“Hello Ladies” is a short-lived HBO show, now an HBO movie, and the failed pickup line that Stephen Merchant‘s Stuart Pritchard has attempted countless times over the course of the property’s atypical run. And the whole thing started as a stand-up comedy special of the same name.
So if anyone is able to adapt one concept to yet another new medium, it’s British comedian Merchant, who was given free rein to create the 80-minute edition after HBO chose not to move forward with a Season 2. The latest programming genre wasn’t without its difficulties, however, he revealed to TheWrap.
“We had this cast of characters, so we wanted to make sure that we checked in with all of them, which slightly limits you to a degree, because if you were just doing a film from scratch, you … could kind of reinvent things slightly,” Merchant said, explaining that the only cast member who didn’t return for the movie was Jenny Slate due to a conflicting schedule.
The challenge did have one major advantage, said Merchant. “One of the things that always makes me a little bit frustrated with the TV style is that you have to sort of keep it open-ended,” he explained. “Because you never know how many seasons there are, you can’t rush. You have to sort of bleed things out over time. You can’t let the characters grow and evolve too quickly, otherwise you might run out of your comic engine.”
What you can’t do much in film is riff, which he and co-star Kyle Mooney (“Saturday Night Live”), who Merchant discovered on the web and wrote the hilarious part of Rory for, do very well together.
“With a sitcom, you can kind of be a little bit more indulgent,” Merchant told us. “If you want to have a two-and-a-half-minute scene of me and Kyle doing something silly, [you can]. In a movie format … it’s like the audience instinctively knows that it’s not moving the story forward. And however entertaining it may be, it just sort of puts the brakes on everything.”
Those long scenes, which will fortunately show up in the DVD/Blu-ray extras, went so well that the duo are currently brainstorming buddy comedy projects to work on together.
All in all, Merchant said that the film format was “satisfying” — but even the movie’s ending may not be the end for “Hello Ladies.”
The comedian purposefully didn’t make the conclusion “completely definitive,” he said, wanting to keep his options open, just in case he feels like coming back to the well again in five years.
“Hello Ladies: The Movie” premieres Saturday night on HBO at 10 p.m. ET.
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