Offline with Jon Favreau - Greg Daniels on the Digital Afterlife

Episode Date: March 13, 2022

Recorded live from the podcast stage at South by Southwest, Jon is joined by acclaimed television writer Greg Daniels, creator of 'The Office' and 'Parks and Rec.' The two talk about Greg's latest sho...w 'Upload,' which just premiered its second season on Amazon Video. Jon asks Greg what inspired him to write a show about the digital afterlife, how likely that future may actually be, and what he thinks of 'The Office's' lasting impact. For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email transcripts@crooked.com and include the name of the podcast.

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 I know you've been asked quite a few times about an Office reboot or an Office reunion. I will go ahead and put in my request as well. One thing I've been wondering as I've watched the show for the 15th time over the last year is how you'd get away with a lot of those jokes, especially from Michael, like here in 2022. Yeah, I'm curious about that too. I'm Jon Favreau. Welcome to Offline. Thank you all for coming to Offline, and thank you for listening to Offline. Getting together in person is much more in the spirit of the show, I think, than listening on our phones and tweeting about it. But please also listen on your phones and tweet about it.
Starting point is 00:00:43 So I'm very excited to be with a guest today who can talk about how the Internet and technology is shaping entertainment, particularly television. He got to start writing on Saturday Night Live and The Simpsons before creating, producing, show running and writing a few decent shows you might have heard about, including The Office, King of the Hill and Parks and Recreation. He's currently running two shows that are back for second seasons, Space Force on Netflix, and Upload on Amazon Prime. Please welcome Greg Daniels. So we're at South by Southwest. Do you want to set the scene? We're in an auditorium.
Starting point is 00:01:23 It looks like there's about 9,000 people, I think. 9,000, 10,000? Yeah, I'd say that's about right. 9,000, 10,000 people, yeah. It's amazing. I could barely hear on the way in. Welcome to Offline. Thank you for doing this.
Starting point is 00:01:34 Thank you. I'm a big fan of yours. I'm a big fan of yours. Like most people who aren't monsters, I'm a huge fan of your shows. I want to start with Upload because, A, I believe the second season is out today. Today, yes.
Starting point is 00:01:47 Which is amazing. And B, so this podcast is about all the ways the internet is breaking our brains. And you've created a show about how the internet may be able to upload our brains to a virtual afterlife of our choosing in the not-so-distant future, which I think raises a few questions. Just to start, can you tell the story about what inspired the idea for Upload and how it ultimately became a series? Sure, sure. So cast your mind back to late 80s.
Starting point is 00:02:18 I am a writer on Saturday Night Live, and I'm walking around Midtown Manhattan from our offices in 30 Rock trying to think of sketch ideas and walking past all the electronic stores that are advertising CD players which have come out and they're all talking about you know your entire music library digitized you know digital digital and so I'm trying to exaggerate that in my head as you are want to do when you're making a sketch. And I'm like, well, what else could you digitize? So, you know, I'm thinking, well, you can digitize all of your personality and your memories. And then maybe you would be in a game environment or some sort of Tron-like thing. I mean, these ideas were around a lot, but the thing that I realized was that it would be a way
Starting point is 00:03:11 for human beings to create their own heaven. For obviously thousands of years, people have wondered what would it be like after we're dead? What are the attributes of that place? And this would be a chance to actually create it, and yet if people created it, would it would be a chance to actually create it. And yet, if people created it, would it really be heaven? It would probably not. It would probably be very unfair and have all the ills of societies that we actually create, right? So I was like, oh, that's a really cool idea to explore a lot of things. It's not a sketch for SNL. The church
Starting point is 00:03:40 lady's not in it. So, you know, I can't use use it today. So it went into the trunk of writer ideas, and then we had a strike in 2008, which was over digital issues. The writers, you may recall, went on strike so that work would be covered if it was streamed. And I had a lot of free time, and I started making it as a book, because you weren't allowed to write during that other than prose.
Starting point is 00:04:07 So I was developing it as a book, but then we went back to work, and then when the office was finally done, I went to my trunk and I got this idea out, and I started developing it at that point for a streamer. Amazon eventually ended up with it, and basically they were like, make a TV series, which feels like a five-hour movie. And so that was the marching orders. And by that point, there were six giant tech companies that were running everything in the world. And my kids were
Starting point is 00:04:38 playing a game called Club Penguin. And so my daughter comes up to me and says, Dad, I need 99 cents to buy a digital TV to put in my igloo. And I was like, so wait, you need real money to buy a little black square that you're going to stick, you know. So I realized that if there ever was a digital afterlife that people were uploaded into, that those six tech companies that would run six different ones would charge you endlessly for in-app purchases. And then it started to sound very funny, and so it became this sort of comedy. I do love the companies that you picked to be fully consolidated
Starting point is 00:05:18 running this near future in 2033. Like Panera finally figured it out. Panera Bread is dominant. They bought Facebook and they pretty much own everything. Oscar Mayer and Intel merged in the future. That was big. I heard you pitch the show as a romantic comedy, satiric, sci-fi, philosophical murder mystery. How'd that go over? Well, that was a good laugh in the beginning of the pitch, you know? Nervous laugh?
Starting point is 00:05:50 But what I was thinking was there's so many TV shows, and I was like really into, probably when I was pitching it, maybe Game of Thrones. But I felt like in order to cut through, you had to have a very intense connection to the show. I also like Bollywood films, you know,
Starting point is 00:06:06 and one of the things I like about a good Bollywood film is they take the attitude that you're probably only gonna see one movie a year, so we're just gonna make sure it hits every box for you. You know, there's gonna be songs and a love story and action and comedy. So I try to pack everything into it, and this is the result. I should say that I absolutely,
Starting point is 00:06:26 I love the show. Thank you. My wife Emily and I binged both seasons in like a week, and my first reaction was to start googling to figure out just how much is science and how much is fiction, and I came across this Atlantic piece from 2016 with the headline, Why You Should Believe in the Digital Afterlife. And it was written by a professor of neuroscience. How deep did you get into the scientific research about the potential to transfer our consciousness to a computer? I have done a lot of research. So the show has two parts, right? Because it's set in the year 2034. And so a lot of the characters who are alive
Starting point is 00:07:06 are walking around in futuristic New York or LA. And then there's also this very designed metaverse experience, or six of them, that the different tech companies are hosting. And the tech company in our show is called Horizon, which is kind of hilarious since Facebook turned around and named their new portal Horizon. And they host a luxurious afterlife based on the Mohunk Mountain House Hotel in upstate New York. That's what it looks like. It's like a very sort of Victorian Ralph Lauren type of vibe. And so to come up with a lot of the stuff, a lot of research went into the tech that is present in 2034 real world. Some of them are more fanciful,
Starting point is 00:07:53 but a lot of them are just like going to CES and figuring out what's coming and then pretending it's now pervasive and everybody has one. That's what you guys did for... A lot of it, yeah. The upload, specifically the tech of upload, I actually, the more research I did,
Starting point is 00:08:09 the less I think it's coming in any sort of time frame that I'll be able to make use of. But I'm hoping that by doing this show that Amazon will see some kind of benefit in actually making the technology in time. No, that was my purpose in Googling. I was like, wait, am I going to be able to do this? Is this going to happen in our lifetime?
Starting point is 00:08:30 And so, of course, the Atlantic got me. I clicked on the piece and read it. So I'm encouraged by the fact that they think it's possible. So this professor said that he thinks it is decades away, but he thinks that it could happen. But he was also saying that, like, you know, first you have to make a copy of the human brain. Yeah, you have to know how the brain works, which is pretty far away from that.
Starting point is 00:08:50 Then you have to copy the human brain onto a computer, and then the amount of computing power it takes is enormous, which you guys reference in the show, how much it would cost to do all that computing. And then there's the element of, which is more of a philosophical question, is it really you? If you could exactly copy your brain and transfer it to a computer and then you die, what is that copy? Well, one of the things that makes it so fun to work on this show is that there are so
Starting point is 00:09:17 many philosophical questions that are raised by it. The thing that attracted to me at the beginning was the idea of, oh, this will be a way to sort of comment on human society through the means of actually believing that we made our own heaven. What choices would we make, you know, and how would it be unfair, and et cetera, et cetera. But what I'm seeing now is that people are making societies.
Starting point is 00:09:42 That's what making a metaverse is. And you have to come up with the rules of those new worlds that are being created digitally. And so now the show actually feels more like it's about this metaverse creation process than too much else. Well, and you alluded to this, but a big theme of Upload is inequality.
Starting point is 00:10:03 In the show, you can live in a luxury digital afterlife if you're rich. You can live in a fairly low-rent afterlife if you're not. The two gigs status. Two gigs, yeah. And some people... Just for people who don't know, what that is is you've been uploaded,
Starting point is 00:10:19 but now you can't make the payments, and so you are downgraded to two gigs worth of data per month. And when you use up your two gigs, you just freeze until the beginning of the next month. And then some people can't afford to be uploaded at all. Yeah. It's funny because you guys have, you know, there's a protest movement in passing in one of the episodes. And when people are starting to chant, you know, uploading should be a right, not a privilege. In that Atlantic piece, they envisioned that if they did this someday, it would be about who can pay because of all the computation, the power that it will require to pay for. And they said, yeah, probably a slogan would end up
Starting point is 00:10:56 being, is it a right and not a privilege? Universal digital afterlife is something that people are asking for. Why was it so important for you guys to focus on the relationship between inequality and technology? Well, I mean, when you think about a for-profit heaven, like, it's pretty much baked in. I mean, it goes back to, like, selling indulgences, you know, like the start of Protestantism as a reaction to the idea that rich people
Starting point is 00:11:24 could just buy their way into heaven in 1400 or whatever. So that's how long I've been working on the show. But I mean, the actual thing is, it's not like this preachy treatise on capitalism. It's a love story between, you know, a man who gets into a self-driving car accident and is uploaded in his late 20s, which very unexpectedly, and he's on the account of his girlfriend, who's a pretty shallow person in L.A., so he's pretty much dependent on her for everything. But then he ends up falling in love with a much more grounded person
Starting point is 00:12:03 who works as a customer service rep. And she lives in New York. And she's pretty much working at Upload to try and take advantage of the employee discount. So she can upload her dad, who has vape lung, which is a deadly condition of people who vape in the future. One of the things I love about the show is because it's set in 2033, and you were saying you guys went to CES to try to get some of this stuff, but a lot of this futuristic tech stuff you have in the show is just sort of a logical extension of what we have now. Yeah. But maybe a little darker, right? Like everything's a little, there's self-driving cars that you can set on either protect passenger or protect pedestrian. Yeah. Right. Because you
Starting point is 00:12:56 can have a choice apparently. There's, people get food from 3D printers because it's hard to grow food in this future. Yeah. Well, Monsanto has all of the seeds and everything under contract. There's a cut scene in season one where Nora goes down an alley in New York and pays cash for something in a bag that didn't air, and it turns out to be a green pepper, which she greedily eats,
Starting point is 00:13:20 but it's actually grown instead of printed, and so it tastes a lot better. And then she tries to plant all the seeds. And then later you see this drone from the Monsanto company come along and laser beam all the seeds dead so they can keep their intellectual property. And there's also a Tinder now. You can rate people after you've had sex with them. Yeah. Our version of Tinder on the show is called Nightly. And after every nightly experience, you give like a Uber rating to the person you hooked up with.
Starting point is 00:13:54 Which is another thing that sort of in a way has happened. Like China has that social credit thing now. Yeah, exactly. I'd say that it's like dystopian, but a lot of this is comedic, a lot of these elements. I talk about this actually to the crew. This was a big thing because I wanted to make sure that it isn't dystopian and it's not utopian.
Starting point is 00:14:13 It's some comical mix of them. And I would maybe put out the word anointopia, which is based on a Greek word for idiot. But yeah, I think as a comedy writer, when you look at the world, the most powerful law is the law of unintended consequences, more than the law of gravity. Because just every time anybody thinks that something's going to go one way, it seems to include stuff that you didn't count on. Like, oh, wow, I'm going to be able to connect with all the people, all my friends from high school. And then, wait a minute, what happened to journalism
Starting point is 00:14:49 and democracy? Somehow that got lost. I wanted to make friends and now, right. So there's a lot of those kind of things. So yeah, so I think in the future, if things can malfunction comedically, they often do in our show. We've talked on this show about how being extremely online affects the quality of our friendships and relationships.
Starting point is 00:15:14 The romance at the heart of Upload is between Nathan, who's in the digital afterlife, and Nora, who's still living. What did you want to say about how technology changes or doesn't change the way we interact with one another, have relationships, have friendships? Yeah, it's definitely a big topic. And it's interesting because the character Nora is very pro-technology. And Andy Allo, who's the actress that plays Nora, we started promoting season one just when the pandemic hit.
Starting point is 00:15:46 And she was remarkably grateful for Zoom because she lived alone. And that was like her connection to everybody. And, you know, she felt that this was a great technology and that for her to find the person she's in love with, even though that they're digital, but still be able to interact because, you know, she puts on her VR goggles
Starting point is 00:16:08 and goes into the world and they talk to each other. You know, from my standpoint as a writer, having written the Jim and Pam romance, I'm always conscious of where are the obstacles, right? Because once you get rid of all the obstacles, they pretty much should get together. And so this is like a really good obstacle, the fact that he has no body. Dating someone's digital consciousness. Yeah, that's a tough one.
Starting point is 00:16:31 But it also is sort of like romantic, I think, because they're communing on a pretty personality-oriented plane as opposed to physical. It's interesting because for all the downsides of technology, and you show many of them over the course of the series, I do think it says something more hopeful about sort of the ability to connect with other human beings through technology than even we might experience today. I mean, it's interesting hearing that about Andy Allo at the beginning of the pandemic, because I do remember at the beginning of the pandemic thinking, thank God we have this technology to connect with other people. Thank God we can do Zooms. And then two years in,
Starting point is 00:17:14 as I'm sitting there scrolling on my phone on Twitter, and I'm like, God, I just need real human connection. This is horrible. Yeah. Well, one of the things, another scene that is a deleted scene is Nathan's first Thanksgiving with his family where he's being passed around on an iPad and his niece is talking to him and her mom just comes by and says, no more screen time and turns it off and doesn't know that she's talking to her, her uncle. So yeah, there's, I think everybody's had that experience of getting lost in the screens and forgetting about the real world for a while. Yeah. So, I will admit something.
Starting point is 00:17:53 I heard about Upload when the first season dropped last year. I was fascinated by the premise, but I couldn't watch it because I have always had this, like, paralyzing fear about what happens to us after we die. And when I finally watched a few weeks ago, it actually made me feel better, not because I expect to be uploaded. Again, my hopes were dashed.
Starting point is 00:18:12 Has creating this show shaped your own personal view of mortality or immortality? Has it made you think differently? Or what were you thinking heading into it? DAN GALPIN- Well, the show is not supernatural at all, right? There's nothing... It's pretty much science fiction-y,
Starting point is 00:18:29 where everything is very plausible, and, you know, there's an explanation, whether it's BS or not, but the explanation of how it works is in there. It's like a medical procedure, kind of. There's a moment in the pilot where Nora is trying to stop Nathan from jumping into the torrent, which is like the data stream that connects the digital world to the...
Starting point is 00:18:52 And that's like how they would end it all. Because he's just completely weirded out. And a big thing is just like in the pilot is there's a transitional period where you realize that you're only digital and everything starts to feel phony and weird. right so and she's really arguing for him to accept that if his consciousness is still around then he's still around like i think therefore i am and and that this is just a way to keep going whatever it is that we perceive if our memories and our consciousness are intact then we're good to me i think it would be a positive if we could do it.
Starting point is 00:19:26 Seems like it. I found it interesting, too, when Nora's father basically tells her he doesn't want to join her in the digital afterlife because he'd rather be with her mother, who passed away in the real afterlife. And, you know, she treats his faith as this obviously silly belief in fantasy.
Starting point is 00:19:46 Well, she's a little personally offended because he's basically saying, I would rather be with the memory of my wife than be able to actually talk to you. So she's a little annoyed as a daughter. But, I mean, that's part of season two, actually, because it's out there so you can see it. Spoilers, spoilers. At the end of season one, Nathan has finally realized he loves Nora, has broken up with Ingrid, which means he's no longer on her credit account at Lakeview,
Starting point is 00:20:15 so he's downgraded to two gig status, which we were talking about. And there's also, I have to remind you that one of the genres is murder mystery, so that comes into play here as well. And Nora has to kind of go on the lam, and she's taken in by the protest movement who are against Upload. And they're like a weird collection of different factions. There's a religious faction that doesn't want any Upload because they believe, like her dad, that it's some kind of sacrilege.
Starting point is 00:20:44 And then there's a faction that doesn't like U upload because they believe, like her dad, that it's some kind of sacrilege. And then there's a faction that doesn't like upload for the rich and wants universal upload and is also trying to destroy Lakeview from a different perspective. So she's up in the woods with those guys when we begin season two. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:20:59 It just sets up a fascinating philosophical question, which the show does so many, that if you knew that it was possible to live forever in a digital afterlife, would you still hold on to your faith in a real afterlife if that's what you've had your whole life? It's a belief in God or what religion you have.
Starting point is 00:21:19 But that's a tough... Well, you know, the very first version of this show was actually before the Amazon version. I sold it to HBO a couple of years earlier. And in that version, the different afterlives were run by different religions. Oh. Yeah. And it's very interesting because this morning I was at a panel here at South by Southwest about the metaverse.
Starting point is 00:21:37 And they were talking about, you know, are we going to recreate all the problems of Web 2.0 in terms of big corporations running everything? And couldn't there be some kind of public access metaverse or something like that? And I was really reminded of the first version of the show where the Catholic Church would run their own digital afterlife, and it would be according to whatever you believed in as a Catholic. That's the rules you'd get in that digital afterlife. And if you believed in a
Starting point is 00:22:05 different form of heaven, well, that religion would host a different version. Yeah. So I don't know. That's a different version of the show, but. No, I think that, I mean, the smartest point in the whole show is that because it's designed by humans, a digital afterlife is going to have all of the same problems that humanity has. And at the core of humanity, the problem is scarce resources and inequality and people fighting over that. Without giving too much away, I know it was renewed for season three. Well, actually, we have a writing room for season three.
Starting point is 00:22:36 We're still waiting to hear. What other themes are you looking to explore? We tend to end the episodes and the seasons on some sort of cliffhangers. So there's an implication of how we end season two that really suggests a lot of season three. I'll just say that. Okay, we'll leave it there then. I was trying to get something out of you.
Starting point is 00:22:54 I want to ask you about The Office. Emily and I have watched every episode multiple times. We're clearly not alone. The Office is the world's most streamed television show by nearly 20 billion minutes. It was arguably a bigger success on Netflix than it was on NBC, where it first aired. Do you have a theory as to why that is? You know, when you said billions, I just saw that sign for McDonald's that says billions, and billions served. We've all been served by the author. Yeah, so I don't know. Listen,
Starting point is 00:23:22 we had an absolute ball making that show. I think the format was great. I think I was super lucky in the writers that I hired and the cast that I managed to get. And I don't know if it is a repeatable experience in the current TV landscape, but, man, everybody seemed to love it. So, yay. I mean, you have two shows on streaming services now,
Starting point is 00:23:44 used to write for networks. How does the different format change the storytelling and the comedy? Well, like I was saying, for Upload, we were trying to make a five-hour movie. That was the marching orders. And so that's pretty different from 28 episodes a year or something, which is what The Office was like. The production process is very different. It took a year and 10 months which is what the office was like, the production process is very different. Like it took a year and 10 months to do this second season. And there's just a lot of
Starting point is 00:24:10 visual effects and post-production and the way they like to do it. You know, you have the whole season written before you start shooting and then you shoot and then you edit. And whereas traditional network model, you know, you might be six episodes ahead at any one point, and then you're continuously editing, and you have a much bigger writing staff. And so it's just a pretty different model. This is actually closer to how I think British TV is done. You know, like the original Office had two six-episode seasons with a Christmas special, and then it was done.
Starting point is 00:24:41 And they pretty much wrote the entire thing themselves. Which do you enjoy doing more? I don't know. You know, you can't go back in time, right? So I'm happy where I am. What feels like more work? Well, you know, strangely, this feels maybe like more work because I work longer with fewer staff. But obviously, there was just a tonnage issue of more minutes before. What do you think the future looks like for network comedies? And how long do you think that future exists? The first show that I've watched on a network in a really long time is the show The Cleaning Lady that's on.
Starting point is 00:25:16 I just started watching that. That's pretty good. But I mean, I haven't seen a show that came from network TV in years. So I don't know if network now is the same as network then. But when you look at streamers now, a lot of the stuff that's the number one shows on the streamers are old network shows. I'm so curious. I wonder why that is.
Starting point is 00:25:36 Well, I think one of the reasons is that they are attempting to get a larger audience back then, whereas a lot of stuff on streamers is, because the algorithm knows, you know, exactly who to give it to, is going for a more niche audience anyway. I think. I don't know. Do you think that our extremely online culture has made writing comedy harder? Because one thing I've noticed more of the last few years is like every time something happens,
Starting point is 00:26:11 every possible joke has been made about it on Twitter within an hour. And many of them are like exactly the same. And I'm just wondering like if I'm a comedy writer and I'm looking for jokes. Yeah, it's pushed me into the year 2034 to get a first crack at jokes. Anything that's more recent, someone else is going to get to first. What are your online habits? Are you a big Twitter guy? TikTok.
Starting point is 00:26:35 You're a TikTok guy? Big TikTok watcher, yeah. Big TikTok. And I ruin, any time I get on a TikTok that isn't my own feed, it basically turns into recipes within about a half an hour. So I've ruined my daughter's TikTok multiple times. She's had to delete it and go back on it because they're just showing various ways
Starting point is 00:26:53 of putting a tortilla on three eggs and flipping it over or using an air fryer. I don't know. That seems to be all I'm interested in. But are you a Twitter user? No. Okay. Never been you a Twitter user? No. Okay. Never been on Twitter
Starting point is 00:27:07 or Facebook or Instagram. Wow. Yeah. That's healthy. Well, you know, I don't know. What's your secret? What are you doing
Starting point is 00:27:15 with all that? I guess you're writing very, very famous television shows. Yeah. Well, you know, I'm a parent. I have kids,
Starting point is 00:27:21 so I have to do something for them sometimes. I know you've been asked quite a few times about an Office reboot or an Office reunion. I will go ahead and put in my request as well. One thing I've been wondering as I've watched the show for the 15th time over the last year
Starting point is 00:27:38 is how you'd get away with a lot of those jokes, especially from Michael, like here in 2022. Yeah, I'm curious about that too. I would say that when the show was made, we were in a different time in terms of people's sensitivities. And I think the show was doing a good job in showing people who maybe weren't sensitive to other people's struggles that what they thought might be funny actually lands differently on different people. So that was our intention at the time. Now, of course, it's bigger now, right? So I don't know if people watching it now are sort of, in the back of their heads,
Starting point is 00:28:17 they're aware that this is an earlier time being depicted. But I do think that if we were going to redo the show right now, we wouldn't be making the same jokes because everybody is more sensitized to the things that Michael was not aware of, right? He was very insensitive at that time, but for him to still be that insensitive now would be a willful choice. Right. Much more so now.
Starting point is 00:28:41 So it would change the character, I think. Yeah, it's funny. I was talking to someone who wrote on Veep and asking them a similar question. And he was telling me that Veep was a little different because in Veep, they're all supposed to be pretty loathsome characters. And so having them say insensitive, awful things fit a little bit more.
Starting point is 00:29:02 In The Office, they're pretty likable characters, even if they have their flaws, as Michael did. Yeah, well, that's an interesting question. I mean, I felt that a little bit about All in the Family, you know, which we certainly were very aware of and admired. Certainly the voice of the show All in the Family is not supportive of the things that Archie Bunker says. Right.
Starting point is 00:29:21 I mean, clearly every story is, you know, engineered so that he needs to get a blood transfusion from whoever he was just making disparaging remarks about or whatever. So clearly the show has got a certain point of view. And I think The Office, the show, has a good point of view. And when you see the people reacting, there's where the show is telling you what position to take. But Archie also was a dad, and there were other aspects to his character as a human being that were likable. And, you know, so maybe the humanity of people is still salvageable, and you're always hoping that they'll change their mind.
Starting point is 00:30:00 Also, I think to some extent, it seems that art and entertainment is about depicting the complexity of human beings. And sometimes people say horrible things and do horrible things and believe horrible things. And then those same people also have good qualities. Sometimes they grow up and they grow out of it. That's right. I don't know if you've seen this debate pop up from time to time on the Internet, but I figured I'd ask a true authority on the subject. Which of the office characters, if any, do you think would have voted for Donald Trump? That's the next question.
Starting point is 00:30:38 I've heard some people say, you know, there could be some Trump 2016 voters who then were Biden 2020 voters. Maybe after four years, they sort of saw the error their ways. There might be a couple of those. Not that I don't have my own opinions, but just my impression of the fatigue of the subject matter of Donald Trump. As a subject for comedy, it seems like it's been examined in an awful lot of different viewpoints and ready to move on to who votes for Putin or whatever the new horrible thing is. Well, the most explicitly political show you've co-created is Parks and Rec, which I've always thought was the most Obama-era television series of all time, both because it literally ran from 2009 to 2015. It was our whole both terms. But I think it also reflected Barack Obama's political
Starting point is 00:31:26 ethos more than any other show I've seen. One of the most common questions I get from people who look back at Obama's years in office through the lens of the Trumpian hell we've been through and in some ways are still going through is, you know, people say, was Obama's hope for America and American politics misplaced? So I will turn the question to you. Was Leslie Knope's hope for America and American politics misplaced. So I will turn the question to you. Was Leslie Knope's hope for politics and government misplaced? I guess the premise there is that there's an answer to that. I think for the character of Leslie Knope, that's her personality. That kind of optimism, I think, is pretty admirable. She started off at the beginning of that show, she was pretty much the same level of optimism, I think, is pretty admirable. She started off at the beginning of that show,
Starting point is 00:32:06 she was pretty much the same level of optimism, but she didn't quite seem as smart about it. And then as we kind of incorporated Amy Poehler's personality more, I think she got to be a smart optimist, which was actually more fun and kind of a better role model probably. Yeah. What were you guys trying to say about politics in that show? You must have talked about it a lot. Yeah. Well, my co-creator, Mike Schur, has a lot of, he's very thoughtful about his political beliefs. And so as the show got more and more mature, I would point to him as his viewpoints going through it more.
Starting point is 00:32:48 Because I went back to work on The Office after a while. But yeah, I mean, I think optimism was a big part of it. And the ability of government to be functional and serve people is a huge theme. And so I think that's all good stuff. I think some people, you know, I've seen critics say like, oh, it was about people can, you know, Republicans and Democrats and people who disagree can get together and, you know, maybe that. But the way I looked at that show also is we can disagree with one another. We can have opposing viewpoints, but we all live in this town together.
Starting point is 00:33:25 And if we want to get something done, and we want to actually make it a place where people want to live, then we've got to figure out a way forward. Well, the characters also had a lot of nobility, I think, to them. And Ron Swanson was one of the noble conservatives, I would say, on that show. And I've had a lot of good conservative characters
Starting point is 00:33:49 from, I think, General Mark Naird as a good conservative on Space Force. And, yeah, so, I mean, the optimism is that there's people of good will, I guess, on all different sides, if we can find them. My last question to every offline guest is, what's your favorite way to unplug and how often do you do it? You are the first guest I've had on the show. I don't have to unplug.
Starting point is 00:34:13 Who doesn't have to unplug? Except for TikTok. I've got to stop that TikTok. I keep seeing that guy pop in and go, you know, you've been watching an awful lot lately. I guess your favorite way to unplug. I always ignore them yeah i guess i guess your favorite way to unplug from your unplugged life is to go on tiktok and ruin your daughter's algorithm yeah yeah well i got my own algorithm now so that's good uh greg daniels thank you so much for joining offline everyone go check out upload
Starting point is 00:34:41 on amazon season two is out right now. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thanks, everyone. Great to be here. Offline is a Crooked Media production. It's written and hosted by me, Jon Favreau. It's produced by Andy Gardner Bernstein and Austin Fisher. Andrew Chadwick is our audio editor. Kyle Seglin and Charlotte Landis sound engineered the show.
Starting point is 00:35:13 Jordan Katz and Kenny Siegel take care of our music. Thanks to Tanya Somenator, Michael Martinez, Ari Schwartz, Madison Hallman, and Sandy Gerrard for production support. And to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Narmal Konian, and Amelia Montooth, who film and share our episodes as videos every week.

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