You Can’t Be Serious(101)

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Ever since I was a kid, my parents instilled in me the reality that life itself isn’t fair. I’ve been around long enough to know that in business too, there’s no guarantee that something is going to be just. Still, as an artist, I have to admit the commercial left me a little heartbroken. Putting on my executive producer hat, I tempered my words, telling the network, “I am very disappointed with this” and asking, “Why isn’t the network allocating commensurate resources to our show as they are to others?” I stopped short of vocalizing what else I wondered: Was it just coincidence that the most diverse comedy was the one being excluded? Their answers weren’t great:

“You know, we’re running different ads in different ways…”

“We have specific targets on what we think is effective…”

“We have a process here, Kal…”

“Don’t worry about it, we have a lot of targeted ads coming soon…”



Absent any actual data, their reasoning sounded partially caught up in the fallacy I first learned about when I worked for Captain Moneybags (the archaic belief that mainstream audiences might refuse to watch compelling content unless the characters are white). I tried to let this go. And even though I also thought all their justification sounded an awful lot like code for “separate but equal,” I cut myself off from going down the rabbit hole of racism, thinking, This literally could have nothing to do with race or ethnicity, so stop making it about that, Kal. Stop letting old experiences cloud things. Maybe they really are investing in your show in ways that are commensurate but different given the tone of the comedy.

I’d grown to really trust and enjoy working with our executives by this point, so I asked for hard data: specific advertising budgets, lists of our online and television ad placement, what resources were being spent where. It all fell on deaf peacock ears. While they were of course under no obligation to share any of this with me, their choice to ignore the requests themselves added to my sinking feeling that maybe something bigger was amiss.

For their part, our cast remained upbeat, and tried to have some fun with how the season was starting out. Joel tweeted:



The next Thursday came around. Sunnyside aired again. And again, our ratings were awful, but again they were almost the same as that of charming Perfect Harmony and again, we were both up against Thursday Night Football, and again the network said, “Don’t worry about it. We’re completely committed to your show.”



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I’m standing in a lofty writers’ room on the third floor of a modern glass building at the edge of the Universal Studios lot, and I am terrified. The AC is on full blast as usual, something that makes my thumbs numb and ears cold if I’m there for longer than thirty minutes. Usually, I don’t mind icicle fingers because I like how they feel around the mug of fancy hot coffee that one of the writers makes in the communal kitchen.

Today, I just want water.

It’s after 4 p.m. on Monday, October 14. We are shooting our ninth episode downstairs, our fourth one airs this Thursday, but we’ve paused production so that I can step into Matt Murray’s office. The two of us are huddled around a landline on speakerphone, mindful that our writers can see us through the glass, mindful not to let our faces show too much of what we’re hearing and feeling. The executives in charge of our show want to talk, immediately, for some reason that just can’t wait until the next morning.

I have a deeply sinking feeling that goes from my throat to my stomach and wraps around my heart like the stubborn vines you trip on during a hike in the woods. I can sense that this won’t be a nice call.

“Guys, as you know, unfortunately the numbers have not been great these first three weeks,” one executive begins. “So we’ve made a decision that after the fourth episode airs this Thursday, we’re going to be moving Sunnyside from linear to digital. We feel this gives us the greatest chance of success.”

Moving from linear to digital, what does that mean?

“Sunnyside is going to air digitally from episode five onward. And we are going to shoot out the full ten-episode order. We’re not canceling it. We’re going to be moving it digitally.”

No cancellation is easy for anyone. Certainly not for the artists who have poured heart and soul into the creative process, and also not easy—if I’m being fair—for the studio or network executives who have taken a business risk by investing in a show and now have to cut their losses. Still, whatever they are telling us about Sunnyside right now is very, very confusing. It’s being taken off the air, but it’s not being canceled?

“Just so I understand, you’re pulling the show off the air and putting it where? Peacock?”

“We’re very committed to this. The digital space is where this would lie. The Peacock streaming platform isn’t launching until next year. We’re going to direct the audience toward the NBC app and NBC.com. We’re going to put resources behind it.”

“Which resources would be behind this? Do people watch shows on NBC.com? We stream on Hulu the morning after we air on linear television. We were told our Hulu numbers were okay. Will we continue to stream there?”

“We don’t know if you’ll stream on Hulu, because the nature of our arrangement with them is that anything streaming with them has to air on the NBC network first.”