Debashine Thangevelo
WITH long running or popular TV series, characters tend to get embedded in the minds of fans.
And there becomes this expectation of them always exhibiting those traits or playing a similarly shaded character in every role.
Thankfully, some actors have managed to pull off that feat rather effortlessly.
Look at Will & Grace’s Eric McCormack. Fans would never have imagined him as a schizophrenic neuropsychiatrist with more of a functional than designer wardrobe. And yet he pulls it off masterfully in the crime drama, Perception. The same could be said of Taye Diggs, who went from a suave Dr Sam Bennett in Private Practice to a tenacious cop in Murder in the First. Let’s not forget about Boston Legal’s James Spader and his latest acclaimed TV series, The Blacklist.
Then we have Christopher Meloni, who is synonymous with gritty cop dramas à la NYPD Blue, Homicide: Life on the Street, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit and Law & Order: Trial by Jury. But pigeonholed, he refuses to be.
Remember him as a bisexual jailbird in Oz? Then he worked in myriad big screen projects, where he flexed his muscles in everything from romance to action to comedy.
Of his gravitation to comedy with Surviving Jack, he told azcentral.com: “I think comedy comes more naturally. Doing the SVU gig… I was tightly wound. That was difficult material day in and day out for 12 years. And the hours are pretty brutal. I remember after six months – and it’s a nine-month season – I would be toast. More liquid than solid. And you truly need a month to decompress. With the comedy thing, the hours are less. It’s nice to go to work and your biggest worry is to figure out where the funny resides, whether it’s in the behaviour, physicality, timing, a combination of all those relationships, the personal quirks of each character…”
The series, created by Justin Halpern and Patrick Schumacker, is based on Halpern’s autobiography, I Suck at Girls.
Surviving Jack revolves around Jack Dunlevy taking over the parenting of his two teenage kids, Frankie (Connor Buckley) and Rachel (Claudia Lee) when his wife Joanne (Rachel Harris) decides to go back to law school.
Of course, that premise sounds like a recipe for comic disaster – but it doesn’t quite hit that sweet entertainment spot.
On what his expectations were, Meloni shrugged: “I never can figure out the public’s taste. I don’t know what they will like. I watched it, I thought it was funny.”
Of course, he might have been just a tad more than biased there! The series only lasted for eight episodes before Warner Bros. canned it.
Surviving Jack airs on M-Net (DStv channel 101) on Fridays at 6pm.