I am – Hercules!!
Morgan Phillips sleeps in a tiny room with a mammoth jar of his own urine.
This behavior is depicted in the ongoing VH1 reality show “Can’t Get A Date,” which is more like a series of tiny Errol Morris documentaries than something like “Elimidate” or MTV’s “Dismissed.”
Mammoth pee jars notwithstanding, the emphasis in “Can’t Get A Date” is on amusing introspection.
The great care the series takes with postproduction is evidenced by, among other things, the hilarious throbbing green glow added to every ominous shot of Morgan’s urine jar, which makes the jar appear otherworldly and radioactive.
Morgan, a caustically engaging fellow, isn’t crazy. He uses the urine jar because there’s only one bathroom in his dingy New York domicile, and his mom is in there a lot. (Morgan’s life kind of sucks.)
A 35-year-old New York “toymaker” who lives with his parents, Morgan is a comic-book geek, and he pines for a club deejay named Jenny Doom because she’s cute and shares a surname with a key Fantastic Four villain.
Though on the cusp of middle-age, Morgan still gets around on a child’s bicycle. (All of the series’ stars may be New Yorkers, and the series itself seems to demonstrate that New York can be a hellish place in which to dwell if you’re not rich.)
Stefan Springman, the series’ eerily velvet-voiced narrator and mastermind, sends Morgan to a very tall female tailor and a stunning female optometrist. Springman advises Morgan to tone down the obnoxious element in his banter as he deals with these women.
According to the hardworking “Can’t Buy A Date” publicist, Deirdre, one can still view Morgan’s episode (and the second episode, starring single mom Mya Baker) via video-on-demand and this website. If you can get it to work, be sure to check out the brief “one year later” follow-up segments.
Ten hetero installments of “Can’t Get A Date” were created for VH1. Six homosexual installments were created for sister channel Logo.
***
Tonight “Can’t Get A Date” brings us the saga of funny, articulate Jim Berhle. A 32-year-old “poet and bookseller,” Jim appears to sleep in a filthy closet with Hello Kitty pillows. He is, by his own admission, short, broke, bald, unambitious, listless and alone. He also has repellant toenail fungus.
Jim’s naked, overweight body appears on his blog, as does his weekly “crush list”: a ranking of the young women he knows and longs to bone. Happily, we get to meet all the women on Jim’s crush list, who are plenty cute and plenty not interested in sleeping with Jim. At least one winces when shown his naked blog photo.
Jim tries tonight to win over Kat, a fellow poet and the top-ranked girl on his crush list.
The series works because it’s cast with watchable, flawed individuals, because it’s exceedingly well-packaged, and because it offers considerably more reality that the vast majority of reality shows.
Give it a gander. I’ve already commanded my TiVo to give it a “season pass.”
For those curious about its enigmatic creator/narrator, publicist Deirdre offers this:
Can't Get A Date
How a man who doesn't own a television got his own show.
Both the name and idea for a show came in a single sentence, "I'm moving to Moab because I can't get a date." The reasons for Fred Soffa's romantic difficulties were obvious to his friend, Stefan Springman. Fred was wearing Tevas, pleated shorts and a t-shirt with yellow stains under the arms. His white man's attempt at an afro was being hampered by male-pattern-baldness and Fred had a habit of staring at people with an unsettling intensity. Somehow worse than his appearance, Fred was both obstinate and obtuse - he was the kind of guy who would come out of the bathroom, tell you he didn't believe in washing his hands, mock you for being a mindless conformist and then stick his finger in your creme brulee. As a friend in need of help, Fred presented a daunting prospect, but as it happened, Stefan had been looking for a project.
A celebrated bachelor, Stefan was famous amongst his friends for advice in the art of courtship. Stefan's reputation was not the result of his own success at dating. (His penchant for an early bedtime is a players' equivalent of a glass jaw.) Instead, Stefan possessed excellent judgment and a tremendous enthusiasm for the subject. While his contemporaries found dating to be an unpleasant process and tended to quit it as soon as a halfway compatible partner appeared, Stefan seemed to genuinely relish the awkward lows and giddy highs of single life. "The more people you can date casually," Stefan would suggest, "the better your chances of finding your soulmate." He would encourage his friends to pursue dating, to weather heartbreaks and embarrassments, until falling in love made it impossible to continue.
Stefan had been working as a soundman for film and television for 14 years. In that time he'd worked on reality television from its conception (he worked on Burnet's Ecochallenge, an early predecessor of Survivor) through to its present condition of being the genre everyone loves to hate. He felt this negative perception was partly a result of producers pressuring their subjects in to narrative outlines that had been written before the cameras ever rolled. The subjects, who are not actors, invariably come off seeming unbelievable or outrageous, undermining the central premise of reality television. Stefan understood the necessity of creating a narrative arc, but felt there had to be a better way than telling characters what to say. From the myriad experiences of recording sound on productions that both succeeded and failed, Stefan developed a theory of production: good narratives will develop naturally when you put interesting people together and let them interact with as little intervention as possible. Fred's inability to get a date offered a perfect opportunity for Stefan to test this theory in a domain he happened to know a thing or two about.
Making television, even a promo, is a major undertaking. It requires time, equipment and collaboration. To document his attempt at making Fred more dateable, Stefan partnered with old friends, Manny Kivowitz, a producer with an established production company who he had known for over 20 years, and Toby Barraud, his New Zealander wingman and fellow soundman. With the charity of other technically skilled friends the documentation of Fred's transformation began. Fred immediately proved to be resistant to change. He submitted to having his hair cut, but refused to have the hair between his eyes plucked, claiming his late father had declared the mono-brow to be a sign of genius. Fred was especially combative on matters involving his personality. Despite his own observation that strangers sometimes declined to ride in an elevator with him Fred could not be made to see how his intensity might be a romantic hindrance.
Fred's resistance was immensely draining on Stefan, to the point where he actually suggested to Fred that they quit the production. With Fred showing no signs of modifying his behavior, the project was turning into a makeover show and while his hair cut and new clothes had made a radical improvement on Fred's appearance, the intention had always been make a show about psychological issues. Stefan felt depressed at his failure to get through to Fred, but was persuaded by Manny and Toby to persevere.
In the edit room it was discovered that Fred's resistance had actually been a blessing. Narratives require conflict to maintain dramatic tension, and when Fred would stare deadpan into the camera and say, "Give me a contained environment and enough time I can seduce anyone," it was simultaneously disturbing and amusing. Fred eventually did get a date with an attractive Russian girl named Maria. He used the show to entice her, later telling Stefan, "There are no rules in this war. You use everything you've got." When it turned out that Maria found Fred's intense stare sexy, Stefan suggested to Fred that he was a total success. Fred replied that he was just, "a moderate success." But even that was a measure of change - the old Fred could never have been so mild in his rebuttal.
The Fred Show was Can't Get A Date's earliest incarnation, and bears little resemblance to the show on air now. It had no graphics and relied on only one camera angle. Fortunately, Fred would sit so still during the interviews that many of the edit points were invisible. Fred's physical inactivity was compensated by the tension of the dialogue. Stefan had a friend working at VH1 as a producer. She felt the show wasn't right for the network, which mostly airs 'celebreality', but wanted to see it anyway. She watched it in her lunchtime and when a coworker overheard her laughing the Fred Show began a slow climb ascent toward the hands of the network's vice-president, Jim Ackerman. Jim felt the show was something different, later describing it as "pushing the boundaries of television art."
Stefan, who is only heard and never seen in the show, had made the Fred Show with the expectation that he be replaced with someone more experienced if it ever got picked up. But Jim was excited by the absence of celebrities and felt Stefan's voice "cut through". A series was commissioned on the strength of the pilot episode and then a second series for Viacom's new gay/lesbian network, Logo.
Two years later, as the shows finally hit the cablewaves, Stefan still has trouble understanding how he went from being a soundman who didn't own a television to the host of his own show, dispensing courtship advice to lesbians. Still a great advocate for dating, his own exploits in the field had to cease after he finally fell in love. Fred never moved to Moab.
11:59 p.m. Friday. VH1.
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