JERSEY'S NEW SITCOM
Hoboken, Jersey City play big part in 'Marino's'

Monday, April 06, 2009
By JEFF THEODORE
JOURNAL ARTS EDITOR

Sarit Catz has a knack for spotting a hit sitcom when she sees one.

Back in the 1980s and 1990s, she worked on writing teams for such long-running hit shows as "Full House" and "Coach."

The Boston native, who now lives in Milburn, is so certain about her latest sitcom venture that she is independently bankrolling it.

It's called "Marino's," a new comedy set in Hoboken, filmed inside an Italian deli in Jersey City and starring comic Mike Marino, a Jersey City native who bills himself as "New Jersey's Bad Boy of Comedy".

Catz, who dropped off the sitcom scene in recent years to raise children with her husband, met Marino while keeping her creative juices flowing as a funnywoman on the comic circuit.

"He's pretty darn hilarious," she says of Marino, a regular member among sketch players on "The Tonight Show with Jay Leno."

"In his standup, he brings people right into his world...Mike has that Jersey family thing you can easily get a handle on."

"I never came across a comic around whom I felt a show could be built," says Catz, who teaches a sitcom writing course at Columbia University in New York. "It's so different with Mike. In this show, you feel like you want to invite him and characters around him into your home week after week for seven years."

The show centers on Marino portraying a guy who returns home to help his family run an Italian deli after his father dies. The cast includes a widowed mother, a younger sister who married and divorced Marino's best friend, her precocious kids and an uncle who works as a plumbing supply salesman but most people link to the Mafia. Next door to the deli is a chic boutique run by a gay owner.

"It's kind of like old Hoboken meets new Hoboken," Catz says. "One theme of the show is that old school folks are hanging on while everything is changing around them.

"Another theme is that Mike's character was studying business at Seton Hall but has to give up his dream to run the deli when his father dies," Catz says. "There's a tug of war between dreams and responsibility. And in this economy, people out there are experiencing that."

Catz scouted out deli shops across Jersey to film her show's pilot until she happened upon Matarazzos in Jersey City's Heights section.

"This deli epitomizes the show with its family atmosphere, where everybody knows everybody," she says. "This place is a true gem and they've been so nice to us."

After finishing three weeks of editing the pilot, Catz will head out to Hollywood to sell the show. Because she doesn't want to curse her luck, she declined to divulge networks she intends to target.

"I don't want to jinx anything," she says.

What happens if it fails to impress?

"I'll still feel good because I worked on something I think is good," Catz says. "I won't feel like a schmuck!"