Thomas Haden Church recently took a gamble with his career.
He gave up a sure thing for something entirely new and untested.Church, who spent the past six years as Lowell Mather, the sweet but dim mechanic on “Wings,” won’t be back on that hit show. Instead, he’s heading a new Fox sitcom titled “Ned and Stacey.”
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“I had actually decided early last season that I was going to move on and explore what other fields there were to be hoed,” Church said.
His contract expired at the end of the season, and he had told the network and the producers in October that he would not return for the seventh season of “Wings” this fall.
“I very much enjoyed playing the character of Lowell, but they never really saw the need or maybe the opportunity to expand the character beyond what he was, which was to come in, hit a big joke, and then leave,” Church said.
” `Wings’ was a great experience for me. `Ned and Stacey,’ I think, is going to be a great step up,” Church said.
In “Ned and Stacey,” which will air Mondays at 8 p.m. in the fall, Church plays Ned – an overachieving business executive who enters into a marriage of convenience with a woman he barely knows (Debra Messing) in order to secure a promotion. It’s a big leap from the dimwitted Lowell.
“That was a job that was a lot of fun, but I don’t think that it represented who I am,” Church said. “In fact, (Fox Entertainment President) John Matoian told me that early on in their conversations about me that he wanted the character of Ned to be more like me. Because I’d worked in advertising. And I’m smug.”
Without really saying anything negative about “Wings” or the people associated with it, Church made it clear that he was unhappy with his role on that sitcom.
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“I was frustrated for years on `Wings,’ ” he said. “In the very first season I had been told that it was going to be a real strong ensemble show, not unlike `Cheers.’ And it quickly became apparent that they were going to concentrate on Tim (Daly) and Steve (Weber) and Crystal (Bernard), and the rest of us were going to be tertiary characters. By the strength of the writing Lowell did become a very popular character. But it was frustrating.
“You are going to be frustrated as the fourth person in a show. But, again, `Wings’ was a great experience. And at the end of the day it’s one that I will forever cherish.”
As a matter of fact, when he came to the end of his run on that show he took out an ad in Variety thanking his “Wings” co-workers.
“I described it as six seasons in a dream, and it truly was. It was a great, great experience,” Church said. “And I look forward to an entirely great and new experience with Fox.”
The fact that the actor wanted to leave “Wings” should have come as no surprise to either the show’s producers or NBC executives.
“A couple of years ago I did actually attempt to leave the series and was threatened with a massive lawsuit,” Church said. “And realized that I needed to fulfill my contractual obligations.”
He also got himself into some hot water with NBC Entertainment President Warren Littlefield over a Fox sitcom titled “Flying Blind.” According to Church, his standard sitcom contract allowed him to do three episodes of other sitcoms, but NBC apparently interpreted that as one episode each of up to three other shows.
“So I went off and I did a couple of episodes and Warren got really angry about that when we were doing the second episode,” he said.
At that point, the network and the producers discussed the possibility of spinning Lowell off into his own show.
“I was not interested in that,” Church said. “I don’t forever want to be known as Lowell.”
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Whether Church is completely done with “Wings” is somewhat in limbo at the moment.
“They very much want me to come back and do one more episode,” said Church, whose reluctance to do that was obvious. “I mean, I work for another company now. It’s like an attorney leaving one firm and going to another, yet the other firm wants him to come back and do legal work.
“I don’t know how I feel about it. I gave them ample time to resolve that story last year, and they chose not to do that. And now I’m dedicating myself to a new company, to a new show and a new character, and I have a loyalty to this.”
Church obviously still feels a great deal of loyalty to the character of Lowell, and wishes that he could have gone out in an episode last season.
“Unfortunately, they did not give the character the closure that I think he deserved,” he said. “I would have preferred to leave the series with some degree of dignity and explanation to the audience. But they had another agenda, which was to address the wedding.”
Indeed, much of that last season was building up to the wedding between Joe (Daly) and Helen (Bernard). When last we saw Lowell, he was just one of the characters at that wedding, with no indication that that was his final episode.
“Their reasoning was, `Well, we’re building toward the big wedding and if we try to get Lowell out of there, it would detract from that.’ Certainly, I see that applied logic,” Church said. “But for me, I think it could have been handled. It would have been a lot cleaner, as opposed to going back.
“And I would have liked to have seen the character depart with dignity and grace, and not just be like a joke-fest. But to let this really innocent, really ingenuous guy leave in a very gentle, albeit funny way.”
Perhaps ironically, the producers of “Wings” have pitched him just such an episode if he chooses to return and do it.
“If I do it, it will be a really great episode,” Church said. “All of my concerns about the character would be addressed and how he would leave the series. But my big concern is that I don’t want it to distract from the new series.”
Source: https://t-tees.com
Category: WHY
