To all the fans who wish that he were still doing “Andy Richter Controls the Universe,” Andy Richter has a simple message: Let it go.
Richter, the affable Midwesterner who played straight man to some of the most bizarre comedy of the 1990s, now stars in “Quintuplets,” a relatively conventional TV sitcom on Fox. That is the same network that canceled his critically acclaimed “Universe” after separate launches in 2002 and 2003 failed to draw much of an audience.
“Quintuplets” is doing well enough that Fox has ordered a whole year’s worth of episodes and is airing it three times a week in the hopes of building an audience. A new episode airs at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday with repeats airing at 8:30 p.m. Sunday and Tuesday.
From his appearance in the loopy box-office dud “Cabin Boy” to seven years as Conan O’Brien’s sidekick, Richter perfected the part of what improv-comedy people call the “low-status character,” the schlub who is forever humiliated.
Now, on “Quintuplets,” he presides over a family of five 15-year-olds and a brood of standard-issue sitcom plots. Critics have not been as kind to “Quintuplets” as they were to “Universe.”
“What do these people have against me working?” Richter said at the TV critics press tour last month, sounding both bemused and irked. The sarcasm underlines a hard lesson Richter has had to learn about show business since leaving “Late Night” in 2000.
“I’ve tried selling scripts,” he said. “The first draft they’re always, ‘We love it!’ But the further along you get in the process, you know, it becomes, ‘Could you make it more like, like, something else?’
“It took me awhile to realize that the cliche was true,” Richter said. “They’d always say, ‘Be bold! Be different!’ And then I’d realize, no, they want the same old thing.”
He developed comedies for CBS and NBC that weren’t picked up. That left “Quintuplets,” where Richter is just an actor–no writing, no producing–which has given him more free time than usual.
He’s taped one episode of the upcoming NBC animated sitcom “Father of the Pride,” and he and a writer friend are talking about making an independent film.
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Edited by Cara DiPasquale ([email protected]) and Curt Wagner ([email protected])
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