Few series creators speak as candidly as Michael J. Weithorn does when he discusses the personal flaws and details of his life that inspired him to create Fox’s new comedy “Weird Loners.”
“It’s a subject kind of close to my heart,” says the self-proclaimed “weird loner” and “King of Queens” co-creator. “In the five or six years before I wrote [the pilot] I got divorced. And I had a daughter and I was a single dad for half the week. In general, I was just devastated by the whole experience, so I was kind of living the life of a weird loner and I just felt very alienated from the rest of the world.”
The new “unromantic comedy,” as it’s being marketed, follows four relationship-phobic singles—Caryn (Becki Newton), cousins Stosh (Zachary Knighton) and Eric (Nate Torrence), and Zara (Meera Rohit Kumbhani)—randomly brought into each other’s lives in Queens, N.Y.
“I was very aware of the fact that, at a certain age, if you’re not either in a relationship or part of a family, you kind of get a little bit stigmatized by society at a certain point. So I started thinking about people who just really, chronically are not good at that and are not good at intimacy and not good at sustaining it in relationships,” says Weithorn.
To develop his main characters, he says, “I kind of divided my psyche into four parts and came up with four independent reasons why I personally struggle with [this issue].”
Caryn is someone who “over-idealizes and invariably leads herself to disappointment,” while Stosh is a womanizer archetype of sorts who “fears intimacy and feels very threatened by it so he kind of does these stealth strikes with people and jumps away.” Eric is “very perplexed and confused by the ways of adulthood and behavior,” and last but not least there’s Zara, who’s so narcissistic that she’ll only stick with something or someone for as long as it gratifies her.
Unlike many television shows today, Weithorn didn’t want characters who were “single people, [who], theoretically at any moment, could fall in love and find the ‘right’ person.”
“I thought, What if we just say at the beginning of the series that these people are not able to find the right person? They’re sort of crippled in that way,” says the co–executive producer (partnered with Jake Kasdan). “The one thing I hope is clear in the episodes, even though it’s not stated explicitly, is that that’s not gonna happen with these characters at any time in the near future, which is why they kind of know that intuitively and they sort of drift toward each other and become this support group for each other in a very loose but real way.”
As with any ensemble-based comedy, great casting was a vital part of the “Weird Loners” equation, as actors had to hold their own in order to make the whole group work. “From our standpoint there’s no real weak link,” says Weithorn. “They all really work well together and all have very distinct energies.”
While he says chemistry is hard to predict, both he and Kasdan just try to cast actors who “innately have the quality” the character is supposed to have “as opposed to…you’re just supposed to believe they have it because their dialogue is telling you they have it.”
Though Newton is visually more attractive than what they pictured for Caryn, for example, Weithorn says, “Becki can sort of have this crazy-eyed thing that she does and you buy it! She’s able to sell it because of some innate quality she has as an actress….”
And while that might not sound like a compliment coming from every showrunner, on the set of Fox’s new sitcom, weirder is always better.
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