On screen couple Steve Agee (l) and Brian Posehn (r).

While some shows have their gay characters looking perfectly coiffed and appear as if they just stepped out of a fitness magazine, The Sarah Silverman Program took a more realistic path when casting Sarah’s neighbors, gay couple Brian Spukowski (Brian Posehn) and Steve Myron (Steve Agee). While Silverman’s adventures often take the main storyline of the episodes, Steve and Brian’s stories have taken on gay marriage as well as an upcoming storyline that goes against the grain of the show and is not played for laughs. I recently did a three-way with Posehn and Agee (a three-way call, that is) to talk about being gay for each other, their less-than-traditional gay fans and what happens when they’re seen out in public together.

Jim Halterman: How did you both first fall into the world of comedy?

Brian Posehn: I didn’t want to do stand-up as a kid but I did love watching sitcoms and I always loved the characters that didn’t carry the show. They weren’t Dick Van Dyke but it was the guy who would come in for one scene, be funny and walk out. I always loved those characters and I remember learning what a character actor was and thinking “I want to be the funny person who comes in, says something stupid and then gets to leave.” And that’s essentially what I get to do on Sarah’s show.

JH: Kind of like Larry (Richard Kline) on Three’s Company?

BP: I love Larry!

Steve Agee: He was always the funniest! For me, I always loved comedy and when I was in sixth grade and all my friends were buying their first music albums, I was buying comedy. My first album was George Carlin’s Occupation: Foole. I was always into comedy. My parents were doctors so I didn’t know that that was actually a career choice. I felt pressure to go into business or law and I was playing in a band in college and that’s actually what brought me to LA. After a year that fell apart and I started dating a girl who was taking classes at The Groundlings and I went to a show and thought ‘Oh, shit, man, people actually do this stuff!’ I started taking classes at Groundlings and was there for four or five years.

The cast of THE SARAH SILVERMAN PROGRAM

JH: Did you two hook up with Sarah through the whole comic world?

BP: That’s how I met Sarah, out in New York. I was already doing stand-up for a few years and a couple of my friends knew her. She was super young and doing stand-up around town and my friends were like, ‘This girl is already funny. She already knows who she is.’ We kind of hit it off and have been friends ever since.

SA: I met Sarah…I did a play that a friend of hers wrote and he was just in a recent episode. He played the guy who she beheads with the paint can. I met Sarah through that guy.

JH: Talking to different stand-ups, it always seems to be a really close-knit group and family. Is that true?

BP: Yeah, I’m still friends with the people I started with. Most of my closest friends I’ve known for 20 yrs and they’re all stand-ups that you know – Patton Oswalt, David Cross…most of us have stayed close over the years.

SA:  I didn’t know Brian super well but everyone in the cast basically knew each other before the show was written or conceived.

BP:  You and I met playing video games over at Sarah’s. I thought I was Sarah’s big goofy stoner friend and then one day I met Steve and thought ‘Wait a minute! There’s another guy?!’ I just realized when my girlfriend doesn’t let me play over at Sarah’s house another guy shows up and does what I normally do.

SA:  I’m your understudy. [laughs] That’s how the roles came about for us on the show. We were smoking pot and playing video games with Sarah years before.

BP:  It was kinda brilliant that she cast the people who are really in her real life around her in this show. I mean, Steve and I are like her closest male friends. The fact that she cast her sister as her sister was brilliant.

JH: And how did you become a gay couple instead of just a few guys who lived next door?

SA: I think in the pilot it was pretty ambiguous. You don’t know if they’re brothers or lovers or roommates and it wasn’t until the show actually got picked up that they decided to make us gay.

BP: They wanted it to be clear what was going on. The idea was that they never watned us to play it in a stereotypical way. They never wanted us to be sitcom gays. They wanted us to play it the way we play the characters – keep it real and keep it like ourselves and they just happened to be gay but they also are these two big goofy stoners who yell at each other all the time. And that’s one thing that I love – we’ve had so many guys come up to us since the show has been on and saying you’re finally representing a type that has never been fully represented. I’ve had guys come up to me and say, ‘I play video games, I smoke pot, I listen to heavy metal and my husband…’ and the guy looks like Santa Claus. We are a type that is out there.

JH: Who coined the phrase, “I’m so gay for you, Dude?”

BP: That was in the script. It was the first big story where I’m questioning whether I’m really into you?

SA: You might be bi.

BP: Yeah! I laughed very hard. It’s so fun to play and the fact that we aren’t affectionate. A fist bump and eye contact is enough. That’s the way we say ‘I love you.’

JH: Do people think you are really a couple and that you’re gay?

BP: Steve and I hang out on the show but we’re both super busy and we only see each other when we’re shooting. When we went to Rush together people were tripping out because on the show we were going to go see Rush once so it’s a weird thing.

SA: The first year we traveled down to Comic Con and Brian was signing his comic book and I walked over and I think it kind of blew people’s minds to see us in the same place at the same time.

JH: When I talked to Sarah a few weeks ago, we talked about whether you could go too far with the comedy. Is there a line you can’t cross?

BP: I think there are those lines and we would all know. None of us really wants to hurt anybody with our comedy. We like playing with taboos, especially Sarah and I since that’s a big part of our comedy act and we push the envelope but at the end of the day none of us wants to really make anyone sad or piss anybody off so I think we would know. The fact that we did 9/11 jokes and those are rough but I think we waited long enough to do them.

JH: You guys are known for comedy but any interest in doing something more dramatic?

SA: Stay tuned to this season and you’ll see it. .

BP: We do have a dramatic episode for us where our director, Rob Schrab, came up with this story and was really passionate about it. He said, “I want you guys to play this whole story real and not go for the obvious joke that we usually go for.” But I’d love to play the serial killer on CSI. I go out for those parts occasionally and haven’t nailed one down yet. I was in a movie called The Devil’s Rejects but I was the comic relief before I got shot in the face.

SA: Whenever I’m meeting with my agents and managers I say ‘Send me out for the Law & Orders and CSIs’ and it could be just the dead guy in the beginning with the cold open when you see them pull the sheet over my head. I think it would be really fun to be on one of those shows.

JH: What else are you working on besides Sarah’s show?

BP: I’m a professional stand-up so I’m on the road all the time. I have a new record coming out in April called Fart and Weiner Jokes.

SA: I’ve just been auditioning since we wrapped this season. I did a week on a sitcom and I just did this new James Gunn movie with Rainn Wilson and Ellen Page.

BP: I just hope we come back. You know when you hear actors talk about ‘this year is our best’ but season three is the one I’m the most passionate about and we had the most fun with and the writers are really writing great things for us so we hope to do season four.

The Sarah Silverman Program airs every Thursday 10:30/9:30c on Comedy Central and re-airs Tuesdays at 10:30/9:30c on Logo.

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Seth MacFarlane has a lot to be happy about!!

Moderator Bill Maher and MacFarlane

Friends Alex Borstein and Seth Green

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….or as I like to call it “Rich Kids Behaving Badly” or “The Real Gossip Girl.”  Check out this clip of Jules, the latest reality show ‘character’ you will love to hate.  High Society airs tonight on the CW at 9:30/8:30c on the CW.

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Diahann Carroll is still busy acting on USA's WHITE COLLAR

Diahann Carroll may be turning 75 later this year but she obviously isn’t thinking about retirement anytime soon. Besides a long, often groundbreaking career, the classy Ms. Carroll is still very active whether it’s getting the word out about being a cancer survivor or playing the role of June, a wealthy Rat Pack-connected widow who takes in sexy Matt Bomer’s con man character Neil Caffrey on cable’s latest hit series, White Collar, which airs its first season finale every Tuesday at 10/9c on USA. I was there when Carroll recently talked to journalists about just how good looking Bomer is in real life, her new role on the cable hit and what else she’d like to accomplish in her already wonderful career.

First things first. Is Matt Bomer as drop dead gorgeous as he appears on the show? “If it’s possible, he’s better looking in real life and also very charming,” she shared along with a prediction of where Bomer’s now-hot career is going to go. “I think this is going to catapult him into the kind of stardom that he deserves. He is very hard working and it’s a delight to watch him in front of the camera. I think the character is perfect for him. He is really a bad boy who has good instincts and he looks the part.”

Diahann has nothing but good things to say about Matt Bomer

While Carroll had a recurring character on ABC’s Grey’s Anatomy as the mother of Preston Burke (played by Isaiah Washington, who was let go from the show in 2007 for his infamous anti-gay remarks to co-star T.R. Knight) she hasn’t been a regular on a series since her role as Dominique Deveraux on ABC’s prime time soap Dynasty. How did the role of June come to her? “The creator [Jeff Eastin], actually, is the person who approached [me] about doing this role and he really understood the period of time that was June’s hey-day and I thought, ‘Well, this is going to be really great fun because it goes back to the period of the Rat Pack’ and [June] was, obviously, a part of it to the degree where she was married to one of the musicians.”

Carroll broke new ground by starring in the 60s series, JULIA

One important period in network television occurred with the 1968 premiere of the television series Julia when Carroll broke new ground by being the first African American woman to star in her own series and not portray a domestic worker. While the world of television has made great strides since that time, the Tony and Golden Globe-winning actress still sees room for improvement. “There are so many shows on the air that I’m not really familiar, but I do believe that the stereotypical woman that was dominating television when I started, we’ve done away with that… the integrating is still not on a level that I would like to see it but I do think it’s coming. I do feel that we are trying and that it’s getting better.”

Carroll also said that the integrating of race needs to continue on a broader level. “We have white communities and black communities and white country clubs and black country clubs. It’s very important when we integrate ourselves, and it helps us to have a better understanding of the world, to people all over the world and this is the time in history that we have become very aware of how important that is, so I think it’s just really…we have to know each other and work together and play together in order to write about each other.”

Carroll back in her DYNASTY days

Just as important to Carroll is breast cancer awareness, which is something she definitely does not see as warranting quiet shame but quite the opposite. “Any time I have the opportunity to talk, particularly to women who are going through what I experienced, it’s always a very gratifying exchange for me.” Having let cameras follow her through her own treatment for the disease for a future documentary, Carroll definitely hopes her experience can be of help to others. “I learned something and I hope that I give them something in return, something they can use, something they can move on, and I think that’s one of the best things—one of the perks actually if that can be called a perk—when one knows that they have breast cancer is the exchange, meeting each other, discussing, making new friends, learning new things that they have done that they can pass along to me, and vice verse, and that’s what we will be doing.”

Back to acting, the New York City native was asked what draws her to a particular script or character and she revealed that it’s not always easy to verbalize the feeling. “It’s something that happens intrinsically and also if there’s action that is required of the character and it moves you in a way that is different from anything else that’s on your desk, that’s the piece that you will respond to and wish to have as a part of your life and as a part of your legacy.”

The best advice she could offer in connecting with a role is to go with what your emotions and your own body tell you. “It’s something that’s inexplicable, really, that’s down in your gut and it’s moved by something that makes you feel ‘I’d like to do that, I’d like to be able to say that and make people hear me because I think it’s important,’ even if it’s not—even if it’s a negative, it’d still be important, so I think that’s as much as I can say about it, because it’s something that really is emotional and difficult to verbalize.”

Having been in the entertainment industry for over five decades, Carroll wanted to spread some advice to young actors and actresses trying to break in. “The lesson that I would hope everyone would learn quite early in their career is don’t take it personally. Whatever it is that happens, you’re accepted for a role or rejected for a role of whatever, don’t take it personally. It’s part of the business and the person that is either hiring or firing…that’s their business. That’s what they are there for and it has nothing to do with how you feel about it. It has to do with someone else’s perception of should you, or can you, do this particular part, so just don’t take it personally.”

While it would appear that Carroll has done it all in her career, what does she have left to tackle? “I appreciate that question but I really have not done it all, but…I’ve done theater and television and film and nightclubs, that is true, but I really would love another opportunity to do something as fascinating as Dynasty was on television. I really enjoyed doing that and I’d like to see something like that come about again. Something that is totally absurd and fun.”

She also surmised that perhaps the biggest accomplishment is just living day-to-day. “I’m enjoying it and getting something out of it and putting something into it is a lot to do. I’ve been doing it now for…it will soon be 75 years, in July, and I’m pretty satisfied. I’ve also had four marriages that I went through, which is, also, difficult to do, so I don’t know. I’m feeling satisfied and so everyday—not satisfied to the extent that I’m not making—I’m still making the effort and the effort to do what? Everything.”

White Collar airs every Tuesday at 10/9c on the USA network.

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The cast of PARENTHOOD

Before the latest version of Parenthood hit the air last week, it already had an interesting and unusual back story. First a Ron Howard-directed film starring Steve Martin in 1989, a failed television adaptation in 1990 with Ed Begley, Jr. starring. But, when Friday Night Lights creator Jason Katims came to Howard and Brian Grazer to talk about a new version, the longtime partners had an important question for him. “We frankly said in that first meeting,” Howard explained, “you’re a pretty creative guy why don’t you just make up your own family?” According to Howard, Katims replied, “It’s like a book or a play or anything that you can make a strong adaptation from, there’s something in the DNA of those characters and the family dynamics that I think I can build upon.”

Howard, Katims and series star Lauren Graham recently talked to the press about the making of this series as well as Graham’s stepping in after the original pilot was shot when Maura Tierney had to unexpectedly drop out. First, though, Katims explained his thought process of putting the series together. “The idea of the show is to sort of try to explore as much about the experience of parenthood as we can. And that includes the joyous moments, the celebration of family. It includes the embarrassing funny moments …and some very dramatic stuff, which includes having a kid with special needs, which is something that is very much a part of the show. What I’m really proud of so far having now shot the first handful of episodes and seeing a few cuts, what I’m very proud of is that I think not only are we dealing with that subject matter in a way that honors it and is real, but it’s also done in a way that is not self-pitying and depressing.”

Graham with GILMORE GIRLS co-star Alexis Bledel

Tierney, best known for her long-running role of Abby Lockhart on ER, originally played the role of Sarah but had to drop out due to her battle against breast cancer. Now that she’s on her way to recovery, would Katims write a part for the Tierney in the future? “You know, I have no idea whether that would happen. I mean, obviously I love Maura, love the work that she does and right now she’s doing what she kind of needs to do to get healthy and get back to a place where we might have that conversation. But it’s nothing like that is anything that we’ve talk about yet.”

While Graham said she did not watch the original pilot shot with Tierney, she talked about the difficulties of stepping into the role and ensemble. “It felt really difficult in ways. I’ve put a lot of pressure on myself to really do a great job. And I push anyway but then this just felt like I hoped that it would go well and I hoped that we would all gel. And I hoped that actors wouldn’t mind doing a scene a second time, you know, with me. Ron mentioned it earlier, but I do have to say it didn’t feel so much like taking over or anything…it wasn’t like that. It was like we all together kind of started anew.”

At the Television Critics Assoc in January: (back, l-r) Dax Shepard, Erika Christianson, Monica Potter. (front, l-r) Ron Howard, Jason Katims.

Graham said when it came down to do the series, the decision really came from her gut. “I have been reading scripts for two and a half years or three years, whatever it is since Gilmore Girls ended. And there just wasn’t anything I connected to and that’s including things that I was developing that maybe didn’t get to exactly the place I wanted them to. It follows like the dating model of you have a list of things that you want and then you meet somebody and fall in love and half the things were not on your list. And this is kind of that in the ways that I didn’t plan to play a Mom, I didn’t plan to do an ensemble, I sort of was thinking about a comedy and maybe cable. And then, you know, and then I read this script and I met with Jason. And just the idea of being able to collaborate with a writer who has such a beautiful group of work but also is encouraging in the take your idea and kind of run with it and improvise once in a while if that makes sense to you.”

The casting of the family was an incredible experience, said Katims. “You’re trying to create a family, you’re trying to create a group of people who when you put them together the sum will be greater than its parts. And so that’s what was sort of that was what was, you know, the complicated and challenging part of it is making sure not only were you getting wonderful people for the roles which is what you’re always doing.

If you look at the people we were lucky enough to be able to work with – with Lauren and Peter [Krause] and Craig [T. Nelson] and on and on and  Bonnie Bedelia…I feel so excited and humbled by having this sort of embarrassment of riches is really what it is. And that wouldn’t have happened had we not gotten the support from the network to say you know what we’re not just going to put one person in this that we could go out and sell, we’re going to build a beautiful show here and we’re going to put our resources behind it.”

Having been involved in television since he was a child starring on The Andy Griffith Show, Howard was asked what he thinks of the television landscape today. “There’s more going on and so there are more opportunities to stub your toe along with doing something really special. But I think that cable TV and the series – the short 12 and 13 episodes a season cable shows have really been great for the medium because I also think it sort of challenges the more traditional network shows in exciting ways. I love the variety that you find on TV. I think that from an acting standpoint and a writing standpoint it’s pound for pound the best work in the world is going on in that medium.”

Parenthood airs Tuesdays at 10/9c on NBC.

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