Top Story! Weekly has more than once gotten people from NBC shows to guest star on a Sunday that happened to fall right after the network cancelled their show. Memorably, Brian Kiley – Conan O’Brien’s head monologue writer – was our special guest two days after the final episode of “The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien”. And this month Parvesh Cheena from “Outsourced” was our guest star the Sunday after NBC announced the show would not be on the new fall schedule. Parv was great – you can watch his sketches on the TS!W website – and incredibly good natured about the show’s cancellation. So much so that he, and his equally awesome co-star Sharmila Devar did this segment – as their characters Gupta and Lata – about the new fall schedule. (And I worked in a little good-natured joke about my friend Jason Ritter.)
In just a month, Hartley Sawyer has become almost a semi-regular in Top Story! Weekly. He’s super talented and a great guy, so it’s a real pleasure to work with him. And now that we know him, we can write specifically for him. The week Osama bin Laden was killed, I knew I wanted to write a sketch for Hartley about a guy trying to pick up girls at a bar with his buddy, the Navy Seal just back from Abbottabad. And Hartley got to say one of the best final lines I’ve written for a sketch in a long time…
So the night before the royal wedding, we’re putting the Top Story! Weekly script together. We have two sketches called “The Royal Honeymoon” and we like them both, so we think about doing a runner – but if so, we need a third. Some brainstorming among the head writers and executive producers leads to the idea of Elton John interrupting the couple; song parody ideas are tossed around – and here’s the result, a tribute to the collaborative process of our show.
Neil Garguilo is one of my favorite actors to work with in the world. (In fact, he’s just plain one of my favorite people in the world.) And a guy as talented as Neil gets busy, so he doesn’t have as much time to do Top Story! Weekly as he or I would like. But he was able to do it this past Sunday, so I put together this sketch about Donald Trump’s allegedly racist comments and got to enjoy the magic that he and Phillip Wilburn have on stage together.
Fun fact: this sketch was performed within a half hour of President Obama’s announcement about the death of Osama bin Laden – look for the line at the top that was added to allude to that fact!
Mike Hughes' blog 
Watch Gupta and Lata from “Outsourced” Talk About the New Fall Schedule – with Parvesh Cheena and Sharmila Devar – from Top Story! Weekly Episode 103: “Apocalypse Now?”
May 31, 2011Top Story! Weekly has more than once gotten people from NBC shows to guest star on a Sunday that happened to fall right after the network cancelled their show. Memorably, Brian Kiley – Conan O’Brien’s head monologue writer – was our special guest two days after the final episode of “The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien”. And this month Parvesh Cheena from “Outsourced” was our guest star the Sunday after NBC announced the show would not be on the new fall schedule. Parv was great – you can watch his sketches on the TS!W website – and incredibly good natured about the show’s cancellation. So much so that he, and his equally awesome co-star Sharmila Devar did this segment – as their characters Gupta and Lata – about the new fall schedule. (And I worked in a little good-natured joke about my friend Jason Ritter.)
GUPTA AND LATA TALK ABOUT THE NEW FALL SCHEDULE by Phillip Wilburn and Michael Hughes
Starring Parvesh Cheena (Gupta), Sharmila Devar (Lata) and Phillip Wilburn (Anchor)
Directed by Michael Hughes
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