KUTV to launch comedy sketch show courtesy of Cougar Radio
By Bryan C. Kuriawa
KUTV is set to launch a new comedy sketch show entitled “Kean Afterhours.” Developed by Cougar Radio’s Phil Giannino and Alex Wisniewski, this show intends to give students a satire of campus life. For both students, this represents both a new medium to tackle and a similarly personal project.
“Alex is the one who had the general idea and he came to me and said, hey I know you like TV, so come on over,” Giannino said. “It was an excellent idea and that was my true passion, I love the radio station, and it was hard to really leave, but my true real passion that I have is television.”
As head of Cougar Radio, Giannino had implemented a series of updates during his tenure at the station. Once many of his changes were in place, he moved forward with Wisniewski on the show idea. Yet in the process of developing the show, both found themselves fully into the creative process.
“When we originally had the idea we were going for more of a late night talk show format, but as we started production, we quickly realized that it was too difficult to maintain a show like that with the resources and the staffing that we have,” Wisniewski said. “Because in order to do a talk show like that you have to be really consistently topical, you have to stay on top of what’s going on. So we decided to change it over to a sketch comedy format.”
Developed as a 20 minute program, Giannino and Wisniewski intend to satirize university life in a variety of assorted sketches. Along with their two writers, both have already been in the process of planning their first filmed skit.
“We picked and chose what was good and we threw out what was bad and we are currently going to film a parking mockumentary in a Nat Geo style about the parking here at Kean,” Giannino said.
At the same time, in order to make the planned sketch work well, both of them developed the skit accordingly. Based on an idea about Kean’s parking, the skit will feature a student dressed in a stereotypical safari adventure outfit going around the lot.
“It’s a funny concept if you think about it, because we’re really making a wildlife documentary about people trying to park at Kean University,” Wisniewski said. “You go up and down the aisles all the time, you see people stalking parking space like vultures.”
In this and other sketches, Giannino and Wisniewski plan to relate them back in a positive, yet satirical fashion. Presented in this manner, they don’t intend to paint a negative light, but instead want to present ideas people can relate to.
At the present time, both students hope to have the first completed episode by the end of the spring semester. Yet if all goes well, they hope to produce more episodes for the station over the next year and a half.
“My goal is to have 12 episodes by the time we graduate in the spring of 2015,” Wisniewski said.
“Kean Afterhours” is scheduled to air towards the end of the semester, and full episodes will be available on Giannino’s website at www.thephilgshow.com.