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The Hard Times of RJ Berger aired from June 2010 until May 2011 on MTV.

The Hard Times Of RJ Berger orbits the hilariously-hellish lives of a deeply unpopular 15 year-old (Paul Iacono) and his scheming, sex-obsessed best friend, Miles Jenner (Jareb Dauplaise). Other than pining after the girl of his dreams, Jenny Swanson (Amber Lancaster), receiving daily beatings from the meanest jock in school, Max Owens (Jayson Blair), and evading the stalker-ish advances of Lily Miran (Kara Taitz), there really isn't much excitement in RJ's life. That is, until his anatomical gift is accidentally exposed to the entire school.

In a single moment, RJ goes from anonymous to infamous, and for the first time in his life, he feels a tiny sliver of confidence. Swept up in this man-sized wave of recognition, we'll watch RJ claw his way out of the popularity basement. Whether it's trying to get laid, dealing with his bizarre parents, or simply navigating the treacherous waters of sophomore year, RJ will live out the stories -- good, bad and ugly -- that we all remember from high school. One mis-adventure at a time, we'll see him grow from a shy, awkward boy into a slightly less shy and awkward young man. Part The Wonder Years and part Superbad, The Hard Times Of RJ Berger is a loud, funny, raunchy, sexy look at the life of lovable loser.

The series was created by David Katzenberg and Seth Grahame-Smith.

An Article from The New York Times

Television
A Standout Student at Ribald High

By DAVE ITZKOFF
Published: May 20, 2010

THERE’S a lot that can be gleaned about the sensibility of “The Hard Times of RJ Berger” from its opening minutes. In its very first scene, “Hard Times” finds its title character, a nebbishy high school sophomore, in bed, engaged in an act of self-gratification. The intrusion of his unsuspecting mother brings his efforts to a halt, but her innocent touch on his side only results in the inadvertent completion of the act.

This isn’t a sequence from an R-rated 1980s comedy like “Porky’s,” or from a latter-day, Judd Apatow-style update on the formula intended for the multiplexes, but from a new television series that MTV hopes will find favor with its teenage and twentysomething audience.

With its raunchy dialogue and suggestive situations, “The Hard Times of RJ Berger” (which has its premiere on June 6) can sometimes seem like MTV’s attempt to further stretch the already permissive boundaries of basic cable.

But for a channel that has become synonymous with reality shows like “Jersey Shore” and “The Hills,” it is primarily an effort to develop a fictional character its young viewers will relate to, and revive its lineup of scripted programming.

In this case, MTV is building its campaign around a protagonist who, midway through his show’s debut episode, is revealed to his entire school to have a prodigiously large penis.

“It’s really about the awakening of this kid’s confidence,” said Seth Grahame-Smith, who created the series with David Katzenberg. “Lo and behold, this one discovery gives him the confidence to stand up to people who have bullied him his whole life.”

Though they come from different backgrounds, the “RJ Berger” creators bonded over the miseries they endured in high school. Mr. Grahame-Smith, 34, the author of the best-selling literary mash-up “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies,” went to Bethel High School in small-town Bethel, Conn., where he was harassed and beaten up. Mr. Katzenberg, 27, a segment producer for “Survivor” (and the son of Jeffrey Katzenberg, the chief executive of DreamWorks Animation), attended the exclusive Harvard-Westlake School in Los Angeles, where his teenage crushes rarely returned his affection.

Three years ago, while they worked together on the Web comedy series “Clark and Michael,” they found they shared a lowbrow sense of humor.

“I’m a juvenile 34, and David’s a mature 27,” Mr. Grahame-Smith said. “We kind of meet at 30 1/2.”

Before the premiere of “Hung,” the HBO comedy about a similarly well-endowed protagonist, they made a short film called “The Tale of RJ,” which Mr. Katzenberg directed and Mr. Grahame-Smith produced. A short homage to “Boogie Nights,” about a well-endowed nerd (played by Christopher Mintz-Plasse of “Superbad”) going to high school in the 1970s, this film was meant to be Mr. Katzenberg’s directorial calling card, but its creators felt it had potential as a television series.

“We realized early on that we wanted this to be a coming-of-age story,” Mr. Grahame-Smith said. “The more we can minimize the penis-related humor, the more show there was to tell.”

“The Tale of RJ” happened to reach MTV at a time about two years ago when the network was looking to reassert itself as a broadcaster of scripted shows as well as reality programs. Though MTV currently enjoys strong ratings for hits like “Jersey Shore,” it has surely noticed the ever-expanding roster of scripted shows that other cable networks are using to distinguish themselves, including AMC, Starz, TBS and Spike.

“It’s not at all about abandoning reality,” said Tony DiSanto, the network’s president of programming. “It’s about augmenting the reality genre with all these other genres and offering a diverse slate for our viewers.”

In Mr. Katzenberg’s film, MTV saw the potential for a modern-day “Wonder Years” — told in a different vernacular.

“We want to do stuff that’s rebellious and noisy and authentic,” said Liz Gateley, MTV’s senior vice president for series development. “We have to serve an expectation that we’re going to serve something that’s more authentic than what they’re getting on other networks.”

With “RJ Berger,” Ms. Gateley said, “every high school kid can relate to that opening scene.” She corrected herself: “Every high school boy can.”

On the show, Mr. Katzenberg, Mr. Grahame-Smith and their all-male writing staff clearly enjoy their freedom to find humor in potentially inappropriate subjects, whether they are sexual (an anime-style sequence detailing a failed encounter between RJ and an Asian classmate) or not (a character is described as “five feet of pure Columbine”).

The show has almost as much fun at the expense of RJ and his teenage cohort as it does at the expense of his parents (played by Beth Littleford and Larry Poindexter), who are engaged in their own amorous shenanigans with a pair of swingers (played by Lori Alan and Jim Hanna) and dole out terrible life advice to their son.

For Paul Iacono, the 21-year-old actor who plays RJ, the boundary-pushing spirit made for a thrilling work environment.

“Everyone was just so excited to come to the set the next day and face that new challenge,” Mr. Iacono said. “How were we going to pull this gag off? Or how do you get away with only showing so much? Or Lori Alan’s going to take off her top today. That was exciting for a lot of people.”

The “RJ Berger” creators said they were less interested in violating taboos than in humorously representing the struggles faced by teenagers.

“We make the show that we would have wanted to see when we were 15,” Mr. Grahame-Smith said, “a show that doesn’t talk down to us, that tries to present the way kids really talk and the problems that kids really go through.”

Mr. Katzenberg said, “We definitely want to be that show that younger kids have to sneak into their TV room or their parents’ room when they’re not supposed to.”

But MTV says it is being more circumspect with “The Hard Times of RJ Berger,” which it is aiming at 18-to-24-year-old viewers, in a 10 p.m. time slot that tends to draw a 12-to-24-year-old audience.

“The show does ride a fine line,” Mr. DiSanto said, “but I think it falls on the PG-13 side. It can’t go to the places that you would go to in an R-rated film, and that’s not even necessarily the intention.” (It’s fine, for example, for “RJ Berger” to show the title character imagining his love interest arriving at school naked, but not to actually show the nudity.)

Mr. DiSanto compared the humor of “RJ Berger” to adult cartoons like “South Park” and “Family Guy,” and said it was “not edgy for the sake of being edgy.”

“Our intention’s never to offend, of course,” he said. “But if you’re going to commit to an idea, you have to go for it and put it out there and see what happens.”

MTV is putting substantial promotional resources into the show and has scheduled its debut to follow its widely watched MTV Movie Awards. (In subsequent weeks, “The Hard Times of RJ Berger” will be shown with “Warren the Ape,” a new comedy about a down-on-his-luck puppet.)

For Mr. Grahame-Smith and Mr. Katzenberg, there is sufficient satisfaction in getting on television with a show that conveys their more-or-less real-life experiences without diluting their comedic voice.

“Now,” Mr. Katzenberg said, “both my parents know my sense of humor. And I don’t think they’re surprised by this at all.”

He made clear, however, that a scene in which RJ’s father suggests he may have to find sexual fulfillment from less desirable girls before he can “drive a Ferrari” was not taken from his own adolescence.

“My dad definitely did not use those words,” Mr. Katzenberg said. “He never said anything close to that to me.”

A Review from Variety

TV Reviews

Posted: Tue., Jun. 1, 2010, 5:27pm PT
The Hard Times of RJ Berger
(Series -- MTV, Sun. June 6, 11 p.m.)
By Brian Lowry

Filmed in Los Angeles by MTV. Executive producers, David Katzenberg, Seth Grahame-Smith; producer, Craig Cannold; director, Katzenberg; writer, Grahame-Smith.

RJ Berger - Paul Iacono Miles Jenner - Jareb Dauplaise Jenny Swanson - Amber Lancaster Max Owens - Jayson Blair Lily Marin - Kara Taitz

Like "Hung," "The Hard Times of RJ Berger" essentially uses a crass come-on -- the protagonist's extra-large trouser luggage -- to sell an otherwise fairly conventional dramedy. The HBO show, however, is more satisfying than this furtive MTV foray into the scripted world, which lands somewhere between a weak "The Wonder Years" and the kind of coming-of-age series that drove Judd Apatow (happily, in retrospect) into movies. MTV itself charitably describes the show as a mix of "Wonder Years" and "Superbad," but the punny title notwithstanding, this undercooked slab of meat is barely super-OK.

Mostly, the three previewed half-hours make sparing and not particularly believable use of the central premise -- that nerdy, popularity-challenged, 15-year-old RJ (an appealing Paul Iacono) is disproportionately endowed. How this will empower or further humiliate him remains an open question, despite voiceover narration (must every teen-show employ that device?) hinting it will be the former.Beyond his unusual package, RJ's is a fairly standard high school-outcast tale, as he pines for a seemingly unattainable girl (Amber Lancaster), is constantly accompanied by his roly-poly pal Miles (Jareb Dauplaise) and has little interest in a less-attractive classmate, Lily (Kara Taitz), who keeps throwing herself at him. And yes, there's a cruel jock (Jayson Blair, no relation to the famous fabulist) to torment and tease him.With such familiar elements, producers David Katzenberg and Seth Grahame-Smith seek to distinguish the show in its details and style, which are, for the most part, too gratuitously salty for the program's good. RJ's parents are sex-obsessed swingers, there are plenty of bleeped expletives -- and Lily tells RJ she's available to him by promising "any place, any orifice," a line that sounds conspicuously dreamt up by pervy guys, not a teenage girl.Along the way, RJ uses his secret (and eventually, not-so-secret) weapon to help strike a few blows for dweebs everywhere, but most of those moments are no more convincing than the aforementioned ones. And while there's a certain manic energy in the use of animation or fantasy sequences to illustrate RJ's fertile imagination, too often the scripts fall back on being crude in lieu of clever.Ultimately, "Hard Times'?" salacious logline (alas, everything sounds dirty in this context) serves as little more than a means to gain attention -- the added wrinkle being that hypersexualized teens are sure to draw rebuke from the usual suspects, which will only help promote the series.ABC Family has clearly demonstrated cable can participate in the current dramatic renaissance by appealing to a younger audience, and MTV would seem a natural to join the party. Fortunately for them, the show's derivative nature will be lost on a target audience barely in diapers during the initial run of "Wonder Years."It's only too bad that the Viacom channel began its scripted push with "RJ Berger," which works a little too hard at, er, standing out.

Camera, Mathew Rudenberg; editor, Steve Edwards; music, David Gregory Byrne; casting, Debra Zane, Tannis Valley, David H. Rappaport. 30 MIN.

An Interview with Paul Iacono by NY Magazine

* 6/4/10 at 1:00 PM

The Hard Times of RJ Berger’s Paul Iacono on the Pros and Cons of Playing a Huge-Wanged High-Schooler

* By Mike Vilensky

Since his role in last year's Fame remake, New Jersey native and Professional Performing Arts School graduate Paul Iacono has spent his time in Hollywood, filming MTV's upcoming return to scripted programming, The Hard Times of RJ Berger, which premieres on Sunday night. In the series, created by David Katzenberg and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies author Seth Grahame-Smith, Iacono, a young-looking 21, plays the titular character, a high-school outcast with a freakishly large genitalia. We spoke to the actor about the show and big expectations for his own endowment.

You're an East Coast guy: How was life in L.A.?
Well, I was back and forth, and I'm here in New York as much as I possibly can be — I just love New York too much. I got a place here on the Lower East Side, and I live by myself because I like the solitude. After filming, I needed to isolate myself a little bit in general; I needed to spend a little time focusing on myself. I viewed L.A. as a necessary evil.

So how was your first experience filming a TV show?
Shooting Hard Times nearly killed me. We shot one episode, 30 minutes, in three and a half days, on location at a real high school in the suburbs of L.A. That's a lot of work for any TV show, but when you are the title character and in every scene, you don't have the leisure of coming in and saying, "I'm a little tired, didn't get much sleep last night" and then half-ass it until noon. The camera is on you and you have to be on 100 percent all of the time. It was physically draining and emotionally draining; I had to be on all of the time. But of course, it was that much more rewarding.

You went to high school in Manhattan, right?
Right, at the Professional Performing Arts School, class of 2006. It was amazing. It was like suddenly you're not the only person who knows the complete libreto to Company, and there's solace in that. It's an island of misfits, really — everyone is sort of an outcast in way or another. They all gather there and culminate there — not that everyone gets along, not that it's a utopia or anything, but there's some sense of understanding. So I can absolutely tap into RJ's feeling like an outcast and being ostracized — I get that. But my method was just to play it honestly. I have a theatrical background so I have a tendency, not just with this, but even in my personal life, to be a little over-the-top and larger-than-life. But I just wanted to play this character honestly. He's a 15-year-old kid whose life sucks and all he wants to do is get laid.

Why does his life suck?
He has two friends — one is a chubby, obnoxious guy scheming ways to get cooler and more popular, he puts one foot forward and takes three steps backwards and somehow RJ always gets stuck in the middle of his stupid plans. His other best friend is a girl named Lily who's more of a troll next door, she's his "friend" but more of his stalker. She'll do anything to get close to him. But he lusts after the most beautiful girl in school; he has forever. Her name is Jenny Swanson — the name sums it up. She's just the perfect, all-American girl and she dates RJ's arch-nemesis, of course, who goes out of his way to antagonize RJ to all extents just because he knows that RJ, deep down, has a thing for his girl. Not that anyone thinks RJ has a chance. And his parents are sexaholics, they're swingers, and they're constantly engaging in sexual acts in front of him. His father tries to give him advice and tells him to be more direct, he says, like, "Next time you're in the library, take her hand, unzip your shit," and the father and mother start acting this out over dinner. And he kind of does know it's going on.

So there's some uncomfortable humor here. Is it more like Welcome to the Dollhouse or American Pie?
Ah, I love Happiness. But it's somewhere in between Solondz and American Pie. It's all about the tone. And it's MTV.

How did you get involved with the project?
I was in kind of a dark phase. I'd just gotten out of a relationship with this Schmollywood girl. I was looking for something to motivate me and focusing on auditioning. This was in a lineup of a bunch of auditions, I just went in and I gave it my all, and it wound up being the right project. I always gravitate towards sick, dark, fucked-up humor.

So your own experiences in high school were similar to RJ's?
Fairly similar, but high school was fun. When I was a freshman, I wouldn't call myself a loser, but I wasn't popular by any means. I've always sort of been a weird guy — in my tastes and sensibilities and what I find interesting. There were more adult things that I liked to do. When I was a freshman in high school, I just wanted to go see Broadway plays. But I got older and the more you raise that freak flag and own your weirdness, people see that and respond accordingly. RJ is learning to embrace that fact that he's not a jock and he's never going to be — he's a weird kid, but he has a good heart and a big penis, so what's not to love?

So is there like a Boogie Nights scene with a prosthetic penis? How do they reveal that your 15-year-old character is well-endowed?
It's left to the imagination, so it can be as big as you want it to be, you know? I think everyone has their own idea of what a monster penis looks like. But through these crazy circumstances, in the first episode, his basketball shorts fall down. All of a sudden he goes from being anonymous to infamous — it doesn't make him cool, though.

It's, like, weird-big?
It's weird, absolutely. But I don't really know, you know? From RJ's perspective, or me playing RJ's perspective — when I was 15 years old, I didn't really have much to compare by, as far as my own size. So I don't think RJ knew that this thing was so big.

Do you feel like there's going to be some added pressure on you now as far as your own endowment?
Um, yeah. Clearly that will be like a thing, and all I can say is I hope that I can meet peoples' expectations? I'm coming up with a line of T-shirts to make with slogans, like, "Find out for yourself!" or "Could be, who knows?"

Have you been prepped for ...
The penis talk in interviews? Not really, no, but people have asked me, "Are you afraid you're going to get pigeonholed?" Because it's TV, and that happens a lot, and it's such a specific role. But Paul and RJ don't look anything alike, really. It's a whole other person — the wardrobe, the hair, the glasses. I become another person, which is my job. I'm a theatre actor first and foremost and I hope this is just one role in a long career, and hopefully the next role I play will be a character with a really, really, really small penis.

You know the Hung guy just virtually gave measurements to Men's Health! I guess that's the one way to go.
Yeah, that's good for him ... but a little mystique never hurt anyone.

Who do you see as the average MTV viewer?
I don't know; I don't watch MTV. MTV's never appealed to me before. But I'm currently up-to-date with it; I've fist-pumped with the Jersey Shore kids. Snooki's reintroduced herself to me about eight times. The Situation is a very sweet guy.

A Review from The LA Times

Television review: 'The Hard Times of RJ Berger'

Aside from a few novel details, MTV's latest is a by-the-book geek sex comedy for the Apatow Generation. In other words, a likely hit.

June 05, 2010|By Robert Lloyd, Los Angeles Times Television Critic

On Sunday, MTV takes yet another step away from its original charter as a purveyor of music videos with "The Hard Times of RJ Berger," a single-camera sitcom about a boy with a big penis. Nevertheless, in moving what I suppose we may call "forward," MTV has created a show that goes right to the heart of the network's original aesthetic, the erotic dreams of adolescent males. It strikes me as no cultural coincidence that MTV launched, in 1981, on the eve of a wave of take-my-virginity-please teenage sex comedies —- "Porky's," et al. — that, like many an early music video, paired geeky boys with hot girls. "American Pie" revived the genre near the millennium; "Superbad" brought it back for the Apatow Generation.

"Hard Times," which premieres Sunday before taking up its regular post on Mondays, is basically the network getting its "Superbad" on, minus the humor, warmth and believability. Created by David Katzenberg (son of mogul Jeffrey) and Seth Grahame-Smith, author of the bestselling "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies" (which gets a passing nod), it is, for a step into new territory, surprisingly tepid and old hat, if strenuously outrageous. This is the network that brought you the divine "Daria," and, with "The Real World," more or less invented modern reality TV.

"Nature made me scrawny and weird-looking, awkward and pale," says our hero (Paul Iacono) by way of introduction. "But I'm not about to roll over and be nature's bitch. I'm going to beat it." He is masturbating as he says that, see, making it just the first of the many sexual puns, metaphors, euphemisms and innuendos that people the series.

Apart from the big, main twist, it's all very much by the book. R.J. has a friend who is more socially marginal (and ambitious) than himself (Jareb Dauplaise, big like Jonah Hill), and a girl friend who is not a girlfriend (Kara Taitz, game), although she would like to be: "Any time, any place, any orifice," she tells R.J., disturbingly. (She also refers to menstruation as "a vampire buffet.") But like every scrawny hero in the history of fictional high schools, R.J. has his eyes set on the most desirable girl in the school (Amber Lancaster), who is dating the school's top jock (Jayson Blair, but not the well-known plagiarist), who is, I am going to shock you now, a jerk.

R.J.'s gift, or curse, is made public when he loses his pants before what amounts to the entire school, but past initial gasps of delight or horror, no one really seems to care. (Much that happens here fails to prompt any appropriate response.) Indeed, subsequent episodes (of the three I've seen) do not make a big thing out of his big thing, and though on the one hand this counts as welcome restraint, on the other it also makes the show's central conceit sort of beside the point, just an occasion for jokes and minor plot points, a high-concept but meaningless tease.

Some of the details are novel — R.J.'s parents (Larry Poindexter and Beth Littleford) are swingers, the first time I can remember that happening in a TV comedy — and there is something in the premise that does speak, in an exaggerated way, to the sometimes frightening way that teenagers are buffeted by their own bodies. But notwithstanding some inspirational, now-gods-stand-up-for-geek-nerds rhetoric and R.J.'s doe-eyed pining for his female ideal, "Hard Times" feels shallow and mechanical, its characters jerked around for effect, comic or triumphal. MTV may have a hit on its hands.

A Review from The Boston Globe

Raunchy MTV sitcom has a heart
June 05, 2010|Matthew Gilbert, Globe Staff

MTV’s “The Hard Times of RJ Berger’’ is puerile, sexist, flooded with geek and jock clichés, inappropriate, obvious, derivative of “Superbad,’’ forced in its political incorrectness, and filled with double-entendres that make the title look subtle.

And I kind of like it.

This scripted high school sitcom, which premieres after the MTV Movie Awards tomorrow at 11 p.m., is crude enough to fit in with MTV’s lineup of steamy hot-tub reality shows. Our brainy, awkward young hero, RJ, has an enormous penis that’s accidentally revealed to the entire school during a basketball game. The series opens with him masturbating in his room — right before his mother walks in on him. His sex-obsessed best friend Miles — he’s the Jack Black/Jonah Hill chubby sidekick of the piece — is always ready with a lewd retort, searching for “hot girls with low self-esteem’’ and prepared to be vomited upon by drunk girls if that’s what it takes to get female company.

But somewhere behind all this MTV male-audience bluster beats the heart of a sweetly droll coming-of-age story. It’s the same heart that makes all the Judd Apatow movies into something more than their raunch, into human stories that so often lead to the triumph of the dork. The show, created by David Katzenberg (son of Jeffrey) and Seth Grahame-Smith (author of “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies’’), takes on all the facets of its teen characters’ sensibilities; not just the sexual obsessions and gross-out humor, but the vulnerabilities, fears, and desperation as well.

A show like “My So-Called Life’’ was a chronicle of teen stress and school hierarchies, but it always kept one eye on its adult audience. Knowing and literary, it appealed to the more mature young viewers, as well as to older demographics. And “Glee’’ is an adult’s message of inclusiveness addressed to kids. But “The Hard Times of RJ Berger’’ is about teens and for them, too. Indeed, one of the trademarks of “Hard Times’’ is the way it ruthlessly lampoons teachers and suburban parents. RJ’s mother and father (Beth Littleford and Larry Poindexter) are locked in a narcissistic, orgy-loving bubble of their own, flaunting their sex life in front of their son. Next to them, RJ is like a little Ward Cleaver.

It helps that Paul Iacono, who plays RJ, makes such a sympathetic underdog hero. He has the Harry Potter look, with his round wire glasses, but he’s a bit of a depressive whose horniness is suffused with defeat. He feels doomed by his fixation on the school’s prettiest blonde, Jenny (Amber Lancaster), who also happens to be dating the school’s nastiest jock, Max (Jayson Blair — not to be confused with the New York Times plagiarist). It’s familiar David-and-Goliath teen-romance material, but Iacono improves on it with some of the self-conscious charm that made Adam Brody as Seth Cohen the real star of “The O.C.’’ He is as likable and fleshed out as the other teen characters on the show aren’t.

“The Hard Times of RJ Berger’’ stands out on MTV, not because it’s about music — that would be a miracle — but because it is scripted. It’s a small step forward for a network that has been selling hollow exhibitionism, Tila Tequila, and “Jersey Shore’’ for far too long. From RJ’s campaign for office (with a “yes we can’’ reference in his speech) to his moment as the star of the high-school play (a mash-up called “Vamp Side Story’’), there’s more truth in his misadventures than in all them there “Hills.’’

For more on The Hard Times of RJ Berger go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hard_Times_of_RJ_Berger