Crave’s I Have Nothing takes a jokey premise and fills it with genuine feeling

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In the first half of our lives, we dream of becoming: a spouse, a parent, a homeowner, a success. So isn’t it nutty that the dream we’re often sold in the second half of our lives is about chucking everything we tried so hard to become? Decamping to Greece to buy a taverna, say, or riding through Paris in a sports car with the warm wind in our hair? What if instead we dreamed about making something new happen that fits into our lives, that stretches us from inside, that makes us happy about who we actually are?

This might not be the revelation you’d expect to glean from I Have Nothing, the new six-part, unscripted Crave series created by Carolyn Taylor (Baroness Von Sketch), produced by Catalyst and Blue Ant Media. The backstory begins in 2014, when Taylor hears Whitney Houston’s titular power ballad on her car radio and thinks, “Hmm, I am neither skater nor choreographer, but I bet I could choreograph an amazing full-length Olympic-level pairs figure skating routine to this song.”

From 2016 through 2019, Taylor hones a stand-up routine where she plays the song and mimes (hilariously) the moves her skaters would do. In 2020, pandemic why-not-ism compels her to pitch a television series in which she genuinely attempts this highly unlikely feat. And damn if she doesn’t make every bit of it happen, with Olympic royalty no less, including Ekaterina Gordeeva, David Pelletier, Kurt Browning, Brian Orser and Katarina Witt.

Based on the rapturous, I’m-not-crying-you’re-crying reception when the first episode screened at the Just for Laughs festival in Toronto, I Have Nothing’s jokey premise contains multitudes of genuine feeling, about adolescence and closeted-ness, comradeship and lost parents. It valorizes the joys of hard work; the undervalued value of experience; and midlife heroes who are sexy, viable and compelling. As Taylor, who was 49 when she shot it, told me over lunch, “Don Quixote was 49.”

In the first episode, a childhood friend calls Taylor “a dreamer, but her dreams are really weird,” and the skating star Kristi Yamaguchi says, “She’s not exactly not crazy.” During the postscreening Q and A, Mae Martin, the comedian, a good pal of Taylor’s and a recurring figure in the series, talked about returning to shoot the finale after a few weeks away, and being shocked to see that “any sense of irony had gone. Carolyn’s delusion had taken hold of everyone.” At the afterparty, another friend of Taylor’s told me she’s like a cult leader, but a nice cult.

Taylor puts it this way: “I have a mind that believes a lot of things are possible.” On screen and IRL, she’s an enormously likeable presence – the kind of person who’s constantly told, “You remind me of my friend so-and-so,” including by me; who loves throwing dinner parties and putting people together to read Tarot cards or make fun stuff; whose sensibility is both comedic and flagrantly sincere. She was the catalyst behind Baroness Von Sketch, which ran for five seasons; more recently she invited a diverse group of friends to live with her for 18 days at Bathouse, the Tragically Hip’s recording studio/coach house in Kingston, to write and record an album (as yet unreleased). “It was my version of taking my queer family to Disneyland,” she says.

She was raised in Montreal by a single mother who sat supportively through her “Look at me!” plays and songs (her dad died when she was 4). At Queen’s University, she abandoned political science to pursue theatre. In Toronto, she worked at many jobs she didn’t want to do, but kept accruing experience and collaborators. She remains “the cheerleader who encourages friends to quit their jobs or try their podcasts: ‘Do it! It will be okay.’ ”

Throughout I Have Nothing, we watch as person after person bids farewell to their comfort zone and buys into Taylor’s dream: the producers, network and crew; Taylor’s mentors, such as the Canadian choreographer Sandra Bezic, who crafted medal-winning routines for skaters from around the world; and the skaters themselves, who go from gazing at Taylor in incomprehension to beaming at her with gratitude. The vibe is the opposite of Borat: Taylor assured everyone “that if anyone looks delusional, unhinged, too earnest, strange, a clown, it will be me.”

She herself morphs from a person who can barely stay upright on skates and knows zero terminology, into a credible collaborator. “I didn’t know that some of the moves in my head defied physics,” she says. “I didn’t even know that choreography includes everything in between the jumps and tricks. I really didn’t overthink it. I underthought it, and overfelt it. But if you buy in, you buy in. You can’t sort of buy in.”

Martin calls Taylor’s a hero’s journey, but it slyly reverses that trope: Taylor journeys from irony to innocence. Her quest isn’t about surviving in the wilderness or on a battlefield; it’s softer, human-sized. “The risk for me was allowing myself to abandon the critical distance I usually have as a comedian,” she says. “These tender and vulnerable moments would appear, and instead of compartmentalizing or making a joke, I tried to embrace them and go deeper.”

Of course, it’s not all sincere. Taylor understands how to make television, and nothing is less real than “reality TV.” But even when she’s exaggerating, she leans into truth. For example, it wasn’t a certainty she’d clear the rights to Houston’s song. So she decided to crank out a backup with Martin – in two hours. Those stakes were manufactured, but the feeling of writing under pressure was honest. “If the emotion was true, we’d play it out,” Taylor says. “If you fully pretend, something happens.”

Despite her love of magic and improvisation, Taylor also put in the hours. She cut a version of the show where she wasn’t prepared and didn’t get anything done “that was actually funnier than the truth,” she says. “But it didn’t sit right with me. It cheated the audience of seeing that hard work pays off.”

She has a tantalizing premise for a second season, should there be one, and a juicy idea for a road-trip project starring herself and Martin, called Nowhere Fast. She would love for more Canadian producers and broadcasters to take risks, “because if you believe in the vision and the team, chances are it will work, and if it doesn’t, that’s part of art,” she says. “This country has amazing talent. Let’s get some more yeses.”

Interestingly, Taylor’s biggest struggle during I Have Nothing happened in the editing room. “The camera caught me geeking,” she says. “I’d look at myself and go, ‘Ugh, you’re so excited.’ I could see the 15-year-old in me. That’s a crazy thing about the world we live in: Sincerity is scarier. Being unapologetically earnest feels brave.” But it’s a dream worth dreaming.

Special to The Globe and Mail

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