Comedian Chris Gethard Talks To Mediaite About Finding The Future Of Entertainment Via Public Access TV
Note: There is some profanity in both the interview text as well as the show videos.
Mediaite: First off, how would you describe the show?
Gethard: I would describe the show, let’s see, The Chris Gethard Show is a comedy show first and foremost. It ran at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre in New York for close to two years. And we did some pretty cool stuff with it and it kind of very quickly turned into something I didn’t think it was going to. And I feel like it sort of ran its course. It had a lot of buzz as a show at the theater and now it’s The Chris Gethard Show 2.0 which is a public access television show.
It’s like even now, we’re a few months into it, and it’s still sort of reshaping itself and it’s become a show that’s driven by a lot of interactivity, a lot of caller driven stuff, a lot of internet driven stuff. The stage show was largely internet driven. A lot of the coolest stuff we did had a lot to do with the internet. So a lot of the show is figuring out how we can use this platform and the performers, and the people who are watching it can sort of connect and invest in each other a lot.
So, yes, I think that would be the most basic way to describe it. It’s a comedy show, sort of variety show, but stuff that definitely tries to incorporate social media pretty heavily and interactivity very heavily. Sort of make the viewers feel they have stakes in what’s going on. So hopefully it’s just funny at the end of the day. But, hopefully, it’s funny in a way that sort of speaks to how modern audiences and performers can connect and utilizes that. I’d like to think that we’re going to really push ourselves to find new ways to use that as best as we can.
“So hopefully it’s just funny at the end of the day. But, hopefully, it’s funny in a way that sort of speaks to how modern audiences and performers can connect and utilizes that. I’d like to think that we’re going to really push ourselves to find new ways to use that as best as we can.”
Mediaite: What made you decide to use Manhattan public access. Because you’re doing the online thing and you could have easily just done that. What made you decide to use the two of them?
Gethard: First, it’s out of necessity. For the stage show, everything that happened with Diddy- did you hear about that?
Mediaite: Yeah, I was tweeting angrily when I couldn’t get tickets.
Gethard: Ah, dude, it was fun, yeah. So we used Twitter to convince Diddy to do the show and I felt like the show had a lot of buzz up until then and it took us a year – from the time he told us he’d do the show to the time he did it was 14 months. I felt like we had this sort of die-hard cult crowd and, once Diddy did the show, we did the stage show three or four times after that and I could just kind of feel that the Diddy thing was kind of the end of it. Like for a lot of the people who had been coming every single month, it felt like a finale, y’know? It felt like the final chapter of something. And the show was still going well and I was still putting as much work into it but I could feel a lot of that hardcore crowd was sort of moving on, which is fine and natural. But I was like, so this has to either end or evolve.
And then I met one of my former students who I taught in an improv class who happens to work at Manhattan Neighborhood Network. I was at the bar with him one night, shooting the shit, and he started telling me all about it. He was telling me everything they had to offer and that’s what convinced me to do public access. For two reasons, I think. First, I just think there’s something kind of old school and cool about public access television. I grew up on it, out in New Jersey. When I grew up you had The Uncle Floyd Show. The first time I ever saw ECW Wrestling was like in the middle of the night on one of our local access stations.
I always felt like it was this place where you could discover cool stuff. I just feel like there’s some validity to it. There’s some real motivation that it’s a TV show. I actually feel like the Internet stuff is the most important way that we’re going to reach our viewers but there’s some validity to the idea that it’s going out on TV.
The other aspect was just what they offer technically. We could do an Internet broadcast show and be a little more in control of some of the situations we’ve run into, I’m sure. But they’ve offered us a 40-by-40′ studio with cameras, call in capabilities, streaming online and it’s all free. The weird thing about public access is it’s just sitting there. You just have to line up. You just have to fill out the paperwork.
