Matthew Perry (and Wilfred?)

[xadrian]

I'm going back through as many shows as I can. I just started watching a few months ago. I started watching after looking up videos for Dana Gould (like you do.) I've run through most of my favorites and now I'm back to just watching them from the beginning.

Which leads me to the episode with Matthew Perry. About 28 minutes in, he is telling Kevin about the gigs leading up to Friends. One of them he guest starred in with Paul Sand(s) about a girl and her dog. She sees him as a dog, but everyone else sees him as the guy. Which sounds exactly like the FX show Wilfred.

So I did some digging. The show Wilfred was created by Jason Giann and Adam Zwar in Australia apparently in 2001. The two wrote a 7 minute film and won an award before it was picked up by SBS. It was later rebooted in the States on FX with Gann and is apparently still in production as of a month ago.

But Perry's guest starring role was on a show that had to have been around 8 years before this idea was conceived, easily in 92 or 93.

My link then is Paul Sand. I honestly can't figure out who this is. There's a Paul Sand who was in St. Elsewhere for a few episodes and was part of Second City but he was born in 1935, making him 58 when this pilot would have aired. But who else could it have been?

So I'm stuck. Not like it's a shock that ideas are taken and borrowed, and Wilfred is not the greatest show ever but I did appreciate the premise and felt it was really original. Now I find it's not, not even close. So, that's what I did today.