NEW YORK -- On Jim Gaffigan's new comedy series, The Jim Gaffigan Show, the popular stand-up comic plays a comic named Jim Gaffigan.
Like the real Jim Gaffigan, he's married to Jeannie, an attractive woman he readily admits is out of his league (played by Ashley Williams). They, plus their five children, are squeezed into a two-bedroom walkup on Manhattan's Lower East Side.
On the show, which airs at 9 p.m. Wednesdays on TV Land, Jeannie is cool, capable and kooky, which makes her perfect for Jim, who reigns as a serial bumbler with a food fixation.
Autobiographical? Check, check, check, says Gaffigan.
"I don't know what I'm doing! I'm not pretending!" he says, his voice taking flight into his trademark squawk for emphasis. "I'm not in a fat suit and pretending to be lazy -- I am fat and lazy, and you know what? I wish I could be fatter and lazier.
"And I am married to a hot woman," he says. "This is not some network-formula show! This is reality!"
With his droll summation, Gaffigan, 49, has dipped into his stand-up act, which explores his version of the Freudian Id (which, left to its own devices, he argues, "would have us lying in bed eating bacon all day").
The Gaffigans conceived, wrote and produced the show together -- and made sure it captures their uniquely dizzy world and comic vision.
Things were different 15 years ago with Gaffigan's first series, a CBS comedy named Welcome to New York. Jeannie, whom Jim had started dating a few months earlier and who had experience in theater education, agreed to be his acting coach. But he had minimal input in shaping his character.
Welcome to New York had a swift demise, but the partnership between Jim and Jeannie only deepened as they went on to co-produce his TV stand-up specials. They wed in 2003.
His acting career also flourished, with appearances on Ed, That '70s Show and My Boys, but such supporting roles tied him down with little screen time to show for it -- and scant creative freedom.
"There's nothing that compares to the control of stand-up," he says. "Working for an hour-and-a-half a night, you get rather spoiled, especially with a growing family. I could eat dinner with our kids and then go to work."
Network interest in an autobiographical sitcom led Jim and Jeannie to reconsider series TV. It just might work: A self-portrait of their family, steeped in New York's chaos as they scrambled to stay true to their Midwestern values -- including their Catholic faith.
"It's an important element in our lives," Jeannie says. And it provides more grist for the comic mill, as in the episode when Jim by chance is photographed clutching a Bible, which he fears will jeopardize his comedy cred.
"We decided, 'Our life is very weird and kind of interesting,'" Jeannie says. "And we know how to write it -- so we were adamant that we had to have some kind of control."
The project migrated from NBC to CBS, then found a home at TV Land.
"The fact that we were shooting in Manhattan was enormous," Jeannie says. "We could have our older kids [ages 11 to 4] come to set after school. And our youngest, Patrick, we cast as the show's 2-year-old."
Meanwhile, ensuring the show looks true-to-life was as important to the couple as making sure the characters and stories ring true. Ninety percent of the show was shot on location, including Gaffigan haunts like the legendary Katz's Delicatessen. The Gaffigans' apartment is a real-deal clone of their residence (recently vacated for roomier digs).
"As a hands-on producer," Jeannie says, "I was saying, 'No, wait, we need more crumbs on the table because it's too clean for a family with five kids having dinner."
Accuracy, not just laughs, is being served.
Style on 07/26/2015