“You’ve never been a woman among women. That’s no place for a rookie.“
The Argentinian TV dramedy Lalola, about a chauvinistic men’s magazine editor who is transformed into a woman, has been adapted more than a dozen times all around the world, but to date only one iteration hasn’t made it to air. In 2009, Sony Television and FOX partnered up to adapt it as Eva Adams for the U.S. market, but it was sadly not to be.
In ‘Eva,’ Will Arnett starts the proceedings as hotshot sports agent Adam Evanston, who is described a ‘snake’ by even his closest buddy Connor (the late James Van Der Beek.) He’s competing against Connor and soft-hearted divorced dad Paul (David Denman, The Office’s Roy) to sign a big name client when his womanizing ways lead to him being cursed and waking up looking like Rhea Seehorn, who went on to much greater fame and success on Better Call Saul, and now Pluribus.
Far from being paralyzed with panic at the thing that has happened to him (because that wouldn’t make very good TV,) Adam dives right in and decides he has to be Eva Adams, his own hypercompetent assistant who seems to be doing Adam’s job for him while he is “in rehab.” He has to land the big client first, and worry about getting fitted for a bra later.
Walking around as Eva, Adam has a hard time quitting his chauvinistic ways, leering at women in the department store change-room and elsewhere (experiencing “phantom wood.”) He also suffers an embarrassing bathroom mix-em-up at the urinal.
Confronted by the kind of resistance women typically get in male spaces, Adam has to learn to soften his approach, while still being true to his own goals and ambitions. I’ve never seen any iteration of Lalola, but I assume that’s pretty much how it always goes.
If you were to cast your generic chauvinist who has to learn to be better, you could do a lot worse than Will Arnett, who sticks around to perform as Adam/Eva’s inner monologue. That said, like a lot of Will’s projects between Arrested Development and Bojack Horseman, it would probably have suffered just a tad with audiences that he’s not literally playing G.O.B. Still, he’s pretty much just here to set the tone for what kind of guy Adam is inside, and for his gravelly voice to occasionally remind us who we’re really looking at.
Van Der Beek, meanwhile, was always game to play a sleazy, schmoozing slimeball, subverting his image from so many years on the WB. Whether it was as Robin’s Canadian ex on How I Met your Mother or as a caricature of himself on Don’t Trust The B. In Apartment 23, he gave it plenty of goes but never got to play that act for a long period of time.
Rounding out the cast is Kat Foster as Grace, Adam’s neighbor and longtime platonic female friend, the only person he can convince of his secret, and thus his guide into the world of femininity. She’s the one who gets Adam fitted for his first pantsuit. (Arnett’s inner monologue notes he/she’s wearing a thong, but sadly we don’t see how Grace convinced the former Adam to don one.)
I’m not going to sit here at try to convince you that the pilot was great. The entire purpose was to just lay the groundwork for twenty more hours (well, 44-minute installments) of this premise, and it succeeds. In the long term, does Eva come to realize that Grace is the perfect gal for him? Or is there a certain twinkle in his interactions with Paul that may tempt him to embrace that side of himself? (Boy, wouldn’t that have been weird — refreshing but weird — to see on American TV in 2009 Maybe by season 2 we’d be in a Younger-style love triangle.)
The series’ not-so-secret weapon would have been Seehorn, of course, as the lead. A lot is made of Eva’s looks and how she isn’t the kind of woman Adam would have bothered to bed, even though the actress would probably turn the head of any guy viewing if they saw her in reality. She’s beautiful, but it’s the kind of beauty that has a seriousness to it, which is key for the role of “big time sports agent.” She manages to convey a masculine edge, and a befuddlement at femininity, while not looking totally out of place or, frankly, that uncomfortable in her own skin. Importantly, the performance reads pretty exactly like a feminine side of Arnett’s. You can really buy that this is the same person, feminized and feeling a little desperate and helpless for the first time. Casting makes or breaks this kind of project, and I would have loved to see Seehorn play this character for at least an entire season.
There’s nothing in the pilot to be embarrassed about: it’s a perfectly enjoyable, lighthearted gender-bending hour of TV with a strong cast and all in all it actually takes a really soft touch with the TG stuff, to make it as palatable as possible for a mainstream audience. But alas, it wasn’t to be. The idea, which proved so durable globally, wasn’t for the execs at FOX, and frankly I don’t know that mainstream TV is the place for a show like this, outside of the occasional one-off on the recent Quantum Leap or Fantasy Island reboots. But you could probably sneak it onto Netflix or Prime, get a few ten-episode seasons out of it before people have a chance to go “wait, what?”
The pilot is currently available to watch at Vimeo here — and below!