MOJO’s The Circuit The Blog: How We Make The Circuit
How We Make The Circuit
Some of you, while watching MOJO’s The Circuit, may think to yourselves — selves, how does this show get written? How does it get made? What is the process? How do these people work? What would Deepak look like if he was, say, an Asian woman?
Questions like these are why I’m here..
Hi. It’s me, Yuri, that writer guy, and I’m here to tell you about our process.
The first step to writing the script is the gathering of the news stories. We do this by sending out our crack team of hard-nosed reporters to go into often very dangerous places (one of our reporters had their ear bitten off by Brian Lam of Gizmodo not too long ago) just to get the kind of in-depth coverage you expect from The Circuit. Once the stories are gathered, I have Kai type them out and bathe me in them, so that I can really absorb the information. Absorption is an important process and it’s something that I recommend all writers do with whatever they’re writing about — especially if they’re writing about skin exfoliants.
Once I’m properly absorbed, we begin writing. Kai will write headlines, I will write headlines and sometimes, if we’re lucky, we manage to steal a few headlines from the Daily Show. We often do this word for word in hopes that Jon Stewart will personally come to the studio and bare-knuckle box Deepak. Once the headlines are written, the segments are laid out and Bad Links are badly linked, we send it over to the producers.
The Producers, Scott Broock, Emery Wells, Paul Iannacchino and Pat Carpenter, will then read the script and send back cryptic critiques. Often they will mysteriously say, “Who are you? Are you on the payroll?” or, “This is all garbage” and sometimes just, “Did you steal this from Jon Stewart?”
After chastising us, calling us horrible names and once, taking a small piece of Kai’s kidney, the Producers will give us actual script notes often following them up by telling us that they, “…need this in the next three minutes.” Luckily, we are professionals and manage to get them the changes within seconds.
The changes made, the script finalized, we do a reading. I live in San Francisco — the show shoots in New York, that means that most of the time, I am web-cammed into a swanky meeting room, pointed at Deepak and then forced to listen to him read the lines we wrote. Sometimes, I’ll yell angrily at him because he can’t see me and there’s a certain amount of protection that being inside a laptop offers. It’s not uncommon for Deepak to start with the headlines but end up in an Arnold impression — because he’s Deepak, and that’s how Deepak rolls. Once the reading is done, Deepak is forcibly dressed, made-up (Deepak actually IS an Asian woman before the make up, so the answer to the aforementioned question is this — he makes a gorgeous Asian woman) and sent to the studio to film his heart out.
Then the editors edit, the Producers approve, the episode goes up, you watch it, you read a very strange blog and voila — the week is over and we do it all again.
That said, I hope you enjoy this week’s show, it’s a fun one! Remember, if you like The Circuit, pass it on, tell your friends, tell your families, tell anyone who’ll listen and we will reward you. Oh yes we will.
Thanks for watching. And reading. If you have any questions for me or anyone else in the cast/crew — be sure to leave it here on the blog and we’ll answer it as soon as possible!
-Yuri, that writer guy who once saw Producer Paul Iannacchino eat an entire intern just because he wrote the wrong “there.”