Web Sitcom ‘Closed Mondays’ Always Online
July 6, 2007
Ron Nakano loves the Japanese confection manju, with its doughy exterior and sweet bean interior, so much that he created a sitcom about a manju shop. Well, except the manju shop failed and has been converted to a Japanese restaurant — that’s also failing. Ask why he thinks failure would make for a good sitcom, and he responds with understated wisdom: “In the success of something comes failure of another.”
Nakano hopes to succeed with his groundbreaking online weekly sitcom Closed Mondays, set in a Japanese restaurant. He is the writer for the show and is also founder of Hosomo: Original Television Programming Online, based near Sacramento. Closed Mondays will be filmed in a studio with high-definition technology and available for download via BitTorrent, an Internet peer-to-peer file distribution medium.
That’s a lot of fancy technology for a show that got its start 20 years ago! Back then, it was intended as a serious short film about one guy’s introspection of his life, as he’s looking in the mirror. It has now evolved to become a sitcom about several guys’ lives as they gather at a Japanese restaurant. When Nakano was marketing the idea to Hollywood executives, he recalls vividly that “as soon as they heard ‘Japanese restaurant,’ they dropped the idea, thinking that mainstream Americans wouldn’t be able to relate to it.”
But he refuses to be pigeonholed: “Closed Mondays isn’t about being Japanese or even Asian — it’s about universal situations.” For example, the pilot webisode is about the aftermath of a bachelor party gone out of control. True, the characters are mostly Japanese and it’s set in a Japanese restaurant, but Nakano says he draws upon his own Japanese background only because it makes it easier for him to write the story so that he can focus more on developing the characters.
The benefit of waiting 20 years, besides advancements in technology, is the characters have more depth and richness. The main character Robert Nakayubi, a Japanese American photographer who enjoyed success with his career, returns home near Sacramento to help his ailing father with the family manju shop. Robert decides to turn the manju shop, a fading industry in the Japanese American community, into a hopefully successful Japanese restaurant. As he comes to reflect more on community and family, Robert comes to understand that (as the show’s tagline reads) “in the heart of every community is a place to eat.”
Robert’s friends include perpetually single guy Steve (played by actor David Kiyoshi) and goal-oriented accountant Jeff (played by Jeff Brock). Robert’s love interest, Linda, is played by Lindsay Shortliffe Paquette; the restaurant’s cashier, Risako, is played by Mayumi Reese; and chef David is played by Darren Wong. With filming of the pilot webisode scheduled to begin in August, the focus in July is on casting Robert. Besides being the lead character, Robert is a self-assured “nice guy” type who has a not-so-nice past (if you think you’re the “Robert” Nakano has been waiting for, e-mail him at info@closed-mondays.com).
The waitress, “who’s not afraid to speak her mind,” is one of the few characters who isn’t Asian. Her character is used as a tool to explain references to concepts such as camp (Japanese re-education camp) and traditional Japanese shops being closed on Mondays. These explanations will be provided in an online guide, something that is necessary because the broader non-Asian/non-Japanese audience might not understand some references.
Even the Asian audience may miss some of these same references, especially if the viewer is from a younger generation. Closed Mondays hopes to garner the appeal of the third generation, those in their late 20s, the same generation with whom YouTube has become immensely popular. Even so, this doesn’t intimidate Nakano because the real rival, he maintains, is the good old-fashioned tube.
His dream is for a lot of people to download Closed Mondays from the Internet and then watch it on their own TVs. A few years back, Nakano would have wished for the show to be wildly popular; today, however, he measures his success differently. He will achieve personal success if the show comes out the way he wanted it to, true to his perspective of what life is like.
“My attitude now is ‘I don’t want compromises any more,’” he says matter-of-factly. He would rather walk away than give it up to Hollywood executives who would significantly change the story behind Closed Mondays.
“I just want it to be good, and if something’s important then it’ll come out.”
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