Despite a rapidly shifting TV landscape, theShrinkingco-creator hasnt abandoned his earnest worldview.
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And then they think its cool, and then they think it sucks.
Im lucky to do it.
A Bill Lawrence show is usually a comedy.
Its often a sitcom.
He was fired from not one butthreeblockbuster sitcoms early in his career.
He accidentally outed his best friend!
(After a brief greeting, Lawrence tries to pull the focus back to himself.
This is about me!)
Lawrences tendency toward both self-awareness and self-confidence feels familiar, too.
What was your first spec script?Mad About You,Larry Sanders, andSeinfeld.
I wrote all of them like they were term papers due in a two-week period.
Those were desperate times back then.
We had to do 100 episodes of that show in four years, 26 episodes a year.
I dont think writers nowadays have any idea how insane that was.
Youve now made two comedies for Apple.
Your characters didnt change a lot.
and Id be like, Who fucking cares!
Hes got to talk so much and be mad every week.
Im bored of it!
Its a lot of TV to write!When I look back, Im blown away.
Sometimes I hate talking about it because Im like,Am Ithatold?It happened very fast.
And theyre a little raw and rough.
A month later I sent them two more scripts.
Their other client,Rich Eustis,was there.
I was embarrassed aboutBoy Meets Worldand should not have been.
A lot of people loved it.
And they were right to let me go.
Eventually you go on to developSpin City.Heres how it worked.
I worked at Dreamworks first.
I got fired fromBoy Meets World,The Nanny, andFriends all deservedly, and all great shows.
Friendswas a great experience.
I went to work with Gary on a sitcom calledChamps.
I had the courage to say, I dont think so.
It was not because I didnt love Gary, but because it wasnt in my voice.
Then Jeffrey Katzenberg got Michael J. I was so excited about it, and Mike had just returned to acting.
I thought he was so good inThe American President.
Gary taught me how to run a writers room, how to talk to actors and actresses.
I was really interested in it, kept him blathering on and on and on.
When he left, Gary said, You cant engage on those things.
Hes not just riffing.
Those are things he wants us to do.
Gary would talk about how, on set, particularly for multi-cams, the rehearsal process is exploration.
Its not working for me.
But if you say, I dont like this so Im going to mail it in?Fuck you.
And I will cut it!
But no, you wont get anything in its place.
In the rehearsal, the actor just mailed it in.
Gary stopped the rehearsal and went, Whats going on?
The actor said, I dont like that joke.
I dont want to do that joke.
Garys like, No problem!
Anybody else want to do that joke?
And Alan Ruck said, Ill do it!
The other dude was like, Message received.
Thats a key difference between internet-sitcom production and how most streaming shows are made now.
My understanding is that many streaming shows are mostly written before shooting ever starts.I dont do that.
It might be because Im a dinosaur, but I think comedy suffers for it.
For me, pilots are harder than the show.
Im always super-excited when I think Ive written or shot a good pilot.
Because then we watch it as a group and watch what dynamics work.
The writers are going to get it.
InShrinking, we didnt know Harrison Ford aside from being scared of him.
We were like, Well just write him as grumpy and stoic.
But then we saw very quickly in the second episode,This dude is game for some comedy moves.
So we said to him, Jessica Williams likes all these one-hit wonders.
Would you ever sing one of them if you were driving with her character to work?
And Harrison goes, If it was hard to learn the lyrics, maybe not.
But even then Id dance.
Then he showed up that morning and knew all the lyrics to a Sugar Ray song.
We got lucky onShrinking everybodys super-duper talented.
And then people were like, That guys funny.
We had to go back in and say, Maybe this dude needs to exist more.
Thats why he seems a little wedged in.
He didnt exist in the initial scripts.
ShrinkingandSpin Cityboth depict friendships between straight men and gay men.
So onSpin City, Randall became the co-producer in charge of all the post-production.
Long story short, I accidentally outed Randall.
Stuart and Carter are me and Randall and our friendship dynamic.
And afterward Randall was like, Dude.
You realize I hadnt told everybody in the world yet that Im fucking gay?
And I was like, I was not aware of that, man.
I was not aware of how that works.
But Ive written about that dynamic a lot.
and Turk inScrubsare also me and Randall, except Im Turk and hes J.D.
ForSpin City, you left when Michael J. OnScrubs, there was the challenge of transitioning the show after much of the cast left.
Now youre no longer as involved with makingTed Lasso.
After the first year, I remember telling Jason, Hey, Im editing, come in.
The third year, it wouldve been criminal for it not to have been 100 percent his voice.
Thats the way that show should work.
It was his vision from the start.
I was like, I dont know, man.
Im not great at writing female leads.
I havent done it before.
And Kevin Biegel, to his credit, was like, Ill do that with you.
Which, by the way, is a show that wouldve worked in the pandemic.
The women who wrote for the show were like, Thats not how women talk.
Thats not what they fucking care about.
I own half the character, you own half the character.
But this shows only going to succeed if by the 13th episode, its more like 80-20 for you.
The women on that show ran with it.
Nobody could do a Busy Philipps character better than Busy Philipps.
No matter what we wrote, she was going to Busy Philipps it up.
She came to me and Jason Segel and Brett Goldstein and my production company partner Jeff Ingold.
And were not just white guys.
I said the same thing: 50-50 in the pilot, and then take ownership of the character.
Its got more of a dramatic, mystery-solving engine, right?Its hard.
So on one hand, I love doing shows that have emotional stakes, that areaboutsomething.
Theyre character books that masquerade as airplane books.
But forBad Monkey, there is no indie music or emotional undercurrent.
Its just a goofy, fun, rompy caper thing in the Keys in Florida.
I hope it works.
I feel unsure of myself, but the cast, I got lucky again.
Look, itll either be a disaster or a success.
Well do another year and itll be great!
If you look atTed Lasso, you know which camp Jasons in.
And hes not wrong, because people seem to enjoy living with the characters longer than I do.
It is a case-by-case thing.
