Bill Lawrence: "I'm very lucky that some of the garbage things I wrote never got on TV"

It’s a Bill Lawrence fall on Apple TV+. The prolific producer, writer, and director has back-to-back releases on the streamer: The Vince Vaughn-led crime comedy Bad Monkey ended its first season on October 9, and the second batch of Shrinking launched on October 16. Along with Ted Lasso, these shows have helped Lawrence make his mark on modern TV, with shows that lean into strong emotional hooks and ensemble-driven, punchy humor. And to be fair, this tonal balance has been his M.O. for decades thanks to network hits like Spin City, Scrubs, and Cougar Town.   

The A.V. Club had an in-depth chat with Lawrence about navigating the streaming era after a long career in network TV, what he misses about the “old days,” and what to expect in the upcoming episodes of Shrinking, which adds series co-creator Brett Goldstein to its ensemble. (Speaking of, if you haven’t seen the season-two premiere of Shrinking, or the season-one finale of Bad Monkey, please do so before reading on.)   

The A.V. Club: What was the process of working on Bad Monkey season one and Shrinking season two, considering they released one after another?

Bill Lawrence: I’m not a great multitasker. An advantage of being older and having done this for so long is that I have ridiculously talented people working with me. The production designer of Shrinking and I celebrated our 30th anniversary working together recently. She was the production designer on Spin City, which means I created Spin City when I was 11 [laughs]. Sometimes that stuff can be a little overwhelming, but the weird thing was that we shot Bad Monkey a good long while ago. It got caught up in the writers’ strike last year so we weren’t allowed to edit or finish any of it. That’s why it got weighed on top of Shrinking a little bit. The hardest part for me personally was going back and forth between the first year of production on Shrinking and Bad Monkey. They were shooting simultaneously by accident. So I was zipping back and forth between Miami and L.A. It was fun because I worked with friends and so many talented people who could carry the heavy lifting. 

AVC: What were some big-picture goals for Shrinking season two now that it feels like everyone has settled into the show’s groove?

BL: What you said is such a compliment. I don’t like to keep waxing philosophically about television, but the weird thing about the old network show days is that with the first season of Spin City, we did 24 episodes. That’s almost three seasons of a streaming show. The point is: No matter how hard you work, the reason everyone loves shows like Friends, Will & Grace, Cheers, and The Golden Girls is that those people were given time to create chemistry and connection, especially in a comedy. You want to feel the familial vibes. I believe wholeheartedly that people want to hang out with these characters. That’s usually hard to achieve in only eight or 10 episodes. This may sound corny, but back in the old days when you did a TV show, you’d be like, “Man, if we start hitting our stride in eight to 10 episodes, the show is going to work.” That’s when you get to a point where you can’t take a joke from one character and wonder if you can give it to another. Everybody has specific voices that start to lock in. 

One of the things we’ve done in Shrinking is try to make these people hang out with each other, get to know each other, and push each other. You can see it as the actors start to develop chemistry, and they have to do it fast. I hope what you’re noticing now in season two is it feels like a real ensemble. Another side is that when we pitched the show, we said year one is about grief and year two is about forgiveness. I can only be authentic when the story is at least peripherally related to my life, and there’s a lot of that in Shrinking. Every family is dealing with the shit show that is out there right now. It’s a bummer that people find the topic of grief so universal. With a mix of those two things, we were hoping to create a show that people would want to spend time with. I think getting better and more natural in season two is a huge deal.

AVC: As revealed in the season-two premiere, series co-creator Brett Goldstein is playing the drunk driver who killed Jimmy’s wife. Did you always want to bring Brett on the show as an actor and also introduce this particular character? Did this feel like checking off both boxes? 

BL: One thing about pitching in the network TV days was that they didn’t want your characters to change at all. I think someone once asked Zach Braff how much J.D. changed from season one to nine of Scrubs, and he said he had a beard by then [laughs]. So with Shrinking, we pitched a three-season arc that involved the characters growing up and changing a lot. To achieve that, we knew the driver who killed Tia [Lilan Bowden] was going to show up in the second season because it would carry the theme of forgiveness. 

If we wanted the show to keep going beyond season one, we also couldn’t keep it all about Jason Segel’s character. So we established other stuff like a patient [played by Heidi Gardner] who pushes her husband off the cliff in the finale or Harrison Ford’s character having unresolved issues as a father. We left breadcrumbs so people can see some of the stories coming up. I think astute TV viewers like that but they also like to be surprised, which is what happens with Brett’s character as the episodes go on. 

The second part, and I’ve decided to own it, is that I almost screwed up the casting. When a show works, instead of begging actors to come and do a part, you can afford to say, “It would be cool to try and get this specific person.” For this role, I did not think of Brett immediately. He is not pushy so he was not throwing himself out there. I was joking about this but I fall prey to how you tend to mistake actors for their characters. I remember when I first went out on a date with my wife, Christa Miller, she was still in her The Drew Carey Show days. So a friend went, “Oh, she’s such a guy’s girl who drinks beer in the day and is from the Midwest.” I had to say she’s not like that at all; it’s just someone she plays on TV. She’s a very scary, intimidating, quick, and sharp woman from the East Coast. 

But yes, in my head, besides being a great writer and comedian, Brett was also the gruff Roy Kent from Ted Lasso. Jason Segel said that Brett should play this character. It opened up a door in my head because in real life, Brett is such a sweetie, and we needed this character to be played by an empathetic performer. The only thing is, because he’s an old friend and I’m a jerk, I made him shave his beard. It makes him look like he’s 12. 

AVC: Bad Monkey is based on Carl Hiaasen’s novel, but the adaptation adds quite a lot to it. What was the process for you and the writers to infuse your unique tone into an established story? 

BL: I haven’t been really scared about how something’s going to turn out in a long time because one of the cool things about having a long career doing what you and I do with writing is you get used to rejection and failure. I’m very lucky that some of the garbage things I wrote never got on TV. Anytime somebody says, “You have a bunch of good shows,” I think, “I have some awful ones, too.” I could bring you to the room where they’re kept so you can cringe.

I really felt pressure on Bad Monkey because Carl is an iconic writer, but more importantly, he’s an idol of mine. I convinced him to let me do this. It’s surreal for anybody to think of an idea and go to their favorite author and say, “I want you to trust me to make a show out of your book, but I’m going to have to add six or seven chapters to the middle of it that aren’t in your story.” He was so nice and supportive. He was what I think we are all occasionally lucky to have when someone turns out to be the way that you would hope they would be. He cares so much about the environment and about issues that I care about. I had an overwhelming fear of letting him down that I had not had since I was starting in the industry. It’s probably healthy for me. It made me nervous and work harder.

AVC: Compared to your other two Apple TV+ shows, Bad Monkey lives more on the edge because it’s grislier and unafraid to kill off main characters. Was it creatively fun to play in its genre? 

BL: Yeah, it’s not what I usually do. I talked to Carl, and he let me put some stuff of my own in there. It’s a spoiler I guess but whatever happens with the Dragon Queen’s [Jodie Turner-Smith] redemption arc is not in the book. And Carl had based her on a real person. A lot of his stuff starts with articles and research he collects, so the real Dragon Queen in Andros was a charlatan and never wavered from it. He’ll know better than me but I think ultimately she was incarcerated. 

I enjoyed melding the tones. It’s liberating for me as a slightly older TV writer because I’m probably one of the last people working from the generation where you were either a multi-camera sitcom writer or a serious drama writer. There wasn’t much back and forth between the two, but I’ve always been interested in that. Even when I was trying to sell Scrubs, I had to say it’s a broad, silly comedy with emotional depth. I grew up on shows that had an emotional streak in comedy. I was also a huge fan of banter-driven stuff with blood, gore, and capers. I’ve watched every Elmore Leonard show or movie like 1,000 times. Now we live in a world where genres are overlapping circles. I tried it first with ABC’s Whiskey Cavalier, but there’s an appetite for this stuff where the characters are more important than the caper itself. So the fact that one of my heroes is my way into that world and I get to try something new at this point in my career is…I didn’t expect to have a renaissance at 55 and get to do cool new things. 

AVC: Ted Lasso marked your big streaming debut in 2020. What was it like to navigate this new side of the business in terms of figuring out audience numbers and engagement?

BL: I always take great pains to make sure to say Ted Lasso is a foreign experience to me because it was me helping to execute Jason Sudeikis’ idea. That’s why I don’t talk about it much, especially where the show is going next or if there will be more because everybody’s just going to wait for Jason to talk about it. But the fascinating thing about entering the world of streaming is they want to know the beginning, middle, and end of a story. That was interesting to me. Jason and I have both been on shows that have gone on and on for nine years. Back then, you’d have to go to actors and say, “If you like this part, we’d like you to do it forever.” Now, I can put together a three-season arc and go to Harrison Ford and say, “If you want to do this, I need a certain amount of time, and you can do all the films in between.” It almost felt like entering the movie business.

AVC: Does it help planning a show for primarily only three seasons because that’s how you said Ted Lasso and Shrinking were pitched? 

BL: I’ll use Shrinking because, again, I shy from talking too much about Lasso just to protect myself because anytime it’s mentioned, it seems like I’m talking about the show coming back. But here’s an example of Shrinking that people should understand. The old sitcoms I used to do were supposed to go on in perpetuity in a way. The characters had little life moments, and I’d still try to tug at heartstrings, but I wasn’t telling a beginning, middle, and end story. What’s interesting for Shrinking is when I got Brett, Jason, and Harrison, and we were talking about what we thought the beginning, middle, and end of this story would be, Jason looked at me and said, “I’m having fun. What if we wanted to do more than three years?” The thing about streaming television is that you can tell a different story. It does open up your storytelling ability.

In network days, I might not have even necessarily been able to sell the story about a dude whose wife died so he’s drinking, drugging, and hanging out with sex workers, and he’s a horrible dad. Oh, and it’s a comedy. They would likely pass on it. But you also can’t go “I want to do nine seasons of this” because it has to end. Do I think Shrinking has to come to an end? You know, if we’re having fun, we will hopefully come up with a new two or three-season story for this group of characters, whether some of them splinter off, whether new ones come in. Thinking about this stuff has kept me inspired and engaged in the game. 

AVC:  Do you feel similarly about Bad Monkey because Carl Hiaasen’s book has a sequel, Razor Girl, that you could do next? 

BL: Bad Monkey is a different thing altogether. I think there should be a Carl Hiaasen Universe. I would love to do Razor Girl, and I’m hoping that no one can stop me [laughs]. Hopefully, we find out soon. The best thing about Carl’s worlds is I expect characters to traverse across stories. One of my favorite Easter eggs for people who love this genre is the cool story of Jackie Brown, an Elmore Leonard book that Quentin Tarantino adapted. Michael Keaton is a cop in it, and he’s great. A completely different studio then made another Leonard adaptation, Out Of Sight, with George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez. Keaton had to orchestrate making a cameo in it because these were two different studios, and he said that it’s another Elmore Leonard movie, so I’ve got to play this role again in it. I think that’s how Carl’s books are. Some characters go across novels and show up in different places. If they’re stupid enough to let me do it, I would love to. It would be super fun.  

AVC: With the three main characters of your three Apple shows, there’s a similar thread of being unable to let go of the past. In Bad Monkey’s finale, Andrew Yancy has to decide if he wants to live and not drown. And Jimmy’s season-two arc in Shrinking speaks of forgiveness only come from letting go. What is it about tapping into this specific emotion that fulfills you as a storyteller? 

BL: It’s an astute question. I think everybody’s life journey—for me, my friends, my family, my kids, and random people—is at least partly decided by how much or how little you get in your own way. I’ve been obsessed with this since I was a young writer because I used to say this about myself. I had a horrible case of getting in my own way. I was an absolute rock star in my twenties. It can also be about the inability to let go of things that are permanent obstacles. I really struggle when I write about things that aren’t authentic to me. So it’s not a surprise I often write about mentorship because it was a huge influence in my life, like my first high-school teacher who encouraged my writing. I named Scrubs’ Dr. Perry Cox [John C. McGinley] after another mentor, journalist Bob Cox. I love to write about male friendships and father-child relationships because it’s what I know best. 

That’s why it’s also not a surprise that my characters deal with the inability to get out of their own way and let the past go. These are things I fight with on a day-to-day basis. It’s also how my family operates. My dad is going through a horrible health crisis, and we laugh about some of these things together. It’s dark and it’s whatever and some people shut down completely. No judgment there, I get it. But I think I write the way I do because of how I deal with my shit. Right now, as Hurricane Milton approaches Florida, I’ve got tons of family living there. I’ve been FaceTiming and talking to them, and in the face of an impending storm, we’re laughing. The best-case scenario is it will suck and everybody will get through it. The worst case, well…. But what are you gonna do? You can’t just sit there and be overwhelmed by the darkness of it all. So I try to honor that and hope it feels authentic. 

AVC: Ensembles are a huge part of these shows and of the ones you’ve done in the past. The fun of it is seeing actors doing unexpected things, like Hannah Waddingham in Ted Lasso, Harrison Ford in Shrinking, or Meredith Hagner as a psychotic villain in Bad Monkey. How do you feel like you’ve mastered the casting process over the years? 

BL: There are two things I’m a believer in, and I hope they don’t seem contradictory. I don’t want to sound preachy either but I care about culture on the set. There’s a huge value in getting to know the vibe of the person you’ve just auditioned. There’s no wrong way, but people have different views of approaching art and different personalities. I like to know what a person is like when they’re not reading their lines. We also always tell the actors that when you do a pilot, the character is 50 percent the creator’s and 50 percent yours, but we get the tie-breaking vote. For a show to work, by the 10th or 20th episode, the character does need to be mostly the performer. They need to be able to say in a comfortable way that their character would not do this or say this.  

The other thing I have been pontificating about a lot lately is that someone said once, to be snarky, that there are Bill Lawrence players—as in, people from Spin City are on Scrubs, Scrubs actors are on Cougar Town, the guy from Cougar Town is in Bad Monkey, the janitor on Scrubs is playing Harrison Ford’s patient in Shrinking, et cetera. I think it’s an advantage to know an actor’s voice so that you can write for them to show their strengths and challenge them. Secondly, I don’t care about nepotism or bringing friends and family on either. If you are lucky enough in any walk of life to get to hire talented people that you would want to be around anyway, I think you’re nuts if you don’t do it.

AVC: What do you miss about working in the Spin City and Scrubs network days though? 

BL: It’s fun for me when my kids go back and watch a multi-camera sitcom. It reminds me of how it’s such a specific skill set for the actors, performers, and writers. And don’t get me wrong, when it doesn’t work, it can get eggy and hard to watch. But when it works, it can be brilliant and sharp. I remember there was a time that Hollywood was like, “Oh, this isn’t cool.” But I will still watch an episode of Cheers or Seinfeld. I miss the live-audience feel of those shows. That’s why I go back every once in a while. I miss having that comfort food.