My name is Chris Gethard. I am the host of a thing calledThe Chris Gethard Show. Up until now, that show has been a small stage show and then a slightly bigger public access television show. It has been a thing that only a few people ever knew about, but those few people tended to care a lot.

For years I’ve been saying that if you just gave us a shot to do this thing on “real” television, we would turn a lot of heads and do a lot of damage.

Now we’ve got that chance, and I have to step up and deliver.

A network called Fusion is letting us make ten episodes of TCGS with a budget and an office and the ability to do it right. My mission in life right now is to make them look smart for taking this chance on us.

The process of setting up a television show takes a long time. Thus far, the process of setting this one is taking even longer than we thought it was going to. It makes me restless.

So I figured one thing I could do to calm my nerves, and to touch base with anyone who’s supported us along the way, and maybe to find some new interested parties who want to be a part of this journey before we re-debut at our new home, is to publicly vent all my feelings on how things are going via over-sharing blog posts. Those are a thing I’ve always been good at. So these will happen from time to time.

Here’s where we’re at – first we got word that we should be ready to go into production as early as January. I told our cast and crew that around late November so they could start organizing their lives. Then January came and there was no word. We ended our run on public access at the end of that month. We started hearing maybe March would be go time. No air date was set. Then for a while there was an air date set, in April. Now it’s looking like we’ll debut in May.

Obviously, this is frustrating to me – I’m the kind of guy who wants to go, wants to learn on my feet, wants to fail. I really believe in the idea of failing often and publicly. I think it’s a good way to grow as a human and as a performer and in my experience audiences respect watching you fail as long as you do it with honesty and humility.

But the television network we’re on understandably wants us to have the greatest chance at success that we can possibly have. Which I really appreciate. And all these delays are in the name of that. They are getting more and more excited about the potential of our show the more we talk about it, and they want to give us more time and support to get things right. That’s really rad.

Of course, these delays fill me with paranoia – will our fan base forget about us? Will the cast and crew get so irritated by the shifting calendar that they have no enthusiasm for the project anymore? Will I let this whole process mess with my head so by the time we actually do go into production I’ll be stressed out and over-thinking it?

These are my concerns right now. I think they are all valid. But they’re also all bullshit. Someday there will be a time when the cameras are on, and at that point I know we’re gonna deliver. There’s going to be a lot of bumps and bruises along the way with making this show for a lot of us. A few of our writers quit their day jobs thinking the start date was going to come up sooner than it now is. That’s stressful shit. They’re officially losing money. I feel responsible for it. Some of our production guys work in television all the time – they’ve turned down work thinking this was going to start. The belief the TCGS gang has in this and the sacrifices they’re willing to make are unbelievable.

It means the world to me, but man does it also stress me out.

We’ll get in there. And as soon as we do, I know all these pressures will dissolve. But I am consistently amazed that these pressures are mounting and building and we haven’t even rented an office or a studio yet. Right now all the pressures are on friendships and working relationships and our ability to just keep the ship afloat while we’ve sailed away from public access and are waiting to land on the shores of basic cable. We’ll get there.

One of the benefits of having all this time is that I’m kind of a relentless madman and I tend to surround myself with people who fit the same description, and we now have more time to come up with the dumbest possible ideas of how our show is going to work. Actually, not even the show. The show is the tip of the iceberg. I’ve been going bonkers brainstorming the other 90% of the iceberg.

I’m currently on a flight to Los Angeles with JD Amato, who directs, produces, and writes the show. We’re sitting down with the gang from Fusion tonight and tomorrow. The express purpose of these meetings is so we can all figure out how crazy we can make this thing. I have high hopes.

I want this show to be a funhouse for the people that watch it. The way I see it is that all the people who appear on the show and work behind the scenes are at the complete mercy of our audience. We don’t get to exist if they don’t rally for us. We never would have gotten this shot if they didn’t make so much noise online. We’re here for them.

So above I kind of laid out a lot of my anxieties and fears and let you know where my head’s at in that sense. Below I’ll let you in on some ideas I have that might get your guys’ gears turning. I’m basically going to build a show where you can get lost 24 hours a day and 7 days a week. If you never want to talk to another human being in real life, I want you to be able to have a social life that has an infrastructure built by a weird variety show where all kinds of kids who are equally strange hang out as well. I can’t wait.

I will keep these ideas vague because one thing that sometimes happens is other shows steal our ideas:

- I want to have the entire audience serve as my personal trainer.

- I want our audience to raise an animal together.

- I’m working on an idea where everyone who watches our show lives in a compound of interconnected tents.

- I want the show to basically be a communist life center and one of the major events for that will be a day when we all come together to build the set. I think we should all wear the grey overalls while we do so, so that everyone involved remains genderless and only serves the work.

- Currently having an object buried somewhere in North America. It is a very valuable object. The show – both the televised version and all of our online output (including this) have a series of clues that can lead you to the object. Whoever gets the object will realize that it is not just monetarily valuable, but will give them a role in our show they’ve never dreamed of. I will never mention this again.

- What if no matter where in the world you lived we all ate the same meals at the same time every day? I’m just saying.

- I’m currently doing a lot of research and surveillance on a lonely teen who lives in either Pennsylvania, Ohio, or Indiana. I list all three so you and s/he won’t know it’s them. I am learning everything about him/her and plan on giving them a triumphant moment during the ten-week run of our show. They will have no idea it is happening until it is happening.

- There is a character on our show named Bananaman. I’m currently trying to convince him to wear a camera on his head that livestreams to the internet 24/7 starting from the day we go into production and ending the morning after we wrap. The camera will be waterproof so you can even see what it looks from his perspective while he showers. The camera will be small enough that he will eventually forget it is there. But you can basically live life from his pov for ten weeks.

- There are a lot of terrestrial radio frequencies in remote parts of America that do not broadcast. On one of them there is currently a looped ten minute message being sent out via pirating devices. The ten minute message gives you explicit instructions on ways you can win a trip to New York City to attend our show live. It is on you to find the location and frequency of the broadcast. I can tell you that it is within a three hour drive of a city with a population of over 150,000.

- There is a very important thing that I divided into ten pieces. I sent the ten pieces to the homes of ten different fans of TCGS, in envelopes that do not indicate it has anything to do with me or TCGS. If those ten people all realize they have one of the ten pieces and find their way to each other and re-connect the ten pieces, all ten will get a prize. The prize will take you to a different continent.

Now you’re probably reading these and thinking they all sound insane. But if you’ve watched our show at all you know that the options are this – either none of these are true, all of these are true, or some of these are true.

I’ll leave it up to you guys to discuss.

Seeya soon!

- Geth