Jimmy O. Yang (performing a bit)
speaker
225 appearances
4 recordings
2 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Jan 2025
Jimmy O. Yang (performing a bit)’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Don't do that. Don't do that.
They don't have it.
Because they don't have enough.
Fresh Air · Comedian Ronny Chieng Didn't Tell His Parents He Got A 'Daily Show' Job · 16 Dec 2024
podcast
I'm not saying I want someone to die. So what are you saying? Well, I'm saying if someone's already dead, I would like to be the person to find the body. That's weird, man. Okay, you know how in cop shows, there's usually a cold open? Cold open. The first scene before the main titles. Right.
What was I saying? Somebody's about to find a dead body? Yes. That's the rule. The person in the first scene of a procedural is either a victim or a witness. Holy s***.
Thank you.
So in the documentary, the man who answers the ad is named Sergio, and he, like Charles in the show, is suffering from the fairly recent death of his wife, and he answers this ad, and it ends up really not only transforming his life, but the lives of all the people that he meets.
He makes friends, and he is part of a community, and he finds a certain kind of purpose in just being around other people. And what was remarkable to me about the documentary, among other things, is that everyone I know who saw it had the same exact feeling, which was I should call my mom or I need to call my grandpa or I should hang out with my kids more.
Like it really had this universal effect on people of making them want to reach out to people that they love. And, you know, it's a rare piece of art, I think, that can cause everyone to have such a warm and positive feeling. So, you know, my longtime producing partner, Morgan Sackett, said we should remake that and have Ted play the main part.
And as soon as he said it, I just knew he was right and that there was a very good, slightly fictionalized show that could hopefully sort of give people that same feeling. That was the objective.
Yes, we did a lot of it. We went into a number of them in the California area, talked to a lot of people toward the memory care units and the rooms and met a lot of really wonderful people whose job it is to look after folks when they check in. And it was eye-opening, I have to say.
It was not maybe what you would expect, which is to say, I think your instinct would be that these are sad places because it's folks who are nearing the end of their lives and A lot of them are suffering from various ailments, physical or mental. But they were places of happiness and joy, largely.
They were sort of flourishing communities of people who were very happy to be with each other and to be part of a community. And that sort of matched up with what I was hoping for.
Yeah, well, that is 100% a huge part of the experience of being in these facilities, no question. There are folks who have moved in for a very wide range of reasons, and one of them is cognitive decline. But at least in the facilities that we toured, there is another part of it that's just folks who maybe they had a physical ailment or maybe they just were tired of living alone.
And they wanted to be around other people. And that's at least the part of it that we mainly focused on, although we didn't shy away from the actual realities of assisted living. If we had pretended like that wasn't a part of it, I don't think we would have been giving an honest portrayal of what it's really like.
Oh, we did ask ourselves as writers over the course of the show whether what Charles was doing was, strictly speaking, ethical. It's a question that the documentary asks, too. You know, you're creating a pretense, a false pretense, and you're getting to know folks without them really knowing who you are. The way we decided to answer that question—
In the documentary, Sergio, the main character, ends up moving out without anyone learning what he was really there for. He doesn't get caught. And we decided that what was important was for Charles to suffer the consequences of having been essentially dishonest to the folks that he was interacting with. And so that is a part of our show in the final episodes. He does have to confront Charles.
The reality of what he did and the circumstances under which he entered the facility.
Oh, man. This is going to sound like a strange thing to say. He loves acting. And that, you would think, would be true of any actor, but it's more true for him. He just loves it. He's so passionate about it that even now, decades after... he had to seek anyone's approval for anything he's done, he still wants to be good. And he's constantly asking you, is there something else I should do?
Did I get this right? Can I try that again? He just has this unrelenting desire to be as good as he can be, even now after how many successful series and shows and movies and everything else. And When you work with someone like that, it just makes everything better because it feels like a real collaboration.
Showing 21–40 of 225 · page 2 of 12
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