Strangers with Candy
Strangers with Candy is an American television sitcom created by Stephen Colbert, Paul Dinello, Amy Sedaris, and Mitch Rouse that originally aired on Comedy Central from April 7, 1999, to October 2, 2000. Its timeslot was Sundays at 10:00 p.m.. The series, inspired by after school specials, follows Jerri Blank a 46-year-old woman, who after living as a prostitute and drug addict, decides to go back to high school and start doing things the right way. The series was produced by Comedy Partners, with Kent Alterman serving as executive producer and Colbert as co-producer.
Strangers with Candy episodes were produced in a single-camera setup and were filmed between upstate New York and New Jersey. The pilot episode premiered on April 7, 1999, and three seasons followed. The series stars Sedaris, Colbert, Dinello and Greg Hollimon with a supporting cast that includes Roberto Gari, Deborah Rush, Larc Spies, Maria Thayer, Orlando Patoboy, Sarah Thyre and David Pasquesi.
Tonally, Strangers with Candy uses surreal humor to satirize after school specials and the sanitized, saccharine advice those shows would give to kids. The show altered the lessons so the principal character would always do the wrong thing. It was Comedy Central's first ever live-action narrative series. The show struggled with low ratings during its initial broadcast run. Despite the lack of audience, it is now known as a cult classic, having influenced numerous contemporary comedians and screenwriters. A prequel film of the same name was released in 2005.
Plot
Set in the fictional city of Flatpoint, Strangers with Candy follows Geraldine Antonia "Jerri" Blank, a former prostitute and drug addict—referred to in the show as a "junkie whore"—who returns to high school as a 46-year-old freshman at Flatpoint High. Jerri ran away from home and became "a boozer, a user, and a loser" after dropping out of high school as a teenager, supporting her drug habits through prostitution, stripping, and larceny. She has been to prison several times, the last time because she "stole the TV".Jerri tries to do things the right way but always ends up learning the wrong lesson. Her hijinks often involve, either directly or indirectly, history teacher Chuck Noblet and his secret lover art teacher Geoffrey Jellineck. Every episode features a warped theme or moral lesson and ends with the cast and other featured actors from the episode dancing. The last episode features Flatpoint High being turned into a strip mall, a development that reflected Comedy Central cancelling the show to make room for a TV show called Strip Mall.
Development
Conception
Sedaris, Dinello, Colbert and Rouse first created the sketch comedy show Exit 57, which debuted on Comedy Central in 1995 and aired through 1996. Although it lasted only 12 episodes, the show received favorable reviews and was nominated for five CableACE Awards in 1995, in categories including best writing, performance, and comedy series. After the show was cancelled, Colbert and Dinello were preparing a pitch for a show known as "Mysteries of the Insane Unknown" and had also applied to write for the Late Show with David Letterman. Simultaneously, Rouse and Sedaris had developed their own pitch, which Sedaris described as "something based on after-school specials" inspired by shows like The Brady Bunch. They presented it first to MTV, as Rouse knew someone there; while his friend loved it, they were told the channel would not go for it. Comedy Central was prepared to greenlight "Mysteries" but Dinello convinced Colbert to go help Sedaris with her pitch. Colbert was reticent after hearing her idea because he knew it was better than theirs; he was right, and Comedy Central's Kent Alterman chose her show instead.At first, Sedaris wanted to do a straight after-school special: "We wanted to play it dead, dead serious. No laugh track, nothing. But Comedy Central didn’t go for it." Rouse, Colbert, and Dinello went to the Museum Of Television and found several after-school specials starring Scott Baio, which they used as reference. Dinello later found a tape of Florrie Fisher's The Trip Back at Kim's video in the East Village; Fisher, a motivational speaker, recalled her days as a New York prostitute and heroin addict to a group of high-school students. After watching it, Dinello thought Fisher reminded him of Sedaris and promptly suggested doing a character—inspired by Fisher—who would go back to high school. Colbert added the idea of her learning the wrong lesson after every episode, and Sedaris said "Okay, she'll be a junkie whore this time." Rouse noted Strangers with Candy was a combination of Fisher's tape, the Baio specials, Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer, and Frederick Wiseman’s Titicut Follies.
Writing and production
Colbert, Dinello and Sedaris wrote most of the episodes. The process started with an "overlying outline": knowing the start and the end of the episode, they would build the scenes in between and later would improvise together in a room. Whatever they laughed at went in the script. Colbert later said of this method: "Our rule was, if it makes us laugh, we put it in the script. There was not a single thing said by a character in that show that was right. Every choice was the wrong moral choice. Because of the freedom Comedy Central allowed us, we said and did things that were outrageous and extreme." They would also keep typos in. Sedaris recalled: "That's what I learned from working on Strangers. If you're not laughing, how do you expect anyone else to laugh?" Alterman said of the show's structure "The way we approached was to present each one as a morality play where in the third act the protagonist, Jerri Blank, would always, without fail, make the wrong choice. And then to cap it off, she would come back in the epilogue in the fourth act to say what she learned, and she would also draw the wrong lesson from the wrong choice she had made." To absolve themselves of the offensive stuff they had written, they would imagine all the scripts were written by a middle-aged woman named Jocelyn Hershey Guest, in a similar way to J.D. Salinger alter ego Buddy Glass. "In the world where she’s writing, these are the right moral choices," Colbert has said. Very occasionally they would write with a collaborator such as Cindy Caponera, Mitch Rouse, or Thomas Lennon. Some of Jerri's phrases like "You got skills to pay the bills" and "I like the pole and the hole" came from things Sedaris' brother Paul would say. Much of Jerri's past is taken from anecdotes in The Trip Back, some of which are also in Fisher's autobiography, The Lonely Trip Back. Several lines of dialogue in the series were taken verbatim from Fisher's public-service film. Sedaris would often watch the show without sound to see if a deaf person could follow: "Okay, if I couldn't hear or understand anything, could I still find the show entertaining?" And I did. 'Cause everyone was so interesting to look at." The third season was written in Charleston, South Carolina, Colbert's hometown.Comedy Central picked up the series in 1998 after Colbert had already begun working on The Daily Show. As a result, he accepted a reduced role, filming only around 20 Daily Show segments a year while he worked on the new series. The show was originally entitled The Way After School Special, but later was changed to Strangers With Candy, which was just a name they had come up with years earlier, and had been wanting to use for one of their projects. It came from the phrase "Don't take candy from strangers," which would probably be a lesson from an "Afterschool Special". Sedaris has credited producer Kent Alterman with the development of the show: "He really helped us shape that show. We went in there with strong ideas, but he changed it a lot from the pilot to the first episode. He had a good eye and really good ideas, and we trusted him from the get-go." Doug Herzog, who was at the time, president of Comedy Central's parent company Viacom, also noted his influence, "Kent recognized the brilliance and genius of Strangers With Candy really early on. He really championed it when a lot of us were looking at it, going, “What is this?” The show faced slight censorship from the network, Sedaris said, "It was weird. Like they let you say "pussy," but not "faggot" — until the fourth show. They said, "You have to build up to 'faggot.'" And the script of one show had me writing in my "dirty, filthy Jew diary." Well, I could say "dirty," but I couldn't say "filthy." It was killing me." Mostly, however, the writers were left alone to their own devices.
Vicki Farrell designed the wardrobe for the show. When designing Jerri Blank's appearance, Sedaris told Farrell "I want to look like I own a snake." Jerri would often wear high-waisted pants and snakeskin ankle boots, as well as turtlenecks because Comedy Central did not want track marks or tattoos to be visible. To complete the look Sedaris wore a fatsuit. Some of her clothes were custom made or came from thrift stores. Sedaris wore a wig and fake lashes, and told the hair and makeup department she wanted Jerri to look like a professional golfer. It would take about 40 minutes for Sedaris to get into character.