Ladies first. She's Gabi Moskowitz, resident of San Francisco, where she's been writing a blog called Broke Ass Gourmet since 20000, The premise: she's broke but resourceful.
He's David Holden, graduate of Seattle's Northwest School and Bard College, a Peace Corps volunteer in Thailand who migrated to Tinseltown in the early 1990s with an irreverant style of comedy that might have turned into a successful standup career but veered instead to script writing. "Undressed," "The War at Home," "Accidentally On Purpose," "Shake It Up.". Small steps, not always forward, but steady, cultivating relationships in a town known for backstabbing, using the skills of a stand-up comedian to hone the outlines of a story pitch, and, above all, maintaining personal discipline, knowing that no one has ever batted 1.000 . "Productivity is the key to morale," he says, .
And so CBS sent him to San Francisco to see what was up with this Gabi blogger-person. Broke Ass Gourmet describes itself as "the premier food and lifestyle blog for folks who want to live the high life on the cheap." A blog, a cookbook, fashion advice, all dispensed with good cheer. Eventually a script was written, accepted, tossed around, temporarily shelved, then uncovered by ABC Family (which had to buy the rights from CBS). And finally, a pilot was commissioned. The story? Well, partly "The Nanny," partly Julia Child, partly the real Gabi, partly writer's room brainstorming (e.g. "What if one of the characters was a real-life Top Chef?") and so on.
And lest you think these things are thrown together, no. It's expensive ($2 million and up) to produce even the most modest half-hour pilot, given that you have to design and build the set and build a production team--literally scores of people--out of whole cloth. Everyone wants the best (a good, freelance "punch-up" writer gets $15,000 per episode), and it does get cheaper (by half, probably) if the show gets picked up as a network series, but the people who complain that there's never anything new on TV are only partly right. Doing anything new on TV is just very, very expensive.
Who all is on the cast roster? In the key role of Gabi, Emily Osment (most recently seen on "Hanna Montana"); as the media millionaire where she lands a job, Jonathan Sadowski (of the series "$#*! My Dad Says"), as his mother, Annie Potts ("Gray's Anatomy," "Designing Women"). Most important, the network (ABC Family is owned by Disney) also brought in the star power of Ashley Tisdale ("High School Musical") as an exec producer.
Don't you thinking there's a huge element of fairy tale, of Cinderella and Prince Charming in this story? And I don't mean what happens on-screen. That's fiction. I mean the real life backstory. Gabi has a hip boyfriend, Matthew Evan Wolkenstein. David is single, but has justifiably proud siblings, parents, and a raft of supportive friends. As for Gabi and David themselves, it's safe to say they're both eating better than they were a couple of seasons ago.
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