by L.A. Gonzalez.
Erica Oyama
There’s something inherently funny about dating shows like The Bachelor, where a group of single women compete for one man’s affection, hoping beyond reason to find true love on the reality TV stage in the span of a few short weeks.
Comedy writer Erica Oyama admits she watched the series with fascination and over time became a real fan of the popular cultural juggernaut. But it wasn’t until the 2010 season, while hosting a silly Bachelor viewing party with her actor/comedian husband Ken Marino (The State, Party Down) at their L.A. home that the idea struck to write a comedy about her longtime reality obsession.
“We had our friends, Adam Scott (Parks and Recreation) and his wife Naomi over to watch the finale, because they were fans of the show as well,” Oyama recalls. “We dressed up. They presented us with roses. It was a really ridiculous night.” Then the foursome watched as bachelor Jake Pavelka shocked fans by making a surprising choice in the episode’s closing moments. “Jake had these two options, the perfect, sweet girl and the bad girl everybody hated,” Oyama says. “And he picked the bad girl! It was such great TV. Because you just sat there and watched him in this car wreck, in slow motion, proposing to this crazy person.”
Jake Pavelka and Vienna Giradi in The Bachelor
The made-for-primetime moment inspired Oyama to pen a comedy short about the final episode of a reality dating series, where the bachelor character chooses “Ballerina, the crazy tranny” over Annie, the glaringly perfect girl. “We were just gonna shoot it, you know, for the internet,” Oyama says. “And then Ken was like, you could do a whole season of this. And we could just play around with all the stereotypes of the characters. We realized, oh, we could do a whole web series.”
Having watched the show for years, Oyama drew instinctively from her knowledge of the reality format and began brainstorming different archetypes to create a cast of over-the-top characters. She then went to work outlining the entire season. “And doing a little bit of math,” Oyama explains. “Because it has to go from 16 girls to one girl at the end. So it was just trying to figure out, who should go when, all the different arcs”. While working on the script, the husband-and-wife creative team decided to shoot a trailer with season highlights as a tool to secure funding for the Burning Love series. And Marino, who directs and stars in the series, cast many of his famous actor friends in the roles including Scott who plays the original snarky host—he was replaced by Michael Ian Black in the Yahoo series due to Parks & Rec production—and Ken Jeong (The Hangover) who appears in drag in a mostly improvised cameo as the last tranny standing.
“We did a lot of improv,” Oyama says. “And a lot of that improv informed the characters. So when I was writing the season, I just tried to incorporate a lot of what the actors were already doing and bring out different aspects of everyone’s character. And so that helped a lot.” The Alabama born scribe says Marino’s portrayal in particular was especially helpful in developing the main character, hunky yet sleazy fireman, Mark Orlando. “I think that false sincerity, the fake humility that Ken found was kind of key to making it all make sense,” she says. “So you kind of like him, but he’s so gross. It just kind of plays up the whole idea that, you know, why are all these women competing for this person.”
Finding the right tone was another vital step in the writing process. And Oyama and Marino agreed the key to Burning Love’s humor was to play it straight. “I like things that are sort of dry and also absurd,” Oyama says about her comedy style. “We just tried to take what was already funny and ridiculous about The Bachelor and make it even more ridiculous, while trying to make it feel as real as possible.”
Oyama’s comedic take on reality dating shows resulted in a smart, spot-on parody that not only pokes fun at some of the more bizarre, unquestioned elements of the genre, but in many ways pays homage to them.
“One of my favorite things in Burning Love is just the weird interstitial,” Oyama says. “Because on reality shows they always cut to a plant and a bird flying away. So we just played with that. And had just, like frogs….and a whale. We also had a gardener character who was doing strange stuff like sniffing a flower and gazing into the sunset. It was kind of weird and fun.”
With the help of Ben Stiller’s production company, Red Hour productions, who signed on as producers along with partners Paramount Insurge Pictures, the scripted comedy series eventually landed on Yahoo! Oyama, who had previously written for Children’s Hospital on Adult Swim and the comedy web series Wainy Days, says the online company gave her a lot of freedom, allowing her to be “weird and absurd” and take creative risks that would never fly on a TV network.
And though Yahoo! placed no restrictions on the length of each episode, the running times were a major concern for Oyama who worried that the 7-10 minute episodes she’d writen might be a bit too long for an online audience.
“I was concerned because I kept hearing people don’t have the attention span to watch something for longer than five minutes,” Oyama explains. “But there were so many characters, so much going on, that it ended up being longer than that. But we found that people stayed with it and were invested and didn’t really mind. Oyama credits the growth of online channels like Netflix and Hulu for the shift, as audiences have become acustomed to absorbing content in new, different ways.
Thanks in large part to a Jennifer Anniston clip from the show that went viral—she plays a contestant who hides in a panda suit to showcase her personality—the 14-episode scripted web series garnered early buzz when it debuted. And it continued to gain momentum as audiences became so invested, many held online debates each week, convinced these characters were actual people.
“We were surprised and became very entertained by the comment section,” Oyama says. “People would just get into fights with each other over whether or not it was real, and how could these people be so stupid as to be on this show. We wanted it to look like the real show. So I guess that’s good. But also, it’s not very encouraging, for society, that people thought it was real.”
The success of the Burning Love web series, which has been nominated for an Emmy and also reworked into a weekly half-hour TV series on the E! network, has opened new doors for Oyama in her writing career. Among other projects, she is currently working on a Fox sitcom pilot and also co-writing a movie adaptation of the children’s book, Go the Fuck to Sleep with husband Marino.
As Oyama points out, these opportunities wouldn’t have been possible had she not taken the initiative as a writer to put her ideas on the web, developing projects that showcase her distinct voice and particular brand of humor.
“A lot of these jobs have come about because people were fans of Burning Love, Oyama says. “I think people responded to the jokes and to the characters. That’s been my goal is to try to write things that are silly but also grounded in some sort of reality. Hopefully, we’ll be able to take that into films and make it successful.”
