In Flipped , Will Forte and Kaitlin Olson Play Aspiring Home Design TV Stars
The fictional husband-and-wife home renovation team at the center of the new show Flipped, Jann and Cricket Melfi, are not exactly who we’d hire to help with a remodel. Case in point: Jann’s wardrobe. For the role, the costume department dressed Saturday Night Live alumnus Will Forte in getups such as “a denim shirt with a jean jacket over and then a jean jacket draped over the top of that,” he tells Architectural Digest. “Jann’s home design aesthetic basically follows that template. It’s over the top.”
Presented in bite-sized 10-minute episodes on the brand-new streaming platform Quibi, which launched April 6, Flipped follows the pair (Cricket is played by It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia star Kaitlin Olson) as they attempt to win a contest that would make them the next big “HRTV” stars and lift them out of unemployment. Their strong conviction that they know much more about design than the syrupy-sweet fictional HRTV personalities played by Rebecca Romijn and Jerry O’Connell is laugh-out-loud funny.
What adds to the absurdity is that in the first house they attempt to revamp, they find a pile of money. It belongs to a drug lord (played by Arturo Castro)—and when he finds out they took his cash, he wants them to lend him their decorating services to repay him.
Design aficionados know that the formulaic, familiar lull of HGTV is a cultural staple and that watching it for hours on end is the best kind of guilty pleasure. Admittedly, it is also ripe fodder for satire. “They already are such exaggerations. It was really, really fun, because the characters on a lot of these shows are already so camped out. We’re doing heightened versions of already heightened characters,” says Forte.
To get into character, Forte relied mostly on a period of time he spent in New Zealand for work, when he took to watching home improvement shows. “They are really fun and wonderful,” he says. “They all seemed to kind of put forth the same vibes.” His costar, Olson, did more targeted research, diving into house-flipping shows after she landed the role. “I can really understand why people are addicted,” she tells AD. “It’s not really different from any other reality TV [show] where you get sucked into the characters—although this one is probably not as shameful as being addicted to Real Housewives.”
As for their personal relationships to design, Forte admits he doesn’t have much of one, while Olson reveals she fell in love with interiors while building her own house from the ground up (with her husband and former Always Sunny costar Rob McElhenney). “I was deeply involved with picking out fabrics and materials,” she says, noting that she stuck to a neutral color palette of gray, black, and white with pops of color. “I will say that my house looks absolutely nothing like what Jann and Cricket design,” she says.
Originally Appeared on Architectural Digest
