While TV executives scratch their heads over the question of why so many viewers are tuning out prime-time network offerings in droves, two producers think it’s a huge no-brainer: Maybe the networks aren’t giving those viewers anything they can relate to in their lives.
That’s why Ric Swartzlander and David Himelfarb have aimed “Rodney,” their ABC sitcom premiering Tuesday, squarely at the middle-American audience living in “fly-over country” — that vast expanse of the United States located between the show business meccas of New York and Los Angeles.
Stand-up comic Rodney Carrington stars as Rodney Hamilton, a salt-of-the-earth husband and father living in Tulsa, Okla., where he supports loving wife Trina (Jennifer Aspen) and their two young sons (Oliver Davis, Matthew Josten) by working at a soul-sucking job in a fiberglass plant, although he harbors a dream of being a stand-up comic.
“Rodney” is a show rooted in the mundane blue-collar reality that distinguished the female-driven hits “Roseanne” and “Grace Under Fire,” a genre that — apart from “Reba” on The WB Network — has been missing from TV in recent seasons. That’s partly because New York- and Hollywood-based executives often choose shows that reflect their own cosmopolitan reality, Swartzlander has discovered in his years of pitching new series ideas.
“I would always shoot myself in the foot immediately when I said, ‘OK, it’s a small town,’ and their eyes would just glaze over, and I knew I was dead right there,” he says. “I come from a small town in southern Illinois, and I know there’s a huge (audience) out there between L.A. and New York, and it would be great to give them something that represents their lives a little more closely than the more urban sitcoms.”
Carrington, who brings the same relaxed authority and intuitive self-assurance to his role that Brett Butler brought to “Grace Under Fire,” says he initially was wary when Himelfarb and Swartzlander pitched the show to him, but later was stunned when he discovered how deeply the pilot script was rooted in his own experiences.
“I identify with this story,” says Carrington, whose family is remaining in Tulsa for now. “It’s about two people who love each other and how they make it through every day.”
Like his character, Carrington says he was smitten as soon as he met his future wife, Terry, in a hotel lounge while he was a struggling comic. That night, he predicted he would marry her and within three months, a pregnancy and wedding followed, in that order.
“I was making … maybe $500 a week,” he recalls. “But she thought I had everything. Terry was living in an apartment with two TVs, and the picture worked on one and the sound worked on the one sitting on top of it.”
In a gesture more lovestruck than practical, Terry quit her own job to hit the road with her husband and their kids (two of them by then). At one point, Carrington supported his family by selling T-shirts out of a suitcase.
“If it hadn’t been for those T-shirts, we’d have never hardly made it,” Carrington reflects today. “All the money we had at one point was what was in the ashtray of the minivan. But those are the memories we come from, and that’s why all the things that have happened in my life leading up to this (show) are so special.”
