But it's also a bottomless pit for story ideas. |
I think if people never knew it was an improvised show it wouldn't matter. |
I?m not quite as neurotic. |
It's not about industry people, and it's not a scenario where you go, 'Who the hell are these people and what planet are they from?' It's about real Midwestern families. We're trying to make a show that balances equal parts of heart to humor. |
It's set in a suburb of Cincinnati. But we're actually shooting at Sunset and Gower (in Hollywood). |
The casting process wasn't so much about them being a character, which is the normal way. The character had to become them.... You've got to bring 70 percent, 80 percent of yourself to the party. And an actor's either willing to expose themselves like that, or they're not. |
The dialogue is all made up on the fly, but it's not all made up by the actors. There are a few writers and Nick and I behind the camera, and we're improvising as much as the actors are. |
We wanted a half-hour comedy that was not joke-driven in the traditional sense. You're laughing because you recognize the characters as people you're possibly related to yourself. |
We wanted to try to see if we could take something as traditionally structured as a half-hour TV comedy format and actually bring improvisation to it. |
We write a very strong script. The dialogue just doesn't exist within it. We give the script to the actors and they have a few days to chew on it. Dialogue is never written down. It's generated while we're shooting. We'll throw the actors a line and see where they take it. They bring lines of their own. |
We're just asking people to kind of look at how they're getting their comedy a little bit differently. Since it's not joke-driven in a traditional sense, the jokes are coming out of how we ratchet up the size of the elephant in the room. If you're invested in the characters and you're onboard with them on an emotional level, that laugh will come out of a relatable place. |
We're not trying to be blue. But we're pretty frank, we're pretty raw and we're pretty real. |
Where I come from and where Nick comes from, there are a lot of divorces. People are giving it a second go-around on a bunch of different levels. |