Norman Rockwell is Bleeding: An Interview with Comedian Christopher Titus

Judge Adam Arseneau

January 30th, 2006

Christopher Titus, comedian and star of the Comedy Central special Normal Rockwell is Bleeding and the Fox comedy Titus, took some time out of his schedule to give us a quick interview on the release of Titus: Season Three on DVD.

Judge Adam Arseneau was fortunate enough to catch up to Christopher Titus before going on stage in Cleveland and laughed his ass off talking to the comedian about his work.

DVD Verdict: Christopher, how you doing tonight?

Titus: I'm doing all right, man. Hey, you guys did a full review on the first box set, right?

DVD: Yeah, I reviewed that.

Titus: I read that! It was pretty good.

DVD: No kidding? You read that?

Titus: Are you kidding me? I'm so self-centered, I went right to it! (laughs)

DVD: Sweet! Well, we appreciate you taking the time to talk to us. I hear you're working on a new show? Can you tell me about it?

Titus: It's probably again something that shouldn't be done, but we're doing it anyway. (laughs) We sold the show to Showtime, but they were scared of it, so Comedy Central's doing it now. Here's the premise: I'm like Vic Mackey on The Shield, but due to the Fairness & Disabilities act, I'm forced to start this program called "Handi-capable Cadets." So I'm this bad-ass cop who's pissed off everybody from the mayor on down, and I get this assignment. I have to train these four handicapped undercover detectives. The show's called Special Unit.

DVD: You're kidding me. (laughs) And you wonder why Showtime was scared of it?

Titus: Just the premise makes me think I should have been kicked out of their office! (laughs) They should have called security on me! Let's just hope it doesn't suck! We're filming the pilot in February, and we're actually using real handicapped people. It's going to be pretty wild.

DVD: So tell me about Titus: Season Three. This was the last season, right?

Titus: Yep—fifty-four episodes! We did fifty-four. You know, it's funny—me, Brian Hargrove, and Jack Kenny were watching the show to do the commentary, on the episode with the terrorist hijacking, and we just looked at each other and said "Oh [expletive deleted], we couldn't do this kind of show today!" (laughs) When Zack comes out of the bathroom with the towel on his head and David's screaming "A La! A la!" over and over—(laughing) I watched it, shaking my head, saying "I cannot believe we thought this would work."

DVD: That episode was hilarious, but definitely some unfortunate timing.

Titus: Well, not really. In L.A., everybody watched everyone in New York freaking out, and I understand the whole East Coast freaking out. But on the West Coast, most people were like, "Hey, I don't have to go to work today!" So Jack and Brian asked me what I wanted to do. The way I saw it, the one thing terrorists want us to do is to not go to work. So I said, "Let's just be funny today. Let's just go to work." I think that episode was the answer for us.

DVD: So you don't see it as poor timing?

Titus: No, I don't see it as poor timing. Fox was scared to death of it, but I see it as brilliant timing. Nobody had the balls to do anything like that at the time. But they held off on that episode, and they held off on "The Protector" for a long time. But that's what we did, you know? If you keep it grounded in reality, you can flip it on them and make it funny. I remember one of our writers told me that we kind of painted ourselves into a corner with this show. And I think that's good, because great writing comes out of a show like that.

DVD: So the terrorist hijacking episode never made it to air, right?

Titus: Well, they all got aired eventually. But there were two episodes in Season Three that Fox freaked out about and kind of buried. There was "Insanity Genetic" and "The Protector," where I go to my niece's school with the baseball bat? (laughs) That one really freaked them out. But why that one, I don't know—I mean, come on—there's an episode where Tommy as a kid "sits" with an Irish Catholic priest! I'd pitch these ideas, and people would stare at me and say, "You're [expletive deleted] crazy!" But it was really funny!

DVD: It was kind of weird watching the progression the show made towards being serious and then suddenly going off the air. Like from the suicide episode to being arrested as a terrorist, to beating up a kid with a baseball bat, and then suddenly - bam—the show's over!

Titus: (sarcastically) Yeah, I wonder what happened? Gee! That came out of nowhere! (laughs) But we went dark early and stayed dark. Don't forget—in the second season, I was in a coma! I mean, they pulled the plug on me! And the first episode was called "Dad is Dead," and we had a pool going on when he was going to die!

DVD: (laughing) Oh, God, I remember that.

Titus: I don't think we really ever stopped doing what we always did. I mean, it all happened! My niece, who moved in with us, and we raised her, did get molested when she was a kid and we found that out after she moved in with us. It all happened. And the show was doing so well until Fox stopped promoting it. Even when they cancelled it, we were beating Andy Richter Controls the Universe and Grounded For Life in the ratings.

DVD: That's kind of what Fox does with good shows, eh?

Titus: (sarcastically) Yeah, what with that? I've never heard of that. (laughs) And this whole Arrested Development debacle—man, that bothers me. That show had like a hundred and one, a hundred and two rating all the time. The lowest Titus got was in the sixties, and the best we did was like, forty-three. In a way, it seems like they just tried to re-make Titus. Not to be cocky, but The War at Home—come on. And there's a new show on ABC called Crumbs, and our own producers worked with the guy who created that show before they came to Titus. All you can do is shake your head. (laughs)

DVD: There's got to be hard feelings about that kind of thing.

Titus: I tell you what. I mean, there's no real reason to be bitter. We did fifty-four episodes of a kick-ass show that nobody in the family genre has come close to. If most shows took the subject matter we took, it wouldn't be funny. It would be "A Very Special Episode"—(laughs)

DVD: But that's one of the things that made your show great. You guys always made fun of that kind of sitcom attitude. I remember reviewing the first season of Titus, typing out the synopsis, and saying "Okay, it's a show about alcoholism, and rape, drug abuse, and—"

Titus: (laughing) And abuse and violence and—

DVD:—and you're like—"Oh, wait. How can I explain this on paper?" But everyone I've ever shown the show to, loves it.

Titus: And then they would borrow the DVDs, and come back, and say "Why did this show get cancelled?"

DVD: Well, I'd just point to the Fox logo.

Titus: (laughs) Yeah, well, if you're into conspiracy theories, like the Kennedy assassination, and alien abductions? Check this one out. The president at Fox that cancelled Titus was a lady named Gail Berman, and she knew it was a good show. The week after the show got cancelled, there was an article in TV Guide that basically said, "What the [expletive deleted] happened to Titus?" They looked at our ratings, and couldn't figure out why a network would cancel a show that was doing so well. Well, the official response from Fox and Gail Berman was along the lines of, "We wish Christopher Titus all the luck in his future endeavors." It was basically the show business way of saying, "eat me."

DVD: Is that why it took so long to come to DVD?

Titus: Well, here's the "grassy knoll" theory. We wanted to release the show on DVD, but the show was not approved for release by Fox until Gail Berman left Fox. So my "grassy knoll" theory is, the DVDs are such an incitement of the show. See, I never watched them back then—I was in them, so I just thought I had watched them. But I sat down to watch all the episodes recently, and I hadn't seen them since we made them, and I was like "Whoa, David Shatral is brilliant! And Stacy Keach is amazing!" And I remember thinking that her not releasing the DVDs while she was still president was just evidence of a bad decision.

DVD: No kidding.

Titus: I remember telling my manager that at the time. I said that it was her mistake in canceling the show, but my mistake for smarting off to her. And he just looked at me and said, "Yeah, well, you're paying for both mistakes." (laughs).

DVD: Well at least you've got a new show coming up?

Titus: Yeah, I know. Why, do I sound bitter? (laughs) I shouldn't. I mean, we had such a great time making Titus.

DVD: I think you sound just the right amount of bitter.

Titus: (laughing) Oh, yeah?

DVD: No, really! I mean, everybody that liked the show was bitter when it got cancelled. It's got to be doubly bitter for you, because the show was personal. You aired your dirty laundry on national television.

Titus: Not just me—I aired my whole family's laundry on national television! Not to mention my wife! I mean, we had episodes where I actually had to clear them with her. (laughs)

DVD: Did using a sitcom as a forum to air this kind of stuff actually make things in your life better? Was it therapeutic at all?

Titus: So long as we could make it funny. Because when it all happens in real life, it's not funny. (laughs) But we had some great writers on our team—Jack Kenny and Brian Hargrove, Chris Sheridan, who went on to Family Guy. I mean we had some great guys on that show. I was like the guy with the flashlight, leading everybody into the darkness. The challenge was always how to make the material not so dark. All the stuff you bitch about in your life? If you can turn it into a joke, eventually it just becomes a joke.

DVD: Kind of what the show's all about, isn't it?

Titus: Yeah. The whole point of the show was how screwed-up people were way stronger than some guy who got everything handed to him. That guy goes out in the world and gets hit by a bus, because nobody taught him anything. He had no pain, he had no problems. I'm not dysfunctional—I'm evolving to the next level.

DVD: The most amazing revelation I had was realizing the show was filmed in front of a live audience, and didn't have a laugh track.

Titus: Oh God. I hate laugh tracks more than anything. So we did it in one take in front of an audience. Most sitcoms stop and start, but we'd just do it straight though. It was the only way to get real laughter, to do it like a play. And the laughter's so good; you think it is a laugh track!

DVD: Can you talk about the cast a bit?

Titus: Our cast was great because nobody was trying to overshadow anybody on that set. I wanted to surround myself with the funniest people, and I didn't care if I was funny or not. And we just got the funniest people.

DVD: Like Stacy Keach.

Titus: Oh, my God, Stacy Keach. We cast him, and Jack and Brian were laughing at his reading, but I wasn't laughing, because I thought he was going to come over and punch me. He actually really makes you feel like that. And Jack and Brian said, "If he actually makes you feel that way? He's the guy."

DVD: Anything else you'd like to add before I let you go?

Titus: The only thing I can think to say is, I know it was only fifty-four episodes, and we never made syndication—but I never sold it out. Fox kept asking me to tone it down, tone it down—and I never would. And that's one of the reasons it's not on the air anymore. But I'm proud of that. I mean, would you rather have fifty-four kick-ass episodes, or fifty-four episodes plus another few seasons that just blew? I'm happy with the fifty-four. And I end up in a mental institution. (laughs)

DVD: I love that that's how the show ended. Was that the original intention?

Titus: Sort of. Well, here's the ending I wanted to do: Titus is in the black-and-white space talking, and the camera slowly pans back to a security room with two guards watching the monitor, and it says "Happy Valley Mental Institution" on the wall. And the one guy says, "My god, this guy doesn't shut up, he just keeps telling these stories!"

DVD: Oh, my God. (laughs) That would have been great, too.

Titus: And I remember pitching it to everyone, and Jack and Brian said, "Man, we'd really be cutting our legs off with that one." (laughs) But I wish we had shot it, because if we'd known we were going off the air, we could have tacked it on the end.

DVD: Well, thanks for talking to us, Christopher! Have a good show tonight!

Titus: No problem! Thanks, Adam!