The Half Hour

Tone Bell frames his gym ambitions not around aesthetics, but survival logistics: he wants to be apocalypse fit. He has no desire to lead the survivors through a wasteland; he just wants to be the reliable scout who can rip an arm off a zombie and collect firewood without collapsing.

Filmed at The Royale in Boston and broadcast on Comedy Central in November 2015, the set caught Bell in the middle of a steady run of network sitcom roles. He had recently finished NBC’s Bad Judge and was co-starring in Truth Be Told, but his pacing remains unhurried and built for the club.

He works through the quiet humiliation of telling a trainer he can manage four pull-ups at most, an unresolved grudge against a teller at Chase Bank, and the disorientation of smoking weed after years away from it.