He may have played a guy you love to hate in things like Jurassic Park and Seinfeld, but the actor himself, Wayne Knight, is actually a pretty cool guy. He made an appearance last week at Comic-Con for the “Comedy Legends Of TV Land” panel, and now stars on the TV Land Original Series The Exes, where he plays Haskell Lutz, whose reunion with his ex-wife (played by Lisa Ann Walter) will be the subject of a new episode scheduled for this Wednesday, July 24.
We spoke to Mr. Knight on Thursday to find out what it was that interested him about The Exes and TV Land in general, and he listed a number of reasons why The Exes was right for him. “Coming back to work with Kristen Johnston again, and I love doing sitcoms, and this is shot at CBS/Radford where I shot Seinfeld and 3rd Rock From The Sun, and my first pilot ever in Los Angeles. It’s like Mayberry. It’s the place I come back home to. All of that put together… I don’t think there was a lot of hard thinking going on, and now we’re in the third season, so thank God,” he said.
What makes doing a TV Land series different from what one might find on one of the broadcast networks? “I think the difference is that TV Land is a really relaxed environment,” he said. “It’s a lot different than a lot of other networks, in terms of micromanaging. You literally feel like there are two guys running the joint, and they’re warm, and embrace you, and they don’t talk behind your back, at least so that you can notice, which is very nice. It’s very different.”
The Exes is surrounded on the TV Land line-up by classic TV favorites including Roseanne and The King Of Queens, leading to new favorites like Hot In Cleveland. “I think that it helps, in some ways, because it’s like a mash-up,” Knight explained. “You say ‘here are these people from shows that you like, and here’s writers from the show you like, we’ve mashed them up together, and so after you see these classic sitcoms, let’s take some of these classic actors and these classic writers in kind of a classic situation, and see how it works!’ And I think it’s working. You create this honey trap for people who like sitcoms, and then you gradually wean them off the old ones onto the new ones, and before they know what’s happened, they’ve seen a whole new slate of new shows!”
The Exes is new Wednesday nights on TV Land.
