Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
Ryan Reynolds’ recent appearance on Netflix’s My Next Guest Needs No Introduction with David Letterman is the perfect escape from reality. The two affable pop culture titans exchange silly stories and thoughtful anecdotes as Reynolds effortlessly toggles between charming and introspective. It’s a fun, soothing 40 minutes that I highly recommend, but the wide-ranging interview also contains a riveting mystery that forced this amateur pop culture detective to come out of retirement to solve one final case.
Around the 17:00 minute mark of the episode, Reynolds is talking about his journey from Canada to Los Angeles when he drops this interesting tidbit:
“My first year or two in Los Angeles, I got to see some of the worst in humanity on sets,” he told Letterman. “I did a guest starring role on a sitcom where the lead actor would not rehearse with me.”
Letterman asked the obvious followup question:
Why did they drop “the pizza place” from the iconic late-90s sitcom Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place?
Wait, no. Sorry. Letterman, who I thought was a seasoned talk show pro, asked Reynolds to name the show. But in a classy move, the Deadpool star declined to reveal the title of the sitcom. But his choice in words was interesting. Very interesting.
Before we continue, according to IMDb, the titular pizza place from Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place was abandoned in Season 3 because the show moved away from most of the pizza-related aspects of the series, choosing instead to focus on the “two guys and a girl” part of the show. Moving on…
During his interview with Letterman, Reynolds states that he moved to Los Angeles after appearing on a 1996 episode of The X-Files. Two Guys, a Girl, and an Ill-Fated Pizza Place — a show I genuinely enjoyed, by the way, no shade — debuted in 1998. Between his guest spot on The X-Files and starring role on Two Guys, a Traylor Howard, and a Pizza Place, Reynolds, according to IMDb, appeared on two shows, a few TV movies (including Sabrina the Teenage Witch, which was later adapted into a TV series), and a handful of films. One of the shows, The Outer Limits, isn’t a sitcom.
That leaves one remaining program: The John Larroquette Show.
Airing from 1993 to 1996 on NBC, The John Larroquette Show centered on John Hemingway (Larroquette), a recovering alcoholic who becomes the manager of a big city bus station. I remember liking this John Larroquette vehicle that, somewhat surprisingly, produced 84 episodes over four seasons. The final six episodes of the sitcom didn’t air on NBC, which is important because one of them, “Napping to Success,” features Reynolds as John’s son Tony Hemingway.
The series isn’t streaming (although bad quality uploads are available on YouTube), but this is almost certainly the show Reynolds is talking about. Not only does it fit the timeline, but Ryan saying that he’d be “giving everything away” if he said the name of the sitcom supports our thesis. Plus, Reynolds was portraying Larroquette’s son, which is obviously something production would want to rehearse.
Can I say with 100% certainty that Reynolds was referring to John Larroquette? No. But the proof, as nobody says, is in the pizza.
