"Home Movies" is not your average television show. This new series from UPN certainly isn't the only show that's animated. It's not the only show that's a comedy. It's not the only show that's about a kid whose mother is divorced.
But it is the only show that lacks what you might think would be required for any TV show."There's no script," said executive producer Loren Bouchard.
Um . . . no script?
"There's no script," confirmed Paula Poundstone, who provides the voice of Paula, divorced mother of two, in "Home Movies."
So, um, how exactly do you turn out a show that has no script?
"Loren sort of tells me what is happening and then we talk," Poundstone said.
But, certainly, there had to be some concept in mind when the producers and voice actors began work on "Home Movies."
"Not really. There wasn't one," said Brendon Small, the comedian who provides the voice of the show's main character, a fourth grader also named Brendon Small.
The show, which comes to us from the producers of Comedy Central's "Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist," features the animated mother and son along with Brendon's soccer coach, Coach McGuirk (voice by H. Jon Benjamin) and Brendon's friends Melissa (Melissa Bardin Galsky) and Jason (Benjamin again). It's sort of observational humor through the eyes of a precocious kid who escapes into making home movies.
Not that "Home Movies" ended up being anything at all like what it started out to be.
"We did a test for a completely different idea, which was an animated talk show, and (UPN executives) saw the test and they liked it," Bouchard said, "but they said they weren't quite interested in that idea. But they liked how we worked and sort of who we are and 'Dr. Katz,' so they kind of pushed us in this direction."
"They twisted you," Poundstone interjected. "They twisted you into doing something that you didn't want to do. Isn't that it?"
"That's right," Bouchard agreed.
Actually, "Home Movies" is allowing Bouchard to do exactly what he wants to do -- make a show without a script.
"We're just totally fascinated with the idea of just recording hours and hours and hours of improvisation," he said. "Because it's animated, you can edit it in a way you couldn't do with live video. . . . With animation, we can literally go in and take out a word if it didn't quite work or combine two different performances even from different days. And when all is said and done, we have a track we like.
"It's sort of like making a radio show. And then we turn that over to the animators."
And they really do work without a script. Even without a story outline.
"It just kind of started with formulating characters based on Brendon and Paula and we sort of merged other characters in it," Bouchard said. "But usually we would have an outline for what the scene is and then we'd go in the booth and improvise it."
And that improvisation takes place one voice actor at a time. It's not like they're all in a room together bouncing ideas off one another.
It's sort of the same process that the producers have used on "Dr. Katz," although it's carried to another level on "Home Movies."
"What we do with 'Dr. Katz' is we have an outline and that is sort of the most fundamental document," Bouchard said. "For a 22-minute show, they actors will maybe improvise for about three hours."
And there's more improvising than that in "Home Movies." After all, there's no script.
MIXED REVIEW: When, back in January, I saw a few minutes of clips of the premiere of "Home Movies," it looked like one of the funniest thing I'd ever seen.
Getting a look at a completed episode, however, tempered my enthusiasm somewhat. Oh, there's still some very funny stuff here, but it's a few minutes of funny stuff spread over half an hour.
In tonight's premiere, Brendon isn't exactly happy when he learns that his mother is going out on a date with Coach McGuirk. And he's working on a film set in France because "dramatic things happen in France."
It's low-key humor that can be hilarious. While not wall-to-wall laughs, there are enough to make it a half hour worth watching.