'Episodes' is 'revenge,' not parody

By Gary Levin, USA TODAY

Posted June 27, 2012

Matt LeBlanc had a brief fling with his producer, and now her marriage is in tatters just as their new show is ready to go on the air. That's the episode fueling the second season of showbiz satire Episodes, returning Sunday (10:30 ET/PT) on Showtime.

Only LeBlanc is playing an exaggerated, fictionalized version of himself. "The hardest part is getting my head around the bad things he does," he says.

The series centers on Sean and Beverly Lincoln (Stephen Mangan and Tamsin Greig), a British couple recruited to Hollywood to produce a remake of Lyman's Boys, their hit comedy set at a boarding school.

Reluctant at the start, they became even more horrified at the changes imposed by the fictional network last season. Rotund lead actor Richard Griffiths (Harry Potter) was replaced by LeBlanc, as the character, originally a headmaster, became a hockey coach and the show was retitled Pucks!

Season 2 tells the story of the show-within-a-show's roller coaster ride of success, failure and panic, as Episodes toggles between the trio's romantic escapades and an insidery account of how TV sausage is made, deftly chronicling the egos, humiliation and second-guessing that go into a series. It helps that creators David Crane (Friends) and Jeffrey Klarik (Mad About You), who wrote the entire series, have been around long enough to know the drill.

"I never saw it as parody; I always saw it as revenge," Klarik says. "A lot of writers call up and say thank you. They feel kind of vindicated" by the show's portrayal of meddling executives. "When you're on a successful show, they do take a step back. But when it goes in the other direction, there's such an atmosphere of panic, and that's when the wheels come off."

But the emphasis is on the trio at the heart of the show, and there's plenty of sleeping around. "The thing we set up that was the most fun was the dynamic of all these relationships coming apart at the seams," Crane says.

Beverly, especially, wants to win back Sean after that affair with "Matt," so she's "betraying her own deepest instincts to run away from the lion's den, and she chooses to stay because she wants to save her marriage," Greig says.

LeBlanc is definitely in on the joke but says: "It's weird to talk about myself (as a TV character) based on what people think celebrities are like. He's not worried about what other people think, and he can't appreciate the consequences of what he does. I don't fancy myself that way, (but) I have run across actors who are self-centered, insecure, needy."

Especially when early success gives way to fear as the show faces tough competition from a rival sitcom. "You're up against a talking dog, and people want to see Matt LeBlanc as Joey, they don't want to see him as a hockey coach," Crane says.

Or a fat one. "Matt" becomes upset when bloggers accuse him of "chunking out," as real ones did after a paparazzi photo surfaced in the Friends era. "So much of what he's told us got into the scripts," Klarik says.

Greig was unfamiliar with the ways of Hollywood, and when she read the Episodes script, "I thought it was beyond belief," she says. "But it turns out they were just writing down what they saw."