The Difficult People: The Movie Table Read Was the Best Possible Cast Reunion

On November 3, a couple of hours before the polls closed for the midterm election, hundreds of people lined up outside of New York’s Town Hall. The line snaked down 43rd Street, around the corner past the Steinway piano store, and then back up to 44th Street. The crowd of primarily gays and girls were of the elder millennial and younger-Gen-X extraction. These refugees of a dire comedy landscape had gathered for a Difficult People reunion. One guy couldn’t believe that this was the line for their little cult classic. “The people who get it, get it,” I overheard him say. Difficult People’s pop-culture digs always had the effect of making the show’s viewers feel like industry insiders, and the line waiting to get into Town Hall was filled with signals of aficionado-hood; one fan wore a Jellicle Ball shirt, another wore a black baseball cap that read “Executive Produced by Dick Wolf,” and two were in full drag.

To be clear, Difficult People: The Movie does not exist. Julie Klausner’s Hulu comedy ran for three seasons from 2015 to 2017 and starred Klausner and Billy Eichner as two friends striving to make it in showbiz. The beloved series featured guest stars as 30 Rock-type versions of themselves, barrages of jabs at the Kevins Spacey and Charlies Rose of the world before “#MeToo” was an utterance on anyone’s lips, and sendups of every other show on TV. In the near-decade since, there has been a Difficult People-shaped hole in the media world, satire world, and media-satire world at a time when it’s never needed tough love more. But for two hours, as the election’s blue wave rolled in, that hole was filled with a live reading of the Difficult People film script that Klausner and co-writer Alex Scordelis were hired by Universal to write in 2022, which never got produced.

In addition to Klausner and Eichner, the staged reading reunited almost the whole cast, including Andrea Martin as Julie’s judgy psychiatrist mother Marilyn; James Urbaniak as her walking-PBS-tote-bag boyfriend Arthur; Jackie Hoffman as Billy’s sister-in-law Rucchel; and Gabourey Sidibe, Derrick Baskin, and Shakina Nayfack as Billy’s coworkers. One missing link was Cole Escola, who wrote on the show and played proto-demon-twink Matthew and was unable to make the reading. A Mary Todd–level stunt cast was needed to fill Escola’s clown shoes, so Klausner worked her connections to rope Susan Lucci into the role. Backstage, between the dress rehearsal and performance, Lucci wore a red sequined Bob Mackie gown while Klausner coached her on the correct pronunciation of “Clavicular.” The result was pure camp as the 79-year-old soap diva delivered lines that Klausner added to the script last weekend, including, “After all the Chip City locations closed, the woke mob tore down the statue of Columbus from Columbus Circle and replaced it with one of Hannah Einbinder in Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma.”

As the audience settled into their seats and the man to my right anxiously toggled between election results and texts with his mom, Klausner and Eichner were introduced as “fresh from opening for Kevin Spacey on his cabaret tour.” The two set the night up as a harkening back to a simpler time, “before Twitter was just swastika swastika swastika swastika,” and when, per Klausner, “the only AI that mattered to us was Amy Irving.” The massive pop of laughter and applause over the Crossing Delancey joke caused Eichner to shake his head: “Only in this room.”

From there, the 21-person cast took the stage and assumed their seats for the table read. The script, originally subtitled “Ahead of Their Time,” mines plenty of meta humor out of the show’s cult status and Simpsons-like reputation for pop-culture prescience. Like the original series, Difficult People: The Movie follows Julie and Billy’s characters as they embark on a quest through three out of five boroughs to break into the decrepit horse-glue factory that is the comedy industry. Among the cast were Chris Meloni as a version of himself that is turned gay by an Etsy witch; Kids in the Hall’s Kevin McDonald as Bonesaw, a maniac; and Paul Walter Hauser as a Cockney enforcer named Harry “The Hat” Knuckles. Hauser, a fan of the show, flew himself in from Atlanta to participate in the table read and told Klausner he would perform whatever part was handed to him. Klausner and Meloni had met years ago in the UCB basement at a reading hosted by comedian and writer Joe Mande. She ran into Meloni earlier this year at the Tribeca Film Festival and asked, “What are you doing on election night?”

The two-hour reading featured cracks at a smattering of comedy and political figures: Ted Lasso, Dan Levy, Theo Von, Nick Fuentes, Ricky Gervais, Bill Lawrence, Bari Weiss, Sean Evans, Justin Baldoni, Netflix Is a Joke, Rachel Sennott, Jordan Firstman, The Odyssey, Colin Jost, Pete Davidson, and the Rum Tum Tugger, among many others. A comedy nepo baby names her son “Hinchecliffe Rogan,” the phrase “The Rise and Fall of Reggie Dinkins!” is used as an exclamation, there is a chorus of Che Diazes, and the characters deal with a diaper-clad and performatively mentally-ill character named Globby that Hauser introduced as “the GOAT of the Bed-Stuy clowns.” All of these references served a deeper commentary about a fractured Hollywood in the throes of an identity crisis, and Klausner and Eichner’s place in it as performers and writers early in the streaming era. Some of the script’s most pointed comedy came from Michael Urie and Cecily Strong as the over-the-top dastardly villains: younger, meaner gay-and-a-girl showrunners and stars of a more successful New York-based pop culture-heavy comedy series called The Insufferable Duo, which cribs heavily from Julie and Billy’s in-universe “Quibble” series Mean Pals.

Difficult People’s humor, even at its pointiest, was always rooted in a genuine love for making comedy and a passion for pop-culture fandom, and the live reading was a celebration of that. After the show, Meloni and Eichner graciously took some pictures with fans, people queued to buy souvenir tote bags to stuff into their existing tote bags, and Klausner felt grateful. “This audience who watched this cult show from over ten years ago showed up on election night, and I know my audience,” she said. “They all want to be back to their apartments with their cats as much as I do.”