Caryn Ruby, Erin R. Dooley and Mackenzie Horras spent over a combined 50 years in Chicago, each honing their comedy skills separately.
Unaware of each other’s plans or goals, they all relocated to Los Angeles, only to finally discover each other and cook up a fun, light-hearted new 13-episode webseries called, Baked Goodes.
The all-female produced comedy focuses on cousins Angela (played by Horras) and Julie Goode (Molly Reynolds), who seek to revitalize their ailing bakery business by catering to a 420-friendly clientele.
Their old-school stoner neighbor, Jan (played by Ruby), acts as guide into the world of marijuana and also offers up nuggets of real-world wisdom along the way.
The show explores themes of family, female business owners, new romance, pot, and faith.
According to director, Anna Mehle (not from Chicago), the series is aimed at dismissing the traditional stoner culture, while reclaiming weed culture for this group of women as something that isn’t the traditional stereotype. “What we want to do is have various women at different states with their relationship to weed and watch how that develops in relationship to the business.”
Co-producer Ruby adds that the characters’ varying relationships to weed also reflect the series’ creators own backgrounds with cannabis.
“Of the five of us, I’m the most well-versed,” she explains. “We had other people in the group who had never smoked weed before or been around it, so I found that in the writing room, I was doing some educating on marijuana and weed culture.”
Ruby and line-producer Dooley (A Way To Forgiveness) were introduced by a mutual Chicago-area filmmaker friend, JC Faris, the week Dooley moved to Los Angeles. The timing of the introduction was perfect, as it was days before a meeting to discuss producing a web-series.
Ruby invited Dooley to the meeting where they met Mackenzie Horras, a Northwestern University alumna who plays Angela Goode, as well as Molly Reynolds, who played Julie Goode, and Anna Mehle, the series director. Together, the team filmed the thirteen episodes in six days with a cast and crew of over seventy people.
The show has welcomed a parade of guest stars include Helen Hong (Parks & Rec, Blunt Talk, The Thundermans), Andrew Patrick Ralston (Rush Hour, Brooklyn Nine-Nine), James C. Victor (24, NCIS: Los Angeles, 12 Years A Slave), David Schroeder (Steve The Intern, Community), Laurie Kilmartin (Conan), Alastair Bayardo (CSI: NY) and Chicago-area actress Leigh Rose (Cold Case, Monk, ER).
The series has been met with positive reviews. Decider said it “manages to be funny, smart, and sincere all at once” and Newsweek included the series in an article about the “best marijuana shows to watch this 4/20.”
With each episode around six minutes, audiences can binge the entire season in a little over an hour on the Baked Goodes Series channel here.
LA-Based Colin Costello writes for film, TV, advertising and of course, Reel Chicago. Follow him on Twitter @colincostello10.
