HERE is a recipe for Hollywood success: Come to town, struggle to get cast in any sort of acting job. Use your spare time to shoot a couple of extended skits with two friends using your apartments for sets. Pitch the projects to a couple of networks as a television series, with the provision that if they pick it up, you will not only produce the series but also write the episodes and star in them.
Unlikely as it seems, that is essentially the path that led Rob McElhenney, Glenn Howerton and Charlie Day from acting obscurity to running their own half-hour comedy, “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia,” which begins its third season Thursday on the FX cable channel. Last year the network added Danny DeVito to the cast and saw its audience expand by about 20 percent, to 1.3 million viewers per episode and 902,000 adults age 18 to 49.
This year FX has further increased its bet on the young trio. After an opening season of just 7 episodes and a second season of 10, FX has ordered 15 episodes for the third season, all of which have already been shot and edited. The creators raised their own stakes as well, hiring writers for the first time to help them shape the episodes, nabbing some recognizable names as directors, including Fred Savage, the former star of “The Wonder Years,” and building new sets.
The question is whether those changes will sufficiently broaden the appeal of the series without alienating the devotees who fell in love with it even before it was a cult hit. Some of those viewers will find it hard not to notice that in its new incarnation, Paddy’s Irish Pub, the dive bar that is owned by the three central characters, is a bit cleaner and more of a well-lighted place than it was previously, and that the largely stand-alone episodes have begun to evolve into continuing story lines. Those changes, the creators said, are the inevitable evolution of a series that has grown from little more than a “Let’s put on a show” dream to a staple of FX’s increasingly innovative cable franchise.
The story of how they got to this point is as unlikely as it sounds. McElhenney, 30, and Mr. Day, 31, met while traveling to Los Angeles from New York for an audition during one pilot season.
Day and Mr. Howerton, who is also 31, met the same way. Howerton moved to the West Coast in late 2001, followed by the other two in 2002.
Though each actor found sporadic work, they also grew frustrated with the pace of life as aspiring actors. “So I had this idea for a short film,” Mr. McElhenney said, “where a friend came over to another friend’s house to get sugar, and the friend tells him he has cancer, and all the guy can think about is getting his sugar and getting out of there.
” McElhenney took the idea to Mr. Howerton, who thought it was funny; they agreed to have Mr. Day play the sick friend Mr.
Howerton the sugar-seeker, and to have Mr. McElhenney to direct. They expanded the central cast to four people living in Los Angeles, “a group of best friends who care so little for each other,” Mr.
They shot the scenes, added a second episode, got an agent who set up meetings at networks, including FX, which bought the idea. Originally the plan was for the friends to be out-of-work actors. But that scenario had become a bit crowded.
HBO alone had four shows on the air or in the works with a show-business premise: “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” “Entourage,” “Extras” and “The Comeback.” On broadcast television “Joey” was in its inaugural season. “The network came to us and said, ‘We don’t want a show about actors,’ and we said, ‘Fine, let’s put it somewhere else,’ ” Mr.
“I’m from Philly, let’s put it in Philly, and we’ll make it about a bar, because that’s a job where you can have lots of free time and still have income that could explain how these people can sustain themselves.” That was one of the few changes that the network requested, a light touch that the creators, not surprisingly, say they think has much to do with the show’s success. The first season drew attention for its often outrageously convoluted plots and for a visual style that is unusual in situation comedy.
The plots took full advantage of the show’s basic-cable home, which granted it more leeway both in language and subject matter than a network sitcom would receive. Among the titles of the first-season’s episodes, for example, were “Charlie Wants an Abortion” and “Charlie Got Molested.” In the second season Mac, played by Mr.
McElhenney, has sex with the mother of Dennis (Mr. Howerton), just for the sport of it, which leads Dennis to seek a similar act of revenge. The visual style was equally arresting.
Most comedies are produced using either multiple fixed-position cameras — producing the look and feel of “Cheers,” for example — or a single camera that can move around but which generally focuses on one character at a time, as in “The Office.” HERE is a recipe for Hollywood success: Come to town, struggle to get cast in any sort of acting job.
News RSS