As far as Richter's concerned, merely being on television is a triumph. He half expects that one day he will find himself pitching Showtime Rotisserie Ovens on late-night infomercials, and he will be just fine should it come to that. Bitterness will not feed the wife and kid; anger will not keep the bill collectors at bay. Leave the bitching and moaning to those who do not understand there is no understanding the business of television, which manufactures hits out of stale refuse and tosses its freshest produce into the garbage pile. "I have known financial hardship from a very early age," says the son of parents who divorced when he was 4. It's his way of explaining why he is happy to have a show on the air--whenever that is, wherever it lands.
"I could suss out a bill collector's call at, probably, age 7," Richter says, muting the laugh track on our conversation. "I knew what a bill collector phone call sounded like. So, to me, financial problems are a cancer for which I'm desperately seeking a cure. And they're probably in the way of being a real artist, because I think that there's this pressure on me. I see people who have completely shit all over themselves in their careers by going right from getting a little public notoriety and then being the star of some awful, shitty comedy. I don't want to do that. I want to have some sort of organic growth to my career. But I sometimes feel like a tremendous sell-out because it is important to me to make that living, and there is this pressure, especially having a child and a mortgage, to reach that goal and get that fuck-you money. Then I can feel like I can relax and be concerned about that book I want to write or whatever."
Do not think, not for a single second, that Richter isn't happy with his series, in which he portrays a lovable schlep who writes technical manuals but dreams about that book he wants to write. He will challenge anyone to say, "Oh, it's just the same old shit." He says, repeatedly, he does not want to be involved with a show his friends--Janeane Garofalo, say, or David Cross--will watch and groan at. His fear of failure is second only to his fear of humiliation--and this comes from a man who used to make Conan O'Brien laugh by donning what he calls "a fuckin' flesh-colored G-string" and parading about the Today show set.
Andy Richter Controls the Universe, which returns December 1 at 8:30 p.m. C.S.T., is the sort of show a network should embrace: It's surreal but not willfully weird, heartfelt but not cancerously saccharine, clever without winking itself into a coma, goofy without ever lapsing into the sitcom-silly. It's the kind of show that sabotages Andy's love interests by making them anti-Semitic ("Someone called for you," says a very hot former high school crush. "Some Jew"), then forcing Andy to confront his guilt by volunteering at an old-Jews' home. The kind of show on which Andy offends a black colleague who, as it turns out, is Irish--and Andy is "sick of the Irish." The kind of show on which a grief counselor, called in to console the staff after a death in the office, commits suicide. The kind of show on which Paget Brewster's character swaps off with twin brothers, played by Dan Cortese, because one's smart and awful in bed ("talky") and the other's an idiot and an awesome lay ("humpy").
