FOX is throwing a 'Party Over Here' and everyone's invited

LOS ANGELES -- It was last year, around the time Vanity Fair's much-berated all-male titans of late-night cover came out, that Paul Scheer was already hard at work on something that could change the late-night landscape for the better. Or, at the very least, it will make you laugh.

FOX's Party Over Here, which premieres Saturday, is a half-hour sketch comedy show led by three female comedians -- a fact that's noteworthy to be sure (shows with three up-and-coming females are few and far between) but not necessarily what Party Over Here aims to be known for.

From the start, Scheer says it was his goal to find a trio of women to lead the show, but as they began their search for their stars, they decided to widen the field and look for the best people for the job. In the end, those people, as it turned out to be Nicole Byer, Jessica McKenna, and Alison Rich. 

"I was like, 'Well if we're going to do something let's do something different. Let's make it led by three amazing female comedians, but let's not make that the thing.'" Scheer said. "It's a comedy show."

A tight-knit one at that. All involved will admit that the Upright Citizens Brigade DNA runs deep here -- from the writer's room to the cast. And Byer, McKenna, and Rich have known each other for years. Byer and McKenna were on a musical improv team together. When McKenna first moved to LA, she slept on Byer's couch for 8 months. 

This familiarity and shorthand has led to what Rich will jokingly call "sexplosive" chemistry. Writers who know each comedian's strengths and can write to them, and comedians who feel comfortable enough to write and contribute to the process. Rich wrote about 4 or 5 bits that will appear throughout the show's 10-episode first season and McKenna wrote some musical bits. Each was encouraged to bring their own characters and bits to the table. 

"There will never be another time in my career -- unless I, you know, blow the fuck up -- that someone goes, 'Do whatever you want,'" Byer says.

"It's really...you're putting your own voice out there and it's not just being a words model," Rich adds. "This opportunity was so cool because it was like, 'Oh, I'd really have a stake in the creative process' -- in a way you do't have when you're just auditioning for stuff." 

The result is a show that feels intimate and big at the same time. Intimate because their main "set" is really a platform surrounded by fewer than 100 chairs in the middle of a room on the second floor of a historical hotel in downtown Los Angeles and attending a taping is like going to a really great underground comedy show. Big because it's going on network TV in a spot once occupied by MADtv.

No pressure. 

It helps, though, to have an endorsement and support from one of the highest offices in the comedy landscape -- The Lonely Island. 

Andy Samberg, Akiva Schaffer and Jorma Taccone were under a comedy development deal with FOX when they were approached about doing something in the late night space, but the venture really found some legs when Scheer came on last summer and helped bring it together. 

Though officially announced last month, this project, they say, has been a longtime coming. 

But there was, of course, one call the trio had to make before carving out a Saturday space for themselves: a call to Saturday Night Live creator Lorne Michaels. 

"It was the first thing we said to FOX, 'We'll never go against SNL,'" Taccone says. 

And they're not. The show airs in the half hour before SNL starts. 

"We're not, like, waging war on SNL or Lorne. That's still our home; that's still our family," Samberg says. 

It was a call, Schaffer says, that was surprisingly easy. 

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"I will say, with every conversation with Lorne, it was, like, a half hour conversation and then that part of it lasted about 30 seconds," he says. "I spewed out everything ... and he was like 'Ok, great. What else is going on?'" 

Samberg jokes: "In all fairness, it was during a session when he was blessing a lot of stuff. He was blessing some wine for us, some bread." 

The Lonely Island and Scheer will make appearances on Party Over Here -- but don't expect to see them every week. 

They resisted the urge to throw guest stars in, Scheer says, because he wanted the focus to remain "about [the stars] and launching this cool ensemble." 

"We were adamant that we didn't want that to happen because I want the focus to be on the three of them and our two other featured players."

For the most part, FOX supported that -- as it has most of the things they've tried to accomplish on Party Over Here. Well, most things. 

"The lack of involvement -- in a positive way -- they've had has been amazing, but the amount of standards notes is overwhelming to the point of mind-boggling," Scheer says. 

Among the contested sketches? One involving ghost sex. 

We won't spoil it here -- Scheer hopes some of the show's rejected sketches may live online -- but suffice to say it brought up important questions. For example: Does it count as penetration if there's no penis involved?

Standards and practices still deemed it "too graphic," to which Scheer said, "How?! There's nothing there." 

Pushing the envelope is just part of the fun at this party, Byer says. 

"I think it's fucking awesome," she says. "It's a really cool opportunity to work with cool people on stuff you genuinely think is funny." 

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