Hope Sterling: Hey — quick question before we do anything else. What do you know about a crazy Greek chef named Yorgo?
Finn Brooks: I know nothing about a crazy Greek chef named Yorgo and I suddenly need to know everything.
Hope Sterling: Yorgo is — okay, Yorgo is a character Steve Carell played. On Over the Top. A 1997 ABC sitcom that, like — Tim Curry was the lead, Annie Potts was there, and the whole thing premiered October 21, 1997, and then ABC aired exactly three of the twelve episodes they made and called it a day. Critics said it was potentially one of the worst sitcoms of all time.
Finn Brooks: Okay wait — so nine episodes were fully made and nobody ever saw them?
Hope Sterling: Never broadcast! Just — sitting there. Media born into witness protection is genuinely the only way I can describe it.
Finn Brooks: And Steve Carell is in this. Pre-Office, pre-everything, just — Yorgo the Greek chef on the worst show on ABC.
Hope Sterling: Playing a crazy Greek chef alongside TIM CURRY. That's the cast. That's the show. Three episodes. Gone.
Finn Brooks: The gap between Yorgo and Michael Scott is the most insane character arc I've ever heard of.
Hope Sterling: Okay but — and I need to push on this — 'erased' might be doing too much heavy lifting as a word? Because he literally described himself as 'a crazy Greek chef.' Those are his words. Steve Carell remembered Yorgo.
Finn Brooks: That's — that's the exact thing I wanted to flag. Because if the guy himself can recall the role, that's not erasure, that's just... omission. Like, selective biography.
Hope Sterling: Mm — but like, is there actually a difference in practice? If the press just quietly skipped Over the Top when they were writing the 'Steve Carell's rise to fame' stories after The Office and The 40-Year-Old Virgin both hit in 2005, the outcome is the same, right? Nobody knows about Yorgo.
Finn Brooks: No but the mechanism matters — okay wait, because here's where I think the framing breaks. The unaired episodes? Findable. Online. Tim Curry fan communities literally kept them alive. That's not a destroyed show, that's a show broadcast TV treated as disposable the second it got pulled.
Hope Sterling: Which is SO different from how movies were treated.
Finn Brooks: Completely different infrastructure — theatrical film had actual archival institutions, like, someone's job was to preserve it. Broadcast TV was just... air it, move on, it's next week's problem. So the gaps aren't conspiratorial, they're structural. ABC didn't bury Over the Top, ABC just — didn't care enough to not bury it.
Hope Sterling: Okay I actually think that's a scarier version of the story? Like, malice would at least mean someone thought it mattered.
Finn Brooks: Exactly — and then post-2005, once he's Michael Scott, the press just rewrites the bio and Yorgo stays on the cutting room floor. Not deleted. Just... never mentioned again. That's the real thing.
Hope Sterling: And that's the kernel, right? The hot take is actually correct — but only because of Tim Curry. Like, the reason those nine episodes exist anywhere is Tim Curry fans decided they mattered. Not ABC. Not a studio archive. Curry fans.
Finn Brooks: That is — wait, that is actually the specific thing. It's not 'fans preserved the show.' It's fans preserved the show *as a byproduct* of loving someone who happened to be in it. The show itself had no cult. Curry had the cult.
Hope Sterling: Which means — okay, picture this. It's 2004. Some film student is writing a paper on Carell's pre-Office work, right? She checks every official filmography. Nothing. She goes to the studio. Nothing. And then she stumbles onto a Tim Curry fan forum and there's episode four — complete, edited, never touched a TV screen — just sitting there because someone loved Rocky Horror enough to also archive this ABC disaster.
Finn Brooks: That's not preservation. That's — that's a rescue that happened by accident.
Hope Sterling: By accident! No institution did its job. Like, nobody at ABC said 'let's keep this.' The unaired episodes exist because Curry is *Tim Curry* and his fans are ride-or-die in a way that just — absorbed the collateral damage.
Finn Brooks: And the uncomfortable follow-up is — what about every show that didn't have a Tim Curry in it? No cult figure, no fan base with the energy to go find the tapes? Those shows are actually gone. Like, genuinely gone. Over the Top got lucky by association.
Hope Sterling: That's — ugh, yeah. The safety net is just... whether someone famous enough was attached.
Finn Brooks: Which, honestly — I mean, that makes the Carell biography angle even messier, because Over the Top is only a story we can tell *at all* because of Curry. And the Carell part — the Yorgo part — comes later, after we account for Dana Carvey Show, Daily Show, the whole two-cancellations-in-eighteen-months stretch that nobody puts in the official timeline.
Hope Sterling: Oh, we are absolutely getting into that arc — because that is where the rewrite really happens.
Finn Brooks: And the rewrite is — okay, this is the part that actually breaks me — Dana Carvey Show, 1996, ABC, cancelled after seven episodes. Then Over the Top, 1997, ABC, cancelled after three. Two ABC cancellations in under eighteen months. That's not bad luck. That's a pattern. And then — nothing in the official Steve Carell story.
Hope Sterling: It just — vanishes. He goes to The Daily Show, he's a correspondent, he's doing the work, and the whole narrative just quietly skips that entire stretch.
Finn Brooks: For years. Like, how many years is he at The Daily Show before 2005?
Hope Sterling: Long enough that it should be part of the story! And then — The Office AND The 40-Year-Old Virgin both break in 2005, like, simultaneously, and suddenly the biography is Second City, a steady climb, boom. Which — wait, that Second City thing actually matters, because he was there in the early nineties alongside Stephen Colbert, like that's real, that happened, but the official version skips straight from that to 2005 like nothing in between counted.
Finn Brooks: Two ABC cancellations didn't count. Daily Show didn't count. Yorgo the Greek chef absolutely did not count.
Hope Sterling: Poor Yorgo.
Finn Brooks: But okay — I mean, here's the calibrated version, actually, because I don't think this is unique to him at all. Every time stardom arrives, publicists smooth the timeline. The messy middle gets curated out. Carell's version just has a particularly weird artifact left over — a Tim Curry vehicle with nine unaired episodes floating on fan forums — which is the only reason we can even see the gap.
Hope Sterling: That's — yeah, that's the defensible claim, right? Over the Top isn't lost. It's curated out. There's a difference and it actually matters.
Finn Brooks: The decade-plus of cancellations and obscurity didn't get erased. It got rebranded as a journey, retroactively, the second Michael Scott walked into Dunder Mifflin.
Hope Sterling: My detail — the one I cannot let go — nine episodes. Shot. Edited. Complete. Just... never touched a broadcast signal.
Finn Brooks: Mine is that Tim Curry fan communities are literally the only reason any of it survived. Not ABC. Not a studio vault. A fan forum circa 2003.
Hope Sterling: Okay — 'witness protection for television' is still the best thing I said today and I'm standing on that.
Finn Brooks: It's — I mean, no, fine, it IS a better line than anything I said. I concede. But the grounder is actually funnier? The show isn't erased, it isn't some grand mystery, it's just... living rent-free in a Tim Curry fan forum. That's the ending. That's where Over the Top lives.
Hope Sterling: Nine episodes, shot and edited and ready to go, and the only archive that actually cared was the internet. ABC had one job.
