#it’s a little embarrassing that the main characters are the weakest actors in the whole thing

[jupitersflytrap]

okay actually that one wasn’t too bad. still think the long-form plot is a shambles and the dialogue is not getting any better but i can’t say no to weeping angels.

might head back to the coal face to try and watch another episode of doctor who series 13 because i feel like i have to catch up before the 60th special

[roominthecastle]

Mike Schur on Ted Danson, the ethics of surprise twists, objectives vs superobjectives, and the narrative pitfalls of the reset button

(2017 Gold Derby interview)

How did Ted Danson come to join the project?

Mike Schur: He's my hero, acting-wise and comedy-wise. Cheers is my favorite show and Sam Malone is my favorite character in the history of TV. So I decided to pitch him the character, to write the character for him. I was driving to meet him at his manager's office and I had one thought going through my head constantly, which was "You've gotta be cool. Don't look like an idiot." I'm not a person who gets really revved up by a celebrity. There's a movie star or a TV star at my workplace every week, so I've kinda got inoculated to it a little bit. There are still some people who would make me jittery but not many. Ted was the biggest one. Honestly. Cheers was so formative for me, so important to me, that I got actively nervous. I kept thinking "You gotta be cool. You gotta be cool. You gotta be cool." I got to his office and I met him and he said, "I'm very excited to meet you." And I said, "I BET I AM MORE EXCITED!!" and immediately I was like "you are already blowing it." And he said, "Oh. Why is that?" And I said, "Because I consider you to be the greatest actor in the history of the medium of television." And it was so embarrassing, so not-cool, after telling myself to be cool a hundred times. I honestly thought I had blown it. I remember thinking that if I were this man, I would either think I was a disgusting suckup, or I would think this guy is trying so hard to make me believe something that isn't true, which is that he loves me this much, that either way I am out. Fortunately, Ted is a more centered person than I am. He let it go and I pitched him the show, we had a really great conversation and he signed on. That was the bumpiest moment for us. The first moment when I was an idiot. After that, completely smooth sailing.

He couldn't be a nicer person. He's very thoughtful and very kind and very chill. The reason I fell in love with him as an actor is his timing. I remember loving his comedic timing before I knew what the concept of comedic timing was. There's something about the rhythm of his delivery and the way he would pause. He commands a space better than anyone I've ever seen. We are writing these lines for him and I look at a script and because his style is so distinct and his timing is so good, you can imagine exactly how it's gonna sound, and then he executes it and it's exactly the way you imagined it. He's worked so hard at being good, it's inspiring. He's in his 60's and he doesn't need to prove anything to anyone ever, and yet he works so hard, he wants to get it right so badly and he's so humble in his approach. By human standards, it's great, we should all try to do our job well. But by Hollywood standards, it's shocking and truly inspiring how hard he works at his craft to try and get better every day at his age with his resume.

It's hard to think of a person who has done a better job in more different genres. You put him in a multi-cam sitcom, he creates an all-time hall of fame iconic character. You put him in a very dark, twisted drama in Damages, and he's still probably the best villain that show had. You put him in a single-cam sitcom, and he just blows the door off of it. Especially one where the character had to undergo a massive transformation over the course of the season. He was playing six different things at any one time and once we got to the end with the big twist, they all had to retroactively fit together, they had to be consistent. And Curb is largely improvised, for God's sake. It's like he's checking off genre by genre, being great in every one of them.

Did Ted know that twist was coming?

MS: Yes, from the beginning, from the meeting where I cracked into pieces. Ted and Kristen knew. I felt that actors of their stature deserved to know the full range of what they were signing on for. The entire show was going to be on the backs of Kristen and Ted in different ways. It was almost an ethical question for me because I was approaching these two actors who can basically do whatever they want in TV or movies or anything. In order to get them to sign on, I felt it would be almost unethical - knowing where I was going and what I wanted to do with the season and the show in general - I felt it would be borderline unethical to get them to sign on without them knowing the whole thing. And it was more unethical with Ted because SPOILER ALERT the secret is that this is not actually heaven, it is hell, and this entire thing is a torture chamber. Michael - Ted's character - has appeared to be the architect of a little slice of heaven, but everybody else except for the main 4 characters is an actor and they are torturing these four people. This neighborhood he put together was designed for the four of them to torture each other. They are supposed to be driving each other crazy for all eternity.

It wouldn't have been super unethical if I hadn't told Kristen because she was playing the same character all the way through the 13 episodes. But for Ted, I felt that if I don't tell him this, what I'm doing is getting Ted Danson to sign on to a show where he thinks he is playing essentially an angel, and then I'm going to reveal at the end that he is a demon. And that felt uncool. If he, for whatever reason, didn't want to do that, he should be able to say, "I don't like where this is going." If I hadn't come up with that twist when I pitched the show to him, I don't think it would have been unethical. But since I knew from before I ever talked to him or Kristen, I felt I owed it to them to tell them the whole story. Fortunately, they both liked it, they were both into it, and Ted was far more interested in playing a secret demon who appeared to be an angel than he was in just playing an angel, which I understand. It's a better gig. It's more fun to play the guy who turns out to be a crazed person than just a nice, pleasant, boring, happy nice guy.

It was also probably good to fill him in because it could have influenced the way he played scenes earlier in the season.

MS: True. Ted and Kristen knew and the other four actors in the main cast did not. [Their characters] were being fooled and I was like "let [the actors] be fooled, too, for as long as it's appropriate”. But because they didn't know, Ted, Kristen, and I had to come up with ways on the set to talk about what was going on. We used these acting terms called "objective" and "superobjective". Objective is what you are trying to accomplish in the scene and superobjective is the emotional, kind of resonant thing like a giant umbrella you are going for. So I'd say, "Ted, your objective in this scene is to make Chidi feel better, but your superobjective is to get him to throw his life's work into the garbage.” That's the "true task" that you're quietly, secretly aiming for. “What am I appearing to try to do?” versus “What am I actually trying to do?” He and Kristen handled it amazingly well. I really think that if you go back and watch everything that's in the show, you will see these tiny glimpses from time to time of Ted taking a certain amount of delight in what appeared at the time to be something good that was happening for one of the characters, but in reality it was a thing that was going to make that character's life even worse. It's a testament to how well they can juggle these objectives and superobjectives.

Ted really locked onto this one idea that he was a sort of a middle manager. That was a thing that appealed to him very early, that he is not God, or, in this case, the Devil, but he's in the middle, sort of a bureaucrat. He really liked that because it allowed him to play a middle manager trying to climb the corporate ladder, but also he doesn't have a lot of power and there's people above him that he has to answer to. Sometimes he screwed up and was incompetent, sometimes it looked like he was screwing up and incompetent but it was all part of the plan. He really liked that idea of inserting himself - in terms of this hierarchy - right in the middle. He's not the weakest guy but he's not the strongest, either. He really enjoys playing the nuanced middle, which is a very smart instinct.

Season 2

MS: The advantage of the way that we produced the first season and of knowing what the ending was before we even started writing episode two was that it gave us a lot of time to think about how we’re gonna dig ourselves out of the hole we were about to put ourselves in. Because when you upend the show to that extent and you literally press the reset button, it's a very risky thing creatively because number one: you hope the audience doesn't think "am I just gonna watch the same season again? How's that interesting? Everything goes back to square one." And the other dangerous thing is, you start to run the risk of the audience feeling like nothing matters. If Michael can just reset them whenever he wants to, then who cares? Who cares what they go through? Who cares whether they learn or grow or change or become better? So the main thing we tried to do was come up with a couple different structural pieces that couldn't happen, so it wouldn't be just the same season from beginning to end.

There is some external pressure that meant that Michael couldn't just reset them for the next five seasons. That pressure comes from this boss played by Marc Evan Jackson who basically says, "You can try again but if it goes sideways, you're done." There is a threat, a sort of sword of Damocles hanging over his head. And Eleanor managed in a very quick thinking kind of scrappy Eleanorish kinda way to sneak herself a note by shoving it in Janet's mouth. It says "Find Chidi." So when she wakes up, instead of having to put the whole thing together from scratch over the course of an entire year, she has directed herself to a person who can accelerate the process. These and a couple of other things we buried in there are our way of saying to the audience "it's not the same season, things are going to change and move on."