The joke’s online

Local improv troupe the Bitter End take their
sibling-based sitcom to the Web

FUN WIH DYSFUNCTION: (clockwise from rear left)
Etan Muskat, Erin Agostino, Vanessa Matsui, Marc Rowland,
Brent Skagford, Daniel Beirne

by CHRIS BARRY

Over the past year or so, a promising sketch comedy scene has emerged out of the Théâtre Ste-Catherine Sunday improv nights, in particular the Mile-End hipster-esque comedy troupe the Bitter End—Dan Beirne, 27, Brent Skagford, 30, and Etan Muskat, 29, three ambitious transplants from Ottawa, Calgary and Toronto, respectively, who arrived in Montreal at the beginning of the decade to attend university and eventually decided to call it home. Now, after consistently wowing local theatre audiences this past year with their considerable comic and improvisational gifts, the troupe is taking their popular improvised live sitcom series to the biggest of big times: the Internet.

Yes, on Thursday, Sept. 24, expect to see your net connection slowed as a result of all the traffic that’ll be flowing to thebitterend.tv in order to catch Episode One of the troupe’s six-part debut Web series.

The Bitter End Web show revolves around two 20-something brothers: Bernard, an earnest wannabe novelist who’s just finished university and is living in his first apartment, and Les, a slacker fresh out of rehab who’s decided his brother’s new downtown pad is the ideal place to crash while getting his act together after a lifetime of partyin’.

Estranged since childhood, they’re just starting to get to know each other again and, well, guffaws abound as they soon realize they’ve got absolutely nothing in common while forever meddling in, and screwing up, each other’s lives. And while the Bitter End doesn’t quite follow the traditional, “joke, set up, joke” format of traditional TV sitcoms, it’s actually quite funny, perhaps as a result of its straying from the well-trodden orthodoxy.

Desperate, bumbling, honest

“Our show is really about how the people you’re closest with can fuck your life up the most,” acknowledges Beirne. “Over these first six episodes, they mess up each other’s lives in progressively worse ways, and in future episodes, it’ll get unimaginably worse.

“Bernard is a version of myself,” he continues, “although he’s a little more selfish, petty, insecure, desperate and bumbling than I am. But that’s why I love playing him, a character with those flaws can be a ton of fun. Some of our scenarios are based on things that have happened to us, things we’re extremely embarrassed about. And while it’s all filtered through the eyes of our main characters, hopefully the honesty of the origins of the stuff comes through. We’re writing sad comedy from an honest place, you know?”

Evolving out of a totally improvised live show, the Bitter End series premiered in August ’08 at the Théâtre Ste-Catherine and was developed through much of last year at Club Lambi. The response from the troupe’s steadily growing audience has been so positive that the three writer/comedian/actors, along with supporting players Vanessa Matsui, Marc Rowland and recent addition Erin Agostino, recognized they might just be on to something worth taking to another level.

So, with the help of a $3,000 Jeunes Volontaires grant courtesy of le gouvernement du Québec and the enthusiastic favours of friends, family, cast and crew, the Bitter End went into production for three months last spring and now have a completed Web series, with each episode running a total of 15 minutes. “When you add them up, it’s basically the same length as a feature film,” notes Muskat. “I really don’t think we’d have been able to do all this for so little money if it hadn’t been for all our friends helping out.

“Pat Kiely and Darren Curtis from Kidnapper Films both appear in the series and kind of functioned as our test audience, giving us a lot of advice on editing the show to make it snappier, funnier and clearer, as did Seth Owen from Automatic Vaudeville. And while most of the series was shot in my Mile-End apartment or the apartments of other friends, the Kidnapper guys also let us turn their office space on Clark and St-Viateur into a night school for one shoot. One of our friends even let us destroy a wall in his bathroom in an episode where Les works on a demolition crew. His bathroom wasn’t scheduled to be renovated until later in the summer so he essentially had no wall in his bathroom for a month. Yeah, the community really pulled through for us on this.”

That said, Skagford, along with Beirne and Muskat, have been known to come through for their buds as well, all three not only having helped out on the production end of Kidnapper’s Who Is KK Downey? last year, but having played “stand-out supporting roles” in the film as well.

Plugging in for free

Of course, having a great idea or, in the case of the Bitter End guys, a fully realized show, doesn’t necessarily mean the suits in TV-land will be falling all over themselves to throw production money at you.

“We originally approached producers and TV networks,” says Muskat, “but they’d all go, ‘Hey, thanks,’ and we’d never hear back from anyone.”

“They just don’t put people on TV who’ve strolled into a broadcaster’s office saying, ‘Trust me, I can do it,’ you know?” adds Beirne. “Prior to this, all we’d done were plays and believe me, nobody at a TV channel wants to hear their question, ‘How much TV experience do you have?’ answered with a, ‘Check out all the awesome plays we’ve done.’”

While all three Bitter End cats are still passionate about the live improv comedy they’ve been cutting their teeth on for close to a decade, they acknowledge the medium has its limitations.

“The thing about improv shows is that they disappear at the end of the night,” says Skagford. “So something like this is an important step for us. There’s a lot of really interesting things happening on the Web right now. The industry is only just developing, nobody really knows where it’s going, especially when it comes to generating revenue, so we figured we’d just put something out there.”

“The whole time we were making this, people were coming up to us saying they were doing the same thing, making their own Web shows,” adds Beirne. “It really feels like the Gold Rush, everyone’s doing this right now but there’s no system in place to make any money.”

“It’s a rush, but there’s no gold,” quips Skagford.

Keep on buzzin’

For the time being, the Bitter End boys say they’ll be doing their best to promote the Web series by continuing to build the local buzz they’ve created around their work through a series of live shows and by “heading online to sites where people watch this sort of thing and directing them to our stuff. There’s also this other site we’ve heard about, uh, what is it again? Oh yeah, Facebook,” says Beirne.

“Basically, we just want people to see it,” concludes Beirne. “And then we’re hoping we’ll find a way to shoot a bunch more of them. The great thing about doing live improv comedy is, all you really need is yourselves and a space. You do it and you get instant feedback. And that’s similar to what’s so great about taking a series like this to the Internet. You put it up, people can watch it whenever they want and you get a sense right away of whether they like it or not.”

And outside of there being no direct money coming from their efforts, are there any negatives from going it all alone on the net?

“Sure,” says Muskat. “We don’t have anyone to accuse if it ends up sucking. It’s 100 per cent us, after all. We can’t turn around and blame any producers for not letting us do what we wanted.”

THE BITTER END WILL PERFORM ONE
MORE RUN OF LIVE SHOWS TO
CELEBRATE THE LAUNCH OF THEIR
WEB SERIES AT THE MAINLINE
THEATRE (3997 ST-LAURENT)
SEPT. 24-26. 9 P.M., 8$