Vanessa Bayer knows all about the benefits of childhood cancer – newsdubai

Vanessa Bayer love cookie. No, really: She can not get enough of things. Therefore, it appears in the pilot episode of her new Showtime series, I love it for you. “They had so many cookies on the set that day that I had to take one home,” she tells me over Zoom.

That’s basically also what happens in the first scene of the series. The series opens with a flashback to 1997, and tracks a teenage Joanna Gold as she walks down the hallways of a children’s hospital in Cleveland. Joanna – who has an IV in her arm and a pink scarf covering her bald head – happens to find a nurse celebrating her birthday. “I do not remember when I last got to eat a piece of cookie,” Joanna says to the nurse with an affected sigh. “There are so few pleasures I get in this world. You know-leukemia.Moments later, Joanna eats the entire cake alone in her hospital bed.

It’s the perfect cold opening for the dark comedy that’s starting to stream on Showtime Friday. Co – created by Bayer and Jeremy Beiler, I love it for you follows Bayer as adult Joanna, who uses her childhood diagnosis to move on while working on her dream job: to host a show on a QVC-like home shopping network called SVN. “Jeremy and I and our showrunner Jessi [Klein], we really want it to be a show where you laugh out loud, ”says Bayer. “But we also wanted it to feel grounded, and we wanted it to feel like you really believe in what these people are going through.” This difficult dichotomy gives the show a funny but awkward energy – a “I do not know if I should laugh, but I certainly laugh”. At this point in her life, Bayer is a little used to it.

Like Joanna, Bayer struggled with leukemia through her teenage years in a suburb of Cleveland. “I mean, for me, when I got sick, of course there were really hard parts. But I always really liked attention, and that’s why I think I have the job I have now,” she says. aspects of these difficult experiences that we do not often focus on.I think we all thought it would be really fun to focus on that.

Bayer was diagnosed with acute lymphocytic leukemia when she was 15, around the spring break in her first year of high school. She underwent what she calls the standard treatment of the disease – 10 months of intense chemotherapy followed by “maintenance chemotherapy for a few years” as she tells me that her “hair grew back and things were much more normal.”

“They would give children a few months of treatment and it would look like it went away and then it would come back,” Bayer says. “So they’re just treating you for a really long time.” She completed treatment the summer before her final year of high school.

“I have always wanted to write something about my experience as a sick teenager because I think I had a unique perspective on it. I was really able to find ways that could benefit me, ”says Bayer. She often showed up at school late: “Even though we had a strict attendance lady, she did not ask me any questions. I was a teenager who kind of slept outside and she just said, ‘Go on.’ I got away with a lot. things because I was sick. “

One could argue that Joanna gets away with much more than Vanessa did, but Bayer says it’s by design. “Many of the things that are drawn from my life are exaggerated to show the humor in them,” she says. Other aspects of Joanna’s experience – her isolation from her peers at a crucial point in her teenage years due to forces beyond her control – sound very true.

From her days at the University of Pennsylvania to pursuing comedy in Chicago, Bayer admits she always felt like she was “playing catch-up.” Take dating: “It took me so long to realize that once you’re been on two dates with someone, it does not mean that it’s the only person you’re dating. I thought you were basically dating after a by dates. ” In a particularly awkward scene with Jason Schwartzman, we see Joanna struggling with this very riddle.