Chapter 4: The Talk-Show Dream (2002-2003)

It started with a camera called the Clever Cam and a question that thirteen-year-olds have been asking since television was invented: what if I had my own show?

The year was 2002. Jonathan Harchick was thirteen, in eighth grade in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and he watched late-night television the way other kids watched sports. He knew the shape of the thing he wanted. There was a host behind a desk. There was a monologue. There were guests, and the host interviewed them, and the whole room ran on the easy rhythm of one person steering the conversation while another person supplied the surprises. He named his heroes right at the top of his first episode: Conan O'Brien, Jay Leno. He was not coy about what he was doing. He was copying the format he loved, because that is what you do when you love something at thirteen, and he was doing it in his bedroom with a consumer camcorder and a recliner.

Episode one of Talking With Jon was not supposed to start anything. Jonathan himself says so, plainly: it was just a video test. He pointed the Clever Cam at his setup, pressed record, and tried out the idea of being a talk-show host. The test worked. So he made another one. Then another. Over the next five years, that test would grow into thirty-four episodes, but the important thing about the beginning is how small it was. Nobody commissioned it. Nobody assigned it. A kid tested whether he could be Conan O'Brien in his bedroom, and the answer came back yes enough times to keep going.

There is a philosophy buried in that little story, and it is worth pausing on, because it explains everything Jonathan made afterward. A video test is a question asked without permission. You do not wait for someone to hand you a show. You point the camera at the idea and see if it holds up. Most people never ask the question. Jonathan asked it, and when the answer came back yes, he did not celebrate and move on. He raised the stakes. Each episode became a test of something new: could he do characters, could he do commercials, could he hold an audience for an hour, could he end the thing on purpose when he was done. The ambition never arrived from outside. It grew inside the work, episode by episode, the way a plant grows toward whatever light is available. The test that snowballed is the entire arc of Talking With Jon, and it started with a thirteen-year-old pressing record just to see what would happen.

The set of that first episode tells you everything about how this show got made. An armchair. A small white cabinet with mugs on it. A handheld microphone. A wall decorated with gray and blue construction-paper squares taped into a checkerboard. Everything was paper, tape, furniture that was already there, and confidence. Later in the series he would rebuild this set again and again, and he would narrate every rebuild on the air, but the original is the one that matters: a bedroom that decided, for fifteen minutes at a time, to be a television studio.

The camera he used was an old one called the Clever Cam, and the footage had the soft, noisy look of early consumer video, with room echo and auto-gain pumping baked into every shot. He edited on the family computer in Ulead VideoStudio and made his animations and title graphics in Ulead 3D Production Studio, a program meant for simple 3D titles that he pushed far past what it was designed to do. The finished episodes came out as VCD-era video, tiny MPEG files at a resolution that looks like a postage stamp on a modern screen. The typos piled up, some of them on purpose and some of them not, and he has said as much himself. That detail is worth sitting with for a moment. A kid who cared enough to build a whole show did not always bother to fix the spelling, and sometimes the misspelling was the joke. It is easy to read that as sloppiness, but it reads better as priorities. The energy went into making the thing, not polishing the thing, and the occasional deliberate typo was a wink at the audience: yes, I saw that, and I left it in, because the show is funnier with the seams showing. Nothing about the tools was professional. Everything about the effort was.

The show opened with his production banner: Potato Head INK. If that sounds like the studio credit of a major motion picture, that was the joke, and the pride. He was thirteen and he already had a production company, even if the company was just him. Under the banner he ran clips of Statler and Waldorf, the two old hecklers from The Muppet Show, watching from their theater box, and he scatted a wordless version of "Mahna Mahna," the Muppets' famous nonsense song, as his theme music. He loved the Muppets, and the logic of the opening was simple: borrow the framing of the thing you love, then put your name on it. Homage as branding. He was thirteen and already thinking like a producer.

Then came the monologue and the cold open, where he welcomed viewers to his new talk show and explained, in the straightforward way of a kid who assumes you have seen these shows too, that it was like Conan and like Leno, that he would bring in guests and interview them. And then the show hit its first real problem, which was also its first real invention: there were no guests. There was no audience. There was no budget, no crew, and no green room. A kid with a stricter sense of the rules would have done a monologue-only show, or quit. Jonathan did something else. He became the guest.

The first guest in the history of Talking With Jon was Jonathan himself, introduced under his full name, Jonathan Hartchick. Host-Jon sat in the host chair and asked the questions. Guest-Jonathan sat in the guest chair and answered them. He told the audience he liked making videos, that he had made one about New York, that he lived in Pittsburgh, that he went to middle school, that he had been born in Pittsburgh, that he liked Mr. Potato Head. It is the kind of interview that only works if both people are the same person, and the comedy lives in the gap: a host running the format with a straight face while the guest supplies nothing but raw, unfiltered kid.

Years later, when asked about it, Jonathan gave this decision a name that turns it from a workaround into a philosophy. The two Jons on camera together, he said, represent the two sides of the brain. The host-Jon is the left brain: format, questions, transitions, the part that runs the show. The guest-Jonathan is the right brain: the maker, the fan, the kid who likes Mr. Potato Head and makes films about things he cares about. Logic interviewing impulse, both of them deadpan, both of them the same thirteen-year-old. Once you see it that way, the whole series opens up. Every character he would later play against himself, the old man with the cane, the chef, the pitchman, the cop, is a variation on this first device. There was only ever one brain in the room, so he split it in two and let the halves talk. A kid thinking out loud, in costume, with a straight face.

It is also the show's contract with the viewer, signed in the very first episode. Everything here is handmade, including the people. There are no real guests coming, no celebrities booked, no audience members waiting off camera. There is just Jonathan, the furniture, and whatever he can dream up, and he will not pretend otherwise. He will not do an empty-chair interview and hope you do not notice. He will fill the chair himself and make the filling of it the funniest part. That honesty, that refusal to fake resources he did not have, is what makes the show feel warm instead of cheap. He was not hiding the trick. The trick was the show.

The show's pretend economy started in episode one, too. The Hartchick Society, an imaginary organization with a name suspiciously close to the host's own, had supposedly donated the furniture and set decorations. Jonathan did ad reads for it and other imaginary organizations the way a real talk show would thank its sponsors, which was funny on two levels: there were no sponsors, and the room really did need furnishing. Later, when the sets got bigger, the fiction would grow with them, and the imaginary sponsors would take credit for every upgrade. But it started here, as a throwaway credit gag that was also true, because his family really had provided the room. If you cannot afford sponsors, invent them, and make the invention part of the comedy.

And then, in the middle of this silly little talk show, episode one did something that set the tone for all thirty-four episodes to follow. Jonathan stopped the comedy and screened a film he had made about September 11th, a serious documentary assembled from news-style audio and footage about the attacks, running roughly ten minutes. The host introduced it, the film played, and the show went quiet for the seriousness of it. He was thirteen years old, a year out from the attacks, and he had made a sincere film about a national tragedy, and his talk show was his only screen, so the film went on the talk show.

That collision, a goofy self-interview and a heartfelt documentary sharing the same fifteen minutes, is the tonal thesis of Talking With Jon. He never sorted his work into serious and silly piles. He never signaled which parts the audience was supposed to take seriously. He just made things, and the show played what he made, and the sincerity sat right next to the absurdity without apology. That refusal to rank his own work by tone, that willingness to let the sad thing and the funny thing share a stage, would stay with him through everything he made afterward. It started here, in episode one, because the show was a container, not a genre.

The film itself shows how seriously he took the making of it. It runs on narrated news-style audio, the measured voice of a broadcast recounting the morning of the attacks, laid over footage that includes his local Pittsburgh station's coverage, images of lightning striking the Twin Towers, and multi-panel composites he built himself in the editing software, layering several moving pictures into one frame. At one point a small picture-in-picture figure of a firefighter appears in the corner of the screen, the kind of effect that takes real patience to build in consumer editing software. He was thirteen, working with the same tools he used to make a pizza beg for its life, and he gave the serious film the same care he gave the jokes. The craft did not know the difference between the tones. Neither did he.

Episode two, recorded about a month later in September 2002, showed what happened when the test became a habit. Jonathan welcomed viewers back, introduced a new guest, a mushroom-creature character called Go Shroomo who declared himself a good fighter in broken English, and followed him with another costumed guest, a grim-reaper figure in a black hooded robe and skull mask, interviewed while standing as Jonathan sat with the microphone. The guests were getting stranger, which meant the show was getting more confident. Long stretches of episode two are clips with host wraparounds: wrestling promos, parody songs, comedy bits stitched together by Jonathan in the living room with the microphone. The container was opening. The talk show was becoming a variety show, because the kid running it kept making things that did not fit neatly between a monologue and an interview.

Episode two also gave the show its first real tradition. It closed with an original song, a crude and catchy sign-off refrain that Jonathan sang to end the episode, and it became the recurring closer, the thing the audience would come to expect the way late-night audiences expect the band to play them out. A kid who had just learned he could make a show was already learning that shows have rituals.

There is a footnote to the Conan O'Brien name-check that deserves a moment, because it says something about how far a bedroom test can travel. Years later, the kid who had introduced his little show by comparing it to Conan's would have his own videos played on Late Night with Conan O'Brien. His IMDb page carries the credit. A thirteen-year-old points a camcorder at a recliner and says he wants to be like Conan, and the line between the imitation and the real thing turns out to be thinner than anyone would have guessed. He was not just copying the format. He was aiming at it, and eventually the format noticed.

That is the whole story of the talk-show dream, really. A thirteen-year-old wanted to be Conan O'Brien and Jay Leno. He had a recliner, a cabinet, a handheld mic, a wall of construction paper, and an old camera called the Clever Cam. He had no guests, so he played the guest. He had no sponsors, so he invented the Hartchick Society. He had a production banner called Potato Head INK and a theme song borrowed from the Muppets. He had a serious film about September 11th and nowhere else to show it, so he showed it on his comedy show. It was a video test. It worked. So he made another one.

The snowball was rolling.