Christine Lakin Stars in Lovin' Lakin on Hulu/YouTube

[Pavan]

http://blog.sitcomsonline.com/2012/0...vin-lakin.html

New Comedic Webseries Lovin' Lakin, Starring Step by Step's Christine Lakin, Premieres Monday on Hulu, Watch Her on Melissa & Joey Tonight

We briefly mentioned before that actress Christine Lakin (Step by Step) is launching her own webseries, but now we have the full story for you on how it happened! Comedy/sitcom fans and reality show fans will rejoice! Lovin Lakin, a new online comedy series starring Christine Lakin, premieres on Hulu and YouTube this coming Monday (July 16, 2012). Ten episodes have been produced for your enjoyment. And you don't have to wait every week to watch a new episode! All ten episodes will be available on the premiere date and for people to watch on-demand! Now that's cool! And it even has its own catchy theme song..."she's Lakin!"

If you don't know, Lovin' Lakin is an original webseries "mockumentary" following former child TV star Christine Lakin and her comeback to show business. She will be playing a fictional version of herself, because of course we know she never left show business. She has been a very steady and well respected working actress since the sitcom ended in 1998. This webseries will be a hilarious look at another version of Christine Lakin. The webseries chronicles the former Step by Step actress as she attempts to provide insight into "how to make it" in Hollywood, with episodes featuring some of her cool friends Kristen Bell, Patrick Duffy, Staci Keanan, Kyle Bornheimer, Kristin Chenoweth and Seth MacFarlane. Christine says "they will be playing a 'kind of' version of themselves. Like for example, Patrick Duffy couldn't be a nicer, sweeter, more lovely amazing human being and in his episode, I don't want to give too much away, but the entire focus of his episode is that I think he is really family and I always go to him with my problems and he can't stand me... and everybody on that show couldn't stand me and I was always so annoying, which of course is not the case, I mean he wouldn't come do the show if we didn't have a good relationship! To me, that's what's funny and that's the character I built, and the fact that everyone knows this girl, this Christine Lakin, and everybody hates her (laughs)! It makes me laugh endlessly because there is so many ways to go with it because she is just so oblivious to the fact that nobody really likes her very much!"

We talked to Christine Lakin in detail about her "mockumentary" web series and how she came up with this idea, "I was sitting around with my friend and fellow producer Dave Mahanes, and he does quite serious documentaries, and he looked at me and said, 'I would love to do something just for fun.' So he said if you ever have an idea to film something, he said he would love to work together and do something silly and I've been kind of knocking around this idea in my head that I love The Office and I love that idea of sort of a fake documentary...the device of a documentary I think is really fun and I think it provides a lot of commentary on what's happening for the actors. So I sort of had this idea and I didn't know what it was and I pitched it to him and he liked it and it just kind of blossomed from there. I knew I wanted to do a brand of comedy that was uniquely my own and sort of a storyline that is uniquely my own. So using a page from my real life, people always say that if you're going to write something, write what you know. So I went to the place I knew best, to take my real life and to completely turn it on its head and make myself a caricature and to say, 'what if this girl is someone totally different from me but lived all the same experiences that I lived?' And having left the business and wanting to make a comeback and just having no real knowledge what the business is actually like anymore and having a complete sort of over inflated view of herself. And I think that's what makes Michael Scott, the character on The Office, makes him so funny that he is so likeable but he is such a daft idiot! And I just really enjoy that sort of humor and I love that character and I follow that model a little bit for what I made myself in this webseries. And we were able to make ten episodes in several weeks because they were like five minutes a piece roughly."

She also said "I was really lucky that I have very talented and funny friends who were great improvisers so we sort of used the scripts as a template but really everybody was allowed to go sort of off the page and a lot of the greatest stuff we got was from improv. So I was really lucky in that regard." She added, "if you're going to make a documentary, there has to be a journey. I think as a mockumentary it makes it more pertinent for the character of Christine Lakin to be returning to show business because I think there has to be a sense of discovery for any character. You have to have a goal at the end, you have to have a want, a drive, that's what drives the motivation for any story. So having made it that she left the business and now she is making this grand comeback and she think it is going to go really really well and we all know from the get go that it's probably not. Given the fact that she is not very self-aware at all and times have kind of changed and the fact that she actually thinks after 10 years being out of the business that she still is America's sweetheart is hilarious because as we all know, you could leave for six months and no one would remember you, sadly. I also did this because it's sort of a tongue-and-cheek nod to the fact that I was in real life on a TV show as a child and since then I have done a lot of different things. Making this web series was definitely a chance for me to have more control and more creative autonomy, and that was probably the biggest reason I did it. I did it for me, and if other people like it, man that's the cherry on top because I love to make other people laugh."

There are ideas to bring this to television as well (like a sitcom?), depending on how this goes, but Christine says her goal was always to make people laugh and if there is a second season on television or the web, she doesn't care where as long as she can make people laugh. She says it was fun to film and she loves producing it. Christine also would love to have her Step by Step mother Suzanne Somers on the second season. She does however have some footage from that day she reunited with Suzanne Somers and Patrick Duffy at a TV dads event that she will use as easter eggs, bonus footage and bloopers for this season. She would also love to have her other co-stars from Step by Step on the show if there is a second season. She tells us there is an annual Step by Step pot-luck reunion in August at one of the producers' house and she will definitely try to recruit some of them to join her if there is a second season. And she has a few episodes already written if there is indeed a second season, such as an episode on a "child actor support group" with stars like Melissa Joan Hart, Kellie Martin, Danielle Fishel, Jaleel White and Shannen Doherty dropping by. Melissa and Kellie for sure would do it. Let's hope we get to see a second season so we can see this! Spread the word and watch the first season starting this Monday!

Lovin' Lakin is created by and produced by Christine Lakin and Dave Mahanes. The series is executive produced by Andy Fickman and Betsy Sullenger of Oops Doughnuts Productions. Christine Lakin wrote the series with additional writing on some episodes by Ross Patterson. We have a video trailer below, so please watch!

And Lovin' Lakin is not all for Christine! She will guest star on TONIGHT'S episode of an all-new Melissa & Joey airing at 8:00pm ET/PT on ABC Family. She made an appearance on the sitcom last season as well, but this time her character returns and wants to have a baby...and wants Joe's (Joey Lawrence) sperm! See the hilarious video promo below. In addition, she is also on another webseries, Internet Icon, which is very popular and generating traffic. Lakin also tells us that she hits the stage this fall in the Los Angeles premiere of Silence! The Musical. And if that's not all, she says she is choreographing on a Disney Channel sitcom pilot Bits & Pieces and working on more shows for Worst Audition Ever, which she created and we absolutely love. Everybody is certainly lovin' Lakin, and she deserves it!

Read more: http://blog.sitcomsonline.com/2012/0...#ixzz20SRBsUrv

[Reverend Jim]

Originally Posted by Pavan

http://blog.sitcomsonline.com/2012/0...vin-lakin.html

New Comedic Webseries Lovin' Lakin, Starring Step by Step's Christine Lakin, Premieres Monday on Hulu, Watch Her on Melissa & Joey Tonight

We briefly mentioned before that actress Christine Lakin (Step by Step) is launching her own webseries, but now we have the full story for you on how it happened! Comedy/sitcom fans and reality show fans will rejoice! Lovin Lakin, a new online comedy series starring Christine Lakin, premieres on Hulu and YouTube this coming Monday (July 16, 2012). Ten episodes have been produced for your enjoyment. And you don't have to wait every week to watch a new episode! All ten episodes will be available on the premiere date and for people to watch on-demand! Now that's cool! And it even has its own catchy theme song..."she's Lakin!"

If you don't know, Lovin' Lakin is an original webseries "mockumentary" following former child TV star Christine Lakin and her comeback to show business. She will be playing a fictional version of herself, because of course we know she never left show business. She has been a very steady and well respected working actress since the sitcom ended in 1998. This webseries will be a hilarious look at another version of Christine Lakin. The webseries chronicles the former Step by Step actress as she attempts to provide insight into "how to make it" in Hollywood, with episodes featuring some of her cool friends Kristen Bell, Patrick Duffy, Staci Keanan, Kyle Bornheimer, Kristin Chenoweth and Seth MacFarlane. Christine says "they will be playing a 'kind of' version of themselves. Like for example, Patrick Duffy couldn't be a nicer, sweeter, more lovely amazing human being and in his episode, I don't want to give too much away, but the entire focus of his episode is that I think he is really family and I always go to him with my problems and he can't stand me... and everybody on that show couldn't stand me and I was always so annoying, which of course is not the case, I mean he wouldn't come do the show if we didn't have a good relationship! To me, that's what's funny and that's the character I built, and the fact that everyone knows this girl, this Christine Lakin, and everybody hates her (laughs)! It makes me laugh endlessly because there is so many ways to go with it because she is just so oblivious to the fact that nobody really likes her very much!"

We talked to Christine Lakin in detail about her "mockumentary" web series and how she came up with this idea, "I was sitting around with my friend and fellow producer Dave Mahanes, and he does quite serious documentaries, and he looked at me and said, 'I would love to do something just for fun.' So he said if you ever have an idea to film something, he said he would love to work together and do something silly and I've been kind of knocking around this idea in my head that I love The Office and I love that idea of sort of a fake documentary...the device of a documentary I think is really fun and I think it provides a lot of commentary on what's happening for the actors. So I sort of had this idea and I didn't know what it was and I pitched it to him and he liked it and it just kind of blossomed from there. I knew I wanted to do a brand of comedy that was uniquely my own and sort of a storyline that is uniquely my own. So using a page from my real life, people always say that if you're going to write something, write what you know. So I went to the place I knew best, to take my real life and to completely turn it on its head and make myself a caricature and to say, 'what if this girl is someone totally different from me but lived all the same experiences that I lived?' And having left the business and wanting to make a comeback and just having no real knowledge what the business is actually like anymore and having a complete sort of over inflated view of herself. And I think that's what makes Michael Scott, the character on The Office, makes him so funny that he is so likeable but he is such a daft idiot! And I just really enjoy that sort of humor and I love that character and I follow that model a little bit for what I made myself in this webseries. And we were able to make ten episodes in several weeks because they were like five minutes a piece roughly."

She also said "I was really lucky that I have very talented and funny friends who were great improvisers so we sort of used the scripts as a template but really everybody was allowed to go sort of off the page and a lot of the greatest stuff we got was from improv. So I was really lucky in that regard." She added, "if you're going to make a documentary, there has to be a journey. I think as a mockumentary it makes it more pertinent for the character of Christine Lakin to be returning to show business because I think there has to be a sense of discovery for any character. You have to have a goal at the end, you have to have a want, a drive, that's what drives the motivation for any story. So having made it that she left the business and now she is making this grand comeback and she think it is going to go really really well and we all know from the get go that it's probably not. Given the fact that she is not very self-aware at all and times have kind of changed and the fact that she actually thinks after 10 years being out of the business that she still is America's sweetheart is hilarious because as we all know, you could leave for six months and no one would remember you, sadly. I also did this because it's sort of a tongue-and-cheek nod to the fact that I was in real life on a TV show as a child and since then I have done a lot of different things. Making this web series was definitely a chance for me to have more control and more creative autonomy, and that was probably the biggest reason I did it. I did it for me, and if other people like it, man that's the cherry on top because I love to make other people laugh."

There are ideas to bring this to television as well (like a sitcom?), depending on how this goes, but Christine says her goal was always to make people laugh and if there is a second season on television or the web, she doesn't care where as long as she can make people laugh. She says it was fun to film and she loves producing it. Christine also would love to have her Step by Step mother Suzanne Somers on the second season. She does however have some footage from that day she reunited with Suzanne Somers and Patrick Duffy at a TV dads event that she will use as easter eggs, bonus footage and bloopers for this season. She would also love to have her other co-stars from Step by Step on the show if there is a second season. She tells us there is an annual Step by Step pot-luck reunion in August at one of the producers' house and she will definitely try to recruit some of them to join her if there is a second season. And she has a few episodes already written if there is indeed a second season, such as an episode on a "child actor support group" with stars like Melissa Joan Hart, Kellie Martin, Danielle Fishel, Jaleel White and Shannen Doherty dropping by. Melissa and Kellie for sure would do it. Let's hope we get to see a second season so we can see this! Spread the word and watch the first season starting this Monday!

Lovin' Lakin is created by and produced by Christine Lakin and Dave Mahanes. The series is executive produced by Andy Fickman and Betsy Sullenger of Oops Doughnuts Productions. Christine Lakin wrote the series with additional writing on some episodes by Ross Patterson. We have a video trailer below, so please watch!

And Lovin' Lakin is not all for Christine! She will guest star on TONIGHT'S episode of an all-new Melissa & Joey airing at 8:00pm ET/PT on ABC Family. She made an appearance on the sitcom last season as well, but this time her character returns and wants to have a baby...and wants Joe's (Joey Lawrence) sperm! See the hilarious video promo below. In addition, she is also on another webseries, Internet Icon, which is very popular and generating traffic. Lakin also tells us that she hits the stage this fall in the Los Angeles premiere of Silence! The Musical. And if that's not all, she says she is choreographing on a Disney Channel sitcom pilot Bits & Pieces and working on more shows for Worst Audition Ever, which she created and we absolutely love. Everybody is certainly lovin' Lakin, and she deserves it!

Read more: http://blog.sitcomsonline.com/2012/0...#ixzz20SRBsUrv

[Pavan]

Moving on, today is the day of premiere of the new webseries Lovin' Lakin starring Christine Lakin (Step by Step), which we covered last week. Make sure you watch this hilarious new series on Hulu or YouTube! Christine gave us so much information last week when we talked to her, we want to share more from her today. Plus she also spoke to our good friend Chris Mann of Reimagine That! for the latest episode of his awesome podcast! So please find that below.

Christine told us that she filmed some of her episodes on the set of the big screen movie You Again (starring Kristen Bell, Jamie Lee Curtis, Odette Yustman, and many many more stars like herself): "We were actually filming You Again when I started to film this series, I wrote it right before You Again and we were filming in L.A. that summer and of course I took advantage of the opportunity working with so many great actors. And you know the Jamie Lee Curtis episode, unfortunately we can't air, I mean it's brilliant but unfortunately a little too "blue." Not for I think the world, but for I think for Jamie and the kinds of stuff she does these days, for some of her branding she had a little bit of a problem with it. She did say she would come back to do another episode, so I hope we get to do another season, cause she's just brilliantly funny and such a gifted comedic improviser, and a lot of people probably don't know that about her! So yeah, I sort of took advantage of having all of these great people around, and asked Kristin Chenoweth obviously, Jamie Lee, Kristen Bell, and you know Patrick Duffy had always said he would do an episode with me and again that was perfect timing, he was in L.A. doing a couple of days on You Again, so it worked out great. Staci Keanan came by that day, and then you know Seth MacFarlane, you know I pop in and out of the Family Guy offices, he was kind enough to come in on a Saturday to the (Oops Doughnuts) office when nobody else was there and do that for me. So I cannot express enough that making something like this is a labor of love. Everybody did it as a huge favor to me!"

Christine really appreciated everyone working on this show for her: "I would like to go on record thanking everybody who is a part of it. You know there were a bunch of kids in one of the episodes, where I teach an acting class, and they were all so funny and their parents just totally let me abuse them--in all the right ways--and make them do really silly really wrong things and they were such good sports about it. Everything from that to my friend Patrick Day at the Young Actors Space letting me use that space, to people coming in on Saturdays, to Oops Doughnuts letting me use their office, and everyone that came in and did a part on this show, I couldn't do it without that and I think that's a real part of what YouTube is and part of what the internet is and I think that is a really positive thing. So if people like this, that's great, if people don't like it, that's fine, too. But there are so many haters out there, who post really rude and mean comments on YouTube and I don't think it helps the film making community. And I don't think it helps creativity in general. Constructive criticism is great and I welcome that and I would be the first probably to give that kind of advice on something like Internet Icon (where Christine is a judge), but people work really hard, whether it is a two-minute YouTube video or whether it is a webseries. There's a lot of people around that, it doesn't happen because one person just turns on a camera all the time...there's a lot of people that work behind the scenes."

Please watch Lovin' Lakin today! In addition, our good friend Chris Mann (Come and Knock on Our Door, Retroality.TV) also spoke to Lakin herself! Read about it in his own words: Christie Lakin ... The Spoofed Adventures of New Christine ... In this exclusive Retroality.TV interview, Step by Step child star Christine Lakin tells all about her new satirical webseries, Lovin' Lakin -- premiering July 16 on Hulu and YouTube -- while opening up about her experiences as a '90s teen TV star-turned-versatile, multimedia-savvy performer. (Tweet her @yolakin, @lovinlakin, @worstaudition and @OopsDoughnuts, then like her on Facebook here, here, here and (phew!) here!)

"Lovin' Lakin," a ten-episode mockumentary, casts the 33-year-old star as an egocentric, obnoxious version of herself that clearly couldn't be more removed from the real, laid-back Lakin. The fictional Christine -- unlike her steadily employed originator -- is a onetime child star staging a comeback. Along the way, her former co-stars and famous friends (among them Patrick Duffy, Seth MacFarlane and Kristin Chenoweth) suffer fictional Christine's comic misadventures in relaunching her celebrity. (For more info, check out Christine's terrific new interview with Sitcoms Online news director Pavan Patel here.)

Lakin shares with Reimagine That! host Chris Mann her fond memories of playing Al Lambert, the tomboyish daughter of Duffy and Suzanne Somers in the Brady Bunch-esque Step, which ran from 1991 on 1997 as part of ABC's hugely successful TGIF sitcom lineup. (The series ran for one more season, through spring 1998, on CBS and has remained in syndication ever since.) Lakin is especially lovin' on the paternal Duffy, who she says has remained a cherished fixture in her life.

The go-getter actress explains how her new online series affords her a self-made opportunity to express herself creatively on-camera and behind-the-scenes. She also favorably compares her TV sitcom experiences to her background as a stage actress -- and muses about marrying both in her recent turn as Joanie Cunningham in Garry Marshall's Happy Days: The Musical. (Lakin, seen most recently on TV in Melissa and Joey, has also appeared in the Marshall-directed features Georgia Rule and Valentine's Day; her other feature credits include co-starring with Jamie Lee Curtis in 2010's You Again and starring opposite Paris Hilton in 2008's The Hottie and the Nottie. Up next: reimagining the role of Clarice this fall in the West Coast stage premiere of the darkly comic Silence! The Musical. [Oh, yeah, folks. We're talking "... of the Lambs!"])

Finally, the ever-spirited Lakin discusses why she chose online cheekiness to underscore her serious commitment to supporting gay marriage by participating in the Funny or Die video Child Celebrities Opposing Kirk Cameron.

Also ... on a somber note, Chris fondly looks back on the celebrities we've lost in 2012 and shares his thoughts on the 50-year friendship that Andy Griffith shared with his co-star Don Knotts.

And finally, Reimagine That! dream interpreter Yvonne Ryba offers an in-depth analysis of a client's dream involving pregnancy and creative rebirth.

Read more: http://blog.sitcomsonline.com/2012/0...bc-friday.html

[Pavan]

http://www.youtube.com/embed/zlNDEEPjB6c

[amazins03]

Can't believe this hasn't gotten more discussion -

Some of the best ones besides the one linked above:

Lakin impresses a director:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQbzDfPh00I

Bonus segment, with Duffy and Keenan:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmGdP1GChW4

Lakin gets an agent:
http://youtu.be/bAnkNFBqNS8

[ThomasE]

I loved the series. This webseries was funny. I loved season four when Patrick Duffy and Staci Keenan appeared.