Bike Cops Competes in CBC's ComedyCoup
CBC’s ComedyCoup accelerator project is underway and, not surprisingly, a number of teams have their roots in Humber’s Comedy Writing & Performance program.
In the lead-up to voting, we’ll be running Q&A’s with those teams – vote for your favourite to make it into the top 50!! Voting for this round closes on Sunday, October 26.
Bike Cops
The concept:
Bike Cops is about the Toronto Police Bike Patrol, an eclectic hodge-podge of misfit cops that gets thrust into the limelight. The show centers on the TPBP squad and their hilarious interactions and antics in Toronto.
The team:
Marshall Jefferies, 23, a bike fixer-upper who grew up in the Georgian Bay area. Marshall is in charge of writing, directing, and editing, as well as the Facebook and Twitter social feeds.
Ted Jefferies, 26, an actor/server/valet/salesman who grew up in Waterloo, Craigleith, Blue Mountain, Thornbury, and Meaford. Ted writes, directs, produces, and edits very closely with Marshall.
Erin Reid, 22, an employee at Thunder Thighs, a costume rental house that does mostly film, theatre and commercial work as well as a freelancer for CTV news. Originally from Scarborough, Erin is in charge of everything else, which is enormous. Costumes, locations, scheduling shoots, finding crew members, and running the Instagram feed, just to name a few.
The Q&A:
HOW DID YOU MEET EACH OTHER?
Marshall: I believe Ted and I met over a dispute about a plastic dump truck, but we settled it and have been good since. We met Erin at a Humber event! She organized a big screening that was showing a film Ted was in, and we all ended up at the bar afterwards talking about niche YouTube comedy sketch shows.
HOW DID YOU DECIDE TO WORK TOGETHER?
Marshall: Ted and I run The Bunch Gang Show on YouTube, a comedy sketch series about anything funny. Bike Cops is our first project with Erin, but it won’t be our last. She’s awesome!
Ted: Marsh and I had a comedic short film we wanted Erin to produce. We still want to make the film but ComedyCoup came up shortly after we pitched it to her and we decided to switch over to Bike Cops. We were worried Erin was going to think we were flakey and couldn’t stick to a project, but she was happy to join us for this.
Erin: Since we all had such great chemistry I was more than excited to help!
Marshall: The actors in Bike Cops have worked with us in The Bunch Gang Show. Shawn Ahmed is one of our actors, and is also a co-creator of To Hunt a Monster, another Toronto show in Comedy Coup. In our series, he plays the short-fused and forgetful Constable Glen Styles. Thomas Duplessie is the criminal in our videos. He’s the most enthusiastic, go-with-the-flow kind of actor there is, and we love him. Chloé Sullivan played one of the bike cops in the road-side stop scene in our Differentiator video. As soon as she put on those short shorts and aviators, she became a bike patroller. In the show, she plays the super-sharp and witty Constable Jessica Rice.
HOW DID EACH OF YOU GET INTO COMEDY?
Marshall: A few years ago I figured the best Christmas gift to give my brother would be a script for him to act in. I ended up writing a few comedy sketches, and that was the start of The Bunch Gang Show. I don’t think we filmed any of those sketches because it was my first stab at comedy, but I’ve stuck with it and here I am!
Ted: I’ve wanted to be an actor for pretty much my whole life and for some reason I always pictured myself in comedy. I grew up on Jim Carrey movies and putting on funny skits with Marsh for our parents and their friends.
Erin: I always loved being able to make people laugh. While at Humber I found every student really wanted to push boundaries and do dramatic films, and there I was just writing romantic comedies and sketch comedy shows. I also love the challenge of comedy: it’s so much harder to make people laugh than cry. You can kill off a character in any drama and bring tears to the audience’s eyes, but everyone has such a different sense of humour. If I can make a large amount of people laugh, I’d be living the dream.
TELL US MORE ABOUT THE PROJECT.
Marshall: Constable Eric Spooner is perfectly happy with being stationed in the Toronto Police Bike Patrol, an eclectic hodge-podge of misfit cops that somehow manage to make their quota each month. No one is breathing down his neck to make arrests, and no one cares how he makes those arrests. That is, until the mayor’s bike gets stolen hours before her campaign to promote outdoor fitness in the city. In order to find her bike and save the campaign’s image, the TPBP is put on the case, and to make sure they don’t mess it up, Major Crimes sends Eric Spooner’s arch-nemesis, Detective Lauren Bell to aid in the investigation. Spooner thinks that once this case is done, life will go back to normal and Bell can’t wait to solve the case so she can get back to “real” police work. But when the mayor realizes Spooner and Bell can be the face of her new campaign, she requests a Bike Patrol Investigation Unit, headed by none other than our two protagonists. Now, Spooner and Bell are stuck working together and neither of them are happy.
HOW DID YOU COME UP WITH THE IDEA?
Bike Cops started as a sketch we wanted to produce with The Bunch Gang Show. Ted Jefferies and Shawn Ahmed are hilarious together, especially as cops. I was working on the idea as a web series when I heard about ComedyCoup, and I just knew I had to take the chance to turn it into a half-hour series.
WHAT ARE YOU HOPING TO DO WITH THE PROJECT?
Marshall: I’d love for this project, and ComedyCoup, to be the start of something big for Canada’s silver-screen comedy scene. In five years, I’d like to see Bike Cops and ten other Canadian comedies on TV.
Erin: Of course we’d like to win Comedy Coup, but if we don’t I’d like to make this into a web series. It’s clear to me we have the fan support and the crew talent for it.
WHAT’S IT LIKE PARTICIPATING IN COMEDYCOUP?
Marshall: This competition is the most Canadian event ever. All the teams are so nice and supportive. So far it’s been great comments, constructive criticism, and very few trolls.
Erin: The competition is crazy good! It’s amazing to see all this amazing Canadian talent and it makes me proud to be a filmmaker here. It’s an honour to be competing against everyone, and they really push us to do better and better each week. I’m mostly excited to be competing; I go between both excited and nervous constantly. Any of the guys will tell you there are weekly sessions where we kind of just soothe each other’s nerves. I’m excited while we’re filming and editing, but those two days ComedyCoup allows us for pre-production I’m a stressed out, nervous wreck… and, strangely enough, I kind of love it.
THANKS MARSHALL, TED AND ERIN, AND GOOD LUCK!!
For more info, videos, and to vote for Bike Cops, check out their page on CBC's ComedyCoup website:http://comedycoup.cbc.ca/bike-cops. The Bunch Gang Show is on Facebook at thebunchgangshow and on Youtube at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCuausg6HXyRc6-SbwhQd8KQ/feed.
