With all the controversy over HBO’s “Girls” I thought it would be timely to do an alternate version that might air on another network – and PBS seemed the most appropriate home for a show contrasting a refined appearance with a more earthy subject matter!
Shannon Ayers’ last show as a member of the Top Story! Weekly cast gave me one last chance to write a sketch to showcase her great Jennifer Aniston impression!!
TS!W 720: JENNIFER ANISTON’S SUMMER MOVIE PREVIEW by Michael Hughes
We had four women in the show this past Sunday and I wanted to make sure we had plenty of stuff for them. So I had the idea for a sketch where a group of female friends go to see the 3-D version of “Titanic” expecting to laugh at it, and got affected differently than they expected. Well, according to this article in the Huffington Post, this sketch might have been more true-to-life than I imagined!!
We do a show every Sunday night at iO West based on the news of the previous seven days. And when I saw that this past Sunday would be September 11, it posed a quandary: we couldn’t just ignore the anniversary, but anything we did would have to be tasteful and respectful while still being funny. And then I hit on it: make the sketch about the very difficulty we were having on doing a comedy show on the anniversary of a tragedy, only set it on the anniversary of another, analogous tragedy. I’m pretty proud of the results; I got more compliments on this sketch than on any I’ve written in a while.
We had a very attractive cast in Top Story! Weekly this past week. So when I started thinking about how to make a sketch about Dick Cheney’s new book – especially about the gap between Cheney’s account of what happened and everyone else’s – I thought about having Cheney cast someone very handsome to play him in the movie version of his book. That lead to the sketch below, which got the show off to a great start. But Hartley Sawyer and Phillip Wilburn get all the credit for the movie trailer!!
We put our scripts together on Friday nights. And on Friday night, June 24, the New York State Senate was voting on gay marriage. Clearly it was a story we’d have to address in Top Story! Weekly if it passed. Originally, I wrote this sketch so that famous New Yorkers were urging the Senate to vote in favor of gay marriage. But as I was finalizing the script, the bill passed, so I changed it to a more celebratory sketch, which worked much better. But the real highlight of this sketch is the showcase of our cast’s awesome impersonations. I looked at who we had that week, thought of who they could do, and the results were awesome. The audience applause got louder with every entrance.
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.
When Jimmy McMillan from The Rent’s Too Damn High Party went viral, I knew he was a classic example of a one-week story, so to make the most of him I put two sketches in Top Story! Weekly about him. Here’s the one I wrote. Jason Kelley as McMillan looks amazing.
Are you a New Yorker who wants to move into an apartment you can’t afford, get rid of an annoying mountain, or marry a shoe? There’s a political party for you!
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2 DAMN HIGH by Michael Hughes – from Top Story! Weekly Episode 75: “2 Damn High”
Mike Hughes' blog 
Watch “PBS Girls” from Top Story! Weekly Episode 148: “The Four- (Or Eight-)Year Engagement!!!
May 5, 2012With all the controversy over HBO’s “Girls” I thought it would be timely to do an alternate version that might air on another network – and PBS seemed the most appropriate home for a show contrasting a refined appearance with a more earthy subject matter!
PBS GIRLS by Michael Hughes
Starring Kipleigh Brown (Gwendolyn), Jen Cain (Athena), Shannon Ayers (Honora) and Gregg Lopez (Announcer)
Directed by Michael Hughes
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Tags:Girls, Gregg Lopez, HBO, HBO's Girls, Jen Cain, Kipleigh Brown, Lena Dunham, Michael Hughes, Mike Hughes, Shannon Ayers, spitroasting, Top Story! Weekly, vaginas
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