Former WWE competitor Santino Marella was recently interviewed by WrestlingNews.co to discuss a variety of subjects related to his run with the company.
One topic brought up was a surprising one that involved Marella pitching his former employer on a sitcom idea for himself and Beth Phoenix.
You can check out some highlights from the interview below:
On pitching a sitcom for him and Beth Phoenix: “I pitched a sitcom. I think it was one episode. So I wrote it and it was Beth Phoenix and I and it was called, ‘Somebody loves Santino.’ It was basically Beth Phoenix, like, our home life. I got some of the guys from the Online to do some editing and I added some canned laughter. I waited around one night after RAW outside Vince’s office and I gave him the CD. I said, ‘Hey, this is an idea I had,’ and he watched it. He said, ‘Yea, we’re going to do it.’ He assigned a writer to do a real pilot for three episodes. but there was this, like, what do you call it, like, a tragedy of errors or whatever that, like, the writer got Lyme disease. Then the writer broke his hip. Then the writer’s father died, and you know, this guy’s trying to put together three funny episodes. One episode was funny, A couple of episodes were funny. One was horrible. When we put it together, the WWE, kind of, you know, a little bit higher budget pilots, they weren’t funny, and it was like, ‘Yeah, we’re not doing it.’”
On where he differed on the idea with Brian Gewirtz: “The original one that I did, I thought was better. So we had a little bit of a difference of opinion, Brian Gewirtz and I. He wanted to do a little bit of like a Curb Your Enthusiasm type camerawork. I wanted pure Disney, canned laughter, that standard sitcom backdrop with the stairs on an angle. I wanted it to be for kids. He wanted it to be, I guess, you know, for a little bit of an older audience, but it really never got going.”
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