If we wanted the show to keep going beyond season one, we also couldn’t keep it all about Jason Segel’s character. So we established other stuff like a patient [played by Heidi Gardner] who pushes her husband off the cliff in the finale or Harrison Ford’s character having unresolved issues as a father. We left breadcrumbs so people can see some of the stories coming up. I think astute TV viewers like that but they also like to be surprised, which is what happens with Brett’s character as the episodes go on.
The second part, and I’ve decided to own it, is that I almost screwed up the casting. When a show works, instead of begging actors to come and do a part, you can afford to say, “It would be cool to try and get this specific person.” For this role, I did not think of Brett immediately. He is not pushy so he was not throwing himself out there. I was joking about this but I fall prey to how you tend to mistake actors for their characters. I remember when I first went out on a date with my wife, Christa Miller, she was still in her The Drew Carey Show days. So a friend went, “Oh, she’s such a guy’s girl who drinks beer in the day and is from the Midwest.” I had to say she’s not like that at all; it’s just someone she plays on TV. She’s a very scary, intimidating, quick, and sharp woman from the East Coast.
But yes, in my head, besides being a great writer and comedian, Brett was also the gruff Roy Kent from Ted Lasso. Jason Segel said that Brett should play this character. It opened up a door in my head because in real life, Brett is such a sweetie, and we needed this character to be played by an empathetic performer. The only thing is, because he’s an old friend and I’m a jerk, I made him shave his beard. It makes him look like he’s 12.
AVC: Bad Monkey is based on Carl Hiaasen’s novel, but the adaptation adds quite a lot to it. What was the process for you and the writers to infuse your unique tone into an established story?
BL: I haven’t been really scared about how something’s going to turn out in a long time because one of the cool things about having a long career doing what you and I do with writing is you get used to rejection and failure. I’m very lucky that some of the garbage things I wrote never got on TV. Anytime somebody says, “You have a bunch of good shows,” I think, “I have some awful ones, too.” I could bring you to the room where they’re kept so you can cringe.
I really felt pressure on Bad Monkey because Carl is an iconic writer, but more importantly, he’s an idol of mine. I convinced him to let me do this. It’s surreal for anybody to think of an idea and go to their favorite author and say, “I want you to trust me to make a show out of your book, but I’m going to have to add six or seven chapters to the middle of it that aren’t in your story.” He was so nice and supportive. He was what I think we are all occasionally lucky to have when someone turns out to be the way that you would hope they would be. He cares so much about the environment and about issues that I care about. I had an overwhelming fear of letting him down that I had not had since I was starting in the industry. It’s probably healthy for me. It made me nervous and work harder.
AVC: Compared to your other two Apple TV+ shows, Bad Monkey lives more on the edge because it’s grislier and unafraid to kill off main characters. Was it creatively fun to play in its genre?
BL: Yeah, it’s not what I usually do. I talked to Carl, and he let me put some stuff of my own in there. It’s a spoiler I guess but whatever happens with the Dragon Queen’s [Jodie Turner-Smith] redemption arc is not in the book. And Carl had based her on a real person. A lot of his stuff starts with articles and research he collects, so the real Dragon Queen in Andros was a charlatan and never wavered from it. He’ll know better than me but I think ultimately she was incarcerated.
I enjoyed melding the tones. It’s liberating for me as a slightly older TV writer because I’m probably one of the last people working from the generation where you were either a multi-camera sitcom writer or a serious drama writer. There wasn’t much back and forth between the two, but I’ve always been interested in that. Even when I was trying to sell Scrubs, I had to say it’s a broad, silly comedy with emotional depth. I grew up on shows that had an emotional streak in comedy. I was also a huge fan of banter-driven stuff with blood, gore, and capers. I’ve watched every Elmore Leonard show or movie like 1,000 times. Now we live in a world where genres are overlapping circles. I tried it first with ABC’s Whiskey Cavalier, but there’s an appetite for this stuff where the characters are more important than the caper itself. So the fact that one of my heroes is my way into that world and I get to try something new at this point in my career is…I didn’t expect to have a renaissance at 55 and get to do cool new things.
AVC: Ted Lasso marked your big streaming debut in 2020. What was it like to navigate this new side of the business in terms of figuring out audience numbers and engagement?
BL: I always take great pains to make sure to say Ted Lasso is a foreign experience to me because it was me helping to execute Jason Sudeikis’ idea. That’s why I don’t talk about it much, especially where the show is going next or if there will be more because everybody’s just going to wait for Jason to talk about it. But the fascinating thing about entering the world of streaming is they want to know the beginning, middle, and end of a story. That was interesting to me. Jason and I have both been on shows that have gone on and on for nine years. Back then, you’d have to go to actors and say, “If you like this part, we’d like you to do it forever.” Now, I can put together a three-season arc and go to Harrison Ford and say, “If you want to do this, I need a certain amount of time, and you can do all the films in between.” It almost felt like entering the movie business.
AVC: Does it help planning a show for primarily only three seasons because that’s how you said Ted Lasso and Shrinking were pitched?
BL: I’ll use Shrinking because, again, I shy from talking too much about Lasso just to protect myself because anytime it’s mentioned, it seems like I’m talking about the show coming back. But here’s an example of Shrinking that people should understand. The old sitcoms I used to do were supposed to go on in perpetuity in a way. The characters had little life moments, and I’d still try to tug at heartstrings, but I wasn’t telling a beginning, middle, and end story. What’s interesting for Shrinking is when I got Brett, Jason, and Harrison, and we were talking about what we thought the beginning, middle, and end of this story would be, Jason looked at me and said, “I’m having fun. What if we wanted to do more than three years?” The thing about streaming television is that you can tell a different story. It does open up your storytelling ability.
In network days, I might not have even necessarily been able to sell the story about a dude whose wife died so he’s drinking, drugging, and hanging out with sex workers, and he’s a horrible dad. Oh, and it’s a comedy. They would likely pass on it. But you also can’t go “I want to do nine seasons of this” because it has to end. Do I think Shrinking has to come to an end? You know, if we’re having fun, we will hopefully come up with a new two or three-season story for this group of characters, whether some of them splinter off, whether new ones come in. Thinking about this stuff has kept me inspired and engaged in the game.
AVC: Do you feel similarly about Bad Monkey because Carl Hiaasen’s book has a sequel, Razor Girl, that you could do next?
BL: Bad Monkey is a different thing altogether. I think there should be a Carl Hiaasen Universe. I would love to do Razor Girl, and I’m hoping that no one can stop me [laughs]. Hopefully, we find out soon. The best thing about Carl’s worlds is I expect characters to traverse across stories. One of my favorite Easter eggs for people who love this genre is the cool story of Jackie Brown, an Elmore Leonard book that Quentin Tarantino adapted. Michael Keaton is a cop in it, and he’s great. A completely different studio then made another Leonard adaptation, Out Of Sight, with George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez. Keaton had to orchestrate making a cameo in it because these were two different studios, and he said that it’s another Elmore Leonard movie, so I’ve got to play this role again in it. I think that’s how Carl’s books are. Some characters go across novels and show up in different places. If they’re stupid enough to let me do it, I would love to. It would be super fun.
AVC: With the three main characters of your three Apple shows, there’s a similar thread of being unable to let go of the past. In Bad Monkey’s finale, Andrew Yancy has to decide if he wants to live and not drown. And Jimmy’s season-two arc in Shrinking speaks of forgiveness only come from letting go. What is it about tapping into this specific emotion that fulfills you as a storyteller?
BL: It’s an astute question. I think everybody’s life journey—for me, my friends, my family, my kids, and random people—is at least partly decided by how much or how little you get in your own way. I’ve been obsessed with this since I was a young writer because I used to say this about myself. I had a horrible case of getting in my own way. I was an absolute rock star in my twenties. It can also be about the inability to let go of things that are permanent obstacles. I really struggle when I write about things that aren’t authentic to me. So it’s not a surprise I often write about mentorship because it was a huge influence in my life, like my first high-school teacher who encouraged my writing. I named Scrubs’ Dr. Perry Cox [John C. McGinley] after another mentor, journalist Bob Cox. I love to write about male friendships and father-child relationships because it’s what I know best.
That’s why it’s also not a surprise that my characters deal with the inability to get out of their own way and let the past go. These are things I fight with on a day-to-day basis. It’s also how my family operates. My dad is going through a horrible health crisis, and we laugh about some of these things together. It’s dark and it’s whatever and some people shut down completely. No judgment there, I get it. But I think I write the way I do because of how I deal with my shit. Right now, as Hurricane Milton approaches Florida, I’ve got tons of family living there. I’ve been FaceTiming and talking to them, and in the face of an impending storm, we’re laughing. The best-case scenario is it will suck and everybody will get through it. The worst case, well…. But what are you gonna do? You can’t just sit there and be overwhelmed by the darkness of it all. So I try to honor that and hope it feels authentic.
AVC: Ensembles are a huge part of these shows and of the ones you’ve done in the past. The fun of it is seeing actors doing unexpected things, like Hannah Waddingham in Ted Lasso, Harrison Ford in Shrinking, or Meredith Hagner as a psychotic villain in Bad Monkey. How do you feel like you’ve mastered the casting process over the years?
BL: There are two things I’m a believer in, and I hope they don’t seem contradictory. I don’t want to sound preachy either but I care about culture on the set. There’s a huge value in getting to know the vibe of the person you’ve just auditioned. There’s no wrong way, but people have different views of approaching art and different personalities. I like to know what a person is like when they’re not reading their lines. We also always tell the actors that when you do a pilot, the character is 50 percent the creator’s and 50 percent yours, but we get the tie-breaking vote. For a show to work, by the 10th or 20th episode, the character does need to be mostly the performer. They need to be able to say in a comfortable way that their character would not do this or say this.
The other thing I have been pontificating about a lot lately is that someone said once, to be snarky, that there are Bill Lawrence players—as in, people from Spin City are on Scrubs, Scrubs actors are on Cougar Town, the guy from Cougar Town is in Bad Monkey, the janitor on Scrubs is playing Harrison Ford’s patient in Shrinking, et cetera. I think it’s an advantage to know an actor’s voice so that you can write for them to show their strengths and challenge them. Secondly, I don’t care about nepotism or bringing friends and family on either. If you are lucky enough in any walk of life to get to hire talented people that you would want to be around anyway, I think you’re nuts if you don’t do it.
AVC: What do you miss about working in the Spin City and Scrubs network days though?
BL: It’s fun for me when my kids go back and watch a multi-camera sitcom. It reminds me of how it’s such a specific skill set for the actors, performers, and writers. And don’t get me wrong, when it doesn’t work, it can get eggy and hard to watch. But when it works, it can be brilliant and sharp. I remember there was a time that Hollywood was like, “Oh, this isn’t cool.” But I will still watch an episode of Cheers or Seinfeld. I miss the live-audience feel of those shows. That’s why I go back every once in a while. I miss having that comfort food.
