The last-ever episode of The Nooner went up today on SNY.tv.
For a variety of reasons, I can’t quibble with the decision to pull the plug on the show, but I still find it a bit sad.
It’s sad because I spent about the first two hours of every workday for the past 22 months writing jokes for the show, and that’s a whole lot of energy to invest in anything. And getting paid to write comedy has long been a dream of mine, and since writing for The Nooner became part of the job for which I’m salaried, I was able to convince myself that I was, indeed, paid to write jokes.
And it’s sad because we had such high hopes at the start, and I fear we failed on them at least partly because too often the show wasn’t funny enough.
I wrote it in conjunction with Jeff, the show’s producer, and though I’m certain we came up with a good deal of actually funny jokes over the nearly two-year run, it was really, really hard to churn out three minutes a day of entertaining material every single day given how little time we had to create it and the limitations on our content created by this network’s (totally reasonable) standards on decency.
Jeff insists the show worked to a point, and that the fact that it ran for nearly two years and had sponsors for most of that time means it was a success. He’s probably right. It was something good that ran its course, I guess.
But the process grew increasingly tiresome as it became clear that the show was not blowing up like we hoped it would. We found ourselves repeating material a ton, which is a cardinal sin in comedy writing. We wrote so many damn fat jokes about Eddy Curry, then CC Sabathia, then Rex Ryan, then Bengie Molina.
Brittany Umar, the host of the show, was awesome throughout. I don’t know that she had much of a background in comedy before she started working with us, but she picked it up amazingly quick. She’s also incredible at reading a teleprompter, which I can attest is much harder than it looks. Plus she put up with so much of our nonsense, and was game for absolutely everything we asked her to do on camera.
Anyway, the upside to the show’s departure is that the extra couple hours every day should benefit readers of this blog, since I should have a lot more time to think and process what to write in this space. I’m excited about that.
It’s just a little depressing to see a lot of hard work just sort of drift off into cyberspace.
It’s true, and I agree with James, so read his post.
Though Rubin’s usually on top of these things, it’s just a report and so I don’t want to overreact. And I’m bored of killing Omar Minaya for signing Alex Cora to the deal he did when he did.
Tedquarters 