Pilot Error Revisited: Chuck Lorre's NATHAN'S CHOICE (2001)
Several years ago, when I was a contributor to the sadly now-defunct website Antenna Free TV, I created a column called Pilot Error, where I looked back at TV pilots that never actually made it to series. When the site came to a conclusion, so did the column, but thanks to the kindness of the other folks involved with AFT (it was very much a collaborative effort), I’m able to bring them back to life here on Substack.
Nathan’s Choice (2001)
Starring: J.D. Walsh, Holmes Osborne, Julie White, Ashley Tisdale
Chuck Lorre may not have any sort of documentation that formally declares him to be one of the most powerful people in television, but as the executive producer of Two and a Half Men, The Big Bang Theory, Mike & Molly, and—coming this fall to CBS!—Mom, it’s clear that he’s not exactly what you’d call small-screen small potatoes. Keep in mind, though, that he hasn’t always been in a position to snap his fingers and secure a green light for his sitcoms. In fact, just after the turn of the millennium, even though he had a list of credits that included work on My Two Dads, Roseanne, Grace Under Fire, Cybill, and was in the midst of taking Dharma & Greg through what would ultimately be a five-season run, Lorre suffered through Swing-and-a-Miss Syndrome on three consecutive occasions.
2001′s Last Dance, a.k.a. Slightly Damaged People, which starred Paget Brewster, David Keith, Yeardley Smith, and Michael Rispoli, was to have focused on a romance between a cop and an actress who meet in rehab, a concept which…and I’m just spitballing here…could very easily be retooled to focus on a romance between a cop and a teacher who meet at Overeaters Anonymous. (Actually, Splitsider came up with this observation, too, but we both did so independently. I swear!)
2002′s Two Families, meanwhile, was about a pair of widowers—played by Brian Dennehy and Anne Meara—who find love with each other, with hilarious high jinks ensuing as a result of blending their families together…or, in other words, a modern day, slightly more geriatric take on The Brady Bunch. You can read more about it at the Paley Center website, since it turns out they have a copy of the pilot in their archive.
The third one in the pack, though? Now that one was something special. Sure, it was a crazy idea, but, dammit, the concept seemed just crazy enough to work. It even got some pretty high-profile advance press.
Problem was, it didn’t work. Not as far as FOX was concerned, anyway. But to be fair, we are talking about a concept that Lorre himself summed up by saying, “Think Siskel and Ebert on acid.”
Created with an eye on the 2001-2002 fall schedule, Nathan’s Choice, written by Lorre and his recurring collaborator Michael Roberts, was to have starred J.D. Walsh as Nathan, a guy whose life was to be placed in the hands of the viewers. Yes, that’s ultimately the case with the characters in every series when it comes to ratings—if there are no viewers, then soon there is no show—but in this case, it would’ve been a bit more literal: at the midway point of each episode, the folks at home would’ve been given the opportunity to vote on which way the storyline would proceed after the messages from the very important sponsors.
You’re probably wondering the same thing everyone else has asked me when I’ve mentioned this pilot to them: “Wouldn’t filming two different second halves of every episode be a pretty expensive proposition?” Why, yes. Yes, it would. And yet they’d figured out a way to make it a bit more cost-viable…but we’ll get to that, because now you’re wondering, “Okay, so if that wasn’t why the series didn’t get picked up, what was?”
Well, to answer that, I’ll hand you off to Lorre, who I ran into at a CBS party during this summer’s Television Critics Association press tour, and Walsh, who was kind enough to hop on the phone with me earlier this week and help me fill in a few more blanks. Their answers as to why Nathan’s Choice wasn’t picked up may not be wholly satisfying—they rarely are with these things—but in discussing the concept, they’ll certainly make you wonder why, more than a decade later, no one’s tried taking another shot at an interactive sitcom.
CHUCK LORRE
Can I ask you something completely ridiculous?
Chuck Lorre: Something completely ridiculous? That’s the only thing I like to talk about!
Well, I guarantee I’ll be the only person who asks you about it this tour, but…I do a feature called Pilot Error, and I’d like to ask you about Nathan’s Choice, if I may.
[Very long pause.] Kudos.
What was your mindset when you came up with the premise? Did you just say, “I want to do an interactive sitcom”?
Yeah. Unfortunately, I wanted to do it 13 years ago. [Laughs.] But I thought it’d be fun to have the audience participate.
And was it as fun as you’d envisioned?
Well, I loved making it. But the people at FOX at the time did not like it. It died a very quick death. Never got on.
How would the interactivity of the series have unfolded?
At the act break, the audience had a choice…well, Nathan had a choice…of what he was going to do. Maybe a big choice, maybe a little choice, but he had to make a decision: this road or that road? And the audience would vote on which way he should go or what he should do. So we’d shoot two second acts, and then we’d air the one that wins. In real time. That was the idea. An idea so great it never got on television. [Laughs.]
What was FOX’s reaction when you pitched it? If they let you shoot a pilot, they must’ve tentatively thought it was a good idea.
Yeah, but they hated it after we shot it. But I made a mistake, too. I should’ve done it as a single-camera show, but they wanted it to be a four-camera show. And it was never meant to be that. It was one of those compromises that probably helped kill it.
Were you surprised when they didn’t pick it up? Did you think it had a shot?
I wouldn’t have done it if I didn’t think it had a shot. Yeah, I was heartbroken. I loved it, and I thought it would’ve been exciting to do.
J.D. WALSH
J.D. Walsh: Okay, so when you talked to Chuck about Nathan’s Choice, what did he say? [Laughs.]
Basically, he said that the network liked the premise enough to make the pilot, but then once they got the pilot, they hated it.
Really? I think it went a little farther. I mean, it got picked up for six episodes.
He didn’t mention that.
Yeah, it got picked up for six episodes, and me in my craziness… It was a single-camera, but was this was back before The Office, so, y’know, the landscape was still very much one of multi-camera sitcoms. And they wanted to move it from a single camera to a multi-camera, which bummed me out, because I thought there was more—what’s the word? —coolness in being a single-camera…which is only, like, the biggest case of looking a gift horse in the mouth in the history of mankind. [Laughs.] It’s like going, “Hey, I think this horse has a back tooth that’s a little off,” and meanwhile it’s Secretariat! But, yeah, they started down the line of writing some episodes, and that’s when the network was, like, “Y’know, we don’t really like this.” And that was it.
So take me through this thing from the start, starting with getting the part. I don’t know what your status as an actor was at the time: was it an audition situation, or was it actually pitched directly to you?
Yeah, I’d done Dharma and Greg with Chuck Lorre, he liked me enough to bring me back a few times, and one time he said, “Hey, I’ve got this idea for a show, and I think you’d be right for it.” But that’s all he said. But I said, “Okay, great!” I didn’t really hear anything for months, but I kept thinking about it. When you’re as powerful as Chuck Lorre, you can’t just throw those things around, because actors will obsess over something for months. [Laughs.] But sure enough, he then called me and…hold on, let me just remember all this, ‘cause, honestly, I haven’t thought about the network audition in a long time!
No problem. It’s not like you get asked about this thing every day.
[Laughs.] Okay, so, yeah, I didn’t have to do the first round of auditions, I just had to go to studio. And at studio, there were two other guys, one of whom was Jordan Belfi. He was the guy who played the agent on Entourage, the asshole agent who was, like, Ari’s nemesis. I still know him, and we talk about that all the time. So I went to studio, that went well, and then I went to network on it. I still remember going into FOX. I remember two things about it. I remember there was a fountain in front of it, and I threw a penny into the fountain and wished that I would not get the pilot…and then I turned to somebody who worked on the lot, and I told them what my wish was, my thinking being that nobody ever says that if you wish into a wishing well you’ll get your wish, but everybody says that if you wish in a wishing well and tell somebody what you wished for, then it never comes true.
My God. Why has no one ever thought of this before?
I know, it’s genius, right? [Laughs.] So, yeah, I went in, and…I don’t know how many people you’ve talked to about the network audition process, but it’s just your worst nightmare. It’s 20 people crammed into a little theater that’s in the offices. I remember going into the audition, and there were pictures of failed pilots all over the place. And I remember there was one with David Alan Grier. Like, I remember going into the room and looking at a picture of David Alan Grier in a pilot for a TV show that I’d never seen before. But the audition went really well. I felt pretty good about it. And then the next day, Chuck called me and told me that I got it…and I was so excited that I pressed the phone to my cheek too hard and hung up on him. Which is not great.
Oops. Talk about your momentary panic attacks.
[Laughs.] No kidding! So, yeah, then we shot the pilot, and there were a bunch of famous people on the pilot…or, rather, who eventually became quite famous. Ashley Tisdale was my sister, and, y’know, she went on to High School Musical. And Kaley Cuoco was my temptress. One of the stories was that I wanted to make out with my sister’s best friend, or that she kept wanting to hit on me when I drove her home but I thought she was way too young. Those were the two storylines.
It was a very interesting show, in that the first half of the show was going to basically be two dilemmas: do I date the boss’s daughter or my sister’s best friend? And I had to choose between those, and the audience was going to vote—I think it was done by telephone—and they were going to air whichever one got the most votes. And then the next day on FX, they would air the alternate version. It’s really…I mean, they say sometimes things are ahead of their time, and this was pre-American Idol. What’s crazy is, you could do that now. You could have people text and email and phone in those three minutes and really make a decision based off of that. Whereas back then I think it would’ve been a little more rudimentary, I think that you could do it for real now.
Okay, just to make sure I’m understanding you, the sitcom itself would’ve been on FOX, but the alternate version would’ve aired on FX, correct?
Yeah, that’s right. By the way, the story itself had a very Graduate vibe to it. Kinda like, “I’m fresh out of college, I’m living at home…what am I gonna do with my life?” So we rehearsed the show, and…it was a crazy amount of pressure. You’d go to rehearsal, and there’d be 40 people watching you: 20 from FOX, 20 from Warner Brothers. The way that I dealt with it was that I just pretended that it was the most realistic dream that I’d ever been in. Like, I just detached myself and just was, like, “Wow, what a fascinating dream I’m having!” [Laughs.] That’s what I had to do to deal with the pressure, because it was just overwhelming. But then it didn’t turn out well, and it didn’t get picked up at upfronts. But then maybe a week later, it got picked up along with Andy Richter Controls the Universe.
I can kind of see that as a pairing, actually. So when did you find out that it wasn’t going forward after all?
Well, it was odd: I found out it wasn’t moving forward on September 10, 2001.
Ah.
Yeah. So, y’know, I was sad and depressed that it didn’t go forward, but then things got put it more perspective the next day. So that kind of focused me a bit more on what’s important…and, obviously, the most important thing in life is a pilot on the FOX network. [Laughs.] Yep. Seriously reinforced that. But, anyway, it didn’t move forward, and then Chuck…I think he might’ve had a couple more pilots that didn’t go, but then he did Two and a Half Men, and he asked me to be the pizza guy on the show for Charlie, and I’ve been doing that periodically for the last nine years. Or at least until Charlie had his quarrel and, uh, didn’t order any more pizzas.
What’s funny, though, is that Nathan’s Choice literally just came up yesterday. I was on the set doing an episode of The Crazy Ones, and a guy on the lot yelled at me, “Hey, Nathan’s Choice! I loved that, man!” It was very weird and random. A couple of times it’s come up in the press. A bit ago, Hawaii Five-0 did an episode where you got to vote on the show, and an article referenced Nathan’s Choice. It’s very weird for something that happened 12 years ago to pop up occasionally…like, for instance, this interview! [Laughs.]
Well, as you said earlier, it’s a concept that could work much easier nowadays.
Yeah, I’m very surprised that they have not tried to make the interactive-series concept. I have no idea why somebody hasn’t given it a go, because it seems to be so perfect. I mean, let’s just talk about how the networks are looking for shows that people want to watch the day of, and that they want audiences to interact with and to be involved with on social media, shows that aren’t just being watched on TiVo or on Hulu but that are watched when they actually air. What better show to get that involvement than one where you get to vote on the ending? And then you get the double hit from people watching the alternative version the next night on your cable station or online or whatever it is. It’s fascinating.
Yeah, and the whole FOX / FX business model answers a major question that everyone’s seemed to have when I’ve mentioned the concept: “Wouldn’t it have been expensive to shoot all of that extra footage?” Theoretically, running the alternate version would seem to offset that cost.
Yeah, I think that’s a piece of it. And it’s also really depending on how much you want to do, how much extra you want to shoot. You could theoretically do three acts rather than just split the show in half. There’s a couple of different ways you could do it. I’d be interested to see how that episode of Hawaii Five-0 did, if they got decent ratings and if people enjoyed that aspect of the show. But I remember that the concept of Nathan’s Choice was that it was going to be like a cartoon, that I could die in an episode, and then the next week I’d be alive. Kind of a live-action Wile E. Coyote. [Laughs.]
Do you recall if there was a specific reason why FOX ended up bailing on the show? Was it a change in regime and the new guys weren’t interested, or did they just simply change their mind?
You know, I think they just didn’t like it. [Laughs.] I mean, it’s like asking why I don’t like avocado, y’know? I just don’t. Lot s of people love avocado, but I think it’s terrible. So I don’t know why they didn’t like Nathan’s Choice or why they didn’t give it a shot. Also, at the time, Chuck didn’t have as much power as he does now. He’d had some success with Dharma and Greg, but he wasn’t on the roll that he’s on now. I mean, don’t get me wrong, he was still batting .300 in the major leagues, but he’s heading for the Hall of Fame now.