INTERVIEW: ‘Teachers’ travels from stage comedy to web series to TV Land
Photo: Teachers follows six elementary school teachers as they navigate personal and professional obstacles. Photo courtesy of TV Land / Provided with permission.
Few TV shows take the unique journey of TV Land’s Teachers. The comedy show, which airs new episodes Tuesdays at 10:30 p.m., follows the personal and professional adventures of six elementary school teachers. The series has been a success and is currently in its third season.
Whereas most shows go through a grueling pitch-fest to attract the eyes of studio executives, the origins Teachers was different. For starters, the TV series began as a sketch comedy act by the main actresses.
“I’m in a comedy group called The Katydids, and we started about 10 years ago in Chicago,” said Kathryn Renée Thomas, who plays Deb Adler on the series. “We started doing improv and sketch comedy, and we started making videos. And so we actually created a web series called Teachers that the show is based on, and so myself along with five other women created, wrote, starred in and produced the television show ourselves.”
Then came their connection with the William Morris Endeavor talent agency. A mutual acquaintance introduced the comedians to the company, and a working relationship. Lo an behold, at about the same time, TV Land came knocking looking for a female-centric workplace comedy, something a little younger and edgier than their previous original programming.
Light bulbs.
“TV Land looked at the web series and loved it and offered us a pilot,” Thomas said. “So we didn’t even have to pitch it. I mean, we pitched it in a new, more modern way in that we created the content ourselves.”
Interestingly, each of the six women behind the show has a different variation of the same name: Kathryn Renée Thomas, Caitlin Barlow, Katy Colloton, Kate Lambert, Katie O’Brien and Cate Freedman. This casting was not a coincidence.
“We were all doing improv in Chicago,” Thomas remembers. “We were kind of in the same generation of people at iO [Theater] and Second City, The Annoyance, all those theaters, and one of the gals, Caitlin Barlow, knew all the women individually through classes or doing shows or through the theaters. And she actually had pitched it as an idea for a show that was going up at iO called Radical Concept, so her radical concept was that we all had the same name. She just said, ‘I realized that I knew a lot of women named Katie, or variations of that, that are funny.’ So we said, ‘Sure, let’s do it.’ We applied for the show and didn’t get in, and then we’re like, ‘OK, let’s just do our own thing.’ So we did some one-off shows at blackbox theaters in Chicago and realized that we had great chemistry. We had no idea that 10 years later we would still be together, and we’d have our own television show. We really just did it as a joke. We thought we’d do a few shows and that was it.”
She added: “So now we go to bars, and guys come up to us and are like, ‘Hey, what’s your name?’ And we go around the circle, and it’s, ‘Katy, Katie, Cate, Kaitlyn.’ And they think we’re f—ing with them, but really it’s real.”
Each actress came up with her own character for the series. Thomas’ Deb Adler character is an original for sure, but it’s also based on some experiences she had during her own schooling. For one, she lived in the suburbs and had a good relationship with her parents, but she was yearning to be different in some way.
“I kind of latched on to the group of kids who were the punk kids, the goth kids, the hippie kids, the gay kids, any kind of outcast,” she said. “And so I thought I was pretty tortured and read a lot of poetry and listened to a lot of Tori Amos and dyed my hair … and I just thought, what if I had never grown out of that phase. … So I took myself as a 15-year-old, heightened it a lot, and that’s how my character was born. She’s just like an adult goth who was bullied a lot and hasn’t gotten over it.”
Each of The Katydids has a great deal of creative control on the TV Land series. They not only star in the show but also write and produce. Over the past few seasons, Thomas has taken to the acting part. She loves them all, but the chance to bring Deb Adler to life has excited her professionally.
“Sometimes I am loving the writing part of it the most,” she said. “Sometimes I’m loving the performing part the most. We produce, and we are incredibly involved in all of the creative decisions, which has been incredibly lucky. I feel like it’s an anomaly to have as much creative control as we do, so we’re also involved in casting and a lot of different aspects of production as well. It kind of fluctuates. I will say that being on set is my favorite part, either acting or just being involved in that creation. I think it probably comes from that improv background I have where there’s a big group of people trying to make one thing really special, where everyone is putting their energy into one thing. It’s something about having the amazing crew that we have all coming together to work on it is probably my favorite part. I love writing, but after about two months in the room, I go a little nuts because I just can’t sit still that long.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Teachers continues with new episodes Tuesdays at 10:30 p.m. on TV Land. Click here for more information on the show. Click here to follow Kathryn Renée Thomas on Twitter.
