“I live in Hollywood,” Vera Santamaria tells me. “My family are all, ‘Oooh, Hollywood!’ But, actually, it’s like living on Yonge Street.”
It’s a warm January afternoon. We are sitting on the patio of Lucky Baldwin’s, a bar in Pasadena featured on Big Bang Theory, the hottest comedy on network TV. It seems appropriate to meet Santamaria here, a place that’s real but made famous by fictional television. Working in TV, writing scripts, telling stories has been her life – from a start in 2002 on CBC’s Our Hero, a show described as “a teen version of Ally McBeal,” to Degrassi, Little Mosque on the Prairie and on to L.A. and shows including Outsourced and, right now, Community. As a producer and writer on that acclaimed comedy, she’s at the top of the TV ladder.
With her background and heritage she brings a piquant voice to writing for television. But the most distinctive aspect of her work is the puncturing of pretension and pomposity. On Little Mosque, she wrote an episode where the imam’s shoes get stolen at the mosque, and another where a character thinks he’s dying and tries to make amends to the community. The synopses sound slight, but both are goofy-clever, illuminating affectations and vanity.
“I think I wrote some episodes that successfully walked the line between being culturally specific and ‘funny just ’cause,’ ” she says, “episodes that would start with some culturally distinct detail but then spin out into something that was hopefully funny in its own right. It also helped that I had insider knowledge on some of the themes the show touched upon, like being the child of parents who emigrated to Canada and everything that’s great and funny and weird about that.”
Community is a deadpan social satire set among a small group of oddballs at a community college. Created by Emmy-winners Joe and Anthony Russo (Arrested Development), it’s acclaimed for its rich, sardonic humour – and by the time Santamaria was hired last year, the show was noted for episodes mocking conventional TV genres. A good fit for her style, clearly.
It’s considered brilliant and cool, but not a massive hit. NBC has parked it temporarily off-air to introduce some mid-season shows before bringing it back this spring. Santamaria has solo control of one episode that hasn’t aired yet – and it’s her one, minor frustration with the job.
Community is the kind of show that she would have watched as a teenager, living in the Rexdale area of Toronto. “My parents were very protective, so they liked the kids [she has one brother and one sister] to stay at home and watch TV. I watched everything. My parents love to laugh so we always watched a lot of comedies. My dad loved to watch Carol Burnett. I liked to watch Golden Girls, Three’s Company, everything.”
In conversation, her parents are mentioned often. They came to Canada from India in 1969, settled in Sudbury, Ont., and in 1974 moved to Toronto, where Vera was born. She says that a continuing part of her relationship with her loving and supportive parents – her mother was an educational assistant and dad is an elementary school teacher – is her search for ways to assure them that she does, in fact, have a real job. “They supported my writing, always. But they did say something like, ‘Are you sure you don’t want to get a teaching degree, just as a backup?’ ”
