TV overlaps with my past

Holy krappenzees! I'm watching Bravo's Situation: Comedy, the sort of Project Greenlight for TV with Sean Hayes as the celebrity connection. They looked at 10,000 sitcom pilots, chose 10 for semi-finalists, five for finalists and two to actually shoot for consideration by NBC.

They intro the semi-finalists in this first episode and the last one they show turns out to be a guy I dated back in the early 1990s. Back then he was an accountant by day and a stand-up by night. We went out several times and what I remember from those outings is that I always paid half the check (comics never have money, but don't accountants make some?) and he kept asking me over and over, "Do you think I'm funny?" Things ended badly -- though the details escape me. I think he was just asking me out in hopes that I'd write a feature story about him for the paper I worked at. And look, he wasn't that funny.

So he's in this reality show, pitching his lame sitcom idea. He did get down to the final five, but blew it in his really boring spiel to the network comedy development execs. He was identified as an "accountant from Austin," so I guess this brief shot on reality TV is the most he's made of his comedy aspirations from years ago.

I just couldn't believe he wore baggy jeans and a really ugly cotton sweater to the network pitch meeting. With TV cameras rolling! Hey, hayseed, this is Hollywood!

Didn't escape notice either that two of the guys who made it all the way through -- their sitcom idea is about a middle-school kid who runs his life like a corporate exec... think "Donald Trump in the Middle" -- are extremely attractive blokes. Handsome sells better than shlubby and Austin accountant guy went right off the shlub meter.

Schadenfreude overload.