I’ve always had a complicated relationship with the truth. Ask anybody who met me before my early 20s. They’ll tell you Bill Meeks is a big fat liar.
It’s true if you can believe me. I’d lie about silly things… Movies I’d seen, or experiences I’d had. I used to tell myself it was because I wanted to seem normal. I was homeschooled for seven years, and 9th Grade is bad enough when you’ve been forged in the flames of Middle School. I lied so people wouldn’t know how weird I really was.
It was a lie I told myself, and I even believed it, for a while.
As I’ve grown older, I’ve had time to pick that lie apart. Therapy helped. Falling in love with somebody who wouldn’t reject me for opening up helped more. Over time, I’ve been able to pinpoint the day I rejected the truth.
I was young, probably 7. My family and I were gathered around the kitchen table, going through a trunk of old pictures. I was sifting through a stack of pictures when I came across a square photo with rounded corners, featuring my mother standing with her arm around a man who wasn’t my dad, laughing in a smoke-filled room, with a wreath of flowers strung in her hair.
“Who is this guy?” I asked.
My mom snatched the picture away from me. Her hand shook as she took a long drag from her long slender menthol cigarette.
“That’s… That’s your dad.”
It wasn’t though. I saw my dad every morning before he left for work because I’d be up early, watching Mickey’s Mousercise before my sisters woke up and voted me off the TV. I even knew what he looked like without a mustache. He’d shaved it for the first time when I was three, and I hid under the kitchen table for what felt like hours because I thought there was a stranger in our house. I knew who my dad was, and it sure as heck wasn’t this guy.
“That’s not Daddy,” I said.
“No, it’s Bill.”
Over a very intense conversation which I won’t bore you with, my mom told me that Bill, my biological father, had died before I was born in a freak accident at work. He was an electrician, and somebody turned on the power while he was inside an electrical engine making some repairs. His heart stopped instantly. My mom was widowed, barely 19 with one daughter and me on the way.
When she got remarried some months later, she decided to tell me my stepfather was simply my father. I don’t really blame her for that decision. Not now.
Back then, I was confused and angry. Here was this person who I depended on to protect me, and she’d lied to me, something she’d told me I should never ever do. If she could lie to me like that, if my extended family could lie to me like that, then maybe the truth wasn’t all that important. Maybe it would be easier to just say what I needed to say to get by, if everybody around me was lying anyway.
As I got older, and my mom and stepdad became more involved in an old-fashioned fire and brimstone Baptist church, lying became a defense mechanism, a way to avoid getting in trouble, because if I got in trouble you can be damn sure they didn’t spare the rod, which in this case is what spoiled the child.
What’s The Fakist?
Tom Gehrke
For six years, I produced podcasts under the Universe Box banner with my wife Anne Marie. For several reasons, which aren’t worth getting into here, we decided to close up shop in March of 2017. After producing hundreds of podcast episodes and five books, I was left to decide what would come next.
I wrote huge outlines for a few projects: A metaphysical rom-com screenplay called Our Life that I still hope to finish one day, the final book in my Dogboy Adventures series, and a comedy series called The Fakist. After taking these three concepts through the planning phase, I decided The Fakist was the strongest and most marketable idea.
The basic premise? What if there was a news organization as committed to making shit up as real news organizations are to telling the truth? Sure, every news organization has its own agendas, but any journalist I’ve ever met is a true believer, as committed to the ideals of journalism as they are to the organization they work for. What if you took that passion, and flipped the script?
Enter Paul DaFoe, an entitled trust fund kid with a devotion to faking the news. Every episode contains 3-5 news stories/comedy sketches, connected by a loose theme (like the Service Industry or Abuses of Power). Between each sketch, we go back to the newsroom to tell the ongoing story of Paul and his Fakist News Team.
I had a rough idea for that ongoing story: LeAnn Snyder, the newly hired Executive Producer In Charge of Production for The Fakist, would constantly challenge Paul’s journalistic ethics, eventually turning him into one of those “truth-tellers” he hates so much. But, as I finished the script for Episode 2 – Speedy Delivery, I realized how close Paul’s story was to my own. He lied to be accepted, but those lies were what held him back from forming any real connections with the people around him.
With this revelation, I changed my original outline extensively. It’s still a story about ethical journalism, but it’s also a story about a man whose dim view of the truth costs him everything, and how he tries to claw his way back.
It’s also seriously funny. We’ve tackled pyramid schemes, revealed Kim Jon Un as the world’s biggest Teen Wolf fan, caught up with the lead singer of The New Radicals in Kentucky, and uncovered the scandal of a pot shop employee who pissed hot on a drug test. I’ve always been a huge sketch comedy nerd, so it’s been a blast writing 30 original sketches for the show.
Why The Fakist?
So why have I devoted hundreds of hours to this “sketch dramedy” over the past two years?
First and foremost, I want The Fakist to be entertaining. If you don’t get at least three chuckles per minute, I’ll buy you a Coke. Our podcast listeners always seemed to enjoy my off-kilter sense of humor, and I hope you do too.
Secondly, I want to share a fake version of my true story, to hopefully encourage the lying liars out there to turn around and embrace the truth. Life is a lot easier when you have people to help you through it, but nobody is going to help you if they can’t trust you. It took me way too long to realize that, and if a couple of people change their behavior because of this show I’ll be pleased as punch.
Lastly, I want to teach people what good journalism is by showing people what it isn’t. Every bad decision Paul makes for The Fakist is based on an example of poor journalism from the real world. He’s run VNRs produced by his sponsors, run an editorial against a restaurant that kicked him out because he was drunk, and fired his award-winning investigative reporter for accidentally revealing that his girlfriend was cheating on him. If Paul makes a journalistic choice, you can be pretty sure a real journalist would make the exact opposite choice.
Who’s The Fakist?
I play the Paul on the show, mainly because I didn’t want to burden anybody else with the mountains of lines he has in the scripts. He’s a lot like my standard podcast persona, except when he says audacious things, he actually means them.
I never wanted this to be a show with one guy doing 100 voices, so early on I sought out people from across my life who liked me despite my flaws to fill in the other parts.
LeAnn Snyder is played by Rebecca Johnson, one of the nicest and most decent people I’ve met. We met during a Once Upon A Time Podcasters Roundtable six years ago and became fast friends. I actually wrote the part for her, basing key aspects of LeAnn’s backstory on Rebecca’s actual life. Good thing she said yes.
Birdman Stan, the catalyst for most of Season 1, is played by my good friend Bobby Hawke. Bobby started as a listener of our podcasts, but his voicemails and chat room contributions quickly became a cornerstone of all our shows. He’ll be playing a new, equally important character in Season 2.
Wynn Mercere plays Grace Huberstafforford… I think I spelled that right… the socio-political reporter for The Fakist. Wynn even runs Grace’s Twitter account, where she writes original fake news headlines every day. I loved her headlines so much I asked her to write for the show. Look for her first story in Season 2.
My wife Anne Marie DeSimone plays investigative reporter Ella Fitzpatrick, multi-level marketer Debra Dawnstar, and an assortment of other characters because we live in the same house and sometimes it’s just easier to just run into the living room and ask her to record a few lines. She’s also my sounding board as I work out ideas for The Fakist, and the first person besides me to review every script and episode to make sure it’s fit for normal humans. She’s basically a freaking saint.
All told, we’ve had about 40 actors record parts for The Fakist. The cast list is a Who’s Who of people who have been important to me throughout my life, as well as new friends I’ve made as the project has progressed.
I wanted to teach Paul DaFoe about the power of other people, but this project has taught me how important good collaborators are. Many of the best moments in the show have come from improvisation from people like Peter Price, Amy Hypnarowski, Dean and Shellane Demarest, and Justin Robert Young.
Without these 40 actors, I could never have done this. Thanks, guys. I love all of you.
How Do I Get The Fakist?
This one is easy! Just search for it on your favorite podcasting platform, or follow the links below:
If you aren’t sure if the show is for you, give The Fakist Top 10 Countdown a shot. It has the ten best stories from Season 1, as voted on by our listeners. It will also catch you up on the storyline so you’ll be ready when Season 2 premieres on May 5th.
Conclusion
For a myriad of reasons, I’ve kept this under my hat for the past couple of years, crediting all my work to “Tim Delroy.” With Season 2 about to launch, I’m confident enough in the product to start being honest about my involvement. I’ve never actually lied to anybody about The Fakist, but it’s nice to finally tell the truth.
After a very successful Christmas Special, we’re primed and ready to go back to KCOM Studios in Somewhere West of New York City to make up even more outrageous shit. I hope to see you there.
BONUS: Watch the interview below with me and key cast members. It’ll give you a behind-the-scenes look at the process of making over five hours of content with the help of forty people from three countries. There’s a lot of great info about producing content using the power of the World Wide Web.
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