https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-lzWojCVOA
Perfect Harmony is something to sing about. The NBC sitcom is back tonight at 8:30p and the show’s star Bradley Whitford is as happy as a hog in mud about it.
Now that Dr. Arthur Cochran (Whitford) has moved to Kentucky to teach the Second First Church of the Cumberlands choir how to win singing competitions, he has to get used to their ways. They are not like Yankees and he gets in trouble in blowing his car horn at someone. The shame.
Ginny (Anna Camp) decides to school him on their ways, but he does not learn his lesson. He winds up yelling at someone who was blocking traffic. Not just anyone, but the person who decides who performs when at ForkFest, the town’s big event. Now their choir is moved to a bad time slot.
Ginny tells him he needs to apologize so that they can get a better slot. Things go well until Arthur screws everything up again. Can he do anything to get them a better timeslot? All I will say is I said what I said in the first paragraph for a reason.
All of that while Ginny, her ex Wayne (Will Greenberg), their son Cash (Spencer Allport), Jax (Rizwan Manji), Dwayne (Geno Segers) and Adams (Tymberlee Hill) are trying to enjoy all that ForkFest has to offer like a messy pie-eating contest.
Each week, Arthur perfects their harmony and they try to bring harmony back into his life. Something he lost when his wife recently passed away.
Singing is a big part of the show and recently the cast, creator Lesley Wake Webster and producer Adam Anders revealed if singing is a big part of their lives to at the NBC Summer Press Day at the TCAs.
Does the cast really sing?
ADAM ANDERS: All of them use their real voice.
When did Geno start singing?
GENO SEGERS: I started out in high school. I had a relative who was a singer and convinced me to join the madrigal choir at my high school. And I did that for a year, and then I just sort of put it away.
When did Tymbelee join the church choir?
TYMBERLEE HILL: I did. I did, well, when I was young, from probably 5 to 12. My family is very much a part of the church choir. Everybody in my family sings, plays piano. And my grandmother taught music and was also the minister of music at our church. So I was a soloist for the youth choir and they would travel me all around for years from church to church to do competitions and to just be the guest. They have guest choirs at Baptist churches on Sundays. On fourth Sundays, you’ll have a guest choir come in. And so we would travel as guest choirs. And I sang all the way through maybe freshman year of college. But then there were so many people with such better voices than me, I just let it go. It’s really hard to be around people who it’s just their thing, yeah. So I sing for work, but it’s not, like, my thing anymore.
Which cast member is the rapper?
ADAM ANDERS: Yeah. It’s really an amazing cast, actually, even musically. You know, obviously they’re amazing actors, but there’s a lot we can work with here. It’s really exciting for me because they’re coming from such different places musically too. I mean, Rizwan Manji is a rapper. I don’t know if you knew that.
Does Bradley Whitford sing?
BRADLEY WHITFORD: I was in musicals and there was a little singing going on at Juilliard. I grew up playing an instrument. I sang. I grew up playing the viola.
ADAM ANDERS: I’ll get you to sing at some point.
When did Geno develop his deep voice?
GENO SEGERS: Well, I just woke up one morning and scared the hell out of my mama. You know, she didn’t know what to think, and she literally wanted to know who that man was in my bedroom wanting Fruit Loops. I was about 12 years old, and I woke up one morning, and I couldn’t talk. She made me some grits. She’s a Southern mother. She made me some oatmeal, rather. And then the next morning, I couldn’t talk. She made me some more oatmeal with honey and nuts and cinnamon and nutmeg. Thought that would be good for my throat, she would say. Then another morning, she woke up and said I woke up, and she said, “What do you want for breakfast, baby?” I said, “Fruit Loops, Mama.” And from that day on, she just tells that joke at every family gathering.
Who is Bradley’s character based on?
LESLEY WAKE WEBSTER: I will answer that one. I grew up singing in church choir, going to church. My grandfather, who Bradley’s character is modeled on, was a choir director by trade, and he went to Westminster Choir College, which is a fancy, fancy chorale college — he would always impress upon me — and at the end of his life, he was living in rural Kentucky. My grandmother had passed away, and he got to a very dark place. He was surrounded by people who weren’t like the people he had gone to school with. He was a little bit of a snob and an outsider. But the thing that brought him sort of back to life and gave him meaning was directing this little choir, and he was standing in a circle with people singing who had radically different beliefs and had been raised differently, but together they made something really beautiful, and that’s really what we want to bring to this. Yes, it’s set in a church, but it’s really about people who are each other’s family and find each other. And they do that through music and through friendship, and my experience in various church choirs and glee clubs has been it is really hard to dislike other people if you’re standing in a circle singing with them.
Who did he base his character on?
BRADLEY WHITFORD: Yeah. Yeah. There is a certain kind of beloved theater professor who I had, who was not a snob but always looked like kind of an unmade bed, and so I’m sort of going for that. I mean, I’ve had a lot of exposure to I know a lot of people in academia, so I know that sort of, kind of pretentious mindset.
