hannahstohelit

hannahstohelit t1_jcvv5xt wrote

Reply to comment by MSGRiley in Avenue 5 by MSGRiley

My understanding is that there was a writer's room, with each individual episode being mainly written by one member- not uncommon for shows. But they all did work together with Iannucci.

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hannahstohelit t1_j659c6c wrote

This is adding more ammo to my theory that part of why Disney bought into the show is that they want to be able to add a new property to the Marvel-Star Wars cycle... the only issue from RTD's side is that unlike at the BBC where the spinoffs can air on BBC Two or Three, giving the original show pride of place, at Disney all shows would presumably be at the same level.

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hannahstohelit t1_iwoc9mh wrote

The only one to whom that was ever attributed was a Klemperer, IIRC. He’d had plenty of previous experience playing Nazis in Hollywood (most famously in Judgment in Nuremberg) and was very alarmed when he went to the audition for Hogan’s Heroes and realized that it was meant to be a comedy. At the time he described the show as a workplace comedy that could have just as easily taken place at General Motors.

Interestingly, if you’ve seen the pilot you’ll notice that Larry Hovis, who plays Carter, is actually a one-off character and instead the main gang includes a tailor named Vladimir Minsk. He never showed up again after the pilot, and that’s because Leonid Kinskey, who played him, was also Jewish and was so disturbed by the concept of a comedy with Nazis that he walked. (Kinskey is probably most famous for playing Sascha the bartender in Casablanca and was also a refugee from the Nazis.)

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hannahstohelit t1_iwnyhrg wrote

Thanks for posting this! He was really great on the show. Interestingly, while he was the only Jew to play a POW on the show, he was NOT the only Jew in the cast- all of the main actors who played Nazi officials (Werner Klemperer, John Banner, Leon Askin, and Howard Caine) were Jewish, and while Clary was the only Holocaust survivor, Klemperer, Banner, and Askin were refugees from the Nazis.

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hannahstohelit t1_ited3cv wrote

The question is how much they juiced it up on social media after it started, but yeah, I was watching it while it was airing (or rather I binged it the week the finale aired) and looked to see what was going on on Twitter afterward and it started off small and really escalated over time before it exploded.

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