Farrelly Brothers Monkey Around With Sex, Dating -- And Their Actors

LOS ANGELES (TNA) – Welcome to Planet Farrelly.

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The cast of the new Fox sitcom, 'Unhitched.' From left: Shaun Majumber, Craig Bierko, Rashida Jones and Johnny Sneed.

He just didn’t know how and where the Farrelly Brothers, the warped minds behind “Dumb & Dumber” and “There’s Something About Mary,” would plant their flag.

“I was reading the script,” Bierko recalls. “And then, on page three, I went, ‘Oh, that’s where they’re planting the flag. Right in my ass!’”

This key scene involves a promising date gone catastrophically wrong.

Bierko’s character, Jack “Gator” Gately, is out with a sexy primatologist who begs him to make “monkey love” to her “like a silverback.”

All is going well for Gator until the woman’s “roommate,” a sexually aroused orangutan, decides to join in the fun by making it a three-way.

The payoff: “Me raped by a monkey,” Bierko says -– and his priceless reaction.

Suffice it to say that this scene is a TV sitcom first.

“I thought, ‘This is going to be really fun and interesting and probably deeply humiliating,’” Bierko says. So he happily signed on as the leading man of “Unhitched,” which premieres at 9:30 p.m. ET Sunday, March 2, on Fox.

The show chronicles the dating lives of four divorced friends in their 30s as they meet an array of Miss and Mr. Wrongs.

Bierko -- whose credits range from song-and-dance whiz in Broadway’s “The Music Man” to towering villain in the boxing flick “Cinderella Man” -- figures just about everyone will be able to relate to the misadventures in “Unhitched.”

After all, who among us hasn’t experienced at least one bad date?

Bierko has been there and done that.

“I had dated this girl for about five years and I wasn’t quite ready to date again after we’d broken up,” he recalls. “But within two weeks -– it was way too early -– I went out with this other girl. I knew it wasn’t going to go any farther while we were watching a movie. I figured, I’ll call her in the morning and just say, ‘You know what? It’s too early. It’s not you. It’s me.’

“So I walked her out to the car and I said, ‘Listen, I had a really good time and I’ll give you a buzz tomorrow. I love you.’”

That’s right. An unintended “I love you” slipped out.

“And she just froze and looked at me like I was a lunatic,” Bierko continues. “She was like, ‘I can’t have anything to do with this guy.’ That was a deeply humiliating moment for me. In the last-minute, ‘Twilight Zone’-like twist, I discovered that I was the bad date!”

We feel your pain, Craig.

In many ways, “Unhitched” also has a bit of a “Seinfeld” vibe to it.

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Rashida Jones says when she first met 'Unhitched' producer Peter Farrelly, he tried to unhook her bra.

Gator is the wisecracking Jerry of the group, the one most likely to reject a perfectly nice woman because of some minor flaw. (In one episode, for example, Gator meets his dream girl, except he can’t overlook a giant shrimp-shaped skin tag on her back.)

As for Gator’s friends, Kate (played by Rashida Jones) is the Elaine, a successful attorney but a magnet for losers; Freddy (Shaun Majumder) is the George, a skilled surgeon who’s all thumbs around women; and Tommy (Johnny Sneed) is the Kramer, a deadbeat slob who, remarkably, never has any trouble getting laid.

The Farrelly Brothers, who are the show’s executive producers, directed the pilot episode and, in the process, set the tone for what has the potential to be a politically incorrect classic.

“As outrageous as they can get,” Bierko says, “there’s also a lot of warmth in all their stuff.”

Bierko credits Peter Farrelly and an unconventional directing technique for creating an immediate and lasting bond among the four cast members.

“We were shooting the pilot and doing the first big group scene,” he says. “Essentially, everybody knew the group scene was what’s going to sell the pilot, based on everybody’s chemistry. And we were good, but we weren’t clicking.

“So Peter came in with a rubber band and he made us all flick each other on the earlobe. And the anticipation of the genuine pain, because we really had to do it, got us out of our heads and got us into this goofy mood that clicked.”

As for Jones, the show’s leading lady says she knew that working with the Farrelly Brothers would be a unique experience the moment she met Peter.

“The first time I met Pete ever, I think even before I even got the part, his first gesture was to come hug me,” she says, “which I thought was so sweet.

“Then I realized he was just trying to unhook my bra!”

As we said already, welcome to Planet Farrelly.