For anyone still reeling from a bad breakup, running into your ex’s new boyfriend might feel like meeting Adolf Hitler in the flesh — though it's highly unlikely that he or she would be dating the real Führer.
The new TV series “Man Seeking Woman” takes those feelings of heartbreak and turns them into literal and surreal scenarios to hilarious effect. The series comes from the comedic brain of 30-year-old writer and showrunner Simon Rich, based on his book of short stories titled “The Last Girlfriend on Earth."
The series follows a 20-something guy named Josh Greenberg, played by Jay Baruchel, on a quest to find true love in Chicago. (It's actually filmed in Toronto.) Along the way, in addition to meeting Hitler, he has a blind date with a woman who is — literally — a troll, and he time travels. It’s the kind of satire that works well in book form, but can be tricky to translate to TV.
Simon Rich stopped by The Frame recently to talk about adapting his book for TV and where he came up with the idea for these absurdist love stories.
Interview Highlights:
Can you talk a bit about how the idea for this series came about?
It really just started with me in my living room writing these short stories about dating in my 20s — and they were very unusual stories. But even though they were completely strange and surreal and featured time travel and trolls and aliens, they were actually — ironically — the most personal stories I'd ever written. They were super-autobiographical. The very first story I wrote for the collection is about a guy who finds out his ex-girlfriend is dating this older rich guy and he's really upset, especially when he finds out that the guy is Adolf Hitler, who is 126 years old and has faked his own death. His friends — none of them take his side — all think that this Hitler guy is pretty cool and he should just give him a chance. So I started writing these stories that were kind of [about] dating, but not so much the way dating actually happens — more about how it can sometimes feel.
When you're trying to adapt this for the FXX network, was it really important that you not dilute it by having characters comment on the preposterousness of the situation?
A hundred percent. When you're doing high stakes, premise-driven, absurdist comedy, you don't want people mugging and calling out the joke — that would murder it. That goes back to "Monty Python," at least. You always want to play the wacky premises as straight ahead as possible. But also, just on an emotional character level, it's vital that our hero is in every situation alone. When you're in your 20s and you're dating, it can feel like every single text and every date and every call is life or death. The fate of the world rests on every moment. But when you tell your friends about what you're experiencing, they tend to trivialize it and downplay its significance because — from their perspective — it's not that high stakes. I'm hoping with the show we can dramatize that disconnect — how dating can feel so high stakes and visceral for the hero, and so boring and inconsequential for all of the friends and family that surround him.
You worked on "Saturday Night Live." How does that help adapt your own writing for television? Are there other experiences in your past that helped pave the way for how you would adapt this?
When I got to "SNL," I was really just a magazine writer. I wrote stories for The New Yorker and I published a book or two, but I'd never really written for actors. Actors are a game changer, they have an incredible ability to elevate mediocre material. Working with actors really kind of changed my approach to writing. You start to think about every scene differently and you start to write with performers in mind. It really improved my writing. I feel really grateful that I get to do that kind of work.
When you get to the physical production of the show, what are the challenges about the world that you've created in your stories and the world you have to replicate on screen?
We're really going for a hyper-realist style. It's vital for the comedy to work and for the emotional stakes to work. Everything is played straight, which means the monsters can't be goofy, they actually have to be monsters. The aliens actually need to be from space. It can't look like a comedy-goof version of the genres. We actually try to commit to the genres. We try to hire people with actual genre experience. The creature creator is Paul Jones, a Toronto-based wizard, who has been working in the science fiction and horror genres forever. We brought him onboard and basically said, "Do your job. Do the thing that you're great at. Don't tone it down or goof it up just because we're a comedy show. When you're making a 126 [year-old] Hitler, make him 126 and make it gnarly." And he really delivered for us and did amazing work, week after week.
Part of the challenge of "Man Seeking Woman" is that it takes the conventions of romantic comedy drama and completely subverts them. Do you feel as if it's a little bit of a struggle to get the audience to understand the conceit of the show?
We're definitely asking a lot from our audience. There's a version of this show we could have made where it's constructed closer to something like ["The Secret Life of] Walter Mitty," where the fantastical, surreal elements of the show are depicted as dream sequences or as digressions. When you're watching something strange happen on the show and then you find out it was all a dream, it just feels lower-stakes, less visceral, less emotionally intense. So we wanted it to actually be happening just like on some of our favorite animated sitcoms like "The Simpsons" or "South Park." The supernatural, surreal aspects of those shows are literally happening. Kenny is literally being murdered repeatedly and Homer Simpson really does go to outer space. We wanted to attempt a live-action show that had that level of surrealism. But we know it's unusual, it's a strange one and we're really grateful to be on the air at all. I hope people find the show, but I understand why some people might be confused or even annoyed by it.
"Man Seeking Woman" airs Wednesdays at 10:30 on FXX.