For Hip, Edgy Talent, NBC Taps Hip, Edgy Source

NEW YORK —  The coffeehouse at Here is one that the cast of “Friends” might hang out in if they were making $75 instead of $750,000 an episode.

Pleasantly grungy, swirling with smoke and with the scent of heavy caffeine everywhere, Here, around an alleyway off 6th Avenue in the hipper-than-thou nexus between Soho and TriBeCa, could easily be a set for a downtown Manhattan TV show.

For the last several months, though, Here has been almost that. Adjacent to the coffeehouse, off its open-walled art gallery, is a cozy theater that during early evenings Mondays through Thursdays houses one of the more unusual experiments in network television talent recruiting. It is called PS (for “performance space”)-NBC and if it works, we could very well see a different, and presumably edgier, set of performers on prime time in the near future.

“New York has an extraordinary talent pool, and the networks are just not tapping it enough,” said Lou Viola, the on-site producer at PS-NBC.

“Admittedly, it’s hard to put a team of development people here and get to see much. But for the seasoned scout, if you have a space to bring people in, you could start processing writers and performers, seeing what they have.”

PS-NBC is the brainchild of Marc Hirschfeld, the new executive vice president of casting at NBC Entertainment. Hirschfeld had long been an independent casting director, owning his own firm, Lieberman Hirschfeld Casting, until he jointed NBC last year. He had cast such shows as “Seinfeld” and “3rd Rock From the Sun” with a somewhat New York-style sensibility.

TV, he thought, needed less L.A. and more N.Y.

“I really feel that most of the theater and most of the performance in Los Angeles is very showcasey,” said Hirschfeld, who operates mostly out of Los Angeles. “It’s all about, ‘Look at me. Find me. Don’t you want to be my agent?’ It’s not pure because of this.

“But New York is more a lightning rod for poets, multifaceted performers, writers. There are just a lot of talented people without an outlet for their talent.”

Anthony Sparks may be one of those people. Viola, who had been the talent coordinator for the Aspen Comedy Festival, saw Sparks’s one-man performance piece, “Ghetto Punch,” when he auditioned it, unsuccessfully, for Aspen.

Sparks characterized “Ghetto Punch” as an emotionally, if not factually, autobiographical comic rendering of what it is like to be a young black man in America. Viola invited Sparks to perform at PS-NBC soon after the space opened in the winter.

Sparks then went off to hone “Ghetto Punch” in clubs around town when he could, and in May he was invited back for a night when “best of” earlier PS-NBC performers could display their talents for NBC executives in town for network meetings.

“Those of us there that night were wondering if this will bear fruit,” Sparks said. “They actually had me do the part of my piece that was most challenging. They were not looking for homogenization at all. You’ve got to appreciate that they are making an effort.”

Performers at PS-NBC sign 30-day exclusive contracts with NBC. For that, they get the chance to perform or write for PS-NBC. Though they don’t get paid, they get all the technical support and stage-managing they need to put on their act.

Essentially, the contract they sign gives NBC first rights to actors and writers for a month. Viola videotapes everything and sends to Hirschfeld and others in Los Angeles the best of what he sees.

So far, no one has signed a development contract after that, but that doesn’t mean anyone is giving up on the experiment.

“My manager didn’t think it was a good idea to sign that contract,” said Ahna Tessler. She and her partner, Lauren Engel, have been invited by Viola to do their sketch comedy act three times at PS-NBC. “But it’s ridiculous because we--and most everyone who goes to PS-NBC--don’t have anything going on that would get in the way. We are up-and-coming people who go there. Sure, we may get a shot on a comedy festival or even with Comedy Central, but 30 days is not that long a time for something that could be great.”

On one foggy spring night, Mona Jackson, a young African American writer from New Jersey, was having a reading of a play she wrote that Viola had an inkling might have some good characters. The theme was that the United States had changed its election system to create a more equitable nation by having a computer pick people at random to be members of Congress. A dozen actors helped with the reading, and about 50 of their friends--along with Viola--made up the audience. Most of those watching liked what they saw. Viola was less enthusiastic.

“I was hoping you’d develop the characters, but you gave me what you thought might be a television show here,” Viola told Jackson after the hourlong show. “I would have rather seen just scenes, what you could make of these characters. What I don’t want is you to replicate what is on TV.”

But this was no cliched TV producer waving his arm and telling the writer to get out of his face forever. Viola said he does his best to be encouraging.

“The whole point of something like this is to help develop talent. The point is to bring people in, not push them away,” said Viola. “If we find a spark, we have to encourage it.”

Though dozens of acts have passed through PS-NBC and none has actually been signed, Viola sees possibilities among those he’s asked back and, in any case, is happy that NBC has given the downtown New York scene a shot.

“First of all, I don’t know the exact budget, but I’m betting that running PS-NBC for a year is about equivalent to one failed development contract, and they seem to give a lot of them out in Los Angeles,” Viola said. “And this is getting the network a lot of goodwill in the community here. They know it may be a long shot, but they also know we’re serious.”

Marla Ratner, a talent manager at Principato Management & Entertainment in New York, has had a few of her clients try out at PS-NBC. Some have been not what one would call standard network TV types.

“I think New York has its own flavor, more out there, more theatrical, more experimental,” Ratner said. “I don’t know that my clients or others who go to PS-NBC are exactly TV-friendly. I think they want to be true to the original vision in the shows they have put up. But Lou wants you to do what you do best, so he and the executives know what you can do.”

Hirschfeld bristles when it is suggested that the network would suck the life out of any talented non-mainstream performer or writer. Conversely, he said, the mainstream gets rerouted when talent surfaces.

“Andy Dick, Janeane Garofalo, they were hardly what you would expect going into TV, but they have entered the mainstream,” Hirschfeld said. “On the writing side, you find someone like Aaron Sorkin, who started in the theater and has made a successful segue to TV.

“And we think by being in downtown Manhattan, we will have a chance to bring in ethnic diversity into this space more easily than in the traditional Hollywood route,” he said. “We’ve had some pretty outrageous material performed in the space. Some really isn’t ready for prime time. One even had nudity in it. I have to admit that wouldn’t make the air, but what we are looking for is good writing, smart performances, creativity and a chance to develop some people without the pressure of Los Angeles sucking the creativity out.”

Tessler, for instance, isn’t upset that she’s been on the stage at PS-NBC three times and not been offered a contract. In fact, she’s ecstatic about it.

“Right now, we want to be in control of everything. We want our own TV show,” said Tessler, who characterizes her sketches as edgy, New York-style stuff. “They are encouraging us, letting us work things out, at PS-NBC. If we were in L.A., we would be seen once and either get a big deal or be out.

“I don’t know that we’ll get a development deal out of this, but we are getting the idea of how to do the sketches,” said Tessler, 26. “Besides, I don’t intend to go to Los Angeles before I have to. I love New York. This is where the fresh ideas are. Maybe NBC is seeing that.”