Maddy Kelly is wearing the most incredible shoes. They’re neon orange and plush, but in a water-resistant, puffer-coat sort of way. I ask her how she’d describe them: “Like an outdoor slipper. They’re my tour shoes.”
They seem almost practical for someone as perpetually on-the-go as Kelly. Maddy Kelly is a young multihyphenate who is rapidly running out of hyphens. She’s a writer and comedian. And an actress. And a showrunner. You might know her from CBC’s Let’s Make a Rom-Com podcast or perhaps from The Debaters. If you don’t know her, you might meet her in the coming weeks on her cross-Canada comedy tour. Or else at a clowning class, which she swears are lifechanging. (“It’s very expansive stuff about how we’re expected to shrink ourselves to be more palatable in regular life, but we want our entertainers to do the opposite. And experimenting with the boundaries of performance.”)
But the project she’s most enthused about recently is her new show Popcorn for Dinner, a fully scripted podcast that brings the sitcom to an audio format. Kelly is the showrunner, lead writer, and a lead actor as well. It’s a natural fit, given Kelly’s encyclopedic and enthusiastic knowledge of sitcoms (her friends think she’s a Monica by the way, and, given the shoes, probably a textbook Carrie, too). But Popcorn for Dinner is about more than pushing the boundaries of genre and format; more than anything, Kelly wanted to modernize the sitcom, to create a show by young twenty-somethings for young-twenty somethings. “My show was created before Sex Lives of College Girls, which I love,” Kelly notes, “but at that time, I had never seen a sitcom that encapsulated the early 20s as well as Friends did with mid-to-late 20s. I wanted to do that.”
Narrated by Nickelodeon star Ciara Bravo, Popcorn for Dinner introduces audiences to four new best friends: the optimistic and slightly neurotic Laura (Kelly), cool but aimless Ellie (Second City’s Jillian Ebanks), lovable dork Michael (Charlie Foster), and Austin, a complete and utter oddball Austin (think if Phoebe and Kramer fused into someone younger and, impossibly, stranger, performed by the hilarious Ben Fossett). They stress about capturing the perfect party vibe, engage in high stakes Facebook marketplace swaps, try to stay off their phones—and, of course, fall into a few will-they, won’t-they love triangles along the way.
“I am totally the person that puts a sitcom on in the background goes and cleans. It doesn’t look at it,” says Kelly. “And that was a big impulse behind the show, to bring a new energy to those familiar, comforting beats.”
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Kelly has already wanted to write a sitcom. She wrote her first pilot at fifteen. It was called Garage Bride (a play on the then-popular video game Garage Band) and tailored for success. “Everyone always used to tell me you have to have a family sitcom with a high concept hook,” says Kelly, and that’s what Garage Bride was: a family sitcom centred on a fourteen-year-old girl who plans weddings out of her parents’ garage. “And she has a lot of experience because her mom’s been married seven times.”
“Through a lucky connection, that script ended up being read at Disney when I was fifteen and rejected by several showrunners at Nickelodeon and Disney. So I started getting rejection letters pretty early.” When I ask if she was given any constructive criticism, Kelly laughs. “The only note I remember, which I got from everyone, is ‘Why are the adults in this show smoking? This is a kid’s show!’ But in my life, all the adults smoked. I just thought cool adults smoked!”
The next time Kelly thought about writing again, she was twenty-one. She decided to write a script that was just what she wanted, professionals be damned. This time the sitcom was about four friends—Laura, Ellie, Michael, and Austin—and had absolutely no hook. “My idea was that I was going to film a ten-minute version of the script in a real apartment with a real studio audience—and this was the first massive failure of my life, artistically.” The person she hired to film the show turned up with no equipment. When the equipment arrived, it was set up in vain. In the recording, all of the actors’ heads were cut off; the footage was unusable.
Kelly licked her wounds. She went to New York and committed herself completely to stand-up comedy, but the writing bug wouldn’t leave. When she returned to Vancouver, she revived her apartment sitcom as a live show. Laura, Ellie, Michael, and Austin moved into the old Little Mountain Gallery. This time, the stars aligned. “First, we called the show All You Can Eat Laundry—and then everyone started eating Tide Pods. So that was huge for us,” Kelly quips. “We ended up making eight episodes live. And they were really popular. All the actors were great. We had the narrator who would read the stage directions, and I would always add jokes in for them because I didn’t want one person to have to be reading just dry action.”
It was a natural and generous impulse—and it became the show’s hook. When Pat Kelly, no relation, of podcast production studio Kelly&Kelly saw the show, he knew the narrator was the key. “He said, ‘That’s the character that will help you propel this. There will be this narrator that draws you through this sitcom.’” The Kellys teamed up and in a month, Maddy Kelly sold her sitcom to a podcast network. Popcorn for Dinner was reimagined for an audio format.
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Popcorn for Dinner is the first podcast of its kind, but transforming the beloved television genre into audio was a challenge Maddy and Pat Kelly loved. Maddy credits the Kelly&Kelly production team for nailing the sound of a sitcom, down to the laugh track, and Pat Kelly for keeping the comedy clean, even without visual cues. “You never lose your place in the show while you’re listening to it, which is pretty hard with audio. But you always know what’s happening.”
Things really clicked once Popcorn for Dinner found its all important narrator in Ciara Bravo. “We want someone who really liked the show and wanted to do it and who’s like got it and seemed like they had the right sensibility for to speak to young directly to young people,” says Kelly. “I hadn’t never worked with such a big star before. But Ciara was so sweet and so professional. She gives the show a lot of luster.”
The biggest adjustment for Kelly, who cut her teeth in live stand-up, is having to wait for the audience response. “I hope people are enjoying the show. I used to know people were laughing, but now I have a little computer button that I press for the laugh! And sometimes the last track won’t laugh at a line and I’ll be like, ‘Hey! That was a good joke.’”
The process took time, but in many ways our culture is more prepared than ever for Popcorn’s hijinks. “When I started writing the show in 2017, there was no word for ‘situationship,’” Kelly points out. “The fact that Laura is constantly pretending she’s not dating Jason”—her pretentious, Infinite Jest-reading on-again, off-again love interest—“they aren’t serious, they aren’t a thing, but she keeps sleeping with him.”
“I’m not saying that’s a brave new idea, but even Pat didn’t understand that. He was like, ‘Why would she do that?’ Like, trust me. This is what you have to do. You have to pretend you’re chill. That’s the only way with these douchebags. Laura’s not wrong to want to do this. She’s not weird.”
That balance of sharp cultural commentary and deep empathy is the backbone of Popcorn for Dinner, which, beneath all of its laugh out loud wackiness, is rooted an vulnerability unique to one’s early twenties, to finding yourself in new relationships or unexpected situations and figuring out how you’ll define yourself for the very first time.
“For me, Popcorn for Dinner is about trying,” says Kelly. “Trying to look like you’re not trying, trying to try, trying too hard. Laura is always trying to hard and needs to learn how to relax. Ellie’s too relaxed and needs to learn how to try a little bit, stand up for herself in some ways. But you have to try, because you never know and—spoiler, I’m not going to tell you what happens at the end of this season—but sometimes not getting what you want is the best thing.”
And what happens when do get what you want, and it becomes a hilarious, heartfelt show with a life of its own?
“I think you try again,” Kelly says brightly. She’d love another season of Popcorn For Dinner. She’s pitching a new project, one that’s half-scripted, half-unscripted. And of course, she has that upcoming cross-country comedy tour. If her clown classes have taught her anything, it’s to resist making herself small, so Maddy Kelly isn’t going to stop trying anytime soon.
