‘THE Two Coreys” want ev eryone to know that their new reality show is not exactly real.
“News flash: The show is not a reality show, but the emotion is real,” says ’80s superstar Corey Feldman, 36.
“Every episode has a beginning, a middle and an end, just like a sitcom,” says his longtime best friend, co-star and equally recognizable ’80s movie star Corey Haim, also 36. “We wrote out the storylines before each episode.”
“The Two Coreys” debuted last night on A&E.
On the show, Haim moves in with Feldman and his wife, Susie, so they can try to re-launch their showbiz careers together. After their glory days in the 1980s, both stars experienced a nightmarish fall from grace, literally destroying their high-flying careers in a blaze of drugs and alcohol, long before Britney, Paris or Lindsay were out of grade school.
“Corey once came up to me and said, ‘I can’t believe you’re still alive after what you’ve ingested,’ ” Haim says. “But I’m here, and I’d like to do whatever I can do to do features again – I just feel real lucky to be working again, man.”
They bristle at questions about the new generation of out-of-control teen starlets and resent being referred to as former child stars.
“We’re like the OG [old guard] supposedly of this bad boy era. How many more questions do you think it’s fun for us to be asked about this?” Haim says. “It’s quite an honor to be asked about these things if we can help in some way, but unless somebody has really hit below rock-bottom, there’s nothing anyone can do, so it just takes away from our show – it’s been happening to us a lot lately.”
“The Two Coreys” is being promoted as a new version of “The Odd Couple” with a twist, Feldman is neat and kept under his model-wife’s thumb, while Haim is a slob and free to pursue whatever catches his fancy.
But all is not what it seems.
The Feldman’s home, in which Haim is a “guest,” is really a mansion rented in Vancouver, Canada for the purpose of filming the show. The three moved into it for the duration of the six-week-long shoot, which did not include any footage or mention of the Feldmans’ 3-year-old son, Zen.
Feldman compares the show to Larry David’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm” in that much of what appears on camera is improvised. The difference, he says, is that on many occasions, unintentionally real situations worked so well, they became part of the show.
“We sort of said, ‘We’re starting here at point A, and we want to finish the episode at point B. Let’s see how we get there.’ ”
One such heartbreaking moment occurs in the series’ third episode when Feldman tells Haim that Warner Bros. is making a direct-to-video sequel of “Lost Boys” – the ’80s vampire film that put them on the map – without either one of them.
It’s a project that Haim has clung to for almost 15 years as a chance to return to his former glory, and he cries on Feldman’s shoulder when he hears the news. “I’m not stoked every time a commercial goes on and it has me crying” Haim says. “But hey, that’s what really happened.”
Feldman believes the show could be considered a new kind of genre and jokes that instead of a reality show, improv or sitcom, maybe it should have been called an “improvicom.”