Interview: Situation: Comedy Star and The Sperm Donor Co-Creator Mark Treitel - Page 4

It's funny, going back to the reality show thing, we were supposed to be living with them originally. But they cut that aspect out of the show.

I'm sure you're really good at this by now, so give me your 30-second pitch for The Sperm Donor.

[Laughs] The Sperm Donor is about an uptight psychiatrist who has a thirteen-year old daughter who she has problems with, so she tries to bring in the father. She thinks the father is going to be an uptight snooty-snoot, but he turns out to be a Jack Black uncontrollable roadie.

And what our show is really about is a male-female Odd Couple. It's kind of harkening back to the sitcoms of the 70s and the 80s: two people who can't get along but you can feel the attraction.

We have such great chemistry between these wonderful actors. Maggie Wheeler and David Deluise. And I've had people tell me, this is a Sam and Diane [from sitcom classic Cheers] kind of thing. We felt it when we watched it. And you have Richie Keen , who plays the brother, and you have Lauren Schaffel, who is a teenage actor. She's on Still Standing, and she really carried the show.

What advice would you give to someone who is interested in writing for television?

Make sure you have money coming in some other way! It's really difficult, but at the same time I would say that there are opportunities, particularly because of the fact that there are so many cable channels.

How many scripts did you write with Shoe before The Sperm Donor?

We've written about four to five features, and about ten pilots. We've been writing together for so long, and you come up with so many different ideas. We have about thirty or forty different treatments.

There are some fun things that we've written. We wrote a Happy Days where it takes place during the present time as though it's gone through to present day, so you have Chachi Jr. Jr., which is Chachi's grandchild! [Laughs] And then Ron Howard, Richie Cunningham, comes back and he's like the Senator of Wisconsin. And he comes back and has an election against The Fonz. You know, like the old Happy Days, where they have the high school elections? So it's Fonzie versus Richie for State Senator.

Did you write that to get yourselves out there, or was this a serious idea to bring Happy Days back to the air?

It was just a way to do something different to get yourself noticed. And that's why we called this show The Sperm Donor. We had no idea we would actually get a show produced called that!

Article Author: Eric Berlin

Eric Berlin is the publisher of Online Media Cultist. He's also prone to referring to himself in the third person in author bios in an attempt to make it look like someone Less Important wrote it for him.
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