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Can do
With Can of Worms, three guys in Danvers have made a public-access TV show that doesn’t suck — and just might take the North Shore national

BY MIKE MILIARD

JOSH. PLEASE DO the intro. I just need you to do the intro.... Why do you come over here, then? Just do the intro.... Why am I the bad guy here if I just want you guys to film? Josh. Do the intro.”

A camera, manned by the unseen 24-year-old Rob Potylo, traces a wobbly panorama around his small bedroom. The room — brown shag carpeting, walls plastered with photos of the Who and Jose Canseco and a jumpsuit-clad Vegas-era Elvis, closet door guarded by a life-size image of Stone Cold Steve Austin, trophies on the bureau, unmade bed — looks as if it hasn’t changed much since Rob’s high-school days, probably because it hasn’t. Potylo, a bear of a guy in a Hawaiian shirt and green stocking cap, still lives at home with the folks and still hangs out with the same buddies he’s had since high school.

On a Monday night, two of Potylo’s buddies laze around his room, blithely oblivious to his entreaties. Josh Nagle, at whom Potylo’s exasperated pleas are directed, is a tall and lanky 23-year-old who boasts an impressive pompadour and impeccable fashion sense: black suit, maroon shirt, silver tie, porkpie hat, and two-tone shoes. Matt Ellsworth, also 23, unfortunately is not as sartorially gifted. He’s teased regularly by Rob and Josh for always wearing the same clothes: a U Maine baseball cap (backwards) and a paunch-betraying light-blue T-shirt, a primitive Grim Reaper tattoo peeking ominously from beneath the sleeve. Tonight is no exception.

Together, Rob, Josh, and Matt, along with Rob’s unbilled but omnipresent girlfriend, Kelly, 19 (“Yoko to Rob’s John,” she says), produce a cable-access show in Rob’s bedroom (they sometimes venture as far as his Danvers back yard or the parking lot of the local shopping center). The show is called Can of Worms, and essentially, it amounts to a long home movie by three guys with thick North Shore accents and active imaginations.

But in a time when people pay money to watch via the Internet as others go about their daily routines, and Tom Green’s cancerous testicle is watchable TV, home movies — especially ones this funny — are as valid a form of entertainment as anything. Viewers seem to think so: Can of Worms has completed 24 episodes (it’s on triweekly), is shown in 18 communities (including, not insignificantly, Manhattan), and has garnered a rabid, if somewhat sophomoric, fan base. (“Your show is the funniest on TV. Better than Tom Green humping a moose,” reads one Web guest-book entry. “My anus tickles when I watch your show,” reads another.)

Tonight, both Josh and Matt are relatively taciturn — happy to sit back and let the effusive Rob talk about the show’s travails. As the driving force behind Can of Worms, the Moe of these three stooges (to manic Matt’s Curly and deadpan Josh’s Larry), Rob often seems hard-pressed to keep the others in check. “A lot of times when they come over, I have to be the father figure,” he says. “And it sucks, ’cause we’re all chillin’, playing video games, Josh and Matt are arguing. And I have to be, like, ‘Guys, let’s film!’ And they look at me like, ‘Who the fuck are you now?’ ”

Because, all appearances to the contrary, COW is not just the impromptu goofings of three guys suffering from arrested development. It is scripted (to an extent), it is self-conscious (a show about making a show), and its creators have high hopes that they will one day be famous. They may just be right.

Can of Worms took shape two years ago, after Potylo graduated from Westfield State with a major in communications, rarin’ to conquer the TV business. Danvers public access offered him a volunteer job where he could help out with production. The very first week on the job, Potylo approached his bosses with a pitch.

“I came to them and said, ‘I want to do a show. I noticed all you have on the air is town government and sports. I thought we could do a comedy show — just our lives and stuff like that,’ ” he says. Potylo’s bosses agreed.

But Potylo quickly learned that getting the green light would be the easy part. As he was editing the first COW episode in the Danvers studio, a supervisor overheard a snatch of on-screen banter: the word “friggin’,” following close on the heels of the word “damn.” Not exactly on George Carlin’s list of seven dirty words, but potty talk that wouldn’t fly, certainly not with Rob representing Cablevision (it owned the Danvers public-access station) and definitely not in a town with a sizable elderly population.

Most public-access stations are owned by larger media conglomerates, and their bureaucracies often make it difficult, either through intimidation or by causing sheer exasperation, for people like Rob, Josh, and Matt to get on TV. Registration forms. Disclaimers. Many stations require a sponsor who lives in the community and will sign a document stating that he or she will take responsibility for the show’s content. It often amounts to more red tape than the average kid who just wants to get on the air is willing to deal with, and Danvers’s prerequisites were no exception.

But Potylo was not easily discouraged. So, while continuing his internship in Danvers, he took the show to Peabody and produced five episodes in secret. “It was really tightlipped,” he says, mimicking an exchange with his supervisor:

“What are you doing?”

“I’m going to Peabody today to, uh, help out with a show.”

“What show?”

“Oh, uh ... Fun with ... uh ... Oils! It’s a painting show.”

Once his internship ended, Potylo was able to persuade Danvers to begin broadcasting Can of Worms.

With its fart humor and tear-jerking odes to dearly departed felines (see Rob’s “Catnip in the Wind,” which beats Elton John, that bard of dead blondes, at his own game), the show is considerably different from most cable-access fare, which — even when it’s not soporific town-council proceedings or interminable high-school sports — tends to be rather lame. You know the stuff. “A lot of public-access shows, I’m not saying they half-ass it, but they go into a studio, they sit down for 30 minutes — y’know, it’s a typical bad background, two people — and for 30 minutes they let the tape run,” Rob says. He will not let COW be that show. “Every episode has, like, a hundred edits. Even though it looks half-assed, we set up everything so it somehow relates to the next scene.”

That’s Spielbergian directorial prowess compared to most DIY television. But Rob makes no bones about the fact that they’re “trying to make it look like a bad show.” This they pull off swimmingly. Title cards are written in crayon on notebook paper. The opening and closing themes are shambling, altered-lyrics versions of “La Bamba” and the Jam’s “That’s Entertainment.” It’s in this unabashed badness that COW is so funny.

Mainly, though, the show’s appeal lies in the natural interactions between these dissimilar oddballs. Chubby Matt and beanpole Josh wrestle like seven-year-olds; Rob’s luxuriantly mustached father coerces him into eating a raw oyster, oblivious to the fact that he’s being taped for broadcast. In a recurring sketch called “’80s Action Figure Theater,” a shaky camera trains on a hand-held Jabba the Hut (now a coke addict) hanging out with Mets catcher Gary Carter (three sheets to the wind, micturating into an unsuspecting R2-D2). Then there’s the spot in which Rob and Kelly vacation at Old Orchard Beach in September — a month too late. “Here we coulda got Belgian waffles and ice cream and lemonade,” Rob laments, reading the sign of a boarded-up concession stand. “But all we’re gonna get today is pain.”

Can of Worms takes its role as the enfant terrible of the cable-access world seriously, gleefully mocking the medium’s conventions. In what was surely meant as a sop to Danvers’s elderly population, Rob and Josh created a sketch called “Town Talk” where, in a parody of a by-the-numbers public-access show, they sit in a bland studio like NPR commentators on Quaaludes, exchanging idle palaver about all things Danvers:

“I fed the ducks today.”

“What’d you feed ’em with?”

“I fed ’em with bread.”

Later, Rob issues an impassioned plea to his senior viewers: “Look, I know we’re not as funny as The Golden Girls ... [but] I love the elderly! A lot of people want to put you on islands! I don’t!”

ALTHOUGH HE did eventually succeed in getting COW to air in his home town, Potylo describes the experience as “an all-out battle.” And even as he fought on the Danvers front, bloodied but unbowed, he continued to expand his cable-access empire — Salem ... Reading ... Saugus ... Boston ... Allston/Brighton ... Dorchester. All the while, his eyes were (and still are) on the big prizes: national exposure, an agent, fame.

The show is no easy sell. “Comedy Central’s been rejecting us. Like, 500 times,” Potylo says, producing a stack of the network’s letterhead — each successive missive a little more personalized — from his dresser drawer. Rather than lament the rejection, he did what came naturally: he made fun of the letters on his show and sent Comedy Central the tapes. Eventually, he hit pay dirt of sorts. “What finally happened is that the lady I’d been sending the tapes to called me,” he says. “Her name is Jessie Klein and she’s the development-department head. She finally called me up, like out of the blue one day.... She’s like, ‘Rob. If you wanna make Comedy Central the butt of your jokes, you’re not going to get our attention that way.’ ”

But he had gotten her attention. And he used an ingeniously sneaky maneuver to leverage the telephone call into a huge opportunity: getting his little public-access show broadcast in a city of eight million people.

“Manhattan was brilliant,” Rob gloats. “I have to pat myself on the back on that one. I sat down one day and thought, ‘What is the biggest thing we could do that could get us an agent?’ I thought, ‘We gotta get to Manhattan. That’s where everybody is.’ ”

But Manhattan cable access wanted a sponsor. So Potylo gave them ... Jessie Klein. “My old friend from Comedy Central! She’ll sponsor the show!” He sent in four tapes with the assurance that “Jessie Klein, Comedy Central” would sponsor him. “What’s she gonna do? I didn’t forge anything. She never said she didn’t wanna sponsor the show. I got a call from Manhattan cable access two weeks later. Thanks, Jessie!”

Now, Rob waits for that agent to call. “We all keep our fingers crossed, ’cause it’s our only chance, to get that guy one night sitting down thinking, ‘Jeez, I wonder ... oh my God, I could use those guys!’ ” he says. But he labors under no delusions. In the real world, he says, “it doesn’t happen like in Wayne’s World, where someone comes down and says, ‘Hey, I’m the director at CBS and I saw you guys on the access station while driving by — I wanna hook you up!’ ”

But that doesn’t mean he, Josh, and Matt are going to slow down. “I would not give it up now,” says Rob. “I don’t care. Even though I have to lie to myself and maybe work a retail job during the day, this is what my life is. I love just doing this stuff. And I would not care if it was just this for the rest of my life — even though I wish when I die that I would be associated with this instead of” — he breaks into the dulcet tones of a pastor giving a eulogy — “ ‘Rob worked at Barnes & Noble and Filene’s Basement and Sears,’ which is unfortunately probably what most people will associate me with. I’m a retail whore.”

Rob Potylo does not mind being a slave to commerce so long as he can keep making TV shows in his bedroom. Because even if he never makes it to real cable, he knows his show is better than a lot of what’s out there. (“The number-one complaint we get is: ‘Dude. Why don’t you do what they did on Jackass and run into a wall with a fuckin’ shoppin’ cart?’ ” he says. “And I’m like, ‘Dude. Why don’t you just watch Jackass?’ ”) And it sure as hell beats a show like Friends. Because Can of Worms is real. These guys don’t live in rent-controlled Manhattan townhouses. They live with their parents. In Danvers. “I look on TV and I don’t see a Josh or a Matt anywhere,” Rob says. “I’m able to look at Matt and say, ‘Please be exactly who you are when this camera goes on. Please don’t change.’ And if you think the show sucks or you think it’s good, it’s us. Josh is exactly who he is. Matt’s exactly who he is. Unfortunately, I’m who I am. Kelly’s perfect. I mean, we’re all ... us.”

Mike Miliard can be reached at mmiliard[a]phx.com. Visit www.COWshow.com to download clips (and a complete episode) of Can of Worms.

Issue Date: February 1 - 8, 2001
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