I’m gonna keep this brief this week (he says, ambitiously. Bookmakers the world over begin placing odds on quite how far I will overshoot the general person’s yardstick for what constitutes a “brief” newsletter entry, while dyed-in-the-wool Joz Norris enemies/sceptics scoff at his naive suggestion that his newsletter might be being read by “bookmakers the world over.”)

But what I’m writing about this week is fairly simple and, despite my spending the last 2 months making and promoting a 3-part miniseries exploring the subject, probably won’t benefit all that much from unnecessary elaboration.

The Happiness Chain, the sitcom pilot I made with director Ben Kent and an amazing team of comedians, filmmakers and incredible artists, is finally out online and you can all watch it here, if you like:

We made this back at the end of 2024 and have spent a good while since then getting it right and exploring the options for what its future might be. Now we’re finally taking the wraps off it so the audience who helped us make it can actually see it and enjoy it!

I’m so proud of how it turned out – such an amazing cast and crew helped to make it into a really funny, warm, kind-hearted thing (in my totally unbiased opinion). It’s about the pursuit of happiness, doomed endeavours, and trying to work out what you actually want from your life. Can anyone relate to any of that? Just me?

The script was originally loosely inspired by a time in my life when I got a lot of things wrong – reaching too hard for things, hoping for too much, and not really being there for people who needed me. It feels nice to draw a line under that time and make something positive out of it.

At the same time, it does feel odd releasing it after all this time. I first wrote it way back when writing speculative ambitious long-form TV comedy projects still felt like a sensible use of my time, but a lot’s changed since then. These days there’s so much more opportunity in making stuff directly for its audience, but mostly that seems to revolve around the more or less full-time production of short-form content, which I continue to be quite bad at and baffled by. So part of the thinking behind all this was to see whether there’s a place for more long-form scripted projects in that world as well. We only got to make this because its audience paid for it, and maybe there’s room for more things like that to happen in the future.

Obviously I have no idea what’ll happen to it once I click “Publish” over on YouTube – perhaps it’ll find its audience online, perhaps it won’t. The main reason I made the behind-the-scenes series was to give myself and the creative team the opportunity to tell the story behind the pilot, and to put it in the context of an ongoing process of making, writing, collaborating, developing and trying again that’s constantly going on behind the scenes of the relatively rare finished projects we actually get to put out into the world. That way, whatever happens when it goes online, we can be proud of what we made and move on to whatever comes next.

But whether or not I get to tell more of this specific story, or whether or not I get to make other audience-focused long-form projects in this way, I’m so proud of what we made and so grateful to everyone who helped us make it. Not to mention grateful to YOU for making it through the frankly exhausting barrage of promotional content I’ve been putting out about it in the lead-up! We finally made it through! Well done, everyone! (Although I suppose I’ll have to post clips from it now, won’t I? God, it never ends. Do you see what I mean? O brave new world that has such people in it!)

Anyway, I really hope you enjoy it. It’s the culmination of about 4 years’ work on and off, so I’d love it if you could give it a like or a comment or a share. If you’d enjoy watching more of it, let us know! And if you wanna team up to talk about making more long-form projects in this way, get in touch! I genuinely loved making it and would love to find out if it’s a viable sustainable way to make more things.

I suppose the main thing I’ve taken from all this is that if there’s something you really want to make, it’s worth having a go at making it. You’ll learn things, you’ll have a really good time, and you’ll end up with something you’re really proud of, especially if you find the right people to do it with.

Tl;dr – Made a thing with loads of awesome humans. Proud of it. Would love you to watch it. Hope you enjoy it. You gotta have fun, don’t you?

A Quick Plug – Eggbox on Tuesday is positively heaving, but there’s still plenty of seats left for anyone who’d like to see our latest batch of hand-picked comedy shorts and scripts! Meanwhile, I’m now kicking off the promo campaign for December’s Pleasance run of Jackman/Phantom in earnest, and I’d love to see you there if you’ve not seen the show yet! Here’s a fun piece that the Londonist asked me to write about it.

A Cool New Thing In Comedy – I’m late to the party on this, but in case anyone else has also been dawdling on it, make sure you watch the long-awaited second series of Ellie White & Natasia Demetriou’s unhinged sketch show. At a time when fewer and fewer risky or weird propositions are making it to TV, it’s a joy to see something so daft and brilliant getting made.

What’s Made Me Laugh The Most – Alexander Bennett co-hosting ACMS on Monday with Luise Wolky, who he had never met, and at one point trying to get some banter going between them by asking her if she had a job, which is not something I’ve ever seen one half of a double act ask the other one before.

Book Of The Week – Still on Five Little Pigs by Agatha Christie, I’m afraid. My reading’s really slowed down the last few weeks! Hope I can still inch towards my target before the end of the year.

Album Of The Week – Vision Songs Vol. 1 by Laraaji, a cassette of spiritual and devotional songs he put out in the 80s which is basically just him improvising on a synth and singing about a guy called Cosmic Joe. It’s brilliant.

Film Of The Week – Primetime’s pretty good. It doesn’t really have much of an angle on the thing it’s about, and I couldn’t necessarily tell you what Lance Oppenheim actually thinks about Chris Hansen and To Catch A Predator, but it’s a really well-made and captivating film and Pattinson is great in it.

That’s all for this week! If you enjoy the newsletter, feel free to send it to a friend or give it a share, and take care of yourselves until next time,

Joz xx

PS Had a lovely time filming another little something with a very talented group of legends this week, in which Kathy Maniura appears to be playing some sort of evil priest:

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