No matter if it’s Caroline’s on Broadway in New York, Hollywood’s The Laugh Factory, Chicago’s Second City, the Improv clubs located throughout the United States, or any other throughout the world, the atmosphere of a comedy club comes with its own excitement, anticipation, and of course, plenty of laughs courtesy of some of today’s best and brightest comedic talent. While the roster of legendary stars that those clubs have produced is way too numerous to mention, what isn’t often discussed is the people who work behind the scenes to make a night at the improv a hilarious and memorable experience.
Those people are the focus of a new comedy web series called HERE ALL WEEK, now streaming on its official web site, Youtube and Vimeo pages. Created and co-written by series co-star Hari Sriskantha, and loosely based on the real life experiences of Sriskantha and his fellow castmates in the world of standup comedy, HERE ALL WEEK takes viewers behind the scenes of a fictional U.K. comedy club called The Last Laugh. Sriskantha stars as Senthil, the club’s resident techie who tries desperately to help keep things moving smoothly as a crop of talented young comedians prepare to strut their stuff each night. 6 episodes are scheduled for its first season, though Sriskantha says there’s a chance it could return for season 2.
Yet, he’s not the only one who’s trying to help keep The Last Laugh afloat; there’s Greg (James Stewart), the new manager of the club who seeks to return it to prominence, plus his assistant Walt (Tom Pseudonym), whose ideas for making the club loads of money always seem to fall flat.
The club’s staff also features those responsible for giving its patrons a little libation with their laughs every night: Amy (Clarisse Loughrey), who one day hopes to be in charge behind the scenes like Senthil, Josh (Richard Hanrahan), who wants to be performing on the club’s stage rather than serving drinks there, and Sophia (Olivia McNulty), a new employee who tries to do her job while also trying to make sense of the daily chaos that she encounters. Rounding out the group, as well as being the main focus of the final two episodes, is Jenny (Rachel Timney), a talented emcee who hopes to become the next big late night TV sensation.
Long before cameras rolled, HERE ALL WEEK evolved dramatically over the course of its pre-production in many ways. “We spent quite a few months writing the show before we started filming, and it went through a lot of changes. We originally planned six twenty-minute episodes, but this got cut down as we realized how foolishly ambitious this was. The current series spans around one-and-a-half of these episodes. After we finished the first batch of filming, we then re-wrote parts of episodes one and two and refilmed them to make the story a bit clearer – these are the ‘meeting’ scenes between Senthil and Greg. As I mentioned above, the show is loosely based on our experiences performing stand-up, and trying to make friends,” Sriskantha says.
It didn’t take long for Sriskantha to find his cast, crew and writing staff, who just also happened to be some of his closest friends. “…Most of the main cast were writers on the show. This made it very easy to play to everyone’s strengths and personalities. It was also easier because we didn’t have access to a large pool of actors (especially ones that were willing to work for free); I’ve tried to do things like this before, but struggled when I couldn’t find anyone to fit the characters’ personalities. Doing it this way eliminated that problem,” he adds.
Hanrahan describes the process of casting HERE ALL WEEK in further detail: “We essentially cast the show by finding people as close to the writing table as possible; friends, family members, awkward acquaintances. If you were serving us coffee, you’re probably in the show,” he says, jokingly. Sriskantha knew just who he wanted to bring the show’s characters to life. However, for the actors who would eventually fill those roles, it was, at first, a guessing game thanks in large part to a specially developed “writer’s handbook” (actually a PDF file) Sriskantha wrote. The manual featured outlines for each episode, as well as rough sketches of the show’s characters.
“At the first meeting, the character assignments amongst the writers (based partly on ourselves or our stage personas) were kept secret by Hari and we were invited to guess who we might play. The guessing game didn’t last long; gender, age and personality being very large giveaways,” remembers Stewart. Adds Hanrahan: “It’s funny – when Hari first approached us with the idea, he had in mind particular people to play particular roles, and we spent most of the first few weeks trying to guess who he thought was like who. I thought he’d written me as a female character, pretty much until we started shooting. Then I realized he cast me as the failed idiot. I made the part my own.”
As any filmmaker will tell you, the process of bringing an idea from script to screen is one that’s always fraught with difficulties. HERE ALL WEEK was no exception, but despite those problems Sriskantha and his crew accomplished their goal of creating a web series that combines their main creative and comedic influences with their own personal experiences – all within the constraints of a small budget. “I may be mistaken here, but I think it (HERE ALL WEEK) was quite ambitious in terms of (a), the number of cast-members, and (b), the number of stories crammed into the six episodes. Luckily, we had such an amazing team who could help pull it off,” he says.
Producing each episode also provided Sriskantha and his team with ample opportunities to grow as filmmakers, actors and writers. “Our aim was to make this a professional production and move on from work we’d done as students, as far as our means and experience would allow; spending a lot of time honing scripts, filming with the best equipment available in real locations and treating this as the first steps on the road to our eventual careers. We have tried to blend all of the elements we love about various comedy shows, series and comedians and mixed together what we see as the best parts of comedy and how it is put together in both the U.K. and the U.S.,” Stewart adds.
Inspired by the great TV sitcoms of the past and present, plus filmmakers like Wes Anderson, Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg and others, Stewart, Hanrahan and the entire cast of HERE ALL WEEK find inspiration not only from those sources, but also from the man who brought the series to life: “The sense of fun and unfettered joy I see in those involved in things like the American version of THE OFFICE, SPACED and ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT has been my greatest inspiration. The opening up of entertainment to anyone with a camera and some form of computer equipment has allowed the dream of creating a sitcom to become an easier reality – except maybe in finding an audience with so much more content for people to search through. Obviously, the person who really inspired this project is Hari. I have various other stages of script and ideas on the go for a few different projects but Hari actually sat down and set the foundations for this to happen and kept it all going. It took us a year but we got there and made something we can all be very proud of,” Stewart says.
A comedy that takes viewers behind the scenes of just what it takes to make tomorrow’s top bananas shine in the spotlight of standup, HERE ALL WEEK does more than just make people laugh. It’s a show about the lives of people who work to make it possible; people who have their own dreams and aspirations of one day making it big. For Sriskantha, it’s a goal that he and his talented team hope to achieve themselves through their series.
“I guess a recurring theme is that a lot of the characters in the show follow their dreams, no matter how unlikely it is they’ll be successful, or how little skill they may actually have. Senthil wants to make friends, Jenny wants to make her late-night talk show, Greg wants to run a successful comedy club, Walt wants to make money, Amy wants Senthil’s job and Josh wants to be a comedian. In a way, I guess that’s just like us,” Skriskantha says.
(Note: The series is not currently closed captioned, but Sriskantha says he’s working on it.)
ON THE WEB: http://www.quarkwood.com/hereallweek
YOUTUBE (Quarkwood’s Youtube channel): http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCf_0QWSrt2B0Z5nmdssp0UQ
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