Getting people drunk and making movies, what a life! It’s the life of Seth Weitberg, co-producer of Comedy Central’s “Drunk History.” I don’t know whose job I envy more, the producers of the show, the actors who portray the founding fathers, or the guy who gets to drink a bottle of Tequila and tell stories. One person I know I do envy is Seth. The talented actor, writer, comedian and improviser was a well respected performer for years in Chicago. He moved to Los Angeles just three years ago and went to work learning the business. And the hard work is paying off. Talented, ambitious, not to mention good-looking. Oh and he couldn’t be nicer.

Photo by Sally Blood

Serial Optimist: Hi Seth! What are you doing right now?

Seth Weitberg:  Right this minute? Drinking coffee and reading resumes. Do you mean, job-wise?

SO: No, just curious about right this minute, but I’d guess a lot of what you do is job related. Seems like creative types are always working.

Seth:  I can’t speak for all creative people, but I definitely love working every day. Even on vacation, it’s hard for me to go a full day without writing something down.

SO:  Were you like that as a kid too?

Seth: Yes. I think at various points in my life my mother worried about my inability to relax. I’ve gotten much better at it.

SO: So tell us, what’s the process was like to go from a Second City Touring Company member to becoming a producer of “Drunk History?” By the way, congratulations on all the great stuff going on these days!

Seth: I think process is the right word, even when it looks like opportunities pop up, your ability to capitalize them or not is always a result of all of the experiences leading up to those moments and how prepared you are or are not for them.

I pretty much spent the entire first year I was in LA just learning the lay of the land and the business. It’s really easy to forget that working in the industry is just as much about knowing the business as it is about knowing your craft. As the douchiest agent of all time once told me, “It ain’t called show art.” The first real work I did out here was actually rewriting the entire iO West training center curriculum, which was a massive effort involving the entire faculty, which proved to be an amazing lesson in working with others. In hindsight, the same goes for my touring experience. All the writing and performing I got to do was amazing, but for me the real benefit was having a safe place to fall on my face a bunch of times as an ensemble member. By the time I started working on TV shows, I had gotten a lot better at working in groups than I was even a year earlier.

My first job was writing for T.J. Miller on his show “Mash Up,” and from there you can connect the dots to every other opportunity I’ve had, right up to “Drunk History.”

SO: Do you miss Chicago or touring?

Seth:  I absolutely loved touring and love Chicago, but I don’t miss either. I think that’s the same way that I feel about New England and about college too. I loved my time there, it shaped me as a person and a writer, and then when it was time to move on, I moved on. It’s good for things to end, I think. It’s good to have new phases. The second, the challenge disappears is that I start to lose interest. Touring for Second City has its ups and downs like any job, but it’s fucking awesome. In back to back nights once I got to play shows in an octogenarian-filled VIP tent at Seminole Casino in Coconut Creek, FL and the 3000-seat Minnesota Orchestra Hall in Minneapolis. It was a special job, for sure, but one day you wake up and realize that you tackled that beast and you’re ready for a new one.

Chicago will always feel like a home to me, in many ways more so than my real home, but as far as comedy writing goes, it can only offer so much. Los Angeles is not Chicago, but Chicago is definitely not Los Angeles. As soon as I released myself from wanting this place to be like that one, I became much more open to just how great this city is, and it really is. I’ve totally fallen in love with LA.

SO: Tell us about the process of making “Drunk History.” How much of the drinker’s story do you edit and what’s the audition process like? I can’t imagine you just have a bunch of drunk people show up to a casting office and slate.

Seth: “Drunk History” is such an unbelievable joy to make, and that’s all because of Derek Waters and Jeremy Konner who created it, and how kind and special they both are. It feels like a family operation, and part of the reason why is that there are no auditions. All the storytellers are friends of Derek and Jeremy – smart, likeable, funny people who are passionate about history and great stories.

Sometimes the narrators pitch us stories, and if they’re great, we’ll do them. Paget Brewster’s story of the Kellogg Brothers and the invention of cereal, for example, was one that she brought to us. We also do an unbelievable amount of research for the show and then will go to someone we want to be a narrator and pitch them a few ideas we think they’d be great for, and then we hope to find one they are in love with and dying to tell.

We almost always film the narrators in their own home, there’s a medic on set for safety and there is quite a bit of alcohol consumed. We will film someone for upwards of five hours to get what will ultimately be a 5-7 minute story, so yes, there’s quite a bit of editing that goes on. It’s so important to us that we don’t lean on the drinking as a crutch for the show – the stories have to be amazing and everything else is there to heighten them – and drunk people do not always tell neat, compact narratives. I could write long essays about how amazing our editors are.

Making the show is really like making three separate shows, though, because you have to find the stories and film the narrators, then there’s all the footage we shoot on the road, and then we come back and do all of the reenactments. So there are points in the process where we are simultaneously doing post-production, production and pre-production. It’s a huge workload.

SO: So you really make sure all the facts in the stories (besides the obvious drunk moments) are accurate.

Seth: Yes. We won’t leave anything in the story that is untrue. But remember, it’s also history, so not everything is black and white. If there’s one version of a story or a specific detail that a large part of the history community thinks is accurate, but others dispute it, we’ll leave it in. If something is clearly false, we take it out every single time. Go down to San Antonio, though, ask the experts what happened at the Alamo and you won’t get one clear answer. Sometimes we have to cut out details for time, so it ends up looking like we’re saying there’s causality between certain events when we know there isn’t, but until Comedy Central asks us to start making two-hour versions of stories, that’s going to happen.

SO: That’s awesome! You performed a lot in Chicago, but it looks like your focus since leaving has been writing, directing and producing. Any plans to do more acting again?

Seth:  No. I will get up and improvise a few times a month, but that’s all the performing I need. If you really want to succeed at a high level, at any aspect of the industry, you have to love the grind associated with that discipline. When I was touring and going to a lot of commercial auditions, it became very clear to me that I do not love the grind of being an on-camera actor, but I love the grind of writing and producing. It’s more interesting to me creatively. I also feel like as a writer I have a lot more control over my career, I have a lot more control over what people see of my work. And I swear I’ve gotten better with my control issues.

SO: Any plans to write and shoot any more “Harder Than It Looks” episodes? It’s really a great series!

Seth:  Thank you for watching! I don’t think we’ll do any more for the web, but it’s something we’ve talked about adapting as a half-hour and taking out. Luckily, though, all of us are busy so we’ll see if the stars ever align for that.

SO: That would be awesome! With all the stuff you’ve written and done, what are you the most proud of?

Seth:  Maybe I’m just a slave to the present, but probably “Drunk History.” It’s a show where I’ve been fortunate enough to be involved in every aspect of production from the earliest research phases all the way through the final cuts. When people say they’ve watched the show, I feel like a beaming parent. I really do. I am so unbelievably grateful that anyone has seen it, let alone liked it. I’ve told Derek and Jeremy that they’re the parents of this child, but I feel like the step-dad who loves it like it was his own.

I really believe that when you’re overseeing a collaboration, you have to enable people to do work they love and are proud of. If you can get a big group of people to all be proud of their work on a project, you can make something really special. When you’re running a TV show, it’s like running a company. When we’re shooting the reenactments, it’s like filming a new short film every single day. I think I get my greatest pride from knowing how many things had to come together to even pull the show off, and how hard we worked on that challenge every single day.

SO:  So besides “Drunk History” what makes you laugh really hard? Any good guilty pleasures?

Seth:  TV-wise, I probably laugh the hardest at “Archer” on FX. That show is so well done, so well written and orchestrated. I don’t find myself actually laughing out loud all that much when I watch stuff, but I just watched The James Franco Roast on Comedy Central and thought they crushed it. As far as guilty pleasures, “Top Chef” and “Project Runway.” I fucking love those shows. Any time people have to make something, and then other people at a high level in that field evaluate it and critique it, I’m all in because I feel like I learn other ways to think about writing and making TV shows. At the end of the day producing TV or a dish or a dress is all about having a conception and then materializing it, creating something out of nothing, and I like having as many ways as possible to think about the challenges in front of me, which the language and process of other disciplines can provide.

I guess I said it was a guilty pleasure, and then I immediately gave the academic justification for it. Like I said, though, I’m still working on relaxing.

SO: Any other upcoming projects you’re excited about that you’re working on?

Seth:  I’m writing a script at the moment that I’m in love with, I helped produce a pilot for USA last month that was an awesome process start to finish and I’m excited to make more “Drunk History.”

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SO Note: Watch episodes of Comedy Central’s “Drunk History” HERE and “Harder Than It Looks” episodes HERE. Then go to Seth’s site sethweitberg.com and tweet “Project Runway” gossip to him @SethWeitberg.