Readers of the April 26, 2006 New York Times might have checked to see if they were perusing the April 1 paper when they got to Bill Carter’s scoop about Mick Jagger filming a sitcom pilot for ABC. The story was true, but the project’s original title – Let’s Rob Mick Jagger – obscured creators Rob Burnett and Jon Beckerman’s intent to focus on a gang of have-nots who plan to raid the singer’s Fifth Avenue pad to get back at a world that treats them like crap. The series premiered as The Knights Of Prosperity, a moniker far more suggestive of the slobs-versus-snobs comedies that inspired Burnett and Beckerman. ‘Mick is awesome, and I hope he’s one of 20 awesome personalities that we try to rob over the years,’ says Donal Logue, who stars as Eugene, a Queens janitor who leads the Knights. ‘Because he’s such an overwhelming celebrity, on the one hand it was a coup, but on the other it was dangerous because it put too much emphasis on his involvement.’
Although sitcoms such as Scrubs, Arrested Development and The Office have placed a strong emphasis on continuity in recent years, Knights goes further by offering a season-long story line à la 24. ‘When we sat down with the network presidents, Jon and I said, “In today’s climate, there’s really not a lot of use in doing just another television show,”’ Burnett says, speaking from his office at Silvercup Studios in Queens. ‘You might as well swing for the fences and try to do something that’s really different and really unusual, and hopefully people will like it.’ Even so, he continues, Knights incorporates traditional TV– comedy elements that have fallen by the wayside in recent decades. ‘When you think about them, most comedies on television don’t have a comic premise – it’s a show about a family, it’s a show about people living in an apartment, but it’s not anything that’s an actually funny idea.’
Beckerman is more specific: ‘With Gilligan’s Island, Bewitched, all those shows they used to do, there’s an actual comic premise that motivates stuff.’ The series was scheduled to premiere in October, but was delayed at the last second by ABC so the ratings monster Dancing With The Stars could be expanded. At the same time, the network gave a vote of confidence by ordering scripts for nine episodes beyond the 13 that have been shot.
Burnett and Beckerman, former writer-producers for the Late Show With David Letterman, worked with Logue on the pilot for their previous series, the 2000–04 NBC dramedy Ed, but Logue’s contract for Fox’s Grounded For Life took precedence, and his role went to Michael Ian Black. Knights was conceived with Logue in mind, and the combination of the concept and the actor was enough to elicit offers from multiple networks before a script was even written. Although Jagger’s portrayal of himself as a coddled jet-setter in the mock E! segments that fuel Eugene’s rage is priceless, the real highlight of the pilot is Logue’s big recruitment speech to his prospective gangmates, which evokes Bill Murray’s rallying-the-troops scenes in films like Stripes (‘I was born with a plastic spork in my a**, just like the rest of you!’ Eugene proclaims. ‘So what if we’re not conventionally handsome? Or educated? Or ‘sober’? We have dreams too, don’t we?’). Burnett agrees with the comparison. ‘I think Donal has a sweetness and sincerity to him which adds another layer on top of that,’ he says. ‘Bill Murray is kind of above it all, which is part of his genius, but Donal really feels like he’s right in there with the other guys.’
Starting with the second episode, the series is quick to flesh out the gang, which also includes another janitor (Lenny Venito), a cookie-crazed security guard (Kevin Michael Richardson), a virginal intern (Josh Grisetti), a Colombian waitress (Sofia Vergara) and a cab driver (Maz Jobrani) who was a hot lawyer back home in India. ‘It kind of feels like Taxi, where you’ve got Reverend Jim, Latka and Danny DeVito’s Louie all on the same show,’ Logue says. ‘We have the same weird, sad broken-toy diversity in our cast, which I love.’ Although there are no guarantees in television, the creators have been operating under the assumption that they’ll get to tell the whole story. ‘You have to go into something like this hoping for success instead of hedging for failure,’ Beckerman says. ‘It’s rare for us, but we actually have a game plan.’
The Knights Of Prosperity starts on August 16 on Show Comedy at 10.30pm
