Leap Year Review
During the third season finale of the AMC drama Mad Men, Donald Draper, Roger Sterling, Bert Cooper and Lane Pryce decide to sever their ties with advertising agency Sterling Cooper and embark on a path of their own design. “Well, it’s official,” Roger Sterling quips in regards to the decision. “Friday, December 13, 1963—four guys shot their own legs off.” Subsequent seasons of Mad Men thus include the efforts of these men and their associates as they follow the American Dream of building a business and the inherent obstacles that lie along the way.
In the dramedy webseries Leap Year, five friends find themselves on a similar path when they suddenly lose their jobs and figuratively have their own legs shot off. In lieu of searching for a new means of employment, Aaron Morrison, Jack Sather, Derek Morrison, Olivia Reddox and Bryn Arbor instead decide to take the same leap as Don Draper and his colleagues on Mad Men. While the award-winning AMC series is an exploration of an historical turning point in the evolution of the United States through the eyes of advertising executives in the 1960s, however, Leap Year is a comedy that spotlights the fears, risks and inherent obstacles involved in starting one’s own business in the Twenty First Century through a natural form of humor that envelopes the entire narrative.
“There’s always something,” Jack Sather (Drew Lanning) tells a reluctant Aaron Morrison (Yuri Baranovsky), whose wife Lisa (Rachel Risen) is five months pregnant. “Today it’s a baby, tomorrow it’s a house. The next day it’s a mistress with a drug habit. I’m just saying, life happens. You’ve got to take the opportunity while it’s there.” The five main characters ultimately agree to share office space while each develops their individual career paths in a spirit of shared entrepreneurship. Their plans take a twist, however, when a mysterious e-mail that has been popping up in their in-boxes is suddenly taken seriously by the group.
“You don’t know me but I certainly know you,” the anonymous message begins. “I think all of you have the capacity to do great things, be leaders in your industry, which is why I propose a simple contest. I will give you four months to put together a business plan for each of your businesses, get yourself some customers and generally impress the hell out of me. At the end of four months, you will each present your individual plans to me. The company I like most will receive five hundred thousand dollars in funding.”
The five friends sharing a dream of building their own businesses now find themselves as rivals competing against each other for the funding that could potentially propel them to success. Minor setbacks inevitably become amplified as the group backstab and even sabotage each other in an effort to emerge victorious. Embarking on the path of an entrepreneur is strenuous enough but the characters on Leap Year must also deal with the moral issue of betraying their friends while facing their own fears and personal deficiencies in the process.
“You’re not the kind of girl who has friends,” the punk rocker-looking Bryn Arbor (Alexis Boozer) is told during one episode. “You’re the kind of girl who wears a spiked collar so you can stab people in the face when they hug you.” Olivia Reddox (Daniela DiIorio) likewise struggles with the lengths she is willing to go in order to succeed. “What’s the phrase?” a friend asks. “‘Nothing personal, just business.’ Men understand that. Men invented that.”
While each member of the group excels in their own personal areas of expertise, they also share feelings of inadequacy and self-doubt that likewise need to be overcome. Aaron Morrison is neurotic on the level of a classic Woody Allen character and displays a similar ability to offer the comedic one-liner. “What if I can’t afford a hospital and then we have the baby in the woods?” he half-jokingly tells his wife. Older brother Derek (Wilson Cleveland), meanwhile, is the underachiever hiding in the shadows of his more successful sibling, while salesman Jack Sather is continuously “spinning” any given situation as opposed to honestly interacting with those around him. Ironically both Derek and Jack hire the same attorney, albeit for different reasons, and are more open with the female lawyer than with anyone else.
“I don’t really care if you want to waste three hundred dollars an hour guessing what’s in the envelope,” Josie Lanning (Julie Warner) tells Derek when he is served papers on a pending lawsuit. “That’s your right. The main thing is, I want you to understand it’s three hundred dollars an hour.” Later Jack likewise meets with Lanning and showcases the same verbal ticks as Derek. “I’m just trying to figure out if I really need to be in the room or if I can charge you for talking to my chair,” the high-priced attorney frustratingly remarks.
Although a comedy, Leap Year contains an equal amount of drama and is more a combination of the two rather than an “either/or” proposition. In many ways the webseries is the contemporary counterpart of thirtysomething, the late-1980s ABC series that followed a group of friends with a shared idealistic youth who have evolved into middle-class suburb dwellers. The initial episode of Leap Year commences with Aaron Morrison’s thirtieth birthday, as well as the group’s own transition from the traditional corporate environment of their twenties into the world of entrepreneurship. While the baby boomer generation yearned for the peace and prosperity of middle-class America in the 1980s, however, branching out on one’s own in the modern age of start-ups and capital funding is the dream of their present day equivalents.
Leap Year was co-created by Yuri Baranovsky—a pioneer in the webseries medium who launched his first production in 2007, the award-winning Break a Leg—and distributed by CJP Communications, a marketing firm that has been at the forefront of crafting original webseries for clients as advertising vehicles. In the case of Leap Year, Hiscox Small Business Insurance is the customer and the narrative contains a strong advocation for real-life wannabe entrepreneurs to begin building their own dreams. “I’ve found the best way to get people to think outside the box is to show them how safe it is in an unboxed world,” the mysterious mastermind of the half million dollar competition explains to the group.
“The thing about coding is it doesn’t always work,” Bryn Arbor tells Jack Sather in an earlier installment. “You can try to get a program to do one thing for days, weeks even, but it doesn’t. The thing that keeps me going is knowing that there is a solution. I’m smart enough, I’ll figure it out.” The two quotes could easily serve as the moral of the newfangled fable known as Leap Year. With a combination of comedy and drama, the webseries demonstrates that with enough initiative, vision and effort, any obstacle can be overcome in the quest to realize a dream—one just needs to be willing to take the “leap.”
Anthony Letizia (February 15, 2012)
Discuss on the alterna-tv.com Forum
