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Conceiving Inconceivable: Unplanned pregnancy births audacious sitcom

Once upon a time, Rita and Adam meet at an indie film event in East Van. They get super wasted and sleep together (although Rita doesn’t normally sleep with dudes).
REEL PEOPLE Inconceivable 0511
Still from filmmaker Joel Ashton McCarthy's six-part series Inconceivable.

 

Once upon a time, Rita and Adam meet at an indie film event in East Van. They get super wasted and sleep together (although Rita doesn’t normally sleep with dudes). Not long after the hook-up, Rita discovers she’s pregnant – and Rita and Adam, despite barely knowing each other, decide to keep the baby and co-parent.

Inconceivable? Not if you’re filmmaker Joel Ashton McCarthy, who mined his real-life sitch for a web sitcom that’s amassed more than 100,000 views since premiering on YouTube last month.

Inconceivable– which was funded through TELUS’ Storyhive program – stars Katie Stuart (The 100, Altered Carbon) as Rita and Bruce Novakowski (Average Dicks) as Adam, unlikely sex partners who end up maneuvering through the first trimester of an unplanned pregnancy. McCarthy conceived of the six-part series – and (spoiler alert!) a baby named Bowie – with Rachel Kirkpatrick, with whom he wrote the series along with frequent collaborator Mike Doaga.

The trio pulls no punches in Inconceivable. Its first season deep dives into all of the awkwardness and discomfort that you might expect from an unplanned pregnancy between acquaintances: the lead-up to, and act of, telling both sets of parents that a grandbaby is on the way; complicated conversations about next-steps and what-ifs; the McCarthy character contemplating the potentially catastrophic impact of fatherhood on his burgeoning film career. “When people [watch Inconceivable and] are like, Well, someone wouldn’t do that, I can go, Well, I believe they would, because it did happen like that,” says McCarthy in a recent phone interview.

“Some people will think of it as a comedy, but to me, it’s more of a drama,” continues McCarthy, who also directed the episodes. It’s been “somewhat therapeutic” to re-live these moments, according to McCarthy, but it also makes him feel like a “crazy person. I just don’t know anyone else who’s going to get a room full of actors to re-create intimate moments in their life.”

Inconceivable isn’t the first time McCarthy has mined his personal life for a screen project. He won multiple awards (including Audience Choice prizes at several American film fests) for 2014’s Taking My Parents to Burning Man, a documentary about the time he literally took his parents to the tripped out Burning Man festival, and critical acclaim for Shooting the Musical, a standout 2015 Whistler Film Festival mockumentary feature about earnest film school grads (much like McCarthy and friends) who band together to shoot a movie musical about a school shooting. The latter has secured a distributor and will soon be coming to a theatre near you. (McCarthy is up for a slew of Leo Awards, as well, for the Crazy8s film I Love You So Much It’s Killing Them, a lively horror rom-com short about an accountant turned serial killer that is clearly not based on the filmmaker’s life).

Inconceivable is something of a sequel to Shooting the Musical. Both star Novakowski as a fledgling filmmaker named Adam Baxter; both have the same Eastside fixer-upper (which McCarthy has previously referred to as Crack Shack Studios) as a key location.

McCarthy can’t imagine anyone else but Stuart as Rita, although it almost wasn’t to be. McCarthy and team had been wowed by Stuart’s demo reel, and were dismayed when she canceled her audition. “I creeped her on Facebook, saw we had a mutual friend, and had my mutual friend say, You should really go to that audition,” says McCarthy, noting it “wasn’t a professional way to go about it, but she ended up coming in, and the feeling was unanimous. We hit the jackpot with our two stars.”

While Inconceivable is as audacious as McCarthy’s previous screen projects, it differs from the bulk of them in that it was executed with a smaller screen in mind. McCarthy realized the need for a slight course correction after he posted the pilot to his YouTube channel. “I looked into our analytics and saw that 50 per cent of the people were watching on their cell phones.” He ended up “framing the show tighter than I normally would.” That said, McCarthy’s ultimate goal for Inconceivable is the more traditional world of half-hour sitcom television.

For someone who has offered up his private life for public consumption, McCarthy is surprisingly coy when asked about where the series could lead. “I don’t even want to spoil what our living situation is right now, because it’s too funny,” he chuckles. “We’re living season three right now.”

Reel People loves recommending binge-worthy web series, and we’re crazy for Inconceivable. Binge the entire first season of Inconceivable on YouTube and thank us later.