[May 16, 2012] UNT's big sitcom on campus Tweet DENTON, May 16, 2012 (Fort Worth Star-Telegram - McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX) -- Comedy, as Steve Martin once said, is not pretty, and the world of situation comedies can be pretty ugly. For every Modern Family, New Girl or Big Bang Theory that connects, there are scores of Man Ups, Robs and I Hate My Teenage Daughters that don't. Most sitcom pilots never make it to the air; those that do are lucky to get past three episodes. So what would compel a 21-year-old college student to spend more than a year working on a sitcom for no pay and no course credit? And to recruit 35 other students to join him in the leap of faith? And to film it in front of a live studio audience? You could chalk it up to youthful exuberance, naivete or even the air of invincibility that surrounds you in those glorious college years. But Noah Sargent, an affable University of North Texas radio-TV-film student with a low-key air that belies his passion, doesn't seem to be driven by any of those factors. For him, a sitcom just made sense. "We asked ourselves, 'What do college students like to do?'" says Sargent, "and we realized it [involved] food and cheap drinks, a place to study and a place to relax." Sargent, who did some work with the UNT theater department (multimedia design for Godspell), got frustrated with the hit-and-miss nature of some of the projects. So he posted a call for scripts online and via on-campus fliers ("Think you have what it takes to write a sitcom? Prove it!"). Out of dozens of submissions, eight writers were selected, with three eventually chosen to be the writing team for Peppuccinos, a sitcom that takes place in a half pizza parlor/half coffee bar. Like Sargent, the writers, actors and crew worked for free, and although they had some input from faculty sponsors, Peppuccinos is almost entirely an all-student project. (Sargent looked into trying to turn the project into a class for credit, but the process took more than a year, so he went ahead with it as a volunteer project instead.) Sargent took things a step further by deciding to film in front of a live audience and recruiting some 35 students to give up their free time to act as cast and crew. James Martin, a UNT radio-TV-film lecturer who acted as an adviser on Peppuccinos, says he had never heard of a project that brought all those elements together. "Getting students to get something of this scope on a volunteer basis ... is very, very difficult," Martin says. "Because they have other classes, they have outside employment and sometimes they lose interest. To do something like that in front of a live audience -- typically, unless it's theater, we don't have live audiences." Sargent contended that a laugh track would be distracting and not organic. "There was a big debate with one professor about studio audience," Sargent says. " 'You don't need it, you don't have the space.' But I really kinda drove that point home, because it's a different energy when you have people watching you." You also have added risk: What if nobody laughs? "A soap opera, if it's really bad ... still works on some level," says Chuck LaMendola, a TCU teacher whose department had experimented with several soap operas. "It may not work on the level that you thought it was going to work, but it can be campy and become Dark Shadows. But if a sitcom isn't funny, [it's] a disaster, because nobody laughs. Or they laugh at the wrong time. That's why it's a deadly project to do, because what 19-year-old kids think is really funny doesn't necessarily play when you actually get everybody in the room together." Which raises the question: Why did Sargent tackle what may be the hardest TV genre to pull off? "We asked him that a few times," Martin says, with a laugh. "I think it's because Noah really, really wanted to challenge himself. He really wanted to push himself to see how far he could go. He had a very distinct vision for what he wanted to do. It did change a little bit with input from faculty, but we never tried to sway him from that vision that he had in his head." All unpaid, all volunteer If you've ever been to an audience taping of a TV show, you know it comes with cheerleading and even coaching: Warm-up comedians try to keep the energy high, production-assistant types tell you to laugh louder than you would at home. On a calm Saturday afternoon in a UNT studio, Sargent is the warm-up act, as well as director and executive producer, of Peppuccinos. "I'll talk to the audience and ... I'll say, 'Hey guys, you're kind of like our fifth element, and we just need you -- if you're gonna laugh, laugh. If you don't laugh, that's OK, too. We're incorporating you.'" When Sargent addresses the audience at this taping, though, he's talking to a 40-seat bleacher section that is only about half full. When the cameras roll, the audience laughter is the quieter, self-conscious kind that you sometimes get with smaller crowds -- although the volume does increase a little bit when a couple of the employees of Peppuccinos become convinced that one of their co-workers has been replaced by a robot version of herself. This is one of three tapings this particular weekend, and the plan is to edit them together to get the best episode possible. Sargent says the bigger the audience, the better the shows have gone. "The first weekend, we had a full studio audience, which was pretty sweet," he says. "You can definitely feel the energy." Sargent hopes to enter Peppuccinos in some festivals, maybe even submit it as a pilot for a syndicated TV series (because of festival-rule limitations, complete episodes aren't online yet, although there is a trailer available at peppuccinos.com). And he's put a lot of work into it -- he estimates about 500 hours -- for no pay or college credit. "An average project for a TV show for college is 30 or 40 hours a semester," Sargent says. "Some of these [actors] are probably up on 100 hours unpaid. And there are 14 or 15 students like them. It's all unpaid, it's all volunteer. We all want to do something different." Martin says that Sargent initially sought to make a theater-television hybrid, with the actors and set-design crew coming from the theater department -- but as the project evolved, it became much more sitcom than one-act play. Writers Joseph Kotisso, Lindsay Duke and Caitlin Rodden had a lot to do with that. "We were just hashing out locations for the show, and we decided that we wanted it to be a workplace sitcom," says Kotisso, 21. "So we decided to do pizza and coffee. Ideas just pop in my head when I'm thinking of funny things, so I just thought, well, pepperoni and cappuccino, I'll just mix it up. Why don't we call it Peppuccinos? It sounds kind of quirky." The $3,100-project was funded in part through more than $2,000 in pledges through Kickstarter, a website that helps friends and fans support independent projects and startup businesses, and through seven sponsors, with Big Mike's Coffee Shop, a funky spot near the campus, providing most of the money with a $1,000 donation. "What really set Peppuccinos apart was, in part, the volunteers, but also the scale of the project," Sargent says in a follow-up e-mail after interviews. "Many people doubted that a group of volunteers could fund-raise, build and complete a three-episode series with no network sponsor, no big-business sponsor, no professional producer, crew or director." True to Martin's comment that it is difficult to get students to commit to a volunteer project like this, many of the people involved with the project dropped out along the way. But writers Kotisso and Duke (Rodden wasn't interviewed for this story) say they stuck around for the experience -- and learned a few things about what actors can do with their words in the process. "Just seeing the actors say the lines was eerie," says Duke, 23, "It wasn't so much nerve-racking as it was, 'This is weird.' Someone taking your stuff seriously enough to perform it and bring it to life, and these characters have been in your head and they're not real, and all of a sudden, they're sort of alive. That's the weird part of it." Peppuccinos wasn't Kotisso's first crack at a sitcom script. He wrote a spec script for The Office, but his submission was declined, and he has been working on a Modern Family script. But he acknowledges that trying to break into such established shows, which already have writing teams, can be difficult. So he is writing a pilot script, and he is hoping Peppuccinos will provide him with extra juice. "It's pretty much for fun," he says, "[but] I can put it on my resume and say 'Hey, I can write some good stories and write some good characters and hopefully give you a hit someday.'" Duke says she enjoyed the experience, but she is not sure sitcom writing is for her. "Comedy is really hard," she says. "I don't think I'll necessarily evolve into a professional comedy writer, if it comes down to it. I'm much more comfortable with sci-fi or stuff like that, where you can be kind of creative and dramatic without all that pressure of finding a funny joke.... And you never know who's going to laugh at what, because everybody has a different sense of humor." The writers also fed off the show's cast, all of whom are in the 19- to -21-year-old age range as of this month: Desmond Ishmael Thomas and Klarice McCarron as Maxwell and Cici, the temperamental-opposite twins who run Peppuccinos; Hallie Davidson as Judy, an unprofessional employee with a tendency to show up for work with a hangover; Jacob Harpel as Nick, the new kid in the store; Megan Bryant as Ms. Price, the shop's evil landlady; and Franky Gonzalez as Dexter, an enigmatic gangster type with an over-the-top posh British accent. "It's one of the more villainous, flamboyant parts," says Gonzalez, who is a bit of a scene-stealer in his relatively small role. "I don't know where that British thing came from. I don't know what kind of gangster has this going on, but obviously something is gangster-esque." It's not like the character was written to be British, but then Bryant's character wasn't written to be female. "When they saw my audition, they were like, 'Well, y'know, we really like you, we want you somewhere, so we'll just make the man a woman, and see how it goes,'" Bryant says. "They liked it, so they said, 'All right, let's turn you into a Cruella De Vil character and see how it goes from there.'" Friends and classmates The actors, most of whom either had classes with Sargent or were his friends, joined the project long after the writers did, and some of the things they did made the writers surprised at their own words. "Everything was just on paper for us for so long, that you don't see certain things, or even how certain things can be said or how characters can be portrayed, and they bring different layers," Duke says. "That would actually affect how we wrote other episodes. When we cast the first episode, we hadn't finished writing the second and third scripts yet, so their portrayals would end up shaping how we ended up writing actual episodes." Used to the stage, the actors had to adapt to working in front of the cameras. "In theater, you have to PROJECT to reach all the way to the back of the audience," Gonzalez says, emphasizing the verb. "With this, if you get too loud, you're going to screw up the sound. Because my training's all theater, Shakespeare, it's been a challenge going back with my voice." Martin, who credits Sargent with uniting the radio-TV-film and theater departments, says the faculty members who acted as advisers learned a few things themselves. "It helped me get to know how the process works on the theater side of things," Martin says, "and it helped them understand where our students are coming from. It helped the two departments figure out what we could and couldn't do." Experience like no other Sargent -- who has produced several other student-run shows, including a Lone Star Emmy-winning talk show called Taboo Topics, and who teaches editing workshops at UNT -- says that at first, he wanted the Peppuccinos project to be a for-credit class. But the process would have taken more than a year, and he and the writers didn't want to wait. "We just said, 'We're going to do this hit-or-miss,'" he says. "The statistics have been against us. About 70 percent of the students that we've asked to help out, somewhere down the line ... have dropped out. But the 30 percent that we have that stuck on were the committed ones that were able to dedicate and show a lot of enthusiasm day after day, hour after hour." LaMendola, the TCU professor, says that one of the problems he has had with projects is that students don't like to take orders from other students. "[A TV show] is a hierarchy -- somebody's the executive producer, the producer, the director," LaMendola says. "But students don't particularly care to have someone their age telling them what to do. So that's always been a problem, and you really have to fight for that in the beginning. So [by] volunteering, I guess, everyone's buying into it, but somebody's got to be the creative force behind it." Sargent says he has pursued a "work hard, party hard" philosophy to maintain friendships with the cast and crew. "Noah's been great," Thomas says. "It's a learning process for him, too, as much as it has been for us. I think what we've all come together and realized, through the whole process, is that we're all just kids trying to get our feet in the door." But the big question remains: Is Peppuccinos funny? Because what we saw isn't the final product, it's tough to judge. There are amusing moments and vibrant characters. And it takes a moment to notice what's missing: The vulgar, double-entendre humor that has become a staple of just about every sitcom on network TV. "That was kind of a really big emphasis in the beginning," Sargent says. "I decided that we needed to make sure that we could reach a big audience. When you're looking for sponsors and you say, 'It's a family-oriented show, you can bring your kids to it,' it helps a little bit. Everybody thinks that crude humor is funny, and yeah, it's funny at times, but if you're able to write something that kids can get to and not be offended, I think you reach a lot more people." Ultimately, the success or failure of this UNT sitcom will not be measured by ratings points, Web hits or even laughs. The experience could prove priceless. A look at Sargent's official website, www.noahsargent.com, shows that he has directed or worked on more than a dozen documentary shorts, fictional short films, shows for on-campus station ntTV, music videos, ministry videos and other works. He is a videographer and editor, as well as a producer and director. But sitcom show-runner -- well, that's not something you see every day on a 21-year-old's resume. "It's given me variables I never would have gotten in a classroom," says Sargent. "And most would say it has already been a huge success to prove that we could do the impossible. And if Peppuccinos continues on from here, it would be a blessing for all that were involved. If it doesn't, we all came out with something we didn't have before." Online: www.peppuccinos.com/peppuccinos.com; www.noahsargent.com/noahsargent.com/Noah.html Robert Philpot, 817-390-7872 Twitter: @rphilpot ___ (c)2012 the Fort Worth Star-Telegram Visit the Fort Worth Star-Telegram at www.star-telegram.com Distributed by MCT Information Services [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]