For comedy fans of a certain bent, The Chris Gethard Show‘s “One Man’s Trash” is considered to be one of the best episodes of television of all time. Filmed live on May 25th, 2016, it opens with host Chris Gethard on the set of his unconventional talk show, sitting in front of a dumpster. He informs the audience that there is an item inside the dumpster, and they — along with speciaI guests Paul Scheer and Jason Mantzoukas — will be spending the episode trying to guess what’s inside. The result: glorious chaos.
Although the episode has been available in full on YouTube since 2016, the secret of what’s inside the dumpster has been carefully guarded by fans, because the experience of learning the answer is too wonderful to literally spoil. However, this article will be revealing it, for an important reason: At least one side of the story has never been told, and in revealing the secret, I’m able to share some wild details about how the episode came to be.
Before you read any further, though, you really should experience it for yourself. Gethard agrees: “If you want the full joy that you can get out of this, go watch it before you get to the spoilers. In this one episode, I think we really showed the potential of television as a joyous, simple, interactive medium, that gives you some good sweet dopamine kicks.” Behold:
Did you watch it? Great. Here’s what the contents of the dumpster have to say about it.
[Editor’s note: The following contains spoilers for The Chris Gethard Show, Season 2 Episode 9, “One Man’s Trash.”]
People have casually mentioned “One Man’s Trash” to Paul Giamatti over the years, but he’s pretty sure that this is the first time he’s doing a full interview about it. He laughs, when asked if he has clear memories of his time in the dumpster. “Pretty clear. Weirdly clear. Strangely clear,” he says via Zoom. “It’s funny how much of it I remember.”
The Chris Gethard Show began in 2009 as a UCB live show, followed by the leap to TV as a New York public access series in 2011. While it didn’t have a huge reach, it did grow a loyal fanbase, which included a friend and producing partner of Giamatti’s, who recommended they meet with Gethard to discuss potential projects.
Gethard recalls that during that first meeting, “really quickly and in the most classy way, it was clear that [Giamatti] was like, ‘These are really out there ideas. They’re cool, they’re interesting, but they’re not what I’m trying to build with my company. But you seem cool.'” After laughing a lot and bonding over their mutual love of solo road trips, it was clear the meeting wouldn’t lead to any future projects, “but we did like each other’s vibe in a big way.”
Says Giamatti, “I remember thinking he seemed exactly like what I thought he was going to be like from watching the show. We just loved talking to him. And then I went and watched [the public access show] a couple of times, because I just thought it was great that he was doing it the way he was doing it.”
Gethard remembers that when Giamatti was hanging out on set, “he was off to the side and a bunch of the people there were like, ‘That’s clearly Paul Giamatti, right?’ And I was like, yeah, he just wants to check it out.”
After TCGS moved from public access to its first cable home on Fusion, the team wanted to feature Giamatti on the show. Unfortunately, there was a problem with the network. Gethard credits the show’s talent booker, Patrick Cotnoir, with being able to bring in great guests on a weekly basis. “There were times where we probably should have been canceled at the end of our season, but we were getting Amy Poehler and Jon Hamm and Method Man to drop by and do videos. So our show survived.”
However, when the show’s producers submitted lists of potential guests to Fusion executives for approval, the network would say no to Giamatti. This happened repeatedly, and it took some time for Gethard to find out why. “Turns out that one of the heads of our network was married to a woman who was pretty young, like 24 or 25 years old. And he would go home with our proposed guest bookings and just ask her, ‘Who are your favorites on the list?’ And Paul, if you read this, I don’t say this to besmirch you, but she was one of the rare people on this earth who was just not a fan of Paul Giamatti.”
Thus, TCGS literally had to sneak him onto the show inside a dumpster. “As magic as it is that he was in the dumpster, Paul Scheer and Jason Mantzoukas are the booked guests on this episode,” Gethard says. “This was not boldness on our part. This was not us being like, look how cool we are, we’re sitting on Giamatti. It was the only way we could convince them to let us have him on the show.”
The Chris Gethard Show, photo by Andrew Bisdale
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