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MEGAN SCOTTHey Monie, the first adult cartoon with African-American women at the center, pairs real-life best pals, whose goal is to be real and funny for women of all colors.
Simone and Yvette have been best friends since the eighth grade, when they faked sickness to get out of gym class.
So when they heard about a Best Friends segment on The Oprah Winfrey Show, they jumped at the opportunity to meet their hero.
But Simone and Yvette got into an argument in the waiting room and missed their chance to be on the show.
Think that's funny?
Angela Shelton and Frances Callier think so, and they have funneled their hilarious friendship into the voices of Simone (a.k.a. Monie) and Yvette in the animated comedy Hey Monie.
Hey Monie airs on the Black Entertainment Television network at 8 p.m. Tuesday and on the Oxygen cable network at 9:30 p.m. Sunday (it repeats on Oxygen at 1 a.m. Friday and 1 p.m. Saturday). This is the first adult cartoon to feature an African-American woman as its central character, said Tosha Whitten-Griggs, director of entertainment and programming for BET. It also is the first animated series to air on BET.
The show is created and produced by Soup2Nuts, a production company in Watertown, Mass. Soup2Nuts also was responsible for the Peabody Award winning Dr. Katz: Professional Therapist, which aired for six seasons on Comedy Central. Soup2Nuts is owned by Scholastic, a global children's publishing and media company.
"I created the show as kind of a modern-day Mary Tyler Moore," said Dorothea Gillim, an executive producer at Soup2Nuts and creator and producer of Hey Monie. "I wasn't so much thinking about breaking black stereotypes. I wanted these women to be women that I would want to hang out with, who had a brain."
It helps that Shelton, from Detroit, and Callier, from Chicago, are real-life best friends. They met five years ago while doing standup comedy with Chicago's Second City troupe. Shelton moved into Callier's apartment building a few weeks later, and they've been best friends since.
Shelton, 30, and Callier, who won't give her age, come from similar backgrounds. Shelton, who gives voice to Monie, was an original cast member of Detroit's Second City. She appeared in the series Mr. Show on HBO. Callier, who voices Yvette, was an instructor and executive director for the Second City Training Center, a school for improvisation, acting and writing.
"The thing I immediately liked about Frances was her confidence and willingness to just do anything," Shelton said. "I finally found someone that when I said, "Hey, we should go hang gliding off of the Sears Tower,' she was already looking in the Yellow Pages for a place that sells hang gliding equipment.
"And of course, she's totally funny."
The show follows the life of Simone, a single, black, professional woman in Chicago, and her relationship with an interesting cast of characters, particularly her best friend and downstairs neighbor, Yvette.
Shelton was hired first. Then she wrote the character of Yvette to be her character's best friend.
"When it came (time) to cast the part of Yvette, I suggested Frances because she is my best friend, and they, amazingly, said okay," Shelton said.
Simone, 28, is disciplined and directed, and has the ability to read people and offer support and insight. Though she is looking for love, she's not just waiting to exhale. She's not depending on a man to provide all the answers.
"I tend to be much more resolute and definite than Monie," Shelton said. "She's more timid than me and more careful. She has a little bit of a shorter fuse . . . but I think of her as like the gentler, kinder Angela. I'm a lot more - daring?"
Yvette, also 28, likes to live for the moment. She knows how to have a good time, and she speaks her mind without a second thought. She has relationship problems with her boyfriend, Raekwon.
Callier said that she is more like Monie than Yvette. She is more mild-mannered than her character. Yvette is never afraid to say what she thinks. In the Oprah episode, in which Winfrey does a voice-over, she makes fun of some of the other best friends who are waiting to be on the show.
"She says some things that we all want to say to our boss, our friends," Callier said. "She stands up for herself at all times."
Each episode takes about four hours to record. Shelton and Callier, who now live in Los Angeles, are given an outline of a situation and improvise the rest. The result is edited into a 20-minute show.
Both actors say that the improvisation makes the show more real and gives them the opportunity to create their own words.
"The situations are real because they come from our real experiences," Shelton said. "These are things we would and have really said and done in one way or another."
BET considers Hey Monie to be a hit, with more than 600,000 viewers tuning in on Tuesday night, said Whitten-Griggs. By contrast, TLC's Trading Spaces, which often finishes among the top 10 cable shows in ratings, draws about 4.2-million.
But Hey Monie was crossing over before BET.
The show first aired in 2000 as a five-minute short on the Oxygen show X-Chromosome, a prime-time animated series for women that explores issues from a female point of view. This is Hey Monie's first season as a show.
Oxygen approached BET this year about having a hand in producing the show. The networks, along with Soup2Nuts and the actors, come up with creative story lines that they hope are engaging and funny.
"We just feel that our audiences are sort of different enough, so we might help each other gain audiences that we don't currently have," said Herbert Niles, vice president of film development and program acquisition for BET. "For some time, we have wanted to expand our original program. It seemed like the perfect fit."
Some viewers might feel uncomfortable with parts of the show that seem to play on black stereotypes. The women can be loud, use slang and roll their necks. In one episode, Simone goes to church to meet a man.
One interesting thing is how Simone interacts with her colleagues at her job as an account executive, particularly how her dialect changes from you-go-girl to Valley girl.
Janice Rhoshalle Littlejohn, a freelance television writer, said that the characters play true to who they are. She has reviewed Shelton and Callier's sister-friendship comedy act, Frangela, at Comedy Underground in Santa Monica, Calif. She also has interviewed the actors.
"It just seems to capture who these two people are as girlfriends," Littlejohn said. "It also plays true to a lot of their standup, which is a lot more edgy and a lot more hard."
There are certain stereotypes that are true about black women, Shelton said. For example, most black women aren't married.
And no one talks or behaves the same way around their friends as they do around their parents.
"Our show does something that I haven't seen another African-American show do as well," Shelton said. "We traverse the public and the private as it pertains to middle-class African-Americans. We show an experience that isn't uniformly in one world, an experience that is really a lot more accurate, I think."
But the creators try to stay away from most stereotypes. They don't do black-male bashing. And they work to come up with creative plots. Their goal is to make people laugh.
"We like the show to be funny, people to be entertained and have a good time," Callier said. "I don't think we're going to solve the world's problems in this 20-minute show. We get out those perspectives and try to have fun with them."
Hey Monie is very much a buddy show, Gillim said, the kind you want to watch with a girlfriend while munching on popcorn.
Although it's a show that features black women, she said it's more like a funny show in which the characters just happen to be black.
"We wanted to really feature the friendship and show (that) women really lean on their best friends," Gillim said. "Your best friend is there for life. She gets you through the hard times. She's also there to help you bust out and celebrate the good times, too."