Past My Bedtime
The early 2000s were a different time, David Letterman was still on the air, no one was fighting online on Facebook or Twitter, and tv executives were so desperate to replace a recently deceased obnoxious 50 something talk show host that a charming 10-year-old whose catchphrase was “it’s past my bedtime!” almost became an overnight sensation.
Well, almost anyway. That’s the story of Past My Bedtime, a new Audible Original oral history 10-episode mockumentary starring Stranger Things David Harbour as a former journalist obsessed with finding out why 10-year-old Donnie Dixon, who was whisked away from his small town life and taken to New York City, only lasted six minutes as a television talk show host before the show went off the air. Whoopi Goldberg also stars as the tv agent tasked with getting Donnie on the air and convincing his Midwest parents that he was up for the job.
I was captivated by Harbour’s wry engaging performance that was very reminiscent of his droll comedy stylings in the Netflix
Past My Bedtime is tremendously engrossing laugh-out-loud audio that will make you believe that Donnie Dixon and his protective dad and starry-eyed mom deserved better than what he got. What happened when Donnie stayed up past his bedtime? Sign up now for Audible to find out!
I spoke with the writers Max Silvestri and Leah Beckmann over Zoom
I must know what David Harbour was like to work with.
Leah Beckmann: We spent 5 days with him and by the end were completely in love with him. He’s so charming.
You must have seen Frankenstein’s, Monsters, Monster, Frankenstein.
Max Silvestri: Yes and John Levenstein, who plays himself in our podcast, was the writer of that and is a friend of Davids, so we knew going in that David was good at poking at his image.
Leah: He was very much in on the joke.
He felt like an investigative journalist investigating himself.
Max: It was very fun to write a character whose biggest blind spot is their personality.
Did you write for him in mind?
Max: I had written for him before in a show called Q-Force where he played this buffoonish character. David can play someone who believes they are high status and is telling on themselves constantly, but does it with such a sweet unawareness that you don’t hate him for it.
Is that what you were looking for in that character?
Leah: Yeah, I think we loved the idea of someone who’s unaware. You can almost get away with being a dick when you’re so unaware. It’s an endearing quality. He has no awareness at all which makes him charming to us.
Max: David has such great dramatic chops and gets to play very tortured, fully developed, intense characters, but he also does comedy often and is able to play the drama of what his character believes is the most criminally under-reported story of the last quarter century. We knew we could push David as Phillip because Phillip is the one choosing to edit the piece this way. Every time he puts himself in a moment that reveals himself as unaware with people in his life, it’s Phillip showing that.
He’s telling on himself a lot.
Leah: Yes, he is! We had a running joke with him where he’s talking to his editor and his team, but he doesn’t have one. It’s just him creating this podcast, so all these choices are his choices alone.
Max: Even in the way he worked with our producers that did the sound design, we were trying to present something that was comedic. We tried to filter our decision making through the concept of ‘if Phillip was the real producer of this podcast and if Phillip had 900 dollars that he’d saved to score it and make a drama happen what would be the choices he would make that would be overwrought?’ We wanted it to match Phillips’ brain, not just ours as creators. If Phillip believes that this is the turning point in his romantic life, then the music reflects that because for him he’s like ‘I’ve fallen in love with this woman who has no interest in me.’ That’s just Phillip, he’s living his best life.
In regards to Donnie, wow careful were you to pay attention that you weren’t just making fun of midwesterners stereotypes for instance?
Leah: I think we really were. I thought you were going to ask if we victim shamed Donny. And we were very careful about that. The Midwest thing we fully leaned into.
Max: It’s loving, especially in that the family are the real victims. Ultimately, you might say the mom or the dad had misguided priorities and the choices were always to protect her son. We’re always ready to indict power brokers and this was a nice family that gets swept up in the tv people’s grand plans.
They call the Empire State Building “where the monkey is.”
Max: We aren’t from New York, and we reached into the feelings we felt when we first came here.
Leah: I channelled Donnie’s mom intensely when we were writing, and especially when it came to Sex and the City references. I was obsessed with the show when I was way too young and I love the idea of a sweet midwestern woman who sees herself as a Samantha, even though that could not be further from the truth. In that way we’re leaning into, I don’t want to say yokel, but that stereotype exists. At least, that’s what I thought of.
Are the clues there in the first episode about what happened to Donnie?
Leah: You would really have to be listening. You would have to know what you were looking for.
Max: This is how our thinking of the mystery goes. We had this idea of a big oral history of a showbiz disaster and telling it through the eyes of the people that lived it. We had the idea of a late night show with a kid and it got canceled a few minutes in. Having worked in tv we tried to come up with something we could only do in audio. Not a spoiler! But this could only be told this way.
Leah: The reveal of what happened is the tiniest piece of the puzzle. There are many more twists to come.
Was there anything about making a ten year old the star that was influenced by internet culture of today?
Leah: We were trying to lean into the audio format and trying to write something that you couldn’t see on tv and he’s influenced by the apparently this kid is awesome kid.
The tv agent character sounded like Whoopi Goldberg.
Max: That is Whoopi Goldberg.
Wow.
Max: We have an egot winner
Leah: She is like the most incredible performer I’ve ever seen.
Max: We had her say things that were pretty amazing to watch such a distinguished performer say and she was riffing and saying things that you probably can’t say in print like “Eat a bowl of *** and *** soup. She was full of ideas.
Why didn’t the dad believe the show was really going to happen?
Max: He was inspired by my own dad, who was anxious and controlling. They’re worried about aiming too high because you can fall so far, and as you can probably guess, he was proven right. We like any character who believes they’re more important than they are. He acted like he was General Patton and Zach Galifianakis playing him was a wild dream.
The format feels very realistic. How tightly did you have to control that with the jokes?
Max: We liked the tension where someone might feel they were hearing a story they’ve never heard before and tried to find the emotion grounded and have these characters wrapped up in their own worlds. Culture is weird and the whole country is a satire of itself.
Leah: We love spectacular failures, big bloated Broadway productions like Turn Off the Dark. It was a huge disaster with Spider Man falling into the crowd. That’s a crazy stranger than fiction stories you can have when the characters are grounded. If you have grounded characters, anything can be believable.
Max: We have a space over ten episodes to tell a story and that allows us to take a ship slowly teetering on its side in a way that you don’t quite feel it. We both read the book of the Turn off the Dark disaster and as disasters happen, you’re inside the mind of a guy who thought it was supposed to be the best thing and turned out to be the worst.
Leah: We were reminded of how little control you have in a media industry where you can have a germ of a brilliant idea that is wrestled away from you and becomes this whole other thing.
Do you have a favorite joke in Bedtime?
Max: My favorite joke is when Donny is auditioning for the executives, and Whoopi’s character takes a monologue from the 50-year-old comic that was R-rated and replaces the word “my wife” with “my mom” for Donnie, as in “my mom always wants me to eat my vegetables”.
That joke feels like a stand-in for the show as a whole: a perfect mix of sweetness with the dirty underbelly of tired and desperate tv people.
Past My Bedtime is available now only on Audible.
Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshuadudley/2022/12/02/creators-of-david-harbor-fronted-mockumentary-podcast-talk-about-a-10-year-old-who-stayed-up-too-late/