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    ‘Party Down’ Is Back. Did You R.S.V.P.?

    The invitations have been sent, the appetizers plated, the bottles opened. Rows of glasses gleam like baby stars. And somewhere, on the fringes of the celebration, a cater waiter is about to do something very wrong.This was the template of “Party Down,” a Starz comedy that ran for two 10-episode seasons, debuting in the spring of 2009. Canceled just as critics and niche audiences were beginning to catch on, the show followed the disaffected employees of a mid-tier catering company as they moved from party to party, one per episode, filching booze, seducing guests, snorting coke,  flirting with Nazism and accidentally poisoning George Takei.The original 20 episodes never included a surprise party. But get your streamers and party blowers ready. Because in a surprise to just about everyone — most likely including the folks at Nielsen, who once awarded the show’s finale a 0.0 rating among 18- to 49-year-olds — “Party Down” is back. A six-episode revival will premiere on Starz on Feb. 24, with new episodes arriving weekly.Martin Starr, a returning cast member, seemed to genuinely marvel at the development.“This was the only show I’ve worked on where people came to work when they weren’t working,” he said in a group video call. “It’s crazy that we get to come back and do it again.”“Truth be told,” his co-star Ken Marino said, “the reason I came back to set when I wasn’t working is I was between homes.”Starr: “I do remember you were finding places to go to the bathroom that maybe didn’t have your name.”Marino: “I still do. I’m going to the bathroom right now.”Is this the same “Party Down” that failed to dominate cable television over a dozen years ago? Mostly. The show’s original creators, John Enbom, Dan Etheridge, Rob Thomas and Paul Rudd, remain, as executive producers, and Enbom oversees a small staff of writers. The party-a-week structure also endures, as does the original cast — with the exception, based on the five episodes provided in advance, of Lizzy Caplan.In the revival, all of the original main characters (except for Casey, played by Lizzy Caplan, not pictured) are either pulled back into cater waiting or never stopped. Starz“All of us, for the entire 13 years since we stopped shooting the show, all we wanted to do is make more ‘Party Down,’” the show’s lead, Adam Scott (“Parks and Recreation,” “Severance”), said in a separate interview last month. “We all would have been there for free.”But the world has changed in the dozen or so years since the original run was canceled. So have the actors. Unknowns or barely knowns when the show debuted, most have since become household names. (The others? Depends on the household.) And they’ve all seen the current crop of disappointing reboots and reprises. “Party Down” could just be the rare show to get it right, mixing the perfect cocktail of star power, nostalgia, growth and gags.Then again, the characters never put a lot of muscle into bartending. So here’s a Zen koan for a deeply un-Zen show: Can you throw the same party twice?Are we having fun yet?The first run of “Party Down” was both structural marvel and joke spectacular. Each episode was simultaneously a workplace comedy, a hangout comedy and a procedural — a sitcom that never sat down. The celebrations it featured — birthdays, after parties — typically bordered the entertainment industry and nearly all of the cater waiters harbored industry dreams of their own.Those dreams eluded them, which fueled the philosophical inquiry at the show’s center.“What we were asking was: How long do you chase the dream?” Thomas, one of the creators, said. “When do you grow up? When do you quit banging your head against the wall?”The “Party Down” staff are all trying to make it, as actors, screenwriters and comedians. (Marino’s Ron, the manager, has a different dream: a Soup ’R Crackers franchise.) Only Henry (Scott), who has traded beer-commercial celebrity for free-floating despair, has opted out. The actors were trying back then to make it, too. None of the original cast — Caplan, Ryan Hansen, Jane Lynch, Marino, Scott, Starr — were anything like famous when the show began. Acting in a comedy about the entertainment industry’s has-beens, also-rans and never-wills resonated with the cast, sometimes uncomfortably.“It felt so close to home, this show, because I felt like I could be a caterer the next day easily,” Hansen said.Scott, who at the time had yet to play a lead, then shared that sense of career tenuousness. The cast felt deeply connected to the show in those first seasons, he said, and protective of it. “We just wanted to do it forever, because it made us feel better,” he said. “It really did.”“All of us, for the entire 13 years since we stopped shooting the show, all we wanted to do is make more ‘Party Down,’” Scott, fourth from left, said.Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesThe salaries, though small, kept a few of the actors on the sunny side of financial precarity. The camaraderie helped, too. (That camaraderie remains; I had four of the actors together on a video call, and I have never heard grown men exchange so many “Love yous.”) Several actors separately compared the original shoot to summer camp.That genuine affection altered the show’s tone. Some first season episodes included “edgy” humor — gay jokes, post-racial jokes. (“It’s cringey, yeah,” Starr said.) But the creators quickly realized they didn’t need that edge. The show was sadder than that. Funnier, too. The characters are screw-ups, sure, but the show suggests that everyone is a screw-up, especially after an hour at an open bar. So maybe the best thing is to find common cause as you pass the hors d’oeuvres.“It’s about people who think that they’re going to find happiness in something out there,” Lynch said. “But what they have right in front of them is really quite sweet.”Lynch shot the first eight episodes. Then she had to leave for the Fox show “Glee.” Marino hired a stripper for her wrap party. The stripper, Lynch recalled, smelled of French fries. The show went on, with Jennifer Coolidge replacing Lynch for two episodes and Megan Mullally, the only actor who was already well-known, coming in for the final 10.The creators believed that it would keep going, even though, according to Nielsen, the Season 2 finale attracted only 74,000 viewers. Starz had other plans. Those plans didn’t involve letting the creators take the show elsewhere. “Party Down” languished.One decade, zero dinnersIf the original run argued that it’s healthier to let some dreams die, the creators and the cast could never quite manage that. There were talks, every year or so, of getting the crew back together — for a special, for a movie, for a move to another network. Friends and fans often asked Marino about it.“I was like, ‘They’re working on it,’” he said. “‘It’s going to happen! Right around the corner!’” It took him eight or nine years to accept that maybe that corner wasn’t coming.Then in 2019, Starz appointed Jeffrey Hirsch as its new president and chief executive. Thomas reached out to Hirsch and began pitching the show again. Hard. This time, Starz said yes.That was only the first hurdle. The actors had conflicts and prior commitments now. The revival was approved in the summer of 2021, with production scheduled for early 2022. Lynch was to begin rehearsing a Broadway musical. Scott was making the Apple TV+ show “Severance.” Mullally had booked a movie being shot in Idaho.Somehow a six-week window was found, even though that window involved flying Mullally to Los Angeles every weekend and back to Sun Valley by Monday.When “Party Down” debuted in 2009, none of the main cast were anything like famous.StarzIn the new season, the main cast has become more diverse, with the inclusion of two new regulars: Zoë Chao, second from left, and Tyrel Jackson Williams, far right.Starz“We could never get together for dinner for a decade,” Etheridge, a creator, said. “But when we came to shoot the show, everybody was there.”Everybody except for Caplan, who had signed onto the FX series “Fleishman Is in Trouble.” (Asked whether Caplan might make a surprise appearance in Episode 6, Starz declined to comment.) Enbom had originally structured this new season around the on-again-off-again relationship between Henry and Caplan’s Casey. He had to restructure it, adding a new character, a studio executive played by Jennifer Garner. The revival’s first episode takes time out to heckle Caplan: Casey, now a successful comedian, can’t make a crew reunion.“She’s shooting in New York,” Starr’s Roman, still an aspiring “hard sci-fi” writer, says. “Too big time for the likes of us.”There were fewer jokes in real life. Hansen tried to make light of the situation. “Listen, we get it,” he said. “She had a job, whatever. I mean, I personally turned down a Marvel movie to do ‘Party Down.’”“Tell that to everybody,” he added.But just about everyone described themselves as heartbroken, including Caplan. “If I think about it for too long, I start to cry,” she wrote in an email. She sent cupcakes to the shoot.The bow tie abidesHollywood has transformed in the years since “Party Down” first concluded, and in some ways the show has, too. Gratuitous boobs are gone now. And the catering crew, once blindingly white, has become more diverse with the inclusion of two new regulars: Sackson, a YouTube-style content creator played by Tyrel Jackson Williams, and Lucy, a chef played by Zoë Chao who styles herself as a “food artist.”Yet, the sweet-sour, slightly funky flavor of “Party Down” — like a margarita made with off-brand liquor — is mostly unaltered. This seems to be the rare revival that understands what made the original work, yet can still move (or move just enough to include the occasional TikTok dance challenge) with the times.“We kept doing what we’d always been doing, just with new details,” Enbom said. “Because society certainly has not changed into a more wholesome place.”Have the returning characters changed? That depends on how much you and your therapist believe that change is possible. “They’re still the same lovable knuckleheads,” Mullally said. “Most of these people haven’t really moved on, or they haven’t really become any happier, or more fulfilled in their lives.”Friends and fans often asked Marino, top left, whether the series would be revived. “I was like, They’re working on it!,” he said. “Right around the corner!” It took nearly 13 years.Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesSlinging hors d’oeuvres hits different and more darkly in midlife. Still, the creators and the cast didn’t want the revival to feel like a bummer.“It’s going to be fun watching the characters try to claw their way toward something other than their current circumstances,” Scott promised.And if not exactly “fun,” then certainly relatable. “Really who gets what they want in this life?” Lynch said.She probably meant that rhetorically. But the “Party Down” die-hards, Lynch included, did get what they wanted, a third season. And they seem to have delighted in making it, though Marino joked that he’d had to slim down before he could fit into his signature pink bow tie.“Had to work off that neck fat,” he said. “Got my neck nice and lean.”Slipping on that outfit was a little more stressful for Chao, a newcomer. She had watched the show, years after its debut, while working a food-service survival job herself. “Party Down” had made her feel less alone. She didn’t want to ruin it. “I whispered to myself every day, going onto set, ‘Be the least funny, but by as little as possible,’” she said.Williams expressed similar gratitude and anxiety. “Everyone was so sweet and welcoming from the very beginning,” he said. “It never felt like an intimidating environment.” And yet, he added, “there was still like this insane fear.”The returning cast faced related, if less acute, worries. They have been in the business long enough to understand how revivals can go wrong. (A few of them had even appeared in revivals that flopped.) But they were reassured by the scripts, written by Enbom and a small staff, which suggested a continuity of character and tone and food-poisoning-induced body horror. There was also the pleasure of being together again — a little older, a little grayer, but still able to drop a tray on cue.Will the ratings for this coming season be better? Comfortingly, they can’t get much worse. But the cast and creative team are counting on the show’s turning enough heads that Starz will greenlight a fourth season. (“You better believe I’m not missing that one,” Caplan wrote.)Though Starr is inclined to cynicism, he sounded only mildly sardonic in discussing this ambition. “I really do hope we’re allowed to come back and do it again and keep up this little charade we’ve got going,” he said.Hansen put it a bit more pragmatically. “In 12 years, people are going to love Season 3.” More

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    In ‘Severance,’ Adam Scott Gets to Work

    The actor’s latest role is in another workplace series, but this one is more dystopian and involves elective brain surgery. Real-life parallels abound.“Severance,” an unnerving workplace drama, was originally scheduled to begin filming in March 2020, but pandemic shutdowns pushed the shoot to the fall. So in October 2020, Adam Scott, the show’s star, left his family in Los Angeles and flew to New York.For more than eight months, on the days when he could work — production paused a few times for positive tests, and Scott himself caught Covid-19 in February 2021 — he was driven to a busy studio in the South Bronx and surrounded by (shielded, masked) colleagues. Then he was driven back to a silent Tribeca apartment where he spent his nights alone, which made for an odd parallel with the show itself.“Severance,” which premieres its first two episodes on Apple TV+ on Feb. 18, takes a speculative approach to work-life balance. Scott plays Mark Scout, a department chief at Lumon Industries, a shadowy corporation. (When was the last time a TV show had a corporation that wasn’t?) Mark and his co-workers have each voluntarily undergone a surgical procedure known as severance, which creates a mental cordon so that your work self has no knowledge or memories of your home self and vice versa. Think of it as an N.D.A. For the soul.Scott, 48, hasn’t always had great balance. “My boundaries are all over the place,” he said. “I’ve often put far too much of my self-worth into whether I’m working or not and the perception of my work once I’ve done it. That’s unhealthy.” Living by himself, away from his wife and two children, grieving his mother who had died just before the pandemic, that balance didn’t get better.Scott in “Severance,” in which his character has a surgical procedure that creates a mental cordon between his memories of work and of home. The shoot was an oddly parallel experience.Atsushi Nishijima/Apple TV+Still, the job gave him a place to put those feelings. The role demands that he alternate between the guileless “innie” Mark, a vacant middle manager, and the dented “outtie” Mark, mourning his dead wife. Some scenes have the feel of a workplace comedy, a genre Scott knows intimately. (Imagine “Parks and Recreation,” where Scott spent six seasons, remade by Jean-Paul Sartre.)Others have the feel of a thriller, a drama, a sci-fi conjecture — all styles he is less familiar with. Ultimately, this dual role allows Scott to do what he does best: play a blandly handsome everydude while also showing the pain and shame and passion underlying that pose.“He has this understanding of how strange it is to be normal,” said Ben Stiller, an executive producer and director of the series. “There’s a normalcy to him, a regular guyness. He also has an awareness that there’s no real regular guy.”Scott has only ever wanted to be an actor. As a child in Santa Cruz, Calif., he watched as a film crew transformed his street into a set for a mini-series version of “East of Eden.” The road became dirt. The houses reverted to their Victorian origins. Horses and carriages drove past his lawn. This was magic, he thought, and he wanted to do whatever he could to enter what he called “that crazy magical make-believe world.”Whenever he had a moment alone (and as the youngest child of divorced parents, this was pretty often) he would imagine himself as the hero of his own movie — usually a Steven Spielberg movie. He acted throughout school, except for a year or two in high school when he worried what theater kid status would do to his popularity. But he was also a water polo player, so somehow it all worked out.Scott, 48, barely scraped by for years in pursuit of his acting dream until a role in the 2008 comedy “Step Brothers” changed his life. “I was hanging on by a piece of floss for 15 years,” he said. Philip Cheung for The New York TimesHe enrolled in a two-year program at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in Los Angeles. A classmate and fast friend, Paul Rudd, admired his work even then. “I’m like, this guy’s really funny,” Rudd remembered. “And dry and really bright, obviously.”Scott graduated at 20, made the rounds and spent a decade and a half booking just enough work to keep himself solvent — a few episodes here, a supporting part in a movie there — without ever feeling like he’d arrived.“I was hanging on by a piece of floss, for 15 years,” he said.In the early ’00s, his wife-to-be, Naomi Scott (then Naomi Sablan), asked him if he had a backup plan. “And it was so, so painful, his reaction to that,” she recalled. “He was like, ‘There is none.’”Then it happened. He landed a role in the 2008 Will Ferrell-John C. Reilly comedy “Step Brothers” after another actor dropped out. Then he starred as Henry in the cult Starz comedy “Party Down,” replacing Rudd, who had other commitments. He missed out on a role on the NBC sitcom “Parks and Recreation,” but the show’s creators brought him in at the end of the second season as Ben Wyatt, a love interest for Amy Poehler’s Leslie Knope. Suddenly, he had become a left-of-center leading man.In “Step Brothers,” he played a yuppie chucklehead, but the roles in “Party Down” and “Parks and Recreation” felt more personal. He brought those years of not making it to Henry, a would-be actor whose career has been deformed by a series of beer commercials, and to Ben, a strait-laced accountant with a disreputable past.Scott with Ken Marino, left, in the cult Starz comedy “Party Down,” in which Scott played a failing actor whose career was deformed by a series of beer commercials.Ron Batzdorff/Starz“I was like, oh, of course, I feel deeply all of these things,” Scott said, “Having been here for 15 years and not having a whole lot to show for it, and being a bit wounded by the circumstances of this town.”He loved the work. “His defining characteristic is that he just really wants to do a good job,” Michael Schur, a creator of “Parks and Recreation,” told me.But he didn’t love everything that came with it. “I started getting recognized, and it just felt completely different than I had imagined that feeling for those 15 or so years.” Scott said. “It felt more like I had a disease on my face than it did being recognized.”“It didn’t feel like this warm acceptance and hug,” he continued. “I always thought it would feel like love or something, but it’s a weird, isolating feeling.”Scott was speaking on a video call from his Los Angeles home. The call had started a little late because he had spilled an espresso all over the table where his computer sat. The espresso had come from a top-line Italian contraption that takes a half-hour to warm up and that he cleans lovingly every night. If these sound like the habits of a man to whom the small stuff matters, maybe!Scott (with Nick Offerman, left, and Sam Elliott, right) starred in the hit NBC comedy “Parks and Recreation” for six seasons. “He has a powerful store of humility,” Offerman said.Colleen Hayes/NBCIn conversation, he was candid, self-critical, determinedly nice, without quite sacrificing the wryness that often defines him onscreen. He had shown up in the video window — in glasses, ghost pale, neckbearded — wearing a T-shirt and a sweatshirt underneath a flannel. A half-hour in, he took the flannel off.“Sorry, I just started sweating under your question,” he said. (The question: “What made ‘Party Down’ so great?”) He doesn’t love doing press, but he made it seem as if we had all the time in the world. He kept telling me how great I was doing.“He has a powerful store of humility,” Nick Offerman, his “Parks and Recreation” co-star, had told me. Offerman also said that what Scott does so well — onscreen, but maybe offscreen, too — is to embrace what he called, “a sort of geeky normalcy, the flavor of behavior that most people try to avoid if they can help it, because it’s too human.” (Offerman also told me to ask what Scott does to his hair to make it so voluminous, but Scott wasn’t talking.)Scott isn’t cool. Unapologetic in his fandom, he has even made a podcast about how much he loves U2. His enthusiasm for R.E.M. is legendary. Often his characters go a little too hard, want things a little too much. (Evidence? “The Comeback Kid,” a Season 4 episode of “Parks and Recreation,” in which an out-of-work Ben takes a deep dive into Claymation. And calzones.)But several of his colleagues also identified a kind of reserve in him — a sense that he holds something back while performing, which makes the performance richer.“It didn’t feel like this warm acceptance and hug,” Scott said of becoming someone recognizable. “I always thought it would feel like love or something, but it’s a weird, isolating feeling.”Philip Cheung for The New York Times“There is something about the set of his eyes,” Schur said. “You just sense that there’s depth there, something that you can’t immediately access.”Poehler, Scott’s “Parks and Recreation” co-star, echoed this. “There’s a very internal, secret, secretive part of him as an actor,” she said.That tension makes him right for the linked roles of “Severance.” The try-hard part works for the “innie” Mark, a man who just wants to do a great job, no matter how bizarre the job is. And that reserve helps with “outtie” Mark, who spackles his pain with booze, jokes and distance.“It’s the same guy,” Scott explained. “It’s just one is more or less clean, and the other has lived many years and has gone through a lot of things.” Playing the “outtie” made him realize how much he had pushed away his own grief over his mother’s death. So that’s in there, too.It was a long shoot and, given the pandemic protocols, often a lonesome one. Some days were spent almost entirely within a windowless Lumon Industries room — all fluorescent light and plastic partitions and soul-crushing wall-to-wall carpet. “It definitely kind of drove me mad,” John Turturro, Scott’s co-star, told me.Scott put it more mildly. “It was a strange eight months,” he said.But he had a job, the only job he has ever wanted. So Scott, who has never held a real office job, showed up to the imitation office every day that a negative P.C.R. test permitted. He had work to do. More