Tonight at 9:30p we get a sneak preview of 1600 Penn on NBC and you don’t want to miss out watching the first episode of your new favorite comedy.
The Gilchrists are your normal family, the dad is on his second marriage, the step-mom is trying to fit in, the oldest son is going to college, the oldest daughter wants to be a lawyer and the younger son and daughter are in school. But what separates them from the rest of us is their is that they live in the White House!
Dale Gilchrist (Bill Pullman) is the President of the United States, so he doesn’t have time for his family. Emily (Jenna Elfman) is the First Lady and she has taken on his responsibilities as a parent, but the kids don’t want to hear anything from her. Skip (Josh Gad) is the lovable idiot who is in his 7th year of college and he just burned down part of the campus. So he is moving home to be a big brother to his younger siblings. Becca (Martha MacIsaac) is the good girl who has a secret that will turn the family upside down. Marigold (Amara Miller) has developed her first crush and you’ll never guess on who? And then there is little D.B. (Robbie Amell) who is just your average nerd who gets beat up on. Like I said they are just your normal family with a famous address.
Now if you don’t want to turn into this NBC comedy because you fear it will be political heavy, you would be missing out because that is just the backdrop for this hilarious family comedy. It is a lot like Benson where, it was about the Governor raising his daughter at the Governor’s Mansion and the people that worked for him, but it really wasn’t about the politics.
What are things you should know about 1600 before you watch the special preview tonight? Well last week I was on the set and found out some interesting little tidbits for you:
Did you know that the First Lady picks out the rug for the Oval Office? The show’s co-creator Jason Winer told us about the one that is used on the set for the show, “The rug is inspirded by the George W Bush rug which introduced the sunburst pattern for the first time and the Obama rug which introduced the idea of qotations around the rug.” Even though Jenna Elfman plays the First Lady, she had no say on the rug.
Jenna Elfman’s character Emily is a classically trained dancer, that is because she revealed to the producers and writers that she danced in music videos before she switched careers. So once they knew that fun fact they had to write it in for her.
Josh Gad auditioned for Modern Family, but he had to pull out of the auditioning process to do a little Broadway show called Book of Mormon. Ever heard of it?
Bruce Campbell will play Bill Pullman’s competitve brother in a future episode and Jenna Elfman said the two of them look like a lot brothers. In fact Pullman told us his real life brother knows more about Campbell’s films than he does his Pullman’s.
Here’s a little spoiler, Becca is pregnant and MacIsaac was wearing a huge prosthetic baby bump when we saw her. When she was asked what it is like to wear it, she said, “The reaction has been fun. I think my sisters burst into tears when I sent them a photo. They were, ‘It looks just like you pregnant.’ The only thing that is different is the difficulty to go to the bahtroom. But ideally that makes me feel more like a pregant woman having to pee all the time.”
Finally Jon Lovett, who created the show with Winer and Gad, actually worked as a White House Speech Writer before he left Washington for Hollywood. When asked if he is afraid what the White House will think of the show, he said “I am not, I am not. Because first of all, I don’t know why I would be.” He then added, “I think this is a family show that uses politics as a backdrop and uses politics as a way of heightening story or finding avenues to explore their relationships between these characters. So for the most part there really isn’t much that is going to offend anyone’s political sensibilities because that is not what the show is about.”
This is something I didn’t learn on the set, today is Bill Pullman’s birthday so let’s make it extra special for him by giving the show huge rating!
So tune in tonight at 9:30p for a special preview and then come back on Thursday, January 10th at 9:30p to watch the rest of the 1600 Penn episodes at its normally scheduled time. I have seen the first three and they get funnier with each episode and the pilot had me laughing nonstop!
