Blue Mountain State Putting the Cart Before the Sitcom Horse

Let's be clear: This show would never hit the air today. From the hazing to the misogyny to the sexually depraved kicker — none of it would fly.

"For sure this show would not be made right now," co-creator Eric Falconer said with a chuckle. "It wouldn't have a chance."

Shoot, "Blue Mountain State" barely survived its own era, a middling, niche late-night show running on the network formerly known as Spike TV. It got slammed by critics. It lived a year-to-year life and survived only three seasons starting in 2010. "Blue Mountain State" was — even in its own creators' eyes — an underachiever.

But then it became a hit, a cult classic redeemed by the rejuvenator that is Netflix. Its stars became pseudo-celebrities on college campuses. A Kickstarter campaign spawned a movie. Studio executives in their late 20s and 30s sought out co-creators Falconer and Chris Romano to say they loved the show in college.

"Blue Mountain State" — a show originally pitched as "'Animal House' set in Division I college football" — somehow lives on after being canceled in 2012, and its stars and creators can't help but think of the potential opportunities left on the table in its dormancy.

Much as presidential aides often say the absurd comedy "Veep" is closer to reality than dramas such as "The West Wing" or "House of Cards," people involved with "Blue Mountain State" keep hearing their nonsensical look at college football culture hits some of the nuances dead on. They constantly hear that every program has a Thad Castle, the jerk linebacker who's become the most famous character. The man who played Blue Mountain State head coach Marty Daniels, Ed Marinaro, was a Heisman runner-up and NFL running back who contends not all of it is far off.

"We were like a caricature of a big-time, corrupt football factory," Marinaro said, "but I know there were coaches around the country who watched the show and were cringing. It probably hit close to home. 'Uh oh, they're on to us.'"

No matter what you think of "Blue Mountain State," it has over the past decade evolved into a kind of success.

"The show is meant to be watched on a very surface level," Falconer said.

Spike TV wanted a college football comedy, but network execs didn't quite know what that would look like. Falconer and Romano (who also starred in the show as Sammy, the Mountain Goats' mascot) helped them figure it out. The next question was whether the mythical Blue Mountain State should be a powerhouse program or a "Bad News Bears"-style disaster. Producer Brian Robbins pushed them to make it a powerhouse, which, Falconer said, "took the show to kind of another level."

Suddenly, these two New Englanders from Emerson College who were primarily Boston professional sports fans not too ingrained in college sports had to build a world. Some of the show's inspiration came from Falconer's high school football days, but they also started talking to college football players to hear their stories.

They got on the phone with former players. They often tried to get Marinaro liquored up to spill some of his tales, and later when players such as Bill Romanowski and Brian Bosworth made appearances, Falconer and Romano would listen to their unbelievable stories and take notes. There were stories of partying, pranks and encounters with women.

"Honestly, most of the stories we got from other college football players were too wild for the show," Falconer said. "We had a lot of people pitching us stuff that we were like, 'Wow, we could never put that on TV.'"

And when it came time to come up with the main character, they decided on an unseen aspect of the sports world. They loved shows like "Friday Night Lights," and in those kinds of shows or movies, the trope is the backup quarterback steps in to play the hero. They agreed they wanted a backup quarterback, a guy entering the program as a freshman who has to work his way up. But they did not want him to be a hero.

"What if this guy doesn't want to play? What if he doesn't want to ever start?" they asked themselves.

Meet Alex Moran, a sarcastic, lazy, debaucherous freshman quarterback from Wyoming who would do anything to live the life of a college quarterback but without all the burdens of starting.

In the pilot episode, Moran, played by Darin Brooks, has two girls arrive at his dorm room — courtesy of boosters — for a threesome. At practice, he shows his passing talent one day and, after the coach compliments him, purposely screws up. Then he defends his antics with a mission statement on the life of a college backup.

"Backup QB is the best position in sports. Fact," he says. "I get drunk all the time. I don't have to show up to class. And it's just like being a real QB but without all the pain."

Running back Craig Shilo, left, and backup QB Alex Moran commiserate on the bench during freshman hazing. (Courtesy of "Blue Mountain State")

Falconer laughs that this concept of the backup quarterback isn't based on research. He says this part was more a creative comedic touch. Brooks also struggles with its validity, saying "Anybody with that talent, they'd want to go and be the best they can for the team."

But nobody would understand this better than Matt Cassel, maybe the best-known backup quarterback in the modern era. Cassel backed up Carson Palmer and Matt Leinart at USC during its glory days, never starting a single game, but still went on to a 14-year NFL career. He lived that exact life of a football star without the pressure.

"Oh, it was a blast," Cassel told The Athletic. "You get to hang out with all your buddies. You work out and go to class, and there's not the same pressure that there is for the starting quarterback at USC."

To be clear, Cassel wasn't as resigned to mediocrity as Moran was. No, he tried hard to win the starting job, but he doesn't deny he got into some parties he wouldn't have normally gotten into. He got into some clubs on Sunset Boulevard underaged. He was a backup, but most people on campus still knew who he was.

"It was a pretty stress-free life. You have a good time. You go out. You might have an extra few cocktails than somebody that's gonna start in a few days. Then if the starter messes up at all, everybody's saying, 'Let's give this guy a chance.'"

Though it was unintentional, Falconer and Romano found a deeper human truth in Alex Moran, who came to BMS to avoid the spotlight and eventually matured enough to become a starter.

"We did base it on something real, which is the fear these guys must feel," Falconer said. "When you come into a program like that, you're 18 years old. You're barely an adult. You, all of a sudden, are facing the prospect of playing in front of 80,000 people and millions on national TV. If you suck, you're sucking in front of everybody."

Brooks was a soap opera star on "Days of Our Lives" when the show began casting. He kept getting auditions for those teenage, Freeform-style movies. He told his agents, "Guys, this isn't me. I want to do some comedy." One of his agents mentioned this football comedy on Spike.

Brooks was actually a backup quarterback for his high school football team in Hawaii. His offensive linemen weren't any bigger than he was. They were not particularly good.

"I'd get my ass handed to me anytime we would play the big Samoans and Tongans on the other side of the island," he said. "Like they would just have fun with us. I got beat up so much that halfway through the season I was like, 'I think I'm done with football, guys. I think I'll stick to surfing.'"

He went in for auditions and left Romano cracking up on the casting room couch. He just didn't quite put two-and-two together over the coming weeks that Romano also planned to audition for the role of Moran's best friend and sidekick, the reckless, goofy mascot.

Marinaro was a Maxwell Award-winning running back at Cornell who set 16 NCAA records and finished second in Heisman voting in 1971. He played in a Super Bowl and spent six years in the NFL. After a successful career as an actor on shows such as Hill Street Blues, he went into his audition with an inspiration for Marty Daniels that wasn't his college or NFL coaches. It was his high school coach at New Milford High in northern New Jersey. One time, an 0-7 New Milford team was playing an 0-7 Saddle Brook team. As Marinaro tells it, the coach went into the locker room before the game and said:

"Listen up. We're playing Saddle Brook. They stink. You stink. Now, let's go see who stinks the most."

That was the basis for Daniels, a dirty national championship-winning coach who shared some of Marinaro's experiences — for example, his NFL career and the fact that he once dated a member of "Charlie's Angels."

The show consistently did OK, hitting around 1 million viewers per episode, while the critics despised it. Variety wrote, "'Blue Mountain' embraces that (crude comedy) aspect of Spike's mandate over all else – putting the bodily function/semi-nudity cart before the sitcom horse." The New York Times said it was "dumb even by frat-boy standards."

Falconer and Romano didn't care much about those reviews, though, because they didn't write it for the critics. But Falconer felt like the show was an underachiever those early years, as "the cult status of our show didn't really take off until we were off the air." The only positive of not being a hit was it challenged them to get better every season.

They wanted the show to be over-the-top and raunchy, so they padded the script with more absurd jokes than they actually needed, figuring when the network made them cut the worst stuff they'd get to keep the jokes they really wanted.

Well, when Spike TV executives saw the scripts, they said, "We want more."

"When I look back on Season 1, it feels to me like we're overreaching to be kind of controversial," Falconer admits.

Take the character of Thad Castle, the star linebacker who became the titular character in the 2015 movie "Blue Mountain State: Rise of Thadland." Actor Alan Ritchson often went to the writers, saying, "I dare you to write something I wouldn't do." It became a constant challenge for them to meet.

Blue Mountain State captain Thad Castle gets set to race three freshmen who are holding Oreo cookies in their butt cheeks. (Courtesy of "Blue Mountain State")

Falconer feels like the show evolved over those three seasons, relying less on gags and crazy stories and more on the characters. Season 3 was his favorite, finding a sweet spot with stories that came out of characters' relationships and not out of anecdotes they heard.

By the end of Season 3, "Blue Mountain State" was canceled. Not long after, people were discovering the show on Netflix. It became a show for kids in dorm rooms to put on while drinking beers with friends. Most people actually thought it was a Netflix original. Netflix doesn't release numbers, so Falconer and Romano didn't even know at first it had evolved into a hit.

Then the writers and cast started getting invited to appear on college campuses. "We were like the Beatles," Falconer said. "It was crazy." Marinaro played in the Kraft-Nabisco pro-am golf tournament, and Michelle Wie asked him to pose for pictures. She watched with all the football players at Stanford every week. Brooks was once on the set of "The Bold and the Beautiful" when a security guard told him that while serving in Iraq, he and his friends watched the show. "That's what kept us going," he said. "It kept us laughing."

By 2014, Falconer and Romano created the Kickstarter campaign for a BMS movie. It eventually raised $1.9 million (not all of those donations came through, but still the donations mixed with other funding made the movie). That movie didn't go on to much commercial success, but they made it.

Now, the show exists in a strange place: not only as a cult hit people still discover and enjoy – although it came off Netflix in 2019, it's still streaming in various places — but also as a grotesque representation of frat-boy comedy before #metoo.

Falconer has since produced and written for shows such as "How I Met Your Mother" and "The Mick," while Romano has steadily gained acting and voiceover roles. Though Falconer agrees the show couldn't exist in 2020 exactly as it was in 2010, he'd still love to take another run at it. When he and Romano wrote it, they intentionally didn't have a point of view. They wanted no pop culture references. No political agendas. They just wanted to make each other laugh.

Marinaro thinks Coach Marty could come back running a Division III program on the outs. Brooks thinks they could do one more season as seniors as an inverse of Season 1 where they introduce the new Alex Moran, Thad Castle and so on. They believe the audience still exists.

Or maybe this show has run its course.

(Top photo of Coach Marty and Alex Moran: Courtesy of "Blue Mountain State")

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Source: https://theathletic.com/1840474/2020/05/29/blue-mountain-state-college-football-sports-television-cult-classic/

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