Zara Reyes: Okay here's your trivia for the day — name a show where Will Arnett and Kate Walsh were both in the cast before either of them was famous.
Cole Bryant: I — what? No idea. I genuinely don't know.
Zara Reyes: Nobody does, and that's the point. The Mike O'Malley Show. NBC. It premiered September 21, 1999, O'Malley and Les Firestein created it together, and two episodes aired. Two. Then NBC just — stopped.
Cole Bryant: How many did they actually make though?
Zara Reyes: Around seven total. 'The Bachelor Party,' 'The Anniversary Show,' 'Mike Plus One' — produced, completed, never broadcast. And the second episode that did air, 'Out of Their League,' September 28th — that was it. End of show.
Cole Bryant: So Arnett is in this thing that just disappears. No DVD, no streaming — like it never happened.
Zara Reyes: And O'Malley just gave PEOPLE this whole interview saying he was surprised and devastated by the cancellation. Which — I have thoughts about the 'surprised' part.
Cole Bryant: No I want to hear those thoughts, but first — Kate Walsh too? Before Grey's Anatomy? Both of them just erased?
Zara Reyes: Both of them. Before anyone knew either name. But that's almost beside the point now — because the real thing here isn't that the show bombed. It's whether audiences even got a chance to reject it.
Cole Bryant: Wait — say that again.
Zara Reyes: The historical record can't actually confirm whether NBC pulled it mid-run or just never scheduled the back half. Those are two completely different decisions. One is 'we saw the numbers and bailed.' The other is 'we already knew before episode two even aired.'
Cole Bryant: Dude, if the kill decision came before September 28th, before 'Out of Their League' even aired, then Will Arnett's sitting there watching himself on NBC not knowing it's already over. Like the network has already moved on and he doesn't know yet. That's a different kind of brutal.
Zara Reyes: And Henry Winkler directed that episode. Henry Winkler. This wasn't some cheapo backup tape — the production had real industry weight behind it.
Cole Bryant: Buffalo Tom did the theme music! Like, no one throws Buffalo Tom at a throwaway project.
Zara Reyes: Which is exactly — no but that's exactly what kills me about NBC's late-nineties playbook. They were doing this over and over, assembling actual talent, actual budgets, betting Thursday night would just carry whatever they put on it. O'Malley came in with real credibility, he'd built his whole public profile on Nickelodeon — Get the Picture, GUTS — so this wasn't a random casting call. They believed in the bet. Then quietly stopped.
Cole Bryant: And then just — no DVD, no streaming, no nothing. 'The Bachelor Party,' 'Mike Plus One,' all of it just sits somewhere. That's not negligence, that's actually a choice, right? Someone had to actively not release it.
Zara Reyes: Negligence and strategy look identical from the outside when a network has zero incentive to remind people they bet wrong.
Cole Bryant: Okay but that 'surprised' thing — that's actually what I want to pull on, because everyone's reading that PEOPLE headline like it's just pure candid vulnerability and I'm not sure that holds.
Zara Reyes: That's the bad take. That's the one circulating that doesn't survive a second look.
Cole Bryant: But wait — can't both things be true? Like, the surprise was real in the moment, and then the pivot was the lesson he took from it?
Zara Reyes: The pattern is too clean for that. He goes to Yes, Dear on CBS — fine, that's a landing pad, maybe that's reactive. But then he actively avoids another sitcom lead. Develops Pretty/Handsome with Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk. Then simultaneously writes on Shameless AND plays Burt Hummel on Glee for four seasons. That's not someone who stumbled into diversification. That's a deliberate hedge.
Cole Bryant: Four seasons as Burt Hummel — that's actually a real run.
Zara Reyes: Four seasons, and at the same time he's in the writers room on Shameless. That's not accidental. You don't land on both sides of the camera simultaneously by just following opportunities. Someone made a choice about what kind of career they wanted.
Cole Bryant: I mean — okay, I hear that, but the PEOPLE interview sticks with me. He said devastating. He said surprised. Even if we're skeptical of the precise depth of it years later, does the trajectory actually contradict that? Or is it — wait, actually — can a person be genuinely shocked and still learn fast enough that the next moves look deliberate from the outside?
Zara Reyes: The Glee and Shameless overlap is what kills the 'accidental pivot' reading for me. That's not someone who got scared and fell into whatever was available. That's a split identity — actor over here, writer over here — built as a hedge against exactly the kind of volatility that canceled his show in 1999.
Cole Bryant: And honestly the erasure part — the no DVD, no streaming, none of it — we should get into what that actually does to Arnett and Walsh's legacies too, because that story goes somewhere uncomfortable.
Zara Reyes: And it cuts both ways, which is the part nobody says out loud — because no DVD, no streaming, nothing on any major platform means there's no footage of Will Arnett being twenty-something and unformed. The mythology stays clean.
Cole Bryant: Wait — so the erasure is actually protecting him?
Zara Reyes: No archive of him failing means the story goes straight from 'unknown' to 'of course he was always great.' Same for Kate Walsh. Grey's Anatomy, Private Practice — none of that gets complicated by footage people can actually pull up.
Cole Bryant: Dude that's — okay, that's the lost-media thing working as like, accidental reputation management. NBC just didn't care enough to release it and somehow that becomes the best thing that ever happened to two people's careers.
Zara Reyes: That's how networks erase things when they stop believing — they just withdraw all distribution support and the show stops existing. The Mike O'Malley Show is the cleanest example of that. No Blu-ray, no streaming deal, nothing.
Cole Bryant: Okay but — no, bring it back, because the actual detail is that somewhere there are five finished episodes. 'The Bachelor Party.' 'Mike Plus One.' Will Arnett in them. And nobody can watch them. That's — bro, that's not a cultural footnote, that's a vault.
Zara Reyes: Five episodes nobody's seen.
Cole Bryant: And like — imagine you're a casting director in 2003 trying to figure out if Arnett can carry a scene. You can't look it up. The tape doesn't exist for you. So the show's failure actually — wait, that's not even failure at that point, that's just absence. It's a gap in the record that he gets to fill himself.
Zara Reyes: Lowkey the most useful thing NBC ever did for Will Arnett was decide not to release it.
Cole Bryant: My detail I'm not over — 'The Anniversary Show.' That's an episode title. That's a whole arc they wrote, produced, and then just sealed in a box forever.
Zara Reyes: Mine is Henry Winkler directing episode two of a show that was probably already dead when he called action. Like — did he know?
Cole Bryant: Bro, what if he didn't. What if nobody on set knew except one person at NBC.
Zara Reyes: Okay but — if 'The Bachelor Party' or 'Mike Plus One' drops on YouTube tomorrow, genuinely, does that help or hurt? Like does it make the Arnett and Walsh arcs more impressive, or does it just show a rough twenty-something sitcom that deserved two episodes?
Cole Bryant: I — honestly? I don't know. And I think that's the actual answer. Nobody does. O'Malley and Les Firestein made it, it aired twice, and the rest is just... sitting there. Unresolved. Forever probably. Which is — I mean — that's either devastating or kind of perfect depending on the day.
