On December 2, Fox released the trailer for the multi-cam comedy series Call Me Kat, starring Emmy nominee and best-selling author Dr. Mayim Bialik (The Big Bang Theory, Blossom). The show is scheduled to make its network premiere on January 3, as reported by Deadline.
Call Me Kat is allegedly based on a British show that ran from 2009 to 2013 called Miranda, according to Deadline. The original BBC program was written by its titular star Miranda Hart (Emma, Call The Midwife). Like Miranda, Call Me Kat concerns itself with the comic exploits of an independent single woman (Bialik) with her own small business. Call Me Kat, however, replaces Miranda’s joke shop with cat cafe, inviting comparisons to the guinea pig cafe in Fleabag, another popular female-fronted British comedy series.
The trailer showcases Call Me Kat‘s stylistic quirk of the title character being able to directly address the audience and share her innermost thoughts. This device is also present in both Miranda and Fleabag. Bialik spoke about how the technique is used to express her character’s open personality, via Deadline: “What we’ve created is a woman who includes everyone in her world because that’s what makes her world interesting and colorful… We’re including the audience, they’re in on her jokes, they’re in on her experiences because that’s how she views the world.”
According to an interview with Travel + Leisure, Bialik stated that her former Big Bang Theory co-star Jim Parsons (An Act of God, Hollywood) was reportedly the person who first pitched her the idea of doing an American take on Miranda: “I was so incredibly thrilled at the possibility of working with [Jim] again and bringing an eccentric woman who is not afraid to be herself to television.”
Bialik also brought self-possessed feminine eccentricity to the mainstream in the 90’s with her teen sitcom Blossom. In a 2017 People interview, Bialik revealed that Don Reo (The Ranch, My Wife and Kids) had allegedly written the show with a male lead in mind and that her own bookish sensibilities shaped the character: “Don and I shared a love of Catcher in the Rye and J.D. Salinger and we said, ‘What if we made a show that was about a girl going through all these trials and tribulations?’ ”
Prior to Call Me Kat, Blossom was the only instance of Bialik leading the cast of a scripted series. Working on Call Me Kat has reportedly been an extremely pleasurable experience for the four-time Emmy hopeful. “Blossom was fantastic and life-changing, but the way we get to work… and just this whole team has made this for me, personally, the greatest job I’ve ever had,” she gushed, via CinemaBlend.
Catch the series premiere of Call Me Kat on Sunday, January 3 at 8 P.M. Eastern on Fox. The eighteen episodes and two Christmas specials that comprise the entirety of Miranda are available to stream through Amazon Prime Video.