Bill Lawrence - 'Shrinking' & 'Rooster' [LIVE]

25:38I'm like, have you ever finished that something about roller skating bit? Because it was gold. But I wrote in a notebook once, my best friend from college is named John Dorris. He was the medical advisor on the show. He goes by JD. He's still cardiologist and heart surgeon in LA. He's always picked by students as one of the greatest teachers. JD is based on him. On the set we called him real because he was the real JD, but all I had written in my notebook because of our college experience was that we went to, you know, we went to college to enjoy our, he did so poorly in college that when he decided he wanted to be a doctor he had to go back to undergraduate college a second time at a different school.

26:19It's a true story. And so I just wrote in my notebook that my nightmare would be to wake up in an emergency room and have him standing over me going, you're going to be fine. And that became Scrubs. That's great. And also, by the way, the relationship between JD and Turk? Yeah, that's a little me and Randall Winston producing part of mine. He's the director producer of shrinking now just kind of that inseparable friendship that we had when i started at champs he was gary goldberg's assistant we kind of came up in the business together so now we're in the world today we're we're so used to both you know multi-cam and single cam but when scrubs went on there were very few single cam shows that had preceded it right what was it that made you decide to even go down that path and and how did you know what you were doing i didn't know what I was doing.

27:12I was so convinced that show wasn't going to work. The janitor was originally just a figment of JD's imagination. And I've told this story before. Eventually, I think he talked to one or two other people the first year besides Zach. But literally like eight episodes in when it seemed like the show was working, Neil Flynn came by and he's like, I feel like I should talk to other people. Talk to other actors and actresses in the cast. The one thing I had conviction about, I think I was very lucky that I often had misplaced conviction about things I wrote very young, and I knew that scrubs wouldn't work if, look, I wanted to have people care about the life and death stakes of patients and combine, I'd mentioned M.A.S.H., combine the broad silly pathos, you know, of JD's fantasies and daydreams with moments of emotional depth, and I didn't think you could do that with a multi-camera audience there.

28:06I thought in a real deserted creepy hospital which we used and it was on Riverside, Riverside in Coldwater about, and if you, you know, if you turn the lights down and played an indie song you might be able to pull it off, you know, and so I had the convictions of that and I had no idea if it would work and I almost messed it up because I was so convinced that the audience needed cues of when to laugh. If you go back and watch the first four episodes of the show, there's massive sound effects in it. And I cribbed it from Parker Lewis Can't Lose, you know, the sound effects. And it was really embarrassing.

28:42You know, like Dr. Cox was mad. You'd hear thunder. You know, it was a good trivia thing. Only one sound effect from the original four episodes stayed in, and it was the amplified sound of Todd's high fives.

28:59Super fans. Yeah, yeah. Well, so the show, you know, here we are. Let me do the math. So it went on. The original went on in 2001. So 25 years later, it's back. But there was no, I mean, there was a chance it wasn't going to kind of get out of the, you know, hospital from when it was born. I mean, it was, part of that was it was being moved around a lot, right? Well, it's also a business thing, Scott. You know, it's interesting. scrubs was only at the time scrubs was on one of the only sitcoms on one chain you know there's only four channels then but there's one of the only sitcoms on one channel that was completely owned by another channel so uh i worked for disney and abc uh the guy the true story when i pitched scrubs and i'm gonna give uh this person i'm not even gonna say him or her the benefit of the doubt but i pitched scrubs to abc where they were already paying me when i worked this person fell asleep during the meeting, for real.

29:59It was such a bummer. The only funny thing is when we all got up, I turned to everybody, I'm like, how do you think it went? Because he was sawn woods. It was owned by ABC and Disney, but it was on NBC. And in that archaic network television days, it meant NBC had no financial gain from Scrubs whatsoever. And so if it's not a massive hit, it just means they move. I think it had, if you count even like a week to week thing, I think I had 23 time slots in nine years. Yeah, it was bananas. So fun though. Well, and you guys were, I guess, an early example of people rallying support for their own show.

30:38It was the first time I really sensed, because if you guys remember, there was like TV without pity and all these cool kind of websites springing up that I would have glommed onto when I was a kid if I could have connected with anybody that was associated with the shows I loved, I would have spent all night in my room doing so. And we found a real loyal fan base that we knew was following us from place to place. We even found ways to feed them back then. There's an episode. I think they've had to bleep out the number, but we can't do this anymore. We bought a cell phone. The character Turk wanted to change his cell phone number, and we put it on the air.

31:15It spelled out call Turk plus one other number somewhere. Anyways, and then we bought that number, and then we had the cell phone on set and the coolest thing in the world was the phone would ring. If you turn on the phone, it would ring 24 hours from every country in the world. It was so fun. And so many young people would freak out because sometimes it would be like Donald and they'd go, is this Turk? The best version of this ever is I was self-indulgent. I took the phone home sometimes. I took it home one weekend and we would shoot. My wife's laughing because she's going to she knows she's going to get made fun of.

31:50The I took the phone home after we were shooting and it was like 1230 or 1 in the morning And I came in and I was talking to someone about the show and they were excited and When I walked into the house and I was like, so yeah, anyways, that's how we put together the musical We did this and this and my wife goes what the fuck are you doing? It's 1 30 in the morning And this girl on the phone goes, oh my god, is that Jordan?

32:18oh yeah but at my house she goes by krista and i gotta go well so this show despite all the 23 or whatever moves around gets to its eighth season and at the end of the eighth season if i recall correctly there's a bit of a voiceover about what it means to what it really means to be a doctor, but what you've said was kind of also what it really means to be a TV writer. You could personalize it. And then I think there were outtakes and people are saying goodbye. And this was it. Yeah. And then it was back the next season. It was such a, look, it's so fun to get a chance to talk about this because first of all, by the way, if any of you are nerdy TV freaks, watch the voiceover.

33:05It was so fun for the staff because, yes, it was what it means to be a doctor, but it barely makes sense for a doctor. But if you know it's really about what it means to be a TV writer, it makes total sense. All right. So the show ended in a nice way, and it had moved back to ABC, and ABC came and said, you guys want to do a spinoff? And I'm like, oh, yeah. I mean, I'm not going to work on it because I was doing a different show. I had already started a show called Cougar Town, which I thought was awesome. Worst show name of all time. I'm sorry. If you haven't watched it, check it out. It's pretty good.

33:39They said they wanted to do a spinoff, and it was going to be called Scrubs Med School. Scrubs Med. And we cast new people. Dave Franco, awesome. Carrie Bechet, awesome. You see her in Argo. Eliza Koop, Mike Mosley. Other people were running it, other writers I had worked with. I think there was only one Scrubs writer even on the whole staff. And this is my feeling, right or wrong, because it's so interesting. you know it happened with uh shrinking recently that some people that are fans are like you have to end the show and i wish i could take those people off social media and say if you end a show you are ending 125 people's careers in a really really down time in the industry that's just not bueno you can't do it right and so scrubs they you know at scrubs med hey do you want to keep that cast and crew working for another year definitely the only bummer was as networks do and they're allowed to they started to panic a little bit about whether it would work and we hadn't really found the show yet and they said we're going to change the title we're going to keep it as scrubs but it won't be part of the original thing and um and then they made arrangements totally understand it for zach to be on uh more than just the first you know two episodes and uh The bummer is I'll watch that show, and I didn't work on it, and I think I am unbiased a little.

35:00If it wasn't called Scrubs, I probably would have watched that show and enjoyed the crap out of it and seen if it could get its legs. But because it was sold kind of as a continuation of the show, it bummed people out, and I get that too. Well, for you, those next few years before Cougar Town, you try a few different other, you know, there's another, an unaired pilot, right, nobody's watching. there's Clone High, there's a few things that were going on. Clone High was the bomb, though, too. That was the bomb, okay, okay. These two kids made Clone High with me, and I don't know if they're going to do well or not, but they were, no, it's Chris Miller and Phil Lord.

35:34You guys got to go see Project Hail Mary if you haven't seen it. It's their latest movie. It's so good. I'm trying to figure out a way I can take credit for that, but I haven't nailed it yet. They are on my short list of people who have worked for me that have to hire me when I'm unhirable. That's right. Yeah, I'm very excited about it. Well, they're on their way. But for you, it's interesting because Cougar Town, even though it only goes on in 2009, whereas you ended with Scrubs in 2010 or 2009, something like that. Well, so there wasn't a long gap. There wasn't really a gap, but I do take great pleasure in telling people I'm super lucky that most of the really horrible things I made were so bad that they didn't get on television.

36:21and I made some bad ones I did the TV version of Rush Hour did you guys love that? Liar Well but in a way there was a direct connection right between Scrubs and Cougar Town Well yeah at the end of I had worked on Friends I really loved Courtney Cox as an individual and she's really close friends with my wife and we wanted to see if we had a good time working together So she was in the eighth year of Scrubs for a bunch of episodes just to see how we got on. And she was just a pleasure to be with. That show famously started out as a room bit. You guys know what a room bit is? Some of you? Room bit is a joke that you make in the writer's room and that just makes you laugh every day.

37:08And that show existed at the start because Mark Petowitz, who ran Disney television at the time, called me up and said, would you ever make a show for Courtney Cox? and I said I think she's great but at the time this is true you know I was still fairly young and still I thought getting better but not great yet at writing female lead characters and I'm like I don't know I don't know if I'm the right guy for that job and then I went into the writer's room and I said you know what the bummer is I could walk into ABC which is so hard to get a TV on and say I'm gonna do a show called Cougar Town starring Courtney Cox and she's gonna play a woman that was married when she was 19 and, you know, is single at 40, and they'd buy it like that.

37:49And I could go, and then someone else, Kevin Beagle, a young writer on that show, said, yeah, and instead of transitions, every time a scene's over, a claw just goes, you know, and pulls it off the scene. We kept doing those jokes. And then finally, I was like, should I do this? And so it started with a tricky premise, but it became a show. So here's the value of it, too, for me. That show, the first two years of that show, three years of that show, there was more females on the writing staff than men had to be because Kevin Beagle and I shouldn't have been writing a show that starred Krista Miller, Busy Phillips, and Courtney Cox by ourselves.

38:25And the show became how adults while away the time drinking wine and kind of living at the end of the cul-de-sac and hopefully finding community with each other. It became something we're all really proud of. and so it went on from 2009 to 2015 but you after the third season departed as showrunner and I think it's around that time that you set up at Warner Brothers television right 2011 and you again I think it's important people look at you maybe from afar and they just see an upward incline uninterrupted. But you have hiccups once in a while, too. And I think after Cougar Town, you've said there was kind of a run there of some tough ones.

39:12I did not expect to have a career renaissance in my mid-50s. If somebody had shown up at my door and said you're not allowed to write to watch, why would they say I couldn't watch TV anymore? That's so mean. You're grounded. They said I wasn't allowed to write TV anymore and I had to go do something else. I was so lucky and had such a great run, I think I would have been sad but okay. But I couldn't figure out how to crack it. You know, I was doing multi-camera shows. I worked at Warner Brothers, which still did a network model, so I was making shows called Ground Floor and a show called Undateable.

39:42And look, I love you for it. They were fun. I just couldn't get over the hump. You know, and no self-pity, by the way. I'm one of a bazillion out there. They're just trying and slugging away, and you don't know what makes a show work. I got knocked to my core of a now Oscar-winning writer or nominated I can't remember if he won or not named Dave Hemmingson and I created a show called Whiskey Cavalier that I thought was so good and if you haven't seen it check it out it's my favorite failure that we've ever done but it rocked me because I'm like oh we found it we did a pilot we did testing but I tested through the roof I had to move to the Czech Republic to shoot it because we such an expensive action comedy show it shot in Prague make sure you spend some time in Prague it's amazing it really is pretty no one's going to Prague the and it didn't work and it was it went on TV and lasted all of the 12 13 episodes we made and I did not know what I was supposed to do after that because I was sure that was gonna you know work as a TV show so it seems like you had a writer growing up who meant a lot to you and this is a kind of a ballsy thing to do like hey I want to take your work and adapt it into and add to it and adapt it into a show which ends up being bad monkey right but before there could be bad monkey or before there was bad monkey there's Ted Lasso they're tied together and they're tied together can you share uh they're very all my you know I'm not good at thinking of my own ideas they all have to be stuff I steal from my life for real I was obsessed with Carl Hiaasen as a kid my mom's family is from Florida He's an unbelievable American satirist.

41:24If you haven't read his books, you should check them out. They're so funny. And he's such a great guy. He was an award-winning journalist that wrote for the Miami Herald until, you know, five years ago still. I wrote a pilot for it. Jason Sudeikis wanted to talk to me about starring in it, but it was a bait-and-switch. So I went to visit Jason. He didn't want to do Bad Monkey, but he wanted me to turn this series of unbelievably funny sketch commercials he had made to promote the Premier League into a TV show. I was like, well, all right, I missed on Bad Monkey with you. That's all right, brother.

41:56But I said, I'll watch him. And I went and watched him, and I thought they were so funny and loud and bombastic and the very thing that would probably be a barrier to entry five years earlier when he had done that, which is the idea of somebody that was not qualified for a huge job. getting that job and then making everybody's life miserable. I'm joking, I'm joking. You know, populism had kind of reared its head in the world. And so I called him up and I said, I think there's definitely a show here because we were of like minds. He said the hard part is going to be convincing people that it's going to be a deeper show, a little bit about mental health and a little bit about mentorship.

42:41And when we went around to sell it all around town, you know, these are the way these stories work. no one was remotely interested. Everybody, every single place passed. They all watched the loud commercials, and no matter what we said, they thought it was just going to be like an SNL sketch about this, you know, loud, bumbling, idiot American coach who doesn't know the rules of soccer. And Apple, who is kind of an upstart streaming site, purchased it. I think they thought that's what they were getting, and it changed my life, changed my career. I'm very grateful for it. So you've said, quote, Ted Lasso was the first time that somebody brought my brand to me, close quote.

43:18How would you describe your brand? Oh, my brand. It sounds so pretentious to even say it. I'm a softie. I love comedy and laughing, but caring about the characters so much that I can be, you know, I always use in the writer's room the word manipulative is a negative word with your spouse. or so I've been told.

43:47It's got a thumbs up over there. But in television writing, it's a great word. The shows that you all love, the movies you love, are extremely manipulative, and that's my favorite type of television, is ones that I'm laughing and I'm enjoying the ride, and they sneak up and manipulate me and tweak my feelings a little bit. And I'm like, whoa, I did not see that coming. That is a, you know, and by the way, it doesn't even have to be comedy. I was, I went back and watched that episode of Buffy called Hush, you know, again recently. So good, right? I'm out right now promoting The Pit, which is the greatest show on TV.

44:24The point is, that's what I like to do. And Jason had a very clear vision of how people aren't going to know what they're getting with Ted Lasso, and they think he's going to be this bumbling fool, but in fact, He's going to be this curious man who shines a light on everybody else's misperceptions. And I always got to give props to him. He had Don't Be Judgmental, Be Curious amped up before we even started. And so I'm like, oh, I know how to do this. It was very exciting for me. And just so, again, it's kind of amazing how happy accidents happen. Again, you meet with him about Bad Monkey. It leads to Ted Lasso.

45:05You had a pilot I believe that went unfortunately nowhere that also marked the beginning of your Collaboration with Brett Goldstein on Ted Lasso and then co-creating with him and Siegel shrinking So how did you and how did you and Goldstein Brett? I did a pilot called spaced out a Donald Faison was in so I only worked with the same people and just so you know If Brett Goldstein ever comes up here, he will not call it spaced out. He calls it space turk I did hear that. He calls that show Space Turk. But I recognized early on in Brett a kindred spirit. He was hired on that show to be one of the leads of it, but he immediately helped us write jokes, and he was a super successful writer and comedian in the UK.

45:48And we needed some writers on the staff of Ted Lasso that were not only unbelievably talented but soccer fanatics. and Brett's family was a every weekend loyal, you know, Brett Goldstein, Phoebe Walsh, both from the UK, wrote on that show. Both their families entrenched in that, you know, very regional world. He was Tottenham, and I think Phoebe Walsh, he was the Hotspurs, right? Is that right? Yeah, exactly. And then I think Phoebe, I could be wrong, but I think Phoebe was Liverpool, but I'll have to check that. But and both families with lifetime tickets and all that stuff And Brett is if you ever hear him talk he's the sweetest most sensitive guy in the world And the fact that he is Roy Kent and a sexual icon now Even my wife thinks he's hot that's I don't like at all and I don't get it.

46:45I don't get it. I don't get it What All right, okay, because he's because he's so sweet and he loves me there you go well So you guys from being as you say so unexpected it ends up going for three seasons. However, we now Have things look forward to going ahead but the plan it's interesting because it sounds like the plan for Ted Lasso like with shrinking apparently was three and out right well here's what's interesting right and I don't know how to because I tried to explain this on social media recently with shrinking and confused people. So basically, just so you guys know, because shrinking was pitched as a three-episode, three-season story.

47:26And then I said, no, we're going to keep doing it just with, we're going to do a new story now. And so people said, a new shrink story called shrinking with different actors and actresses? Like Beef or something. I was like, no, the same cast, but they'll be playing different characters. And I'm like, I'm going to go to bed.

47:43this isn't working um no the way i like approaching streaming television is what i thought was so exciting and maybe it's just my own personal response to this you guys don't understand but when i i'm a dinosaur and when i when i uh did network television uh it was not even unspoken it was spoken your job was to write a group of characters that never changes that can be on for 150 episodes and be comfort food to people. So much so that one of my favorite Zach Braff jokes I tell often is in the eighth year of Scrubs, someone asked him how much his character had changed. And he said, I think I have a beard now.

48:21Because he's like, at that point, he was like 33 and still going, and having weird fantasies and stuff. And so what really excited me about streaming is every time I pitched a streaming show, I pitched the world, the characters, and because I want to tell a whole story, I go, here's the beginning, middle, and end. Okay? And they say, but what if the beginning and middle and end happen and people still want to watch the show? And I'm like, well, if the characters are that good and rich, we'll come up with another story. Ted Lasso is a great example because Jason stayed very true. I didn't work on the show the third year, but he stayed very true to what we pitched as the beginning, middle, and end of that show.

49:03and then people will see when the new Ted Lasso comes on later this year that it is Ted Lasso, but it's a completely different story. There's no way that people could even mix him up. So shrinking, we're going to keep it going because who wouldn't want to keep working? If Harrison Ford does an interview and says, I'm happy for this to be my last acting gig, in what world am I going to go too bad? It's all over, Harrison. Pack it up. I'm out. Well, and part of the reason I think that you stepped down or stepped away more in the third season of Ted Lasso was because that was when shrinking was getting going.

49:49Yeah. And it was a real personal story to me. And Brett and I wrote it in the UK in our downtime. and Harrison Ford is playing a dear personal friend of my wife's Phil Stutz. If you're looking for something to watch tonight, there's a great documentary on him on Netflix called Stutz. He's an amazing therapist with Parkinson's that's still out there fighting the good fight. And Jason's story, you know, we dialed him in and he kind of really took control and helped us write that character. It's also based on a true story that my wife and I kind of keep close to our vest. And it was just kind of a super cool passion project.

50:29I had no idea that it would resonate this much. I get very lucky that I found, as my voice or brand is, if I write about things that have affected me emotionally, often it seems authentic enough that some people dial in. And I'm learning now that anytime I've tried to do something that feels like, hey, this would be a good idea I've never experienced it and I don't know anything about it. It always comes off as inauthentic and those are the swing and misses. Now if there's anyone here who has not yet sampled shrinking, let's just, I guess, a briefest way to kind of tease it and correct me if you do it definitely, but a therapist whose wife's recently passed away goes a little off the rails, but with the support of his neighbors and friends and mentor at the therapy office, you know, forges forward.

51:26Is that fair enough? Look, I always say my favorite thing about streaming television, Scott, is, you know, you and I have been around long enough that if I had tried to pitch this in Spin City days, if I had gone in, I'm like, hey, I want to do a comedy, and it's about this dude that his wife died. She got run over by a drunk driver, and he's being an awful father, and he's hanging out with sex workers and he's doing a lot of narcotics and he's just a horrible person, they'd be like, dude, you have to go. So that's part of the fun of it. Well, even just the idea, though, that you could do a comedy about grief, maybe I'm forgetting something, but I don't know much of a precedent.

52:05Was that something that even you were totally sure you could do? I wasn't sure it would work, but my wife and I, our family and our extended families, no judgment on how anybody, Look, everybody in here, everybody I know is minimum one or two degrees separated from just a shit show of tragedy, of illness, of bad things happening to people you love, of tough breaks. And I understand that people all deal with it in great ways, different ways. My family darkly laughs our way through it. It's the only way we can tolerate it and the only way we can survive. It's the only way I can tolerate the world around me right now.

52:48And so I had the sense that even if it didn't work, it would feel honest and real, at least the way that people talk about it. But no, one of the great excitements still in my life is I have no idea if anything's going to work. I really don't. It's why I was so shocked that Whiskey Cavalier, Whiskey Cavalier, it's going to fucking haunt you. I'm going to get that show back on just to prove it. Yeah. Why not? You probably could right now. What if I held grudges that much? Based my whole career around it. Well, so with this one, obviously you had, my understanding is you and Brett, as you say, were developing your track together.

53:26I guess Jason, what led you to Jason? We didn't even have the whole show yet, but we knew for it to work, we had to have an actor that could do horrible things and people would still like him and feel sorry for him. That's your guy. And we're like, Jason Siegel seems to have that face that you can't. By the way, and he joked when we called him up, he was like, yeah, if someone shows me their baby, I can go, that's an ugly fucking baby. And they'll all laugh and go, ah! It's just Jason. It's Jason. He's so lovely. So we dialed him in early and knew that as a guy that had gone through some stuff himself, that if he helped us kind of design that character, it'd be a great part of the team.

54:08And then can you take us through how the rest of this kind of incredible ensemble came together? We can start at home and go from there. Sure, at home is the best. Look, I've done my wife a great disservice. Wait, I just always thought she was the funniest chick on the planet, you know, because I had seen her in... Yeah, you can give me a prop. I had seen her in Seinfeld. She's one of the only actresses, by the way, it's good trivia, to play two completely different characters on Seinfeld. You've got to look that up. She was the girl that didn't care about looks. George dated, which made him insane.

54:41And she was also the woman whose velvet jacket George liked to feel to touch it, and she fired him. So she was two different characters, I think, and only like a year apart, which I don't think you're allowed to do anymore. I always thought she was so funny, and I always wrote her as just this acerbic, darkly sarcastic, you know. I used to say that Krista's just like the characters she plays, only she's slightly meaner in real life. And that was any any thoughts on that. And that was a joke that gave me joy. She gets to respond in the segment. No, no, no. But the truth is, she's I wouldn't be with that person.

55:29She's lovely and loyal. And my realization and shrinking, you know, when I was like, oh, I'm going to write this part for her. is she's this insanely talented actress, you know, beyond just being funny. And in Shrinking, we cast her, I don't know why I'm telling this story, she told me to go through the cast, we'll be here for two hours. But there's an early scene with Jessica Williams, who's also amazing, that Krista was, yeah, sure. And Krista was being tagged on being just a mom, you know, and my wife kind of disappeared from pop culture for a second. to give birth to and raise our three kids.

56:11And she turned that, the whole concept of someone saying that you're just a mom to know, being such a hurtful thing. And it became such an emotional scene. And so I was just blown away by her acting chops. And you're so good on the show, I would probably cast you if you didn't sleep with me.

56:36Anyways. So we got Jason, we got Krista, we wrote a Harrison Ford type in the script. He's my neighbor. We got oddly helped. I was trying to think of a story that hadn't come out. I was able to get Harrison the script because I think he kind of remembered me from some just from, you know, staring at him and yelling the word Harrison every time he passed me in the street, which I do, by the way. Just two things. Every time I saw him before I knew him, I'd be like Harrison! He didn't know who I was. I'd do that. And then just so you guys know, I mortified Matt Tarsus, who I created Rooster with.

57:10He's a great writer. We're on the same lot as The Pit. And when we go to our stage for Rooster or for Bad Monkey, we often pass their stage. If I see any actor or actress from The Pit without slowing down, I just go, The Pit! And they always look over and they're not sure what's going on. So, anyways, here's a story that hasn't been told. I don't know if Harrison wanted to meet with us at first, but he was talking to Phoebe... Help me out, Phoebe Wallbridge. She saw Brett Goldstein. I guess there's Indiana Jones stuff going on in the UK, and Harrison was meeting with Brett, and she called Brett and me the cool kids.

57:50I think Harrison liked them. Kids. And Brett met with him in London, and then the story that you guys have all heard, so I'll go quick, is then he didn't really know who Jason Segel was, so he sent him Jason Segel's, a couple of his best movies, including Sarah Marshall, and he sent a thing to back that, if you don't remember that Jason has full frontal nudity in Sarah Marshall, and he sent back a little note that said, the kid is great, tell him nice penis.

58:24That's great. So that's how Harrison signed on. Well, I mean the whole group seems to I've seen you guys at a bunch of different things and it does seem to be the kind of Bond that you can't fit and Luke Tenney I know Just so you know we did you we did Jessica Williams. We got her from the daily show. She's a rock star I Ted McGinley who you guys will see later is a Absolute stud and and for scrubs only two actors tested for dr. Cox It was John C. McGinley and Ted McGinley. I only worked with McGinleys. And Ted and I swore that we were going to work with each other sometime. And then, but one of the great pleasures, you know, for me, besides this amazing— and Michael Urie, who's just insane, the stage actor's great.

59:11But watching Luke Tenney and Lukita in the heart— Maxwell in the heartless world of Hollywood, if they had landed— It's okay. I got a booming voice.

59:22Bill Lawrence:Don't worry, don't panic. No, no, no, we'll get... I'm back. What's up? I'm back. If they had landed and not crushed with these kind of all rock stars, they just would not have gotten much screen time. But Luke and Luke Heter are so good. They're stars in their own right, and they get to be part of people just seeing them for the first time. I can't tell you how much pride it gave me that not only did I forget Luke was on Shrinking, but on The Pit, he's the sexiest fucker. That guy that guy is the man Anyways, well there are There have been over these three seasons so many memorable You guys don't realize that love you bill was Luke.

1:00:04He's hiding back there Well, I mean just when I think back a couple that I'm just gonna mention season two that I think it's the finale where Harrison gives this amazing kind of monologue which I understand was perhaps partially inspired by something that happened in the Spin City era. I'll ask you to talk about that. But also, season three, you have Harrison with the real deal, your OG, Michael J. Fox, and it just takes things to another level. And I guess I just wonder, you know, that trajectory of you're working with arguably the biggest movie star of our time who's decided to take a leap of faith and get into TV and is doing with you guys very much a collaborative thing, but some of the best stuff he's ever done.

1:00:55Oh, he's so good. Yeah. By the way, the only thing I like to argue with, and you'll back me on this, man, is people, sometimes people aren't as informed as you. By the way, give it up for Scott. He's so good at this. No, I mean it, because we both had experiences that it's not an easy thing to do. But some people go, oh, my gosh, You got Harrison Ford to try comedy. I'm like, I got dudes been doing comedy for a hundred and fifty years Who's who's the comic relief in Star Wars? I love you. I know By the way, just so you guys know not a scripted line if you read about it That's a Harrison Ford original right there by the way, which he gives us all the time.

1:01:38I think the end of the second year talking about not being able to do the thing that you love anymore. I watched Harrison accessing probably what it means to have had this amazing career and be looking at, you know, he's coming up on 83 of whether or not he gets to keep doing this thing he loves for much longer. And he started talking about it. I'll tell you the most embarrassing thing. The coolest thing was all the actors and actresses. We had a bunch of cameras I was directing. The coolest thing was everybody that was getting emotional and crying. It was not something that we intended to do.

1:02:08It just felt very real. And so everybody was emotionally affected by it. The embarrassing thing was I got caught up in it and I forgot to say cut Which was incredibly embarrassing because Harrison's doing this emotional thing and then finally he's like are we done? But just to follow up I that moment I believe you wrote it and it was be it was inspired You know, I always want props to the staff, you know, even the scripts that I write and even and Neil Goldman runs that show with me. He's an amazing writer. And my favorite thing is the collaborative process of TV writing. That was without a doubt influenced by, you know, it's a very weird experience doing Spin City because I was very young when it started and I was one of the people in the know, but I was too young to understand it with Mike.

1:02:59When he started that show, he had already been diagnosed with Parkinson's and he literally said, I'm going to do four years, 100 episodes, I'm going to start a Parkinson's Foundation. You know, he had this all mapped out in his head. And when it finally kind of got public out of necessity because of his health, he kind of broke it to the cast and crew of what he was dealing with. And, you know, at the time, was completely unaware if he would be able to continue acting. And if you remember, when he left Spin City, he retired. and then for me what was so cool was Scrubs was being bounced around from place to place to place to place and I said hey Mike I could use a big show how about coming out of retirement and doing Scrubs and he actually did and and then he was so cool and then he went from that he went and did like The Good Wife and a bunch of other shows and then this recent experience was the only time it flipped because I ran into him and you know he's struggling but he's still doing more than all of he's doing so much for the world but he actually said how are you doing a show about Parkinson's and I'm not fucking on it that's great well we have about three minutes left and I want to I wish we could give even more time to your newest show Rooster but can you tell us just the I want to cover just where the seed of this idea and working with Steve Carell on that and then a couple rapid fire.

1:04:27Sure. I'll go quick for Rooster. I told you guys I don't know how to do anything unless it's part of my life. Here's the dirty secret is Steve Carell is playing Carl Hiaasen, who wrote Bad Monkey. And we got to know Carl, and he's this unbelievably, so much humility. You want it to be, you go like, this can't be real, but he's 14 bestsellers, and his buddy Elmore Leonard, if you say, you're like Elmore Leonard, He's like, no, no, no, he's an amazing author. I'm just, you know, I'm a journalist that got lucky. And he's the sweetest guy and still trying to kind of find his, you know, his place and his bearings.

1:05:05He's uncomfortable in his skin but lovely and funny. And we took that and combined it with the fact that Steve, Matt Tarsus, and I all have adult daughters, all the same age, all who understandably don't want us in their lives anymore at the level that we want to be in their lives. And that's where the show came from. It can all stem from my daughter's a singer, Charlotte Lawrence. She's good. She's good. She's killer. I was just visiting her on tour and she let me go backstage and act like I was part of the crew. And then in Paris, she had this cool outfit on. Some would say sexy. I would not.

1:05:41And I said, it's a true story backstage. I said, you should probably put on pants. And then she said, I think it's time for you to go. hall. Anyways, that's what Rooster's about. It's really, it's excellent. Alright, last thing is just some rapid fire. Sure. How do you juggle like I think the count right now is five, how are you doing so many different things at the same time? You said a little bit of it is I'm still, I still feel so lucky to get to do this if they're dumb enough to let me keep writing shows. I'm going to do as many as I can and get as many of us going as possible, but the cool thing for me, you know, whether it's Cabot McMullen, the production designer, he and I celebrated 31 years together.

1:06:24Neil Goldman, who show runs Shrinking With Me, was one of the original writers on Scrubs. Matt Tarsus was one of the original writers on Scrubs, Asim. It's generally surrounding myself with other talented people and empowering people. The reason showrunners you might love disappear sometimes is it's a ridiculous job if you try to do everything yeah and burn out and so I don't I if I what if I told my wife what outfit she should wear on a show we would never talk again it'd be I mean look how I'm dressed I didn't pick an item out myself it was it was all picked up by her so it's empowering other talented people and um I get to do exactly the type of stuff that I want to do it's so fun any interest in doing more films yeah you know it's interesting I I've never my one taste of movies, I was going to make Fletch into a, the reboot of Fletch into a movie, and I chickened out and split way back when I was a kid.

1:07:21I think, I've been thinking about it a lot because the, I got very inspired by Chris and Phil, that's why I mentioned it before. Project Hail Mary is the type of movie that I love, which was, spoiler, I'm not going to do spoilers, but It was beautiful. It had heart. It made me laugh. I saw it with my family. It blew my doors off. So the idea of getting into that is something that really intrigues me. Warner Brothers Television's been your home since 2011, as we said. It's currently being run by Channing Dungey, right? Yep. It's being acquired by Paramount. How's that going to affect your life?

1:08:00Any concerns about that? No, you know what's interesting?

1:08:05Maybe I'm living with blinders on, right? I feel pretty confident that until I put a piece of crap out there and then I'll be a ghost just like last time, which is okay. It's how Hollywood works. Then I'm going to get to make stuff no matter how this goes down. But Hollywood is so weird because we hear these things now so fast and so quick. and until it's actually the reality, I just, you know, already in this journey, it was Netflix without a doubt and now Paramount without a doubt and now if you go online, maybe, you understand what I'm saying. So easy example for all of you out there that might be better for artists is I lived through the death of the multicam, the death of comedy to reality TV, the death of the single cam, the death of the drama and the death of the multicam again it's all horseshit do you mean and uh uh because it just takes one thing that breaks through you know so lastly here we are uh 34 years i believe since billy yeah i i don't remember you got to hollywood in 1990 i got to hollywood in um the end of 1990 all right so 30 36 or so years there um we've talked about all of us.

1:09:23What are you proudest of? You know what's interesting? It's gonna be a bummer because it's not to work. Every time someone asks me like what my favorite episode of Scrubs is or Spin City or Shrinking, it's always the pilot and not because I wrote it but because it's when I got to first meet all those great talented people and I've kept them all in my lives you know in my life you know I've kept all those those friendships and those relationships matter to me so I think for me I'm proudest of the fact that I think that the community I've built though they might say that I'm a lot I think that they would also say I'm a pretty good guy there you go and I let you do hear that everywhere so thank you so much for coming here and thank you guys thanks for coming bill lawrence thank you guys Thank you.

1:10:54and to leave us a rating and review on your podcast app. And to follow us on Twitter and Instagram, where our handle is at Awards Chatter. On those platforms, we announce upcoming guests and provide details about special live recordings of the podcast that you can attend. Until next time, thanks again for tuning in.

1:11:13Bill Lawrence:Spring just slid into your DMs. Grab that boho look for that rooftop dinner, those sandals that can keep up with you, and hang some string lights to give your patio a glow up. Springs Calling. Ross. Work your magic.