Sex, Love, and Rock 'n' Roll: An interview with Love Monkey Creator Michael Rauch

On the surface, Love Monkey's Tom Farrell seems the embodiment of cool. He's an A&R rep for a record label, paid to hang out in clubs and discover new talent. He rubs shoulders with musicians like Ben Folds and Aimee Mann, and one of his best friends is a former professional baseball player.

But he's not cool. He's not trying to be cool. In the words of the show's theme song (by the Odds), he is a sheep in wolf's clothing, the mere illusion of someone who is cool. And that is so much cooler than cool.

As played by Ed's Tom Cavanagh, Tom Farrell is endearing even as he loses his job and girlfriend in the same day, even as he stumbles through painful attempts to pick up women, to do the right thing, and to channel Jerry Maguire in front of his unreceptive boss. There's a refreshing lack of cool cynicism to the show, thanks in part to the sweetness of the Toms.

"When you have the actor Tom Cavanagh, he's so likeable that I could put him in a Nazi uniform and put a swastika on his forehead, and you'd still love him," jokes writer Michael Rauch, Love Monkey's affable creator.

Fortunately, Love Monkey is more High Fidelity than Hogan's Heroes. And like High Fidelity's Rob, Tom is passionate about music to the point of elitism. In the pilot, he says about his soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend: "She listens to Jewel, while I prefer music." In the second episode, he's thrown for a loop when he discovers his new crush, the near-perfect Julia (Ivana Milicevic), worships Starship's We Built This City. It's almost enough to crush the crush.

Based on a novel by Kyle Smith, Love Monkey captures the spirit of that book and puts it in a more TV-friendly environment. "The book dealt with real people and relationships - friendship and love and not having love - and that's really what appealed to me," says Rauch.

But the character was originally a tabloid journalist, and CBS balked at a show centred around a newspaper. So native New Yorker Rauch recalled the time when he hung out with an old friend who worked in the recording industry, "going to clubs to hear bands play and meet women and get drunk," and based Tom's job on that slightly more sexy world.

"That was how it went from being somebody else's book to being my show," he explains. "Creatively, it felt like, OK, now I can have some sense of ownership over it."

The music: “It's a character in the show"

The music industry is more than a setting for Tom's workplace – music itself is an integral part of Love Monkey. "Since the show is about a guy whose job it is to find new music, we're trying to use it to help find new music, too," says Rauch. "Our music supervisor, a guy named Nic Harcourt, sends a lot of new, up-and-coming bands to us, and we pick the songs we like and the bands we like and put them on the show."

Article Author: Diane Kristine Wild

Diane writes about boring things during the day, pop culture things by night. She also runs the TV, Eh? website, a compilation of news and information about Canadian television. Follow her on Twitter @deekayw for more random thoughts.

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