For Steve Dildarian, it all began with a prostitute named Debbie.
On a whim, the East Brunswick native wrote and illustrated an animated short, "Angry Unpaid Hooker," about a regular guy (Tim) who finds a prostitute (Debbie) in his apartment. Things go from bad to worse when Tim's girlfriend (Amy) walks in with her parents, and Tim must explain the seemingly unexplainable.
Dildarian says his rationale in conceiving the short was to "take three people in a room and make it as awkward as possible" because conflict, he believes, is the basis of comedy.
Evidently judges at the U.S. Comedy Arts Festival agreed; "Angry Unpaid Hooker" won its best animated short award in 2006. But it didn't end there. The short took on a life of its own, morphing into "The Life & Times of Tim," a new animated television series which debuts at 11 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 28, on HBO. Dildarian serves as creator, writer and executive producer.
""It's crazy," Dildarian, 38, says of the past two years. "The project couldn't have started out in a sillier way with no expectations. ... It was really just as a lark. It was like this ridiculous little thing we made, and I almost didn't take it seriously myself. (And) when other people started to take it seriously and say, 'Wow, that's great!' I would kind of look at them and say, 'Really, you think it's great?' It's the most underproduced, silliest thing I've ever done. And I guess that kind of had a charm of its own."
Fleshing out 'Tim'
Dildarian knows the difference in quality between produced and unproduced work. He spent many years in advertising and wrote a variety of TV commercials that have achieved significant recognition, including the Budweiser lizards and Staples' jubilant back-to-school dad.
But still, he never thought "Angry Unpaid Hooker" would be the jumping-off point for a TV show. Particularly one about Tim, a 20something office grunt (voiced by Dildarian) who gets into one wincingly awkward situation after another - many of which are the direct result of demands being placed on him by others. Take Tim's boss, for example. In the Sunday, Oct. 5 episode titled "Latino Tim," the black CEO of Omnicorp tells Tim he must pose as Tim Sanchez, the Hispanic vice president of North American sales, in an effort to make the company appear more ethnically diverse during an audit.
"You just sit there and you look Mexican," the boss tells him, without blinking an eye.
There's just one problem: Tim is whiter than white.
Then there's the priest who, before performing a marriage, tells Tim to voice his objections to the ceremony as a joke, and Tim's girlfriend's grandmother, who wants Tim to help her relive romantic memories of her deceased husband, whom he resembles. The list goes on and on.
Yet Dildarian didn't necessarily conceive Tim to be as innocent a character as he has become.
"(In 'Angry Unpaid Hooker') it comes across as if he probably is guilty," he explains, "(but) in most of the way we write the show, it's that he's innocent and that it's either a misunderstanding or a bad set of circumstances surround him. But he's not really a bad guy doing bad things. He just seems to get blamed for things."
That's not to assume that the endless parade of awkward moments that dominate Tim's life reflect Dildarian's own experiences.
"There are certainly things in there that are based on my life, but I think it just comes from a point of view on the world," he says. "It's really a funnier version of my own life or a more conflict-ridden version of my day-to-day (life)."
That being said, "Tim" is filled with Dildarian's "skepticism" toward people in general, whether they be "doctors or bosses or homeless people or any of the clergy ...
"It's also got all the authority figures and it kind of calls them all out and kind of asks who's really right and wrong, (and) who's really a good person or a bad person."
Dildarian readily admits "Tim" bears a resemblance to another HBO sitcom, "Curb Your Enthusiasm," which follows the bad luck and poor decisions consistently made by its star, Larry David.
"That's the one show that really clicked in my head and made me think, 'I can do that. I can write a TV show,'" he says. "Watching Larry David go around in life kind of demystifies the whole process - it seems pretty easy to write. I can write about how messed up my life is."
Getting technical
"Angry Unpaid Hooker" was created entirely by Dildarian and his girlfriend, "Tim's" co-executive producer/art director Leynete Cariapa.
"I drew all the characters and background, and Leynete colored it in in Photoshop and drew the in-betweens to make it move," he explains. "We very much kind of invented our own animation studio."
And even now that "Tim" has actual illustrators to perform many of those responsibilities, Dildarian says they strive to maintain the same crude look.
"We self-consciously tried to not get any better at it," Dildarian admits. "Because, you know, you can take the charm out of it pretty fast if you turn the professionals loose on it."
Most of the voices used in "Hooker" remain the same in "Tim" as well.
"(HBO) was like, 'We might want to change a voice or two, but the main core characters - Tim, his girlfriend, Debbie - let's not mess with what's working,'" he recalls.
Yet HBO wasn't originally the network that was going to bring "Tim" to life. Fox expressed an interest early on, and Dildarian spent a year making a pilot episode, which was ultimately rejected.
"That happens," he says of entertainment industry negotiations.
Fortunately, once Fox passed on "Tim," the rights to the show immediately reverted back to Dildarian. In between considering deals with both HBO and Comedy Central, another studio entered the picture and offered to finance the show without a network attached.
"It was kind of a risky thing," he admits of walking away from the other deals. "It's not an easy thing to do when you've waited your whole life to sell a TV show."
During that process, HBO continued courting Dildarian, and he ultimately decided to accept its offer - 10 half-hour episodes and free rein to create "Tim" the way he envisioned it.
"I don't think it could have worked out much better," he says in retrospect. "This just feels like my show. It feels like my vision and my voice as a writer."