“Parks and Recreation” Showrunner Michael Schur on “Cheers”
A fantastic Vulture Q&A this week with Michael Schur, showrunner for the TV series “Parks and Recreation.” What’s so great about it is the dissection Schur does of his favorite sit-com “Cheers,” drilling down into the minutiae of why that series worked so incredibly well for its entire run (1982–1993). Some excerpts:
What special place does Cheers hold in your heart?
To me it’s the best sitcom ever made. Whenever I’m asked that question I always answer Cheers.
Without hesitation?
Yeah, I’ve always felt that way. I felt that way when I was a kid and I was watching it every week, and I felt that way as new TV shows emerged. There’s a case to be made for the British Office, in terms of it being revolutionary, but that’s more like a mini-series. Cheers did almost 300 episodes over eleven years. The thing that made it so great is it has a giant cast of incredibly great characters and they would get immense mileage out of just having them talk to each other. It wasn’t fancy or tricky, they didn’t have crazy plot moves. You just watched these amazing characters slowly change and evolve over eleven years. You watch these episodes and there are like four scenes sometimes in an entire episode. They’re in the bar and this happens and that happens and you go to commercial, then you come back and they’re still in the bar and they talk to each other and you’re just following this delightful story of these people in this place. And their scenes were so wonderful. The idea that … it’s literally in the theme song: It’s a place where everyone knows your name, it’s a pla
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The show deals with a group of people who all spend their entire lives together, both at work and after. That wasn’t a new concept: The Mary Tyler Moore Show was essentially the same thing, for one. What made this show different?
I think one of the great aspects of Cheers is that it wasn’t revolutionary at all. I personally think the best ideas for TV shows — at least comedies — are very low-fi ideas. High concepts often sell pitches in movies and TV, but, especially in TV when you’re talking about hopefully a 100- or 150-episode proposition, those concepts just burn off and then you’re stuck with nothing. The best shows are always the ones that are very, very low-concept and just about great characters. It’s a very famous story — and it’s true of Seinfeld and Friends and Cheers and a bunch of other great shows that are low-concept — they always start slow. Same with the American Office; at first people are like, “Mahh, I don’t like it, there’s nothing going on.” But it’s because there’s no big hook-y thing. It’s not “this guy has the ability to read people’s minds” or something. [Those kind of concepts] make a good pilot, but what makes a good series is just characters and relationships that take a while to explain and grow. And to me, Cheers is the best possible example of that. There’s nothing at the beginning of the series that’s hook-y or grabby or bright and shiny that would make a good pitch in a room. It’s just a place, a setting where a bunch of really great characters and great actors and great writers had a little laboratory.
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You said you had your favorite characters. Who were they?
Well, my favorites while the show were Sam, Coach, Woody, and Cliff. The same is kind of proven true in rewatching some of these episodes. I have a new appreciation for Frasier because when I was a kid watching the show and he would make a reference to George Sand or something I would have no idea what he was talking about. Having been to high school and college I now have a new appreciation for him. It really is an amazing performance from Kelsey Grammer, that’s one of the all-time great characters on TV. But I loved Sam because I thought he was so funny and because he was so handsome and just confident and he played for the Red Sox so that certainly helped. I loved Cliff because he was a nerd and into trivia and I was a nerd who was into trivia. I loved Coach and Woody because Coach and Woody are very stupid and stupid is the nuclear weapon of comedy. In terms of pure belly laughs, nothing will ever beat stupid people.
If you are trying to write TV comedy, this interview if pure gold. To read it, go here.
Question: Who was the best female comic foil for Sam: Diane or Rebecca? What do you say?