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Posted in: NBC, Peacock, TV | Tagged: macgruber, macgyver, nbc, peacock, richard dean anderson, super bowl, will forte
MacGruber: Will Forte Offers Season 2 Update; Super Bowl Ad Pitch
Will Forte discusses his MacGruber Pepsi Super Bowl ad, recruiting MacGyver star Richard Dean Anderson, and the Peacock series' future.
Will Forte's developed quite an impressive career since leaving Saturday Night Live in 2012, including expanding his MacGyver parody recurring character MacGruber to not only the 2010 Rogue & Universal Pictures film of the same name but also the 2021 Peacock legacy sequel TV series. The actor and comedian appeared on fellow SNL alum in Dana Carvey and David Spade's podcast series Fly on the Wall to talk about a variety of subjects, including his and SNL creator Lorne Michaels' pitch to Pepsi for a Super Bowl XLIII ad and an update on season two.
"Pepsi had approached Lorne and said, 'Hey, do you want to take an SNL sketch and turn it into a commercial,' and somehow he picked MacGruber," Forte said. "When he told Pepsi that MacGruber was what he wanted to go with, they quickly bowed out and said, 'You know what, maybe we don't want to do a Super Bowl commercial.'" The crew filmed three commercials to pitch to the soda conglomerate. Pepsi picked the second ad to air for the game, while all three aired during SNL the following week on the January 31st, 2009 episode.
"So, Lorne said, 'You know what, let's keep making this thing and just make it good enough that they'll want to do it.' So we said alright and rallied the troops, and we did it and brought Richard Dean Anderson in," Forte said of the MacGyver actor from the original '80s ABC series. "We decided because there was no guarantee this would go anywhere, we would make a sketch for the show at the same time. So, we got to hang around with him for a whole day once, and he was so cool."
On the March 7, 2009, episode of SNL, Anderson's Angus MacGyver was made MacGruber's "father" until it was retconned in the Peacock series. Work on the second season has been under development and ready to go, but Forte is awaiting the comedy's fate from the NBC Universal streamer on top of the lingering strikes from the WGA and SAG-AFTRA. "As far as from our end, let us at it," he said. "We finished the first season, and then they let us start writing the second season, and the stuff that we were coming up with was really, really fun, and we love it. But then, at a certain point…the term of that ran out, and then we were just kind of hanging around waiting for an answer, and we never had any kind of answer saying that we weren't doing a second season. But at this point, if they wanted us to do a second season, I think they probably would have said something." You can check out our interview with Forte here.
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