Whitney Cummings Lost a Career-Changing Job to Olivia Munn

Whitney Cummings and Olivia Munn may be good friends now, but there were once strangers fighting for the same big break. As revealed in the new Kickstarter-funded documentary Attack of the Doc!, both Cummings and Munn were in the running for a co-hosting slot on G4TV’s Attack of the Show! Munn ultimately won the gig and set herself up for a successful career in Hollywood, going on to appear in TV shows like The Daily Show and The Newsroom, as well as movies like X-Men: Apocalypse, Iron Man 2 and Magic Mike. However, it was nearly Cummings who landed that platform.

As John Reiber, credited in the doc as executive vice president of G4 Media, explains, Attack of the Show! host Sarah Lane wanted to leave the program due to burnout. The network then started looking for a new co-host for Kevin Pereira via VHS resumes. Olivia Munn’s footage as a sideline reporter at University of Oklahoma was among those sent in, and G4 brought her in for an audition. Stand-up comic Cummings was also in that same audition and was the frontrunner before Munn’s run-through.

“I took Lisa Munn, who (is) now Olivia Munn, and about a dozen other candidates and brought them in, and Kevin did a 10-minute sequence of Attack of the Show! with each of them. And there were many who were not right for it at all,” Reiber explained. “Whitney Cummings, as a matter of fact, was one of the people who came in and auditioned. Everyone loved her. She was incredible. There was no one better than Whitney Cummings until Olivia Munn came on set.”

Munn would start on AOTS! on April 10, 2006, and remained on the show until 2010. Cummings would find success as a standup comedian, actress and sitcom creator, bringing the shows 2 Broke Girls and the self-starring Whitney to TV. The two are actually friends now, and their dueling paths in Hollywood actually came up during Munn’s August 2020 interview on Cummings’ podcast Good for You. In that interview, Cummings confessed that she was jealous of Munn back when their careers were getting started.

“I would see you and, whether this is true or not, I projected onto you. Like you were always so together and so calm and so clear and knew what you wanted and I was just like always so insecure,” Cummings said. “You were always so clear and so confident and I was jealous.”

Munn would reply by saying that any confidence on her part was really just her being “oblivious” to the realities of the entertainment industry, due to her newfound success and the support she found in the “nerd bubble” that was G4.

“It depends on what in what room we might have been in because there were times when started on G4, I had no idea that that would be the key that would unlock Hollywood for me,” Munn said. “So I was just on it, and I had no real barometer for like anything that was happening, and I was just having fun, and it was really fun, and I was just enjoying my life, and I was making money. I remember I called (my mom) when I got that job on G4, I remember the first year they paid me it was like 80 grand, and I thought ‘Oh my God, I’m so rich, forever.’”

Munn and Cummings do not actually contribute to Attack of Doc! themselves, with only archive footage of them being shown. While Munn loved her time at G4, it appears she’s put that part of her career in the past. After a report from The Wrap claimed that she would likely be part of Comcast Spectacor’s relaunch of the network in 2021, she appeared in a delightful G4 reunion special in 2020. However, she ended up having no further involvement in the rebooted G4 before Comcast abruptly shuttered it in late 2022.

Attack of Doc! is available to Kickstarter backers now and will be released to the public on Monday, which happens to be G4’s 21st anniversary. (Full disclosure: I am one of the Kickstarter backers.) The project, directed by AOTS! regular Chris Gore, raised more than $85,000 to fund its production back in 2019. The 90-minute documentary provides a general overview of Pereira and Munn’s run on AOTS!, as well as G4’s presence at big events like San-Diego Comic-Con and E3. Several behind-the-scenes crew members are interviewed for Attack of the Doc!, but most on-air G4 talents, including Pereira and Munn’s AOTS! successor Candace Bailey, do not provide interviews.