Saturday Night Live alumni Vanessa Bayer stars in I Love That For You, a SHOWTIME series that she also co-created about a girl who achieves her dream of becoming an on-air host at a home shopping network called SVN (Special Value Network. When asked during a TCA press conference to do an on-air plug for the show, Bayer quickly stepped into the role, saying “It's something for the whole family. You can watch it day into evening. It's good for any time of day. It's good for any person in your family. It's really elegant. It's got that pop of a lot of incredible characters. It's got heart. It's got that beautiful sense of love and adoration while having so much comedy. It's got drama. It's got everything that you would want in a show. Plus, it's a really great steal if you get SHOWTIME. Obviously, they've got incredible rates, and they are going fast. Honestly, you want to get in on this show. You want to get there. You want to get on the phone. You want to call in, do whatever you need to do to get on this show because this show is going fast and it's going to be just a dream of a show.”
(Nicole Wilder/SHOWTIME)
All kidding aside, Bayer is a self-professed home shopping obsessee, a quality she shared with former SNL writer Jeremy Beiler, who is the other co-creator. “We were having breakfast one day, and Vanessa told me that she had this idea for a show that she was looking for a writer to work on, set in the world of QVC,” Beiler revealed. “And I had had a number of pages written already for a totally separate idea, also set in the world of QVC, and it just delighted us and made us laugh. And so, we knew we wanted to put the show into that world, and then, from there, we knew that Vanessa would be at the center of it, and it made sense to fold in [her] real story.”
When Vanessa Bayer was 15, she was diagnosed with leukemia. “My family is really funny,” Bayer shared. “We always joked around a lot when I was sick, and I always joked around a lot with my friends, and I think that kind of really helped us get through it. In some ways, it's the reason I went into comedy because it was such a helpful tool in communicating and getting through things when I was sick.” Vanessa’s backstory became that of her character, Joanna Gold, except her character, faced with being fired, lies and tells her coworkers that her cancer is back.
“She's desperate to keep this empire that she's built,” comedy legend Jenifer Lewis said of her character Patricia, the owner and founder of SVN who, shortly after hiring Joanna, fired her after a really bad set. “Vanessa's character comes in and she's a little goofy. And so, I'm not really having her messing things up. But I can really only talk about real life. I just love Vanessa and Molly [Shannon], and the executive producers. I'm going to be honest. When I drove onto the set, my whole chest became light. It was just light. It's almost, like, this character, I've been rehearsing for her all my life, and she's a horror story. And I'm just having fun down here. I keep telling everybody how I'm having such a good time. I just know that that's going to reflect in the show.”
“Vanessa and I are both from Cleveland, Ohio,” Molly Shannon shared, one of several things she and Vanessa Bayer have in common, both SNL alumni whose time on the sketch comedy series never overlapped. Molly Shannon plays Jackie Stilton, the star host of SVN who becomes Joanna’s mentor. “Vanessa is so down to earth, so it's very easy for me, as a character, to play somebody who just adores her, and thinks she's so adorable and cute, and wants to take her under her wing, because Vanessa is just so likable in real life, and just so adorable. So, there's no acting required. And then, getting to work with Jenifer Lewis is just a dream for me, and we're just all having so much fun.”
While SVN may have a lot of similarities to QVC, it’s not meant to be a parody or to make fun of the home shopping format. “One of the things that I really love about the show, and drew me to working with Jeremy and Vanessa on this, is that there's a real love and passion for QVC/SVN,” showrunner and executive producer Jessi Klein revealed. “We really don't want to be making fun of it in a snide way. The comedy comes from an excess of true passion and love for it. And so I think that sort of infuses the whole tone of the show, is that there's a real heart and sweetness to all of it, and that we don't ever really want to be in a mean place, or feeling like we're above it.”
As part of the research process for the series, Vanessa Bayer even fulfilled a lifelong dream of getting to tour QVC’s studio in West Chester, PA, and meet with the on-air hosts she’s watched since she was a child. “I think a lot of the live TV elements from SNL do cross over to home shopping,” Bayer explained, likening the struggle to get SNL sketches on the air to a home shopping host trying to get on a better time slot. Meeting with the real QVC hosts proved to be an invaluable resource to the I Love That For You team. “Of course, it's more fun for us making this show about home shopping to make the actual people who work there have a range of personalities. But, yeah, I think there are so many similarities. And also, just the fact that, like, the show must go on, you know? Things don't always go exactly to plan, but you have to just keep moving because people are watching you live.”
New episodes of I Love That For You launch on SHOWTIME streaming platforms on Fridays, starting today. Episodes will air on SHOWTIME on Sundays at 8:30/7:30c beginning May 1st.
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