The Watch - Ep. 14: 'The Andy Greenwald Podcast' With Michael Schur

Episode Date: January 23, 2016

Michael Schur, co-creator of 'Parks and Recreation,' 'Brooklyn Nine-Nine,' and the upcoming 'Good Place' joins Andy Greenwald to discuss comedy, kindness, and the state of TV. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey guys, Andy Greenwald here. Channel 33 is brought to you by Seatgeek. That's our presenting sponsored. Do you know that? It's also my favorite way to buy and sell tickets to sporting events, concerts, public forums, I don't know, whatever else you want to go to that's outside of your home. With the Seatkeek mobile app, you can quickly and easily buy tickets. It's just two taps. You got your tickets delivered straight to your phone, and you can enter the event, again, the event of your choosing. If you can't make it to the event, Seek now lets you transfer tickets to your friends, post your tickets for sale, and it's all from your phone. It's super easy. As a special offer to Channel 33 listeners, Seat Geek is giving 20.

$20 back off your first purchase with the code. Wait for it. BSPN. So to get $20 back on your first Seat Geek purchase, just download the Seatgeek app. Do it today and enter the code BSPN. Hello, my name is Andy Greenwald. This is my podcast. The podcast is exclusively to be found on Channel 33, which is proudly part of the Bill Simmons Podcast Network. You can find Channel 33 and to subscribe on iTunes. What else do you need? You need your Stitchers, your SoundClouds. You got it all. I also want to thank the fantastic Scottish band Churches with a V for making my wonderful theme music. Great show today. We had Mike Schur.

Mike Schur is formerly executive producer of The Office. He was the co-creator and showrunner for seven wonderful seasons of Parks and Recreation. He is the co-creator of Fox's Brooklyn Nine-Nine, a very funny show. And this fall on NBC, his latest show called Good Place, starring Ted Danson and Kristen Bell will premiere. It was great to talk to Mike about his perspective on TV, about peak TV, about his experience running parks and recreation, about why doing comedy about good people is challenging and worth doing. And most of all, whether I would be able to make him cry.

I'm not going to spoil it. You'll just have to listen for yourself from my conversation with Mike Sherr. I noticed that the last time. Yeah. It was just a faded. It was just a cool, gentle. Yeah, it was like, you were in a cafe and you just happened to be walking by and Like, oh, there's Andy talking with his buddy.

Let me listen in. Who's scatting over there? Hey, this Jasmine Greenwald. It is Jasmine Greenwald. I'm here with Mike Scher. I will do an official intro to you after you've left. Sure. I can say nice things and, you know, I wouldn't want it to go to your head.

I want it to be one of those. Can we do the slow, the like casual fade in though? Yeah, I think we've done it. Oh, that's what we did. Yeah, you missed it. People are listening now. But, you know, I'm not just mentioning the Marin thing because we're doing it. But I did want to begin by saying,

You mentioned, Marin, in the email you sent me. Yes, because I listened to your Damon Lindelhoff interview. Yeah, which I loved. Thank you. And I, it was very confessional in the way that Damon Lindelhoff is often very confessional. But I feel like it also positioned you maybe as the guy who deals with TV, culture, movies, and so forth, who, when people are feeling personal or confessional or vulnerable, maybe they show up on your couch and maybe tears are shale. That's what I want for you.

First of all, thank you. That's why I'm here. That's what I want for me too. But that puts a lot of pressure on you because you have to cry. That's fine. Are you a crier? I have plenty to cry about it. Are you naturally a crier or am I going to have to work for it?

I am, well, it depends. In context, for example, saw Star Wars episode 7 colon, the Force Awakens with my seven-year-old son. Yeah. The moment, the like Lucas film graphic showed up at the beginning, I started crying. and he didn't notice, which was good. Did he really not, or was he just being like... No, because he was absorbed and he was excited to see the movie.

Cried like 12 times during the movie. Mostly not at the movie, although I liked the movie a great deal, mostly because I was there with my son and was having flashback-y kind of... Contextual feelings. Contextual feelings. Right. And at some level, also crying because I found the film to be of a very,

generally very high quality. And that was also a huge relief and weighed off my shoulder. That's a very specific kind of crying. It's a nerd nervousness crying. It is, yeah. It's a different kind of crying from the crying I did after I saw the Phantom Menace in New York in 1999. I saw that. I think I talked about this on a podcast I did with Chris Ryan, but that was my birthday.

I saw that movie. That was my birthday gift of all my friends we got together and we drove to Seacong, Massachusetts because we were just graduating from college that week. It was a triumphant time. And then you go and you find out like the space nights of your, were just tax collectors in an evil Muppet verse. And that the force is a virus that can be theoretically given to someone else through a blood transfusion.

Yes, and that just as light travels through the universe, so do racial stereotypes to any corner of the galaxy. Yeah, that was a bummer. So I, so in certain contexts, I would say, yes, I am a crier. I, at least I feel like I have no problem crying. And so we'll see what, like this is a test for you. consider this to be a test. This is a, if you can get me to shed tears, then you will have officially taken over that mantle. I want to say, and I feel like I say this with love, and I hope he hears

it as such, that I feel like being with Damon, like all I had to do is bring the net. Like, I had to bring this microphone, you know what I mean? Like, he was ready to share some things. Yeah. I should have stunted this room. Like, I should have brought in your child or something. That's right. I just hung photos. Like, look who's here. kids around. Yeah. Well, Damon, I will say this, and we don't have to make this whole thing about Damon, but Damon is a fairly new friend of mine.

Okay. And the reason he is a new friend of mine is because I watched the leftover season one. Yeah. And I thought to myself, this person who I've known about for a long time now is responsible for what I consider to be two now, two of the greatest dramas of the modern day. Yeah. I know that you were less a fan of season one than season two. But I'm on the board now.

now you're on board which is great but I loved season one I thought season one was remarkable and amazing and so I was like what do I know about Damon Lindelhoff he created or co-created lost he has now done this show which is like making me feel things I've never felt before while watching television that that I agreed with even in the first season right and by the way he has a very interesting relationship with the public and the media because I had followed from afar his kind of way of dealing with the end of lost and then with his sort of confessional period and then with his very, to me, very interesting decision to sort of say,

like, I'm done. I'm not going to play this role anymore. I don't like it. It doesn't make me feel good, which was sort of confessional and honest in a way that TV writers are almost never confessional and honest, at least in public. And so I was like, I want to meet this guy.

And I called my agent and said, I want to be set up on a play date with Damon Lindelhoff. That's so cute that agents do that. And then it turned out he had also at least consumed some of the things that I had written. And he was either genuinely a fan of them or was being very polite. And he said, I would love to meet you for lunch. And we had lunch and we now become friends. And so I was very interested to listen to him on your show.

That's very nice. But it also does lead to, I think, a question that I had anyway, which is that there does seem to be, this was an arranged marriage or an arranged date. True. But the culture, like the people who have, in the same way that there are only certain number of people who have walked on the moon or played professional sports at a certain level. Yes, there are 500 shows on TV this year and that's something we should talk about at some point. Yeah. But the people who have run shows is relatively small group. And you have had experiences that not many people can relate to in terms of pressure and creation and birthing pains and everything.

Right. So I have found that there are surprising connections, like people that I know who run one show that I wouldn't ever associate with another, they'll get a drink and just vent because they understand each other. Have you found that to be the case generally? Generally speaking, yes. I would also preface any discussion about this by saying that these are not actual problems. Showrunners have right. They're not actual problems. They're show business problems. And that isn't to say. they're not real. They are real. There is a certain amount of just basic job pressure. There's budgetary pressure. You are responsible for a goodly amount of money that a large company is given to you and trusted to you. Usually, by the way, at a time when you shouldn't be trusted with that much money, like, you know, the average budget of a show is in the $2 to $3 million per episode range.

Yeah, that's absurd. If you're making 22 of them, you can quickly, it adds up pretty quickly. and then if you're making multiple seasons of that many episodes that cost that much money, most of the people who are given the job are completely ill-equipped to handle that kind of, like you don't know what a budget is and you don't know how to manage it. Well, it's a completely different skill set. I mean, being a writer is a skill set. Right. And it's tough to develop and not everyone can do it.

Being a manager of people is one thing. Being a manager of a budget is a whole other thing. That's right. And there is a certain aspect of the job, which is that you train your whole life to be a brain surgeon. And then when you get to the top, when you graduate from med school, it's like, congratulations, you're a brain surgeon,

and by the way, also you're a fighter pilot. So you have to do both of these things. And that's, so the problems are real. They're just not actual problems compared to the, I always feel like I need to say that because if you talk about, if you do any kind of woe is me stuff, you feel ridiculous very quickly.

Um, as Conan O'Brien said in his audition, he was talking in, in, when he was doing his test shows, there's this moment I think about all the time. He was doing his test show for NBC. And he's talking to a model and he says like, so modeling like, you know, that must be hard, which is a very boring thing to say. Yeah. And then she kind of starts to answer it. And then he kind of realizes how dummy sounded and says, like, well, obviously it's not hard. Like turning a big crank is hard. It is. And so I always say, I always think of that when it's like, these are not actual problems. They're real problems, but they're not actual problems. So all that, that whole preamble aside, I do find that it's true that you can, anyone who has run a show,

especially people have run network shows. Yeah. And obviously the difference is like network shows have more episodes and, you know, 22. We did 28 or something of the office one year. I wasn't running the show, but there's a difference between show writing a network comedy and like a six episode, you know, Netflix, HBO thing or whatever. But generally speaking, you can pretty much talk to anyone else who's had the job and find something in common. There are a number of things that you have said. We haven't had many conversations. No.

You came to the set of Parks and Rec one year. Like four years ago, or next month. Right. It was the Leslie was running for office, I remember. Yes, and there was the jumping in and out, the rule that I, there was the rule that you had discovered that. Oh, yeah. Right.

There was a rule where you couldn't do the campaigning with, in the building, so she kept jumping inside and outside. That's right. And it was very fun and it was very cold. And I think I was still under the illusion that California was always warm, which I now know is very untrue. Disabused of that, yeah. But in our short time talking, you said three things to me, I think,

that I've been just dining out on since. Really? Quoting them a lot and I'm going to get to them. But one of them actually just came up naturally, which was you said something along the lines of, there are five essential planks to being a showrunner, like five jobs, three of them well or four of them well. It was some number like that. Yes. And I think of that often.

And again, not not turning a crank hard, but yeah, you know, you want everyone for the most part in any business, but we'll talk about show business, wants to do a good job. Everyone's trying to be to make something good. Running up against the limits of what you can and can't do and learning those limits on that level has got to be a that's going through the ringer not turning the crank but going through the ringer yeah that's and and the biggest part of doing the job well is finding and trusting other people who can do some part of the job well delegating yeah and delegating is sort of a simplistic term but it is what you're doing it's it's more than that because you have to find people with whom you're sort of creatively and artistically aligned

not all of those people are doing jobs are purely creative or artistic but for example one of the most important jobs in fact arguably the most important job in any TV show is a line producer it's a person who never gets any credit no one ever knows their name

they're the people who basically run the business end of the show they're the people who handle all the hiring and firing they handle all the budgetary stuff they handle all they just run the show in a real way not in the fake way that show runners run show They actually are the people who are like keep the lights on.

And the line producer at Parks and Rec is a guy named Morgan Sackett. And he, we kind of just got lucky. He was available. He is a very calm person. He liked me and he liked Greg and he signed on. And then slowly as the show went on, it was like, oh, this is, this person is the most important person who works here. In some ways, except for maybe Amy Poehler. This is the most important person.

These are the two people who keep the lights on. Yeah, exactly. And he, part of the reason why he was so great is because while he was in charge of like budgeting and scheduling and kind of dealing with NBC and all that sort of stuff, he also is incredibly funny and very subtly kind of creative and interesting. And by the time the show went off the air, he was directing episodes and he was always, he could. That name, I don't know many line producers, but I feel like that name sounded very familiar. And he would be on this set with a new director and like helping the new director. And this is like, I always get made fun of for using these analogies, but this is like what Bill Belichick does, right? Bill Belichick, when he's putting his team together, is like, I have a limited number of people who can be on this roster.

And if I can find someone who can play like outside linebacker and a strong safety in a pinch and can be on the hands team and can also be on the like punt team. and also can, like, you know. Super utility. Yeah, that's super utility guys. It's why like Ben Zobrist makes so much money. It's because he can play any position. And like those, and when you start to think of a show in that way and you find those people who can actually do all those jobs,

people will say to you like, wow, how it must be so hard to run a show. And you say, yes, it is. It's so hard. It's just a nightmare. You have no idea. And meanwhile, by the end, it was such a well-oiled machine that we all got home to see our kids every night, which isn't a given. That's nice.

And the reason that that happened was mostly because of people like Morgan. It was like I did my job, which was to make sure that the scripts were in good shape and that the actors were well served and that the like big picture of the show was moving along in the right direction. And a lot of other people did a lot of other things really well. And that's when it works. Let's talk about that specific thing that I find really fascinating. And I think Parks did this better than almost any show in recent memory, which is you kept your eye

the big picture, even while you kept the smaller pieces moving. You know, it was a show that was tonally consistent and told us a story and moved the story along. How, you know, I have a bunch of questions about parks, and I'm particularly interested in how you're going to talk about it from this vantage point, because the show went off the air 11 months ago. Right. How do you do, how do you not lose yourself in the weeds?

Obviously, you're super utility guy, your Ben Zobris are out there doing it. But how did you maintain, and specifically in relation to parks, how did you maintain your grip on the big picture of the show while you were managing the, you know, episode 17 of season, whatever? Right. Part of it happened accidentally in that when the show was moved to midseason, season three, we were in the midst of already having to shoot a bunch of extra episodes because Amy was pregnant. And she was going to give birth right when we would have started at season three. This is the one where, so this is, sorry to interrupt. So this is the end of the season when Adam and Rob joined. That's right.

That harvest, that was the fall. It was the- Right. So what happened is the end of season two, Rob and Adam came in, Roblo and Adam Scott. And Amy had gotten pregnant. And so we needed to just basically roll through the end and shoot more episodes that we could bank at the beginning of season three so that she could have the baby and then recover and then we could pick up. Such a diva. Unreal. She needed two months.

The rumors are true, basically. What a monster. So after doing 24 episodes of season two, we had to take like a one week break and then start episode three. And it was threatening to destroy us. How did you spend that week? Like crying. Mostly crying. See?

Yeah. See, there you go. You are in a motion. So I sort of made this snap decision that the only possible way that we could actually pull this off is if instead of just trying to break six more random stories, we had some kind of arc that we could say like, okay, if we know where this begins and ends, then we can sort of fill in the middle. Like if there's a project that she's working on, if there's something that we could use to help generate stories. And so we came up with this harvest festival idea.

Because you just didn't have the time to do 20 individual break 20 individual ideas. In order to get six good ones, really. And so it was incredibly successful, creatively, and also very helpful to us. Interesting. And so what that did is it started a thing where I was like, well, you know, we did that out of necessity because we were under a tremendous amount of time pressure. But it was really fun. Yeah. And it went really well.

And at the end of that arc, when the harvest festival is put on, it felt very satisfying because you had been, you know, network TV has always been a voluble. volume game. It's like, the history of network, comedies especially, is like you, the characters start somewhere, they go on a little tiny journey, they end up exactly where they were before. The next week, you don't have to have seen what happened before. You can tune it at any moment and can catch up. That's not the way TV is anymore. It just doesn't, now it's heavily serialized. But broadcast sitcoms were not even years ago. Even at that point, it felt a little risky, which is hilarious to say. But it felt a little risky because it was like, you know,

and we did a lot of stuff where if you look at those Harvest Festival episodes at the beginning of every episode, there's some kind of talking head where Leslie very quickly catches you up. Yeah, like we're doing this thing and it's very important that this happens for this reason and blah, blah, blah. Because it would have been even like in 2012 like previously on parks and recreation. That's exactly right. It would have been a little strange. And now, but now that's crazy.

That does seem crazy even that that happened even that, even though it was only five years ago. Yeah. But at the end of that arc, I was like, well, we should do this all the time. Like, why? I mean, it was out of necessity then, but why not do it out of just fun and a sense of like, why not for the rest of the time the show is on? So going into the season four, it was sort of like, all right, we might get canceled at any moment. That was, by the way.

The other thing was. That was always there. We were always almost canceled. So it was like, season four, what if it's the election season? which was originally something Greg and I talked about for the final year of the show. That would be her journey, yeah. And it was like, well, there's no better, like, there's literally no better arc than that when you think about breaking out a season because it's like literally episode one she announces

she's running and the finale is the election. Like, that's great. And we just kept doing that. And so part of that, part of the idea of keeping your eye on the big picture was, it began out of necessity and then it became just something that we did all the time. things tend to come, I think, in TV, not necessarily good feelings, desperate feelings can come from this, but good things tend to come from it when you don't save anything. You know, you, you, you trust that the well is not going to run dry and you don't sit on things because then, you know, you don't, nothing is stalled. Everything is, you're, you're go, go, go, and you're giving everything every time. That certainly has been good for the medium, in my opinion. Yeah.

Is that now the, the way that TV used to monetize itself, really, was by making, you the most of it you can and then sell it for the most money. Yep. The world is so different now and the economics of TV are so different that for example, to bring this back to Damon Lindelof, he can get through season two of the leftovers. He's now made 20 episodes of that show and he can like put everything he has into those two seasons and then get to the end and then have a talk with HBO and say how about one more season of and by the way still in determinate number of episodes and everybody's happy. Everyone's fine. He's

happy. HBO has something nice in its catalog that will be viewed forever. Forever and ever and ever on HBO go or any of their other millions of platforms. I as a viewer am happy because I feel like they are holding nothing back. They are going like full tilt all the time. So everybody wins. And that the freedom to release from the concept of the of more equals better has made all of, in my opinion, has made all of TV better, I think. Yeah. And it's funny. The language of serialization is so written into the younger generation's DNA of how they experience TV that, I don't know if you've encountered this, but like when I've spoken to high school kids, high school now kids, you know, the show they most want to talk about is friends. Like, that's their favorite show. Well, first of all, they say, I don't watch TV.

They say I watch Netflix. Do you write about Netflix? And I'm like, I do. I'm so old, I call it TV. And they're like, do you know about friends? I'm like, I know a little something about friends. But I only bring it up to say that they love friends. They binge-watched all 200 episodes to know the whole story.

Oh, my God. Which is insane. Because the people making that show stumbled into a couple things that they kept running back to and Ross and Rachel and the things to keep you coming. But that was not a show that was made to be serialized. There was no essential, like Gunther wasn't the murderer. You know what I mean? Although if he had been, I mean.

First of all, we can assume he was. was. I'm going to extrapolate and say that, yeah, the show had been on one more year. Also, what else was he doing? I mean, he was a 50-year-old barista in a very high-high expensive So they want, they just were like, it's a let's see, 200 episodes, whatever, a hundred hours, I'm going to just sit here for a week and just watch. But like, this is what I do now and I don't want to miss a moment, and none of my friends want to miss a moment, and we'll talk about every moment. And that is the language that they understand TV to be. Not like, when they were like, we were a fan of friends, I was like, yeah, do you remember all? all of the episodes. And I'm like, because I do. I watched them last week. You know, they were then.

They were to England once. When we were doing the office early on, Greg Daniels cited a statistic to us which that showed that people who consider themselves to be a fan of a show. On average watched about one out of three episodes of that show. Like if you say people who self-identified as a fan of friends 20 years ago would probably watch one out of three, roughly, six or eight a year. That's no longer the case. That's no longer the case. And that, he was discussing that by way of saying, we are working on a show that has a real significant romantic arc in Jim and Pam. Yes, I was going to bring it to this. Right. And so while

we're doing this arc, we have to be cognizant of the idea that people may be, even if they love the show, maybe only popping in every third week to check in. And so, he's, he's, you know, he's, He was saying, he was basically saying, we need to slow down. Like, because the writers wanted to speed it up. Yeah. The writers wanted to go, go, go, go, go. And then other, and then we were like, we went way in the other direction. And we're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait.

No, they can't ever get together. We should get to season 10 before they ever hold hands. And it was this wild oscillation all the time. Yeah. And now, were you on one side of this debate? I never wanted them to get together. I was vehemently opposed to some of the stories that were told early. in season two

because I thought they were making it too obvious that Jim was being too obvious to Pam that he liked her. Can I guess a member of the writing staff that was into the rom-com aspect of it? Can I throw out a name? I feel like I'm going to know what you're going to say. It's Mandy something.

You know, I won't, honestly, I won't speak for her because I don't remember where she came down on the divide. I will say that the majority of people didn't want them to get together. Interesting. Yeah, that it was like, yeah, that we felt partly that was because we had broken from the British show a little bit by making Michael Scott more of a nice person than David Brent and that we sort of felt like

maybe to compensate for that we should go truer to the sadness of the romantic story of the British thing. There was a lot going on. But I was on record at the time of saying I didn't want them to kiss in the season two finale. And given the fact that that's probably the most beloved and famous episode of the show ever, I can definitely say I was wrong. It's amazing you ever worked in this town again. No, but the thing about the office, it's interesting.

It really is a bridge show between eras of television because, you know, people who love the British version and I was one of those people, you know, immediately thought, well, you could never do this because you couldn't, first of all, how young we were, six, you know, 12 episodes of a show in America, you could, you could never do that. Sure. Now, of course, you can. But I remember being really, really impressed with the subtle ways that the show was broad, not in the humor, but in the scope of it,

to run multiple seasons. You know, immediately a much larger ensemble, taking some of the pressure off the lead, the softening of the lead character in a way that is necessary if you're going to spend this much time with him. Yeah. But those are sort of old TV values put on it. On the flip side of that,

the quick resolution, more or less, romantic resolution of Jim and Pam, and then the commitment to keeping it, I always found very, very impressive and very groundbreaking. Because you're essentially putting characters on an island story-wise, right? Right. Or you have to do the real challenge, and this is something you did very well with parks,

which is, okay, well, what's the next interesting story? Right. Other than they flirt, they kiss, or they break up. Right. And the difference in the playbook that was run, and a lot of this work, I should say, was done after I left the show. I was at the office for the first four seasons and then a tiny bit of season five. So much of the work of Jim and Pam in their, like, post-gettogether life,

was after I was gone, but the difference in the playbook that they ran that was really smart was, I think, and we tried to do this too on Parks and Rec with Leslie and Ben once they got together, was to say, just because they're together and even just because they're married, you don't have to tell stories about them all the time. And if you simply don't put the two of those people in a story together, it doesn't feel like they're dating or they're married or whatever in terms of like how much attention you're giving to it. I think that the thing that makes people scared as viewers whenever you get the will they won't they or whatever couple together is that now every episode is going to be about them it's going to be how cute they are or how great they are or what happens in their life or whatever dangling them over peril and pulling the back exactly or like are they going to break up which what's going to happen when they meet each other's parents is that and then you're going to talk about nothing but them and then every week kids right by the way sorry to interrupt i just have to say this before i'll forget i think that kids on tv shows are the greatest unforced error that a staff can ever do.

Possibly. And what you did with a time jump and just not doing it? Yeah. Was so, I find, you know what, I'm going to say it was inspiring. Oh. Because what we're talking about here, even though I just interrupted you terribly, is there's a certain way of thinking about story and how TV needs to work. And then there's the radical idea of saying, but what if it wasn't?

Right. What if we didn't have to? What if Ben and Leslie had children as it would, it's very likely that they would. They love each other very much. They were, that's the sort of people they were. But we don't have to tell stories about the children. That's right. You just don't have to.

And that's weirdly radical. Yeah, I had a writing teacher in college, a playwriting teacher, and he used to talk about, the process of writing was like you walk into a dark room and you don't know what's in there and you have a flashlight. And you sort of scan the whole room with your flashlight and you get a little sense of like what might be out there. And then you see something to interst you and you walk towards it. And as you walk towards it, everything around.

what's lit up gets darker but what's in the flash light gets lighter and that's what you want to write about the thing that catches your interest and then you forget about everything else and you just focus on that one thing and that analogy comes back to me all the time in terms of like

when we're saying okay Ben and Leslie have kids I think boy those kids those theoretical kids are in a very dark part of that room in terms of what I'm interested in I couldn't care less about a bunch of infants they're boring they're just lumps and they sit there and they ruin comedy Yeah.

And so it was a very quick and simple and like swift decision to eliminate them entirely from the narrative of the show. Yeah. And I think it was totally the right move because who cares about infants, really. I mean. I mean, in season six, I will say like for some shows, it's the purpose of the show. Who knows? But for our purposes, we were writing a workplace comedy about an ensemble of people. Yeah.

We had people, we had, I remember thinking like, we have Chris Pratt, we have Aziz Ansari. We have Aubrey Plaza. We have Adam Scott and Roblo and Amy Polar. And we're going to give a story time to a bunch of lumps who sit in like little, you know, car seats. Like, what are we? That's insane. That would be insane to give one second of time. And from there, it was a very simple jump.

It was a very simple jump to get to the jump, basically. You know, it was interesting to hear you say that the season long arcs was a matter of necessity because, you know, it is no. secret to anyone listening to this or was read any interview that you've ever done the esteem in which you hold the wire. Yes. I very much believe, and I wrote this, that, like, I like to consider Parks and the Wire as two sides of a coin in terms of TV storytelling and terms of visions of society. Parks is a little grittier.

I thought Parks was a little rougher. You know, it got darker, especially what happened to the kids, you know, in season four. maybe I'm mixing them up but no but that you know I don't I hope I'd like to hope that the world isn't always as dark as David Simon

presents it right I'd like to hope that sometimes the world could be a smidgen a fraction of how light Leslie Knope sees it sure and I just appreciated being able to the reason I like TV is I get to have both and I think the visions complement each other

but but that aside You know, the wire was among many things that it did so well, was just absolutely committed to change. You know, every season, every character full forward in the consequences of decisions and what, you know, and the ripples in the pond, so to speak. And Parks, to me, did that as well. And that's, as we've already had this part of the conversation,

but that's very rare for comedy. And network comedy especially. But I also imagine it could be, nerve-wracking, exciting, a little bit, just a little bit wild, because you have things, as you said, you had things that work and you pushed past them and tried something new. You get Leslie on City Council, we have some new funny characters, we're going to take her off. This relationship's working, no, they're going to break up. I mean, you kept pushing.

Yeah, well, that was the DNA of the show and the character, really, right? Is like, you know, first of all, thank you for mentioning my show and the wire in the same sentence. That's how I got you in the room. but I think that the point of that show was like there were the point of the wire to me was there are people who are trying really hard to do things that they think are good or that can change the way that these sort of calcified systems operates and they just bump their heads against the ceiling and the the happiness whatever happiness you get from the wire you get in the tiniest little dose it's like the very end spoiler alert of season five you see namend and

and he like seems to have escaped of all of the kids maybe the least likely at one point to escape and he somehow escaped he and bunny colvin found a little salvation with each other and he's like on the debate team and stuff and you just get this tiny glimmer it doesn't in any way make up for the misery that you feel at the fate of the other kids in that season but he they do get they do show you they're basically telling you like you got to try and you're going to fail but one and the odds are stacked against you but you got to try and so you're you got to try and so you're basically Parks and Rec I always thought of as the comedy version of that idea, which is a little bit of a fantasy, frankly,

of like if you try that hard and you work that hard and you gut it out and you really truly believe in the concept of public service, you can get from point A to point Z wherever you think she ended up at the end of the show. And also along the way, you'll make a lot of people's lives better. Point Z is the White House in that analogy? I'm just saying, yeah, point Z, that's right. It's a good apt metaphor for the White House. But it just is the journey that she went on was a journey that she got to go on because of her outlook on the world.

And, you know, it would be very funny to like do a thought experiment where you swap her in McNulty and see what happens, you know. I think it would be probably wouldn't work out well for Leslie. I think Beattie would be surprised. I think first and foremost, you got to start at home. Good point. waking up in the morning. I think bunk would roll with it. Yeah, I think he'd be fine.

I think, yeah, now I'm just lost. I think Kima would be really fine with it. I think she'd be very happy with that. I think she'd be super fine with it. I think she'd feel a lot better. Yeah, now I'm totally lost. But also, you know, the other thing about Parks and before we move on to other topics, it really, it was a cheerful, optimistic show.

And I think finding comedy in that, is seems to me to be in some ways more challenging than easy comedy, which is often, you know, what's Nelson on the Simpsons? Pointing and laughing. Pointing and laughing. Yeah. Look at these people, like mean-spirited comedy. And to create characters that you emotionally care about and you root for while still being true to that,

not selling them out, but still being funny, that's a challenge. And I feel like it's not often recognized it. But that seems to be a hallmark of the work that you want to do and that you do do. Yeah, it's also, by the way, just the natural result of working with Amy. Like, Amy is a, I mean, she's quite literally the concept of joy, right? Yeah. Like, it's that's, she has now played that part. She played the role of the concept of joy and for good reason.

And so part of it is just like, that's what I like. That's what she likes. That's what kind of person she is. Can I say that that set visit, you know, when I met you and I was on the set and she was filming, so we never actually had a moment to speak. Right. But three times during the shivering outdoors, she just flitted by and patted me on the shoulders and asked how I was doing. That's my only interaction with her.

And I feel like that was an accurate reflection of my through the screen interaction with her. That's exactly right. She's patted me on the back. Yeah, that's what kind of person she is. And so, yes, that is what I like, but it's also what she likes. And it's what a lot of the other. It's what Chris Pratt likes. It's not what Aubrey Plaza likes, but it's what Aubrey Plaza will begrudgingly do.

By the way, if you pair her up with Chris Pratt. Yeah. So that it was a natural outcrop. It wasn't like, I honestly, I didn't, and I don't think Greg did either. We didn't set out to say like, we're going to do this show that's going to be positive. It was sort of that's what we like to write. That's who the character was. And then what happened was we figured out, you know, you need, obviously, it's like the oldest saw in the world. You have to have conflict without conflict. There's no story. There's no comedy. But you don't have to have, theoretically, conflict between and among the. the main cast on your show. It helps, but it also, it also sometimes leads to, like, sadness and anger and bad, and bad feelings.

So we were just like, all right, we're going to get conflict. It's us versus them. And the them is the library or Eagleton or Ron's ex-wife or whatever, corporations or people in the town who just resist change or are ignorant of the law or whatever. And once you do that and you're spending most of your time with the main.

cast and they all like each other and they're all trying to, you know, make each other's lives as good as possible, then the vibe of the show ends up being very sort of happy and upbeat. You, you know, it wasn't turning a crank, but you were working very hard on this show, somehow surviving, miraculously surviving, not just for, you know, a full seven seasons, but being able to call your shot and end the show in your way. This is not common, certainly on network. you've now had about a year since then, so you're able to look back on it. I guess the two-part question is, do you look back on it?

And how do you feel from this vantage point? You know, you're so in it. Yeah. And then you're suddenly out of it. It's very, I feel incredibly lucky is the, lucky is the main thing I feel about the show in every way, from the beginning through the middle, through the end. I mean, the show was like either canceled or essentially canceled, like a number of times.

Yeah. And then... Were there days when you drove home and you said, I think that's it? Yeah, there were. There were several. There was a day... When we found out we had been moved to mid-season, season, season three, that's usually not a very good sign.

At least it didn't used to be. Now I think it's different. And now it's sort of like, well, whatever. Well, also now, I think... Your orders cut, it doesn't matter. Like, it's a very different world. Networks also seem to have just thrown up their hands about the fall and it's like it's the killing season.

Yeah. If we save you to mid-season, you'll get different attention. It ended up... So that day, we just stopped working in the writer. room and I took all the writers to get a beer at the bar near the Radford lot. And everyone was super bummed out and the mood was definitely like, oh boy, this is it. It was really fun. This happened too quickly. And I remember I stood up and I said, first of all, I love all of you guys. I probably cried a little bit. I said, I love all you guys and I think you're great writers. And also,

we don't know what this means. This could end up helping us. Now, by the way, I was completely full of shit. Can I curse on this podcast? Yeah. I was not completely full of shit, but semi full of shit because I was saying what I wanted to believe. And I thought that at some level I might be right, but mostly I was just trying to like, you know, it's like Michael Keaton and gung-ho. I was just trying to like keep everybody, you know, on the assembly line. But what I said was we don't know. The Japanese were taken over the show. What I said was we have no idea, for all we know, this will end up helping us. Like for all we know, the show that replaces us won't do that well and it'll get care. canceled and we'll just make a good show. And I think the episodes were making it really strong. And we'll swoop in at, you know, in January and we'll do better than whatever show replaces us. And who know, maybe we could go last another five years. And then it, but the thing that I said almost literally happened. Yeah. And so mostly what I feel about the entire history of the show is luck and

good fortune. And a sense of like, it's very similar to the way I felt when I left college. which was, I loved that so much. I wish I could have stayed there forever. Also, I know that if I'd stay there forever, I wouldn't have loved it so much. It's like, it's the kind of perfect, it's best case scenario for how you feel about anything that you work on for that long is how I feel about it.

The other thing, and I, and I won't push you too hard on this because you're still in business with the company I'm about to ask about. But that must have been very strange to be making, and again, I'll say this, you don't have to, but making what to my mind is a perfect NBC show. Now, I love, you know, I've written about this before. I think there are very few networks that have the personal attachment that NBC does, and it's mainly due to the comedy brand.

Right. So to make something that is smart and warm and funny and engaging and was on Thursday nights, you know, to me that mattered, I think to a bunch of people it mattered. And then to be making that show and making it exceptionally well and seeing, I often use the word crater. in polite company I'll instead say decision you know different directions being decided upon all around you the type of show that you were paragon of was not the priority of the network for a few years is that fair to say

that's fair to say um to see that happening around you how can you I'm curious how you would characterize it having been in it taking the long view because you're still in business with this network but you know the year where it was it was uh I'm trying to remember it was community parks 30 Rock 30 Rock and the office right yeah that's right I mean that it was an all-timer a Thursday night lineup I think and the last one I think you know there were there was which is the must see for each generation that you know

every generation had one and then they got away from it here's what I would say about this if you want to be not not just sort of like positive or optimistic or charitable but but to some extent, honest, what you would say is, if you think about the amount that the TV industry and the business has changed in the last 15 years, or five years, or even five years, but certainly 10, 15 years going, you know, the office debuted in, I think, 2005, right? We made it in first season in 2004. So let's call it a decade. The amount that things have changed in that decade or so is incalculable, or as Michael Scott would have said, incalculable.

And the people who are in charge of programming on the networks just were trying stuff. And that is, to some extent, their job is like, we got to try something. You know, Jeff Zucker ran the network for a very long time, had a very important job of one kind or another at NBC for 25 years. He is vilified in many ways for some of the decisions he made. Certainly some of the decisions he made at various levels of his job weren't things that I agreed with, I'll say. You weren't a super size guy? Well, that's the thing, right? He tried it.

And he was, he and a lot of men and women, to less or a lesser extent, women like him. It is the TV business. Yeah. We're like, we're in the position of just having to throw a bunch of stuff at the wall. And as a result, in a world where the sands are shifting and no one really understands, by the way, to this day, no one really understands what's going on. Yeah. they just tried a bunch of stuff. And so I, you know, you can, it's very easy to say you had 30 Rock and Community in the office and Parks and Rec all on the same night and you neglected them and you didn't pay them enough attention and that is, and you're going to live to regret it, Mr.

But another way to say it is like, hey, you put all four of those shows on the air. Community ran. Kept them on the air. A long time. Parks and Rec ran a long time. None of these shows were high rated. 30 Rock wasn't high rated. The office was because it had a grandfathered audience from a time when, you know,

it was getting massive ratings in the first couple of years. But even the office by the end, it was tailing off. So, you know, I can't, I, everybody makes bad decisions in TV at some point. Like every network, every studio head, every actor, every writer, everybody screws up a lot. And so all I, honestly, all I feel looking back on it is gratitude that I got to make 125 episodes of that show because that was in no way something that could have happened if I were somewhere else. True.

You, though, I believe, and I share this to some degree. I think you appear to be a believer in broadcast TV. Yes, I am. In the possibility of it, in the reach of it. You're making a new show for NBC now called Good Place. That's right. Which sounds terrific. You have Ted Danson.

Ted Denson on an NBC comedy. I have Sam Malone on an NBC comedy. Well done. And Kristen Bell. And you have a straight to series order. Right. So this fall will premiere in the face of all these shifting industry sands and the way, you know, viewers' expectations have changed, audiences pattern, viewing patterns have changed. What made you want to do this for them, again, to go to NBC and say, I want this audience, I want this place to make this show, knowing that with your track record and, you know, your ability to attract talent, you could say, I just want to make six of them. and I want to make it first, you know, for crackle or whatever, just to pull that out of the air.

And those would exist. I want to make it for, for Riceeroni. Riceeroni has an app now where you can make TV shows for them. That sounds terrific. They're all to be said in San Francisco. They have huge talent as Sorkin's doing a thing for Riceerone. Well, it's a good question. One very obvious and straightforward, but also true answer is they were awfully nice to me the last time I did a show for them.

and they kept it on for seven years despite its ratings. And not only that, but when I was done with it, they came back to me and said, we would like you to do another show for us. And it's very hard, I think, when I, it would have been very hard for me at that point to say, like, yeah, no thanks. Not impossible, but it would have been hard

because I feel loyalty to them. Are the same people there in the comedy department? I mean, if you go all the way back to when Greg Daniels and I first sold the show, I mean, it's changed three times over. But the Greenblatt regime and the people he has in place for the last few years of parks are still there. Yes, they're there. And Bella Bajaria, who runs Universal TV, who's great. She's great.

And she has been nothing but nice to me. And so there is absolutely a sense of like kind of old-timey 1950s, like company loyalty that I feel because they've treated me very well. They let me hire the cast that I wanted. Greg and I wanted it on Parks and Rec. To an almost identical extent, they let Dan Gore and me hire the people with the writers than the cast we wanted for Brooklyn 9-9. But this is universal, which is not necessarily the same. Yes, but then also the people at the network kept the people of the network could have

turned the lights off and they did it. True. And so they were very nice and said, like, we'd like to give you a show and we'll just put it on the air. You don't have to go through the whole process of making a pilot and that sort of thing. So that's one big reason is that the people at the studio, which is universal and the people at the network, which is Bob and Bob Greenblatt and Jen Salky. And now the woman named Tracy Picosta, who is also great, they wanted me to do it. And it's hard to, it's hard.

Why would I not want to do it for them? That's the sort of business end of it. There's a creative end of it too. Yeah. Which is that I believe that there are many, many, many, many advantages to doing a show on a premium. cable or streaming service. Like, for example, there's no commercials. You can curse. You can do whatever you want. You can make the episodes whatever length you want. I like that you can do whatever you want was the third thing after cursing. Let's do it. Cursing, I wholeheartedly

support cursing on TV. I think there should be more cursing in general and more bleeping. But beeping is funnier than cursing. I kind of agree, yeah. But you can also, like there's, you know, on network you have to run the credits over the show, which interrupts the show. There's snipes for other shows that interrupt your show. Is that what those are called? The little dancing. That's what I think so. Yeah, the little, there's snipe for it.

Yeah. It's a great name. So I, there are obviously, there are many obvious advantages of going somewhere besides a network. But I think there are also advantages that are maybe less obvious of staying on network. Besides just a sense of like loyalty that the NBC peacock means something to me. It does. I think comedy works really well when there are a lot of obstacles to it.

I think obstacles breeds creativity and breeds good problem solving. And I think that comedy works best when it's very crisp and lean. Interesting. And I think that if you say to someone like you can have as much time as you want and you can, there's no commercials and just you can mill around and just get in that pool and swim around, I think a lot of, in my opinion, some comedies, many comedies or at least half hour shows that are on other networks, premium networks, we'll call them. can get a little meandery and a little kind of soft.

And that's not to say that that's bad or maybe that's even exactly what they're going for. But there's a way in which having to write in a crisp three-act structure, or now it's like a four-act structure, which is a whole other problem. But having to write two certain, when you're breaking stories, it forces you to be really lean and mean. It forces you to edit yourself. It forces you to think about the classic storytelling structure of Act 1, Act 2, Act 3. And it's not that you don't remember those things.

You don't suddenly forget them if you go somewhere else, but I think they become less vital to your process. And I kind of believe that it's good for writing to be presented with those specific obstacles, for comedy at least. It's interesting because, you know, you worked with Aziz and Alan on Master of Nun, which is a terrific show. Thank you. on a premium service.

That's right. But I hope I'm not completely wrong when I say this, but in my memory at least, Master of None episodes stuck to more or less like 24, 25 minutes. They very pretty wildly. Some of them are in that range. Many of them are in that range. Some of them are a little bit longer. Some of them get up above 30 even.

Let's a sign of how good it is that I didn't notice. Because I was going to make this point that they had edited, but maybe it's more that they found, they didn't, the vehicle, they used the vehicle they needed. I think so. And also that show is obviously a completely different animal. That show was basically 10 short films that were loosely connected through two characters. Totally completely different. But they did certain things. And Alan worked on Parks and Rec all seven years. And played bass. And mouse rat. And play bass and mouse rat. Good memory. But they did certain things that I think were really smart in that show. Even though the show could be longer, you know, significantly longer than it would have benefited on a network. The episodes have very clear things. themes. They have very clear subject matter. The subject matter of every episode is declared very boldly in a sort of 1970s filmic way at the beginning of every episode. And then they were very aggressive when they edited. We all worked on the editing together to some extent. I did some passes of them. They did other passes and stuff. But they, I mean, Aziz is a stand-up and

Alan's been writing network comedy for a long time. And they weren't afraid to just go like, no, no, no, tighter, tighter, tighter, tighter. Like, you didn't get you precious about it. Yeah, and I think that is to the show's great benefit. And I think if they had let them all kind of like hang out and meander, that it wouldn't have been as kind of fun to watch. I mean, this is my problem with like HBO and Showtime shows and Netflix shows, dramas are like 59 minutes now. Yeah.

That's too long. They shouldn't be that long. It's too long. They don't have that much story to tell. I agree. You don't have that much time or interest. I mean, I think most of the much, I'm a broken record on this. I think some of the best storytelling is being done in a half hour form for any number of reasons.

But one of which is you can, it's more appealing. You can get in and out. You can, you feel like you can really dig in and watch something. Yes. At 30 minutes or 21 minutes on a network. That's right. And 59 minutes is a movie. It's almost a movie, you know?

And I agree. It bums me out. And maybe it's a little bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy where we've all been used to watching entertainment at a certain length. Yes. And our brains and our souls start to sort of melt a little bit. And it passes like 43, 44 minutes. Amen. And so, but also I just think that there, I think that some of the shows that I watch that have a longer running time don't need that longer running time.

Yeah. And I think the problem is, is that there is just a sense of like we can fill up, you know, that thing of like a fish, a goldfish will grow to the size of the bowl that you put it in. Yes. I think that the bowl on some of those shows, on some of those. show on some of those networks is infinite. It's portion control though. Yeah. Like if you give someone unlimited access to, like if you put food on me in front of me on a plate, I'll eat the food.

Right. And then I'll realize I wasn't hungry. And I'll eat half as much and I'll be satisfied. And I think that this is also, by the way, we're in the infancy of this, right? This has just started. Netflix has just started making, for example, its own content a few years ago. I think it's the dust will settle and I think people will, I'm guessing you'll see them pull back a little bit.

but the the show should be as long as the story demands, not as long as you can take with it. And part of what I like about being on a network is it's a little annoying that every episode has to be exactly 21 minutes and 30 seconds. I think it's extremely unlikely that the optimal length for every single episode of every show is exactly that long. In the later seasons of parks, you would release longer cuts. And I'm guessing we will on this show too. but it is a sort of like this is the deal man like that you have to write and edit and act a story that is this length and it's not very long and there's something that's kind of perversely appealing about that to me

can you talk a little bit about the show I know there's a log line out there there's the cast I've I've gotten the impression that there's some things that we were not being told about it yet well you know here's the thing it's nine months away yeah and Yeah, but if my wife said she was pregnant, I'd be like, oh, let's talk about baby names. You know what I mean? Like, I would be all in. For nine months? We differed on this. I loved playing that game more than anything else. She was like, but we already picked a name, we're good.

And I was like, can we just play? And you were still just naming Philadelphia Phillies from the late 80s. You know me too well. Yeah. So Rico Bronia Greenwald was sort of a weird choice, but maybe just Rico. He's from Massachusetts, by the way. He played for the Red Sox at the end of his career. Oh, so that's a hometown boy.

in common. Also, there's a great tradition of Jews named Rico. I just think it's a good. But, no, but like, I wanted to play the game. So I'm only saying nine months is not too long for me because I guess you were saying is you got to prime the pump but not too far in advance. The way the world works now, I think, is if I just said, here's what the whole show is, here's what's going to happen in it or whatever, that by the time the show is actually

on the air, people will be like, haven't I seen that old thing? It sunk into that part of the lizard brain where it's established. There's the upfronts in May where they'll show, I'm sure we will have shot the first episode by then. I'm sure they'll show clips. Then there's a TCA thing in like July. They'll all have a panel. Then there'll be like a bunch of interviews and August. I mean, there's so many moments between now and the time the show is on that it just feels like if I just say everything about it, here's the one thing I'll say about it that helps to explain who Christian Bell's character.

So you're in you're at a red light, okay? Let's say you're a red light in L.A. And there are people going plausible so far. So far, right. So there are people going, you know, perpendicular to you through the green light, right? And there's a person who's waiting to take a left past your car and back back from where you just came from, right? How in your estimation, according to the social contract that we all kind of sign when we get into our cars, how many cars are allowed as the light turns from green? to yellow to red.

How many cars are allowed to take that left and go backwards where you were just coming from before there's a problem? Oh, I think the social contract is two. That's right. That's exactly the right answer. The answer is two. Yeah. We all know the answer is two.

It's not legal, but we're all fine with two, right? Occasionally, there will be a third car, right? When there's a third car, what I think is like, okay, buddy or ma'am, that's not okay. You've made a mistake. You've broken the social contract. However, I don't know your life. Maybe you are racing home to be with your child. Maybe you have just had a terrible day and you just want to go somewhere and like see your friend and talk about how you had a terrible day. I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt. Sometimes there's a fourth car. Well, that's just crazy talk. And when that fourth, so the way that I've been explaining the show to people is Kristen Bell, the character in the show.

is the driver of that fourth car. That's great. And at some point in the show, in the first episode, she's going to have a realization that what she has, that she has lived her whole life acting like the person who takes, who is the fourth car, who doesn't, who thinks my need to go left, trumps everyone else's need to go straight.

And I don't care. And she's going to realize that that's not a good way to live. And she's going to try to change. And Ted Danson will help her. Ted Denson will help her. That's correct. Ted Danson, can I just say, in unparalleled career and television, probably the greatest TV actor ever, right? I would agree.

Well, when we met... Let's just talk about Fargo. Let's not talk about it, but oh my God. Yeah. I sat down with him to pitch him this show on the day before my birthday. Had you met him before? No, never met him. Is he very handsome in person?

He's a total dream boat. And I sat down with him and he said, I have to tell you, I'm very excited. about this meeting. Now he said this because he's also the world's nicest person. Yeah. He said, I'm very excited about this meeting. And I said, I bet I'm more excited. And he said, why is that? And I said, well, probably because I consider you to be the greatest actor in the history of the medium of television. And he laughed because he's a nice person. Yeah. But I was being serious. It was, and I didn't plan to say that. It's just what came out of my mouth because I believe that that's true. If you look at his, I mean, first of all, if he had, if he had played Sam Malone,

alone and then retired, he'd be like top 10 all time. No question. And then everything he's done since then, it is in every different genre, including up to the most recent thing he's done in Fargo is amazing. But also exciting that at his age with his level of success, he continues to try new things. When you see him on board to death and he's having fun, he's playing. Yeah. Damages, and we haven't seen him do that.

That's exciting when it actually does do that. I have to admit, I had a hard time watching damages. I liked the show. There is a scene early on. before you really know anything about him where he is having sex with, I think, a prostitute and doing cocaine. It's the first episode. Is that the first one? Yeah.

And I saw that and I was like a part of my soul died. Was it a little bit like, so this is what Sam Malone was like before he quit drinking? You know, amazingly, I did not have that thought. Why has no one, I mean, that's some rich. A prequel? Prequel show. Like the expanded Cheers universe where it's like, how did Sam become Sam? Yeah.

Although you wouldn't want to see it, though. You wouldn't want to see it, though. You wouldn't want to see it. That's the thing. That's why that character is so great. It's because you realize, like, this is the guy he wanted to be all those years. And let's talk about, like, people are fretting over casting young Han Solo. Like, who has hair to play young Sam Maloney?

But not just hair. Like, the thing about that guy and that character, to me, was from the pilot on, he was just inhabiting that. He just was that guy. And he was real and fully formed. And, you know, a lot of, some of the other characters changed and grew over the... Got broader. Yeah, in the way that, like, all shows. shows kind of find themselves. Sam Malone is the same. I mean, he got a little dumber,

I will say. As years or not, he got a little dumber. There were times when, like, they had a really good joke for like Woody or a coach and they just kicked it over. They were like, yeah, it doesn't fit here. We'll kick it over to Sam. In the spirit of when I used the word crater before, I'll say something that I don't think you can, which is I just think I speak for a lot of people when I also say, thank you for airlifting him out of procedural Saigon. You know what I mean? Like, he was doing all these interesting things. And then he went and did a show. I'm sure he was great on it. Because he's, who doesn't want to watch him do anything. Yeah. And frankly, in my own life, there's no one I would

rather solve my own cyber crimes than if, if there were a crime committed in your house and you were scared. Yeah. And Ted Danson showed up. You'd be like, oh, thank goodness. No, but I mean, again, I haven't watched the show. So I assume a cyber crime is, you know, is like I can't retrieve a file or I saved it with a wrong extension, but he could. Right. You need to update Java or whatever. Exactly. He's the one who shows up. I'm just happy. happy he's back doing something that he was really. The thing that my producing partner said to him at the end of our meeting was comedy misses you.

And I thought that was a very eloquent way to put it. And he likes to work and he likes to try new things and do different things. But he, you know, he's a generational talent in the world of comedy. And I'm happy. I hope I don't screw it up. I hope so too. So you've been very generous with your time. I don't want to keep you too much longer.

But I did want to go through. There were the other two phrases that you said to me that I can use me. Yeah, I'm so curious. One was about making comedy. And the way, in a perfect world, you said, the way to make a comedy would be you make 10 episodes and then you throw them away. And the 11th is the first one people see. That's right. And I think about that every time, I thought about that every time I reviewed a comedy.

I'm not given that luxury very often. But you try to, it did inform my thinking because you realize how much of comedy is chemistry and how long it takes. and not just chemistry between the actors, but chemistry between the writers, between the writers and the actors. That's right. The whole production, and it has to click,

and then it becomes like music, but it's discordant first, naturally so, right? That's right. I think of it less about, as a chemistry issue and more of just a trial and error issue. Right.

It's like we have, you're solving a mathematical equation that has like 40 variables. There's the cast, all of the cast members, there's all of the ways in which it's like, you know, if there's eight cast members,

let's say, it's like whatever eight factorial, combinations of them. Is it eight factorial? Eight combinatorial. You didn't make the Big Bang Theory, so we don't know. And then there's also the way that the writers write for those characters. There's the A, B, and C stories in every episode, et cetera, et cetera.

There are so many variables that basically if you can hit on like three successful parts of the equation per episode for 10 episodes, then you will have figured something out. And that's not easy to do. It's like you're going to, you try a whole bunch of stuff. In the second season of Parks and Rec, I remember the, we figured out a lot of stuff late in season one, which we had all made on the fly. We didn't make a pilot, test it, look at it, and whatever. We made six episodes in a row.

So we were getting feedback about like the pilot as we were writing episode four. And we course corrected pretty quickly. And I think the sixth and final episode of that first season, which was called Rock Show. That was the one that where we were like, Okay, we got it. I think we got it. But then in season two, we still had kinks to work out. We still hadn't solved everything like you never do.

And there were some episodes that were really easy and fun to make. There were some that were really hard. We brought Louis C.K. in. He was great. We were like, maybe this is something. He sold a show, a little show called Louis at the time. And had to go leave and do that. So it was like.

That's weird. But there was a moment that I mark as the true point at which we began to see the Matrix code of the show and it was an episode called The Camel and it's not like a famous episode of the show even for like hardcore fans like it's not one that you that people cite very often it's one of my personal favorites in part because totally accidentally the process of making the episode and the theme of the actual episode completely merged in like a way that would have made dan harmon very proud um and it was basically like they the team was trying to make a mural was trying to design a mural and they were competing against other departments.

And Leslie, the title came from the old thing is if you ask a committee to make a horse, you end up with a camp. Oh, I remember this episode. Right. And so what happened was she solicited ideas for this mural from everyone in the department and she was afraid to tell anyone

that their ideas were bad. And she tried to merge all of their ideas into one giant mural and it was just a complete piece of garbage. And that episode was the longest and hardest rewrite we ever did. It was written by the first, draft was written by a very talented writer named Rachel Axler and she did a really great job and the

story totally didn't work and it was not her fault and then she the poor woman um sat with us as a team as a writer's uh team and went through like 5,000 other versions originally it was like they were designing a they were like landscaping they were designing a fountain it was like it was like we were so all over the map but what happened was we really we had a read through and it was okay and then we tore it apart and Rachel very patiently like worked as a writer on the episode and everybody pitched a million things and eventually we came around and we finally cracked it and we had a second read through it's the only time at parks we ever had a second read through because it was so wildly different from what we had read the first time that we were I was afraid that yeah I was like

the actors just need to know what the hell they're going to say on Monday and we had a second rethrough and it was great and then the episode itself turned into this it was one of the first episodes where the point of the episode was that Leslie kind of have just held everybody together in a big happy hug. And it's, I still, I have the piece of art that she ends up making. She hangs it, at the end of the episode, she hangs it on the, on, in the conference room. Yeah. And it says, by us at the bottom.

And it's a stupid, ugly, awful, miserable piece of art that looks like, someone said it looked like, art that like you would do in art therapy if you were in a military prison. To reflect the truth of your experience. Try to like work through whatever. complicated feelings you have. And when the show ended, it was the first and really only thing that I took from the set. It was like this, because to me, that was the whole show right there, was that episode, the process of making it and process of coming through that weird crucible and getting to the other side.

And that's when the show began. It's in my office now at Universal. And then the other thing you said to me, and this one really stuck, so in the very, very beginning of Grantland, and I just started writing that TV a lot, I decided that I had this really smart, totally unique observation of that TV, which was that the comedies I really liked were single cam and the comedies I didn't like were multi-cam. Pretty groundbreaking stuff. Yeah.

Did you get death threats for that? I got a punisher for it. So I had this, what a great idea. And I think we had never met, but someone who, I think it was Bill actually, passed along your email address, so I was going to get you for comment. What's your take on this? And you wrote a very nice to write back at all, but you wrote a very gracious response which really sort of set me back on my heels,

which was just that, you know, I'm paraphrasing, but you said that, you know, you believe that people use TV for different things. And it's sort of presumptuous to assume that everyone wants the same experience when they sit down at the end of a day. And, you know, the types of pleasures that a old-fashioned multi-cam sitcom can provide are real. And the pleasures that a single-cam camera can provide a real, too. But there are different experiences, and it's probably best. And again, you didn't lecture me, but you said it's probably best not to,

this is my takeaway. It was probably best not to thumb my nose at something that 25 million people meet. And I was like, yeah, it's a good point. Not going to write that piece. But that actually really helped me watch TV critically for the next five years because you're right. Like when we talk about TV, maybe we're talking about watching Master of None on Netflix or maybe we're talking about watching The Wire or maybe we're just deep olive kiddridge heads or whatever. Sure. Also, I like to watch Chopped.

You know, I like to relax. And I feel like that's important to remember that it is a mass medium and there are different experiences happening every time you might. make it. Yes, and also that it started as a big tent and has only gotten bigger. And now there's, in one night, you can watch whatever episode seven of making a murderer. And then you can, you know, exit out of Netflix on your smart TV and you're watching The Bachelor. And both of those things can be incredibly entertaining and can kind of light up different parts of your brain. I, I do watch The Bachelor, although this season I am less interested in The Bachelor than I was. was last season. I got very into it last season in a weird kind of like feminist way because I was

very interested in the fact that on this incredibly moronic reality show where the very premises itself absurd, which is like, I came here to find love if I can just get past these other 30 people who are also in the cameras, and the cameras. But then there's this weird backlash last year where like the woman who was very straightforwardly to my eyes doing the exact thing that every man woman had done on that show forever since its inception was suddenly being like called a horror basically. Yeah. And it drove me crazy and I like watched the show and kind of got really into the show and was like rooting for her to tell everyone to go screw. So I got really into the show. And then this year I watch it again, but I'm now, I watch it for a completely different way, which is a kind of like

stunned, like a confused, like I'm a bird that flew into a window is how I watch it. now because the people on the show are so insane or so like goofy that I'm watching it. I kind of watch it like the way that some people might watch like a horror movie. Like I watch it. My wife has started taking pictures of me and putting them on Instagram of like me literally hiding under a blanket because I'm so scared. But the point is I watch it and I watch it and I'm interested in it as a form of entertainment.

And that's not, that was not available to me when in 1970. five or whatever. Like this way that TV could make me feel was not available to me. And that doesn't mean, by the way, I'm not going to watch it anymore. It's awful. I can't take it. But the leftovers to bring this all the way back around. To Damon.

To Damon, as it always should. So that was by the, it was a very classy and experienced showrunner move. You put a bow on it. You brought it. Yeah. But the reason that I fell in love with the leftovers is, as I think I said earlier, it was a show that made me feel a combination of things I have never felt before. And I feel like at some level, that's why anybody watches TV.

There's a specific feeling that they want. There's a specific set of feelings, maybe in a row that they want. I want to watch this show at 7. I want to watch this show at 8, this show at 9. Everybody has his or her own formula for what they want to get out of television. And the benefit of their being so much TV is whatever the combination is of your personal safe that you want to crack open every night using television to help you, it is available to you. And by the way, it's also available to just like not ever watch it and shut it off.

And so if you don't like it, you don't have to watch it any of it. Get some sleepies. You're turning that crank tomorrow morning. That's right. Now look who brought it all the way around in the beginning. I'm in the presence of a master. I had to, well, I, you know, my only regret here is that I didn't make you cry, I guess. No.

In fact, didn't really come close. No, I didn't push in those ways. We talked. Maybe it's less of a, maybe it's crying is less of the goal. And it's more like confessional or like a, or. I thought you spoke very expansively about this, this business of show. Oh, that's good. You know, I, I don't mean to, now I'm filling my,

and now I'm recapping and reviewing our conversation. You did, you did push a little bit about my feelings towards my specific employer. So maybe your goal should be to get someone fired. Get someone angry, get some fired. I want, I just want action. I want change for change. Just sake. Throw out all the bumps.

You just want scalps. You want scalps to hang on your wall. That would be terrific. No, no, but yeah, you also, maybe you also hedge a little bit right off the bat because you said, this isn't, these aren't real problems. And so by saying they're not real problems, you allowed yourself not to become too emotionally. You're saying that was, I was a, that was a defense mechanism. So maybe we should just consider this.

This is just like round one, I hope. Okay. And that next time. This is your opening gambit. Yeah. And now you're setting me up for... You feel comfortable a little bit, right? I feel cozy. You would never do anything to hurt me.

Never. I'm your friend, and we just talked about TV and like, you know, I said the bad things and you were fine. Next time, I'm just like... And your parents. Right. Just immediately start with what was that like. That's when I realized that you haven't even been recording these. It's just...

No. This is all a show. This is all preamble. This is all my art project. I'll say this and then end, that the one time the ultimate interviewer nightmare happened to me is when I was interviewing a band for Spin Magazine in 2003. And I sat with a band. I didn't have a limited time in Chicago.

I had one interview, one night, and one the next day. Sat down with them, interviewed them for an hour, went up to my hotel room, and the tape recorder hadn't worked. And that's the worst feeling in the world. What did you do? Freaked out, but then, you know, I had a little more time the next day. And then as it turned out, everything that I needed anyway was the second day, because the first day they didn't trust me or they were feeling each other out.

So it almost was like making the 10 episodes. Right. And throwing it away. Exactly right. So then we sat back down. I knew who they were. I knew. So you never told them like sorry guys that didn't record?

No. No, because I'm also, I'm 26 and you don't want to be like. They're going to be like, funny story guys. And that's why the used is the most popular and successful band of the 21st century. I once. Because of my. I do a semi-regular podcast about sports and baseball with Joe Posnanski who writes for NBC. And by the way, I did notice you mentioned Bill Belichick.

and Ben Zobrist early on. I'm used to it. Anytime I'm talking to a microphone, I talk about sports, usually. But I would say five out of the first 11 times we did it, his machine just didn't record. I mean, it was like a parody of incompetence. Those were his own words.

And so now we've been doing it for like on and off for like four or five years now, some very long amount of time. And then after the last time he did it, he was like, there was some technical problem. We had to stop and start again. He was like, hey, I should find someone to produce this for me. And I was like, hey, that's a really good idea.

Five years after the first time. Yeah, so maybe he didn't learn the lesson right away. But you got there. Eventually, we got there. It's a process. All right. We will end there. Mike, I really thank you for talking to me.

I really would like to make you weep at some point in the future. It'll happen. Have me back enough and start asking me about my kids and then you're gold. For Channel 33's upcoming parenting podcast, you'll be the first person on the list. But maybe when Good Place premieres on NBC in fall 2016. Yes, when you actually know what it's about and we can talk about it more specifically. Then I hope we can talk about it. Sounds good.

Until then, thanks. Thank you.