Globe and Mail television critic John Doyle is attending the Television Critics Association winter press tour in Pasadena, Calif., this week.
The sitcom Mike & Molly (Mondays, CBS, 9:30 p.m.) is a hit and a rare one. Rare in two ways – it features two large people as lead characters and, perhaps most rare of all these days, it’s a show that viewers feel affectionate about. It’s not a cool show, it’s not one that people feel fanatical about – it’s a show that people cozy up with.
The leads, Billy Gardell and Melissa McCarthy, came here to talk up the show, and what ensued was a strange combination of showbiz blather and real honesty, a bit like the series itself in tone and content.
When the show began airing in September, 2010, the focus was on the two characters being overweight and much of the humour was about weight and eating. Set in Chicago, the series chronicled the lives of two obese people, Mike Biggs (Gardell), a police officer who's trying to lose weight, and Molly Flynn (McCarthy), a teacher. They meet at an Overeaters Anonymous group and rather awkwardly become a couple.
That weight issue has since diminished a lot, and the show is now emphatically about people who simply look real and have something bordering on an authentic romantic relationship that seems true to life. Oh yes – they are getting married in a May sweeps episode.
It’s a very good thing the weight issue faded on the show. The fact that a network sitcom featured large people in the main roles for the first time since NBC’s Roseanne seemed to distract and irritate some commentators. The L.A. Times called the series “a potentially fine show, struggling to be free of its fat suit.” A writer for Marie Claire magazine wrote that she would be “grossed out if I had to watch two characters with rolls and rolls of fat kissing each other.”
That sparked an avalanche of derision for the magazine and the writer.
Producer Don Foster told us here: “Part of what we really wanted to do with this show is have a romantic comedy of full-grown adults, people in their mid-30s, which we thought was rare on television, who had lives that were spread wide – you know, they had co-workers, each had family.”
And working-class family life plays a significant role in the show. It’s true the Biggs and Flynn families are not characters who turn up occasionally. They’re always there.
Melissa McCarthy admitted she was just hoping to get an acting job – any job – when she landed the Molly role. Since then, she has won an Emmy for her work and starred in the movie Bridesmaids, for which there’s talk of an Oscar nomination.
McCarthy gushed about her good fortune, and joked that she’s had so much success in a short time, she thinks she’s used it up, and in the way that fate sometimes works, she might die soon. “It’s all been wonderful. It's like now I'm going to be hit by a bus.” She also talked about loving going to work and about the cast and crew “just being crazy about each other.”
Billy Gardell was more blunt about the show, and brutally honest about his own sudden stardom. “I never went into the show thinking that the overweight thing was what it was about. It's just an element of it. But we were coming into a world where, you know, everybody on TV is 78½ pounds.
“I was really scared to do this. I mean, a 300-pound guy is going to be a romantic lead. I went, ‘Are you guys crazy?’ And they convinced me that I could take this journey. And then they found Melissa, and it got better and better. Now this is a story, beyond anything else, about two people falling in love who thought they were never going to get to fall in love, and if you can’t root for that, you’re a little dead inside.”
Gardell had a career as a standup comic before Mike & Molly. It wasn’t thriving, but he was getting work. He was asked how working on Mike & Molly had changed his routine, and whether he had any upcoming appearances.
“Same jokes cost more money now,” he wisecracked. And when the laughter stopped, he continued, “I’m very blessed in a way that when I go out to do a standup gig – I have one Saturday night in Minneapolis if you want to put that in – when I see our crowd, it’s a thousand people, and 890 of them are there because of Mike & Molly, not because of me. There’s, like, 22 people that know I’m a standup. I know that because the last time I played in a casino before this show started, it was 65 people who had gotten a coupon to get off the floor for a little while.”
And that rings true, like the show itself.
Check local listings.
