“MICHAEL SCHUR: I believe that there are many, many, many, many
advantages to doing a show on a premium cable or streaming service like, for
example, there’s no commercials, you can curse, you can do whatever you want, you
can make the episodes whatever length you want-
ANDY GREENWALD: I like that “doing whatever you want” was the third
thing after “cursing”.
MS: Cursing, I, I wholeheartedly support cursing on TV. I think
there should be more cursing in general- and more bleeping
AG: But bleeping is funnier than cursing.
MS: I kind of agree, um, but you can also, like there’s on network
you run, you have to run the credits over the show which interrupts the show,
there’s snipes for other shows that interrupt your show… so I, there obviously,
there are many obvious advantages of going somewhere besides a network, but I
think there are also advantages that are maybe less obvious of staying on
network, besides just a sense of loyalty that the NBC Peacock means something to
me, it does. I think comedy works really
well when there are a lot of obstacles to it, um, I think obstacles breads
creativity and breeds good problem solving and I think that comedy works best
when it’s very crisp and lean, and I think that if you say to someone like,
“You can have as much time as you want, and you can- there’s no commercials,
and you can mill around, and just get in that pool and swim around”, I think a
lot of- my opinion, some comedies, many comedies, or at least half hour shows
that are on other networks, premium
networks we’ll call them, can get a little “meander-y” and a little
kinda soft. And that’s not to say that’s bad, or maybe that’s exactly what
they’re going for, but there’s a way in which having to write in a crisp,
three-act structure, or now it’s like a four-act structure- which is a whole
other problem, but having to write to, a
certain, when you’re breaking stories it forces you to be really lean and mean,
it forces you to edit yourself, it forces you to think about the classic
storytelling structure of Act One, Act Two, Act Three, and I, and I, it’s not
that you don’t remember those things, you don’t suddenly forget them if you go
somewhere else, but I think it becomes less vital to your process, and I kind
of believe that it’s good for writing to be, to be presented with those
specific obstacles- for comedy at least.
…
MS: The show should be as long as the story demands, not as long as
you can take with it. And part of what I like about being on a network is- it’s
a little annoying that every episode has to be exactly twenty-one minutes and
thirty seconds, I think it’s extremely unlikely, that the optimal length for
every single episode of every single show is exactly that long… but it is a
sort of, like, this is the deal man, that you have to write, and edit, and act
a story that is length, and it’s not very long, and there’s something that’s
kind of perversely appealing about that to me.”
