sports desert.” All key factors for a comedy about sports broadcasters that needed a streaming home. “People were looking for content. Stuff that’s already fully-formed,” Coker said. “So really, it actually became a perfect time to have a show that was ready.”
Dewey even picked up a new hobby which was basically: “Call Warner Brothers once a month and be like, ‘There’s no new programming, there’s no sports. All you have to do is put this somewhere and press play. It’s completely cooked.’ We just kind of had a calendar reminder to keep nudging. And to their credit, they were wise to those circumstances and found a place that really wanted to put it out.”
Plus, CW Seed ended up being a pretty sweet spot for this show in particular. “I think that the platforms are good for people,” Coker said.” Once you get there, you can stay there. We’re right next to Schitt’s Creek. It’s a huge opportunity for our show to get really highlighted on the platform.”
And there wasn’t a whole lot that needed to change about their product in order for it to fit in on the platform. As Dewey said, “The only real editing was they combined those short format episodes to make them hang together as longer pieces [two to three short-form episodes are combined to make approx. a half-hour episode] for Season 1 that is now three episodes, because that’s how they wanted to deliver those things to their audience. But we didn’t have to re-cut. Had we had to bust that thing back open and cut for time or something, I think we would have been in trouble.”
Oh, and there was one other thing. “And then the bleeping,” Dewey said. “I’m pretty convinced that we are the most bleeped show in CW Seed history.”
“For go90, we could make whatever we wanted. We don’t try to curse too much — Tommy does,” Coker laughed.
“I wasn’t aware of it until I got the 700-page email,” Dewey deadpanned. “When we got that Standards and Practices list of everything — it’s a novel. You’re like, ‘Wait, none of this is kosher to say?’ But there are scenes that play funnier because they’re bleeped.”
In order to be uploaded to the mostly family friendly platform, Broadcast Stands and Practices sent an email with all the notes of words they must bleep. “At first they wanted to [blur our mouths], Coker remembered. “We fought that and won. And then we just asked: ‘Hey, can we be like Arrested Development? Can we just use the bleeps to our advantage?’ We were allowed to have an opportunity to work with a post-production producer to help shave the editing, the bleeps, to make them as funny as possible. As Tommy will attest, I went through every proposed censor, or edit,” Coker said, pointing to a few choice conversations with the S&P department about the use of the words dick and ass. Dewey said, “Some of the funniest conversations you’ll ever have in entertainment, they’re like, ‘Can we just bleep the dick and not the head? Could it be ‘bleep-head?’ Okay, cool. Moving onto the next one.’ Full-grown adults having these conversations for their job, for their actual job, it’s just one of the most surreal conversations you’ll have making television.”
And so a deal was finally struck over the summer that landed Now We’re Talking a September date for both Seasons 1 and 2 to premiere, giving the guys about three months to prepare some social media content in order to promote its presence on the platform. But luckily, not much else was needed. “I think what’s exciting about the show is it’s as relevant, if not more relevant today,” Coker said, “because there’s so much trepidation and trauma in the digital space, and the platform space,” pointing to the end of digital comedy and sports platforms alike. “My favorite part of the show is capturing the chaos of media,” Dewey added. “Everybody pretends to know what they’re doing, and nobody really does. I love the sports stuff, but we really had a second season when we landed on that idea of media being so erratic right now, with new stuff coming online and going offline at any moment.”
So what lessons have they learned that they can pass along to other creators? Dewey is quick to credit Coker for having the patience to not only learn “other trades under the umbrella of entertainment,” but his persistence to push through and navigate them all at every step of the way. “It’s even gotten to the point where we’ve had to learn computer science to understand deliverables,” Dewey said. “What files does a buyer need that are saved somewhere on the Warner Brothers lot? We had to literally track down stuff. Like, ‘Where’s the publicity stuff that we originally shot for this?’”
He continued, “I think you’d want to say, in hindsight, that you could be more careful about go90 and see the writing on the wall that maybe we weren’t going to work. I can’t say that for us. They were spending a lot of money, and buying a lot of content.” But the real lesson he leans on is, “When you’re putting stuff into the world, really sit down with whoever you’re making the thing with, and think what you need to make a good show. Because you can get really excited about stuff, and before you know it, you’ve got something almost impossible to make. You really need to think through production as you’re having all the fun of creating.”
Coker says it’s a testament to the cast and crew involved in the project, “All people that you can just lean on, and be like, ‘Guys, quick huddle! We need to do this in two takes, okay? Can you do it?’ And they’re like, ‘Yeah, we got you.'” The lesson he wants to relay to others is “use this as an opportunity to continue to learn. Just learning about how everyone does their job so you can keep everyone on track — it has to be a machine, or it just isn’t going to work. We were so lucky to have everyone be gung-ho, and pick up the slack, and have good morale.”
“Also, Tug and I were raised to be polite Southern guys,” Dewey said, “Virginia and Alabama, respectively. So part of this was learning how to — in an appropriate, respectful way — be a squeaky wheel. The last thing I ever want to do is bug anyone. At a certain point, if you want your show on a platform, you’re going to have to bug some people. You’re going to have to call them more than once. That’s nothing against those people. It’s just, the media universe is chaotic. Stuff falls through the cracks all the time. Other people are going to be fighting for their shows, so you better do it too. You’ve got to advocate for yourself.”
“Tommy and I started this project wanting to work together,” Coker said. “We made this as a proof of concept, we invested our own money, we shot an eight-minute short, and we sold it. Part of it was, ‘Can we close the chapter? Can we find a way to see this journey through? If there’s no Season 3, that’s up to the people outside of our control. But can we get the thing that we made and finished to an audience?” It may have taken an overtime or two, but they’ve finally scored.
