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::TV NEWS::
LE Newsletter - February 2, 2012
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Vera Santamaria Brings The Funny
Source:
www.globeandmail.com - By John Doyle
(Jan 29, 2012) "I live in Hollywood,"
Vera Santamaria
tells me. "My
family are all, 'Oooh, Hollywood!' But, actually, it's like
living on Yonge Street."
It's a warm January afternoon. We are sitting on the patio of
Lucky Baldwin's, a bar in Pasadena featured on Big Bang
Theory, the hottest comedy on network TV. It seems
appropriate to meet Santamaria here, a place that's real but
made famous by fictional television. Working in TV, writing
scripts, telling stories has been her life - from a start in
2002 on CBC's Our Hero, a show described as "a teen
version of Ally McBeal," to Degrassi, Little Mosque on
the Prairie and on to L.A. and shows including Outsourced
and, right now,
Community.
As a producer and writer on that acclaimed comedy, she's at the
top of the TV ladder.
With her background and heritage she brings a piquant voice to
writing for television. But the most distinctive aspect of her
work is the puncturing of pretension and pomposity. On Little
Mosque, she wrote an episode where the imam's shoes get
stolen at the mosque, and another where a character thinks he's
dying and tries to make amends to the community. The synopses
sound slight, but both are goofy-clever, illuminating
affectations and vanity.
"I think I wrote some episodes that successfully walked the line
between being culturally specific and 'funny just 'cause,' " she
says, "episodes that would start with some culturally distinct
detail but then spin out into something that was hopefully funny
in its own right. It also helped that I had insider knowledge on
some of the themes the show touched upon, like being the child
of parents who emigrated to Canada and everything that's great
and funny and weird about that."
Community is a deadpan social satire set among a small
group of oddballs at a community college. Created by Emmy-winners
Joe and Anthony Russo (Arrested Development), it's
acclaimed for its rich, sardonic humour - and by the time
Santamaria was hired last year, the show was noted for episodes
mocking conventional TV genres. A good fit for her style,
clearly.
It's considered brilliant and cool, but not a massive hit. NBC
has parked it temporarily off-air to introduce some mid-season
shows before bringing it back this spring. Santamaria has solo
control of one episode that hasn't aired yet - and it's her one,
minor frustration with the job.
Community is the kind of show that she would have watched
as a teenager, living in the Rexdale area of Toronto. "My
parents were very protective, so they liked the kids [she has
one brother and one sister] to stay at home and watch TV. I
watched everything. My parents love to laugh so we always
watched a lot of comedies. My dad loved to watch Carol
Burnett. I liked to watch Golden Girls, Three's
Company, everything."
In conversation, her parents are mentioned often. They came to
Canada from India in 1969, settled in Sudbury, Ont., and in 1974
moved to Toronto, where Vera was born. She says that a
continuing part of her relationship with her loving and
supportive parents - her mother was an educational assistant and
dad is an elementary school teacher - is her search for ways to
assure them that she does, in fact, have a real job. "They
supported my writing, always. But they did say something like,
'Are you sure you don't want to get a teaching degree, just as a
backup?' "
It was while working on the comedy series How To Be Indie
(aimed at the tween audience, it ran on YTV for two seasons,
2009 and 2010) that she convinced them she had a real job. Her
parents were proud that she co-created it and it was about a
young South Asian girl trying to fit into school and life in
Canada. But what mattered too was that she had a designated
parking spot on the set. "I took a photo of my parking spot with
my name on it, sent it to my parents and they were impressed, at
last."
At the memory of this, her grave and winsome face breaks into
broad smile. This is a striking moment in our conversation
because, for a comedy writer, she seems a very serious person.
She talks with deliberation, and she holds eye contact
constantly. One knows instinctively that she is an observer,
studying others, and the mischief that comes out in her comedy
writing will rise to the surface later.
How To Be Indie matters a lot in her life and career.
There was seriousness behind the show and, indeed, at the very
basis of her compulsion to write TV shows. "Writing found me,"
she says. "I was a kid watching TV and I wondered why I didn't
see a family like mine on TV. You're just a kid and you're
asking, 'What's not funny about me and my family? And people
like us. What's wrong with us?' "
These questions inspired her to do a high school project about
the lack of "people like us" on TV. She made it funny, and
people liked it, so she kept writing and trying to be funny. Her
determination wavered a bit at Ryerson University where she took
a degree in Radio and Television Arts and, technically, headed
for a career in journalism. "The other day I found drafts of all
these letters I was sending out. 'Dear Marketplace, I would
really like to write for the show.' That kind of thing. I just
wanted to write, really. And step by step, I got there."
First she was a lowly script co-ordinator on Our Hero and
then a script she wrote landed with Linda Schuyler, co-creator
of the Degrassi series and executive producer of
Degrassi: The Next Generation. In 2007 Santamaria was a
writer on the show and executive story editor. "I was
star-struck by Degrassi," she says. "My sister and I
watched the original series when we were kids. It was a show
that felt Canadian, that felt like it was about people like us.
It's a legendary show. People here in L.A. are actually very
impressed that I worked on Degrassi."
That period was a golden age for Degrassi. Two of the
female leads would become major stars, Nina Dobrev on Vampire
Diaries and Shenae Grimes on 90210. But it was actor
Aubrey Graham, now known as the superstar singer Drake, whom
Santamaria remembers most fondly. "I loved writing for him. He
was a natural. Drake wouldn't know me from hole in the ground,
but it was pleasure to create stories for his character."
The Degrassi job led to Little Mosque on the Prairie,
another show that, she felt, inched toward depicting the Canada
represented by her family. She is emphatically dismissive of the
idea that the show is controversial. "Little Mosque is a
light family comedy about a community that lives in rural
Saskatchewan. The fact that the show was even considered
'controversial' should have been the controversy. In my opinion,
depicting Muslims and Islam shouldn't automatically be met with
more contention than depicting any other faith would."
After Little Mosque came How To Be Indie, that
first "real job," and a very personal creation that, because it
was aimed at that age group between kids and teenagers, flew
under the radar of Canadian media coverage. But it had a huge
and devoted audience on YTV. The flimsiest of shows, it was
about little Indie Mehta (Melinda Shankar) dealing with both
school and family, where she felt little understood - but
everything worked out as long as she had a sense of humour about
culture clashes and boys.
"I just channelled family, my relationships and the situation of
my friends," says Santamaria.
In 2010, she moved to LA. "I had five seconds of bravery," she
says. "I just decided to do it. I'd written a spec script for a
new show and decided to try to make it in L.A., in the TV world
here. If I hadn't had those five seconds, I'd still be in
Canada."
She had few contacts, but a meeting with bosses of the NBC
comedy Outsourced, one of the network's highly-touted
shows for the 2010/11 season, led to an instant job offer. The
show, a satire set at an Indian call centre, a workplace to
which American jobs have been lost, was risky for NBC. Would
American viewers find the Mumbai setting exotic or would they
hate it?
Reviews were mixed and the ratings went up and down for a show
that was, for network TV, daringly droll about cultural mix-ups
between American bosses and Indian workers. "What did I learn?
For now, America still likes their Indian characters in small
doses, I guess," she says ruefully. "Some of the feedback
bordered on racist. It was a time when this Canadian was baffled
by the fuss."
When NBC cancelled Outsourced last year, she was hired to
work on Community, another show considered risky, though
more for creative and storytelling tactics than cultural
reasons. And while she waits for her episode to air, she works.
Always writing. "I'm currently consulting on, as well as in
talks, to develop projects for CBC and CTV. I'm helping friends
develop another show, working on my own comedy pilot. I can't
stop writing. This meeting is a real distraction from it."
So I let her go back to work, back to Hollywood, where's she
made it in the TV business. And her family should be impressed,
as any family would be. |
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::ENTERTAINMENT NEWS WITH A CANADAN TWIST::
