Mitch Hedberg’s Sitcom Pilot Was A ‘Disaster’

The stars were aligning for Mitch Hedberg in the 1990s. Time Magazine called him “the next Seinfeld.” The Fox network agreed, handing the comedian half a million dollars to create the next monster sitcom. But as Hedberg told Howard Stern in 2005, “That didn’t materialize.”

He tried to make that Fox pilot, but “it was a disaster,” Hedberg laughed. Didn’t he have any idea what he wanted to do on TV? “That’s just it,” he said. “I didn’t have an idea.”

“I thought I could just roll into Hollywood and lay back and they would just tell me exactly what to do,” he said. “If you don’t have an idea, you’re screwed.”

Sitcoms of that era made TV stars out of stand-up comedians by turning their acts into show premises. Tim Allen was an aggro male who liked power tools. That became Home Improvement. Roseanne Barr sarcastically referred to herself as a “domestic goddess” — her roll-my-eyes approach to housewife duties turned into Roseanne. Jerry Seinfeld’s observations about minutiae became Seinfeld, a sitcom about a comedian with observations about minutiae.

But what to do with Hedberg? He specialized in spacey, drawling one-liners like, “When you walk in New York, a lot of times people will hand you flyers. It’s like they’re saying, ‘Here, you throw this away.’” Those punchlines, delivered in random, just-throwing-it-out-there style, killed in comedy clubs, but how do you turn his stoner observations into a television premise?

“I met with a lot of people, and they all had weird ideas,” Hedberg told Stern. “Like the guy who writes with Mike Judge on that cartoon. He said, ‘I see you as a tennis instructor.’” Despite Hedberg nodding his head in agreement at the ludicrous idea, nothing came of that concept. 

The biggest problem in translating Hedberg to episodic TV? “I don’t know what my point of view is,” he admitted. “I don’t have one. And they’ve had like some really good writers from Hollywood who just couldn’t even figure out my point of view.” 

There’s not a lot of information floating around about Hedberg’s failed sitcom pilot, although an unaired first episode of an MTV comedy reality show, The Mitch Hedberg Project, is out there for viewing. Maybe the problem is that Hedberg wanted to be a stand-up comedian all along, and sitcom stardom was a career path being forced on him. He had a joke about Hollywood trying to turn comedians into actors or talk-show hosts: “All right, you’re a cook. Can you farm?”

Hedberg simply wasn’t a sitcom farmer. The only thing he knew he wanted to do on television? “I want to take JJ Walker’s ‘Dy-no-mite!’ I want to do that again.”