Mike Schur has been a big part of TV comedy in the past two decades, from his time writing on Saturday Night Live and The Office, to co-creating Parks and Recreation (where he served as showrunner) and Brooklyn Nine-Nine.
Schur, who also is an executive producer on Master of None these days, just launched his newest series this week with The Good Place, which aired two preview episodes Monday night, before it debuts in its regular timeslot this Thursday. Kristen Bell and Ted Danson star in the high concept comedy about a woman (Bell’s Eleanor) who dies and goes to the heavenly “Good Place” by mistake, having lived a less than good life.
I spoke to Schur about how his idea for The Good Place came to be, delving into a more fantastical world -- and collaborating with Cabin in the Woods/Lost/Daredevil’s Drew Goddard on the pilot, which Goddard directed -- working with Bell and Danson and more.
IGN: What was the first spark of an idea for The Good Place?
Schur: It’s a very specific spark. I have this light, this traffic light that I get through every day. I have to go left and the left arrow’s like three seconds long. And people going the other way, when it gets to be their yellow light and then their red light, they’re queuing up waiting to go left around me. And I believe that two cars should go, and that’s it. Sometimes there’s a third and I’m skeptical. If there’s a fourth car, I lose my mind and hit the roof. And I started thinking about that person who’s driving that car, and when I eventually pitched the show to Kristen, I said, "Your character is in that fourth car, and if someone honks at her, she flips them off." And that was the genesis of that character, was a person who believes that her need to do Thing X completely trumps everyone else’s need to do Thing Y, Z, A, B, C, D, and E. And will act that way, accordingly, at all times. And then she gets to a place where she’s surrounded by people, 321 other people, who did the complete opposite. And then it sort of all blossomed from there.
IGN: You’ve got this dream duo starring in your show. You’ve got Ted Danson, who’s obviously someone so important to many of us from our childhood, on top of his great recent work, and here’s he’s back on an NBC, Thursday night sitcom. And then there’s Kristen Bell, who is such a crucial casting, because with the wrong person, you might not like Eleanor at all. How quickly did they both came on your radar for these roles?
Schur: I’ve known Kristen since around 2001, I’m going to say. She was doing The Crucible on Broadway. She came to an SNL after party. And I was like, “Who is that person who is so young and yet so much more grown up and self possessed than I am?” And she was in The Crucible with Laura Linney and Liam Neeson and it’s insane. And I’ve always just been so impressed by her... “self-possession” is the word I think of. And also she’s so nice and she’s so inviting and she’s so talented, and I’ve always thought she was super funny. And so, when this character emerged, it was like, I had that exact problem, right? It’s like I’m creating a person, and the point of her character is that she wasn’t that great a person. I had a lot of internal debate writing the pilot of how bad can I make her? Because she has to have been kind of bad, kind of selfish, and kind of non-empathetic and stuff. And Kristen just kept rattling around my brain because I thought if I have her, I can push the boundaries of how crummy she was, because you can’t really dislike her that much. You’re like, “That’s Kristen. Look at her! She’s wonderful!” So when I pitched her the show, the timing happened to work out, because she was wrapping up House of Lies. I didn’t know whether it was going to come back but we were also able to guarantee her that she could go back if they did bring the show back, and all these signals from the universe started floating down that this was the right call. But really the reason it’s ultimately the right call is just because of who she is and how talented she is. She’s amazing. She’s a generational talent.
Then Ted was literally just thinking like, “Who do you want to be in charge? When you die, who do you want to be in charge?” And if it were Ted Danson, you would just feel like everything was going to be okay. So I pitched him the show and I thought to myself on the drive there, I thought, “You’ve gotta be cool, man. Like, this is Ted Danson. Ted’s my hero.” And I was like, “You have to be cool when you pitch him the show!” And then I met him and I was the opposite of cool. I just geeked out super hard and I told him I thought he was the greatest actor in the history of the medium of television.
IGN: [Laughs] That’s not playing it cool.
Schur: And I did a lot of uncool things. And he was very graceful and very nice. And then after I pitched him the show, he said, “Can I ask you some questions?” And I said sure, and then he asked me like thirty of the most incisive and interesting questions that anyone had asked me to that point. Questions which legitimately altered the course of the show and made me rethink the structure of the pilot and stuff like that. And so it was just like, I knew going in that he was the right guy, but then when he started delving into the nuts and bolts in such a smart way, it was like “Oh, this is the real deal in this guy.” In case anyone was wondering... Ted Danson is the real deal!
Continue on as Schur discusses working with Drew Goddard, a big moment he cut from The Good Place pilot, his long term plan for the show and more.
Continues
Aucun commentaire:
Enregistrer un commentaire