New York Times Magazine interview
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QUESTIONS FOR JIM GAFFIGAN
The star of the new show 'Welcome to New York' / a Midwestern transplant in his own right / talks about how Gotham looks to the rest of the TV-loving nation.
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Well, I wanted a show that in its small, funny way would capture, for lack of a better term, that white-bread Midwestern immigrant experience. My character is a weatherman. I've always thought that the weatherman is the outsider of the news team. I mean, he's always standing, and everyone else on the team gets to sit down. So there's the Midwestern simple guy, and there's everybody else looking at him like, "What kind of pants are you wearing?"
How hard is it to translate New York to a national TV audience? Are there aspects of life here that have to be exaggerated in order to make any sense? Or that have to be overlooked?
It's hard, when you're doing a sitcom on a set without any exterior shots, to really portray the fabric of life in New York. New Yorkers are very unforgiving of inaccurate portrayals of their city. When producers try and pass off Toronto as New York, the credibility's totally lost. Or when they have someone buying tokens from a machine that is nothing like the token booth in my subway stop. New Yorkers are very protective. And they should be. It's so hard to live here, don't portray it like it's easy.
Is there a danger of going too far in the other direction? On some of the newer shows, I've seen status details that are so unbelievably specific, I wonder, how many people will get that reference?
I think "Seinfeld" proved that you can't underestimate people's knowledge of New York or their ability to figure it out. Like, if my character makes a reference to "a Dickney bag," someone living in Indiana might not know what a DKNY bag is, but he'd get the sense that it's a malapropism. Or when "Sex and the City" talks about the Hamptons, people in my hometown might not know what happens exactly in the Hamptons, but they can have a rough idea.
What about you? What was your white-bread Midwestern immigrant narrative? Did you dream of New York as a child amid the cornfields?
Yeah. I remember being 8 years old and looking around and thinking, there has been some enormous mistake. I was incredibly bored where I grew up, and the New York that I saw on TV was a city absent of boredom. I always felt like I should have been there, even the New York I saw in "The Odd Couple." The city had such a vibrance. It seemed like the bachelor's playground.
So, how was the New York that you found in real life different from the one that TV had taught you to expect?
On "Welcome Back, Kotter," they have a Murphy bed. I remember thinking, "That's kind of cute." I didn't realize that when I got to New York I would have a tub in my kitchen. But most of all the reality that I was broke was pretty brutal -- the fact that I was going to be not just struggling broke, but look-under-the-couch-for-change broke, for some time. I would leave my apartment and somehow spend $20. I would walk to work and incur debt. And I underestimated how the city would break me emotionally.
How so?
Well, because of the lack of space, there's very little privacy, so it's not uncommon to walk down the street and see someone crying in public or yelling at a broken pay phone. My first few weeks here, I thought to myself, check out the lunatics! Relax, have some manners, don't go lunatic in the middle of the grocery store. But I guess it was probably two months later that I actually caught myself yelling -- at yet another broken pay phone. I remember catching myself, realizing I'd kind of been beaten. You can't compete with living in New York. You're going to be humbled by the experience.
And to survive you just had to accept that?
Yeah. Living in New York, you're always going to feel a little broke. You're always going to feel like an outsider. And you're always going to feel a little vulnerable.