James Hibberd

How About the Title 'The Knights of Mick Jagger?'

July 19, 2006 4:23 PM

Rob Burnett, one of the producers of the recently re-titled ABC comedy “The Knights of Prosperity,” said he and his writing partner Jon Beckerman did not at first consider rocker Mick Jagger as the mark for the show’s hapless would-be thieves.

“We first pitched using Jeff Goldblum,” Burnett said at the show’s TCA session Wednesday morning. As the show became more developed it was ABC Entertainment President Steve McPherson who suggested going with Jagger, a name that Burnett and Beckerman thought was out of their league. Don’t feel bad for Goldblum, though—he’s got his own series next season on NBC.

Jagger’s people were approached, and Mick himself read the script and approved. That lead to a lightning-fast five-hour shoot in New Zealand for Jagger’s surprisingly funny cameo shots in the pilot, which was initially sold as “Let’s Rob Mick Jagger.”

The Jagger storyline will resolve by the end of the season, and for a second season the Knights of Prosperity, as the group of thieves call themselves, will target someone else.

So the working title is now “Knights of Prosperity” because the show—which was being called “Let’s Rob … ” in the press and by ABC—was “too fragmented” for the original title, Burnett said. There were plenty of fun facts revealed about the “Knights” cast at the session as well. For instance, star Donal Logue really had a crappy job when he was a struggling actor in New York (imagine that), where he worked the night shift at a hotel cleaning bathrobes.

Co-star Lenny Venito’s Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, accent is the real thing. Venito, who plays one of Tony’s crew members on “The Sopranos,” is actually the son of a retired NYPD officer. And the far-from-homely Sofia Vergara was a dental student in Colombia before coming to the U.S. to act, a tidbit of information that prompted one female critic to whisper to a colleague (by colleague, I mean me) how impossible it would be for the amply breasted Vergara to lean over a patient to do a root canal.

My colleague got her answer. “All this voluptuousness wouldn’t let me finish,” Vergara admitted with a saucy smile.