Deon Cole on ‘Average Joe’: ‘Humor, drama, gore, gangster s–t all in one’

nypost.com:

BET+ series.“I’m going to be real with you,” said Cole, 51, told The Post. “I wrote a movie from my point-of-view and it had comedy and also dramatic moments.

And I went and pitched it and took [meetings] with some heavy-hitting directors and no one wanted to do it. They said, ‘It’s got to be comedy; drama is going to make people sad.’“I was like, ‘You can really do both.

I guarantee you.’ But no one would do it. And then this script came along and I was like, ‘Oh, s–t, this is like my script!’ It had humor, drama, horror, gore, gangster s–t — everything all in one.”In the 10-episode series, created by Robb Cullen — and inspired by his life — Cole plays Joe Washington, a middle-class, family-man plumber who lives in suburban Pittsburgh with his wife Angela (Tammy Townsend) and 18-year-old daughter, Jen (Ashley Olivia Fisher).

The action opens violently — Joe is slugged over the head in an office — then flashes back to the previous day as Joe and his family mourn the death of Joe’s father, Teddy, who owned a local towing service (and valuable Steelers tickets).Joe soon learns that his father led a double-life as a drug mule — and that Jen’s new-ish boyfriend, Dimitri (Chris Petrovski), is the son of Russian mobster Nicolai Dzhugashvili (Pasha D.