I’m standing in a lofty writers’ room on the third floor of a modern glass building at the edge of the Universal Studios lot, completely fulfilled. I’m making a comedy for NBC, one of America’s most iconic television networks, the one I used to watch Family Ties, Seinfeld, Diff’rent Strokes, and NewsRadio on. This comedy is mine, I cocreated it, I’m acting in it, I’m executive producing it. As if I needed one, I get a reminder every morning about how blessed I am and how far I’ve come when I pull onto the lot and slide into my own parking spot with my name on it right next to my own trailer. I smile so widely with such deep happiness and gratitude that I let out a little laugh. Every morning.
At the end of each day, my smile is even bigger. It reflects the creativity of the talented cast and writing team I’ve spent all day with. It still feels surreal to have been able to hire what we’re told is the most diverse writers’ room and cast in network television history. And because of this diversity, I find that I never have to justify myself or set up a cultural reference point. I never have to overexplain that actually no, this joke I pitched has no ethnic or racial signifiers. In this group of talented artists, I just get to be.
When I leave in the evenings, I don’t head out the way I came in. I always back out of my parking spot and go a few hundred feet past our soundstage, so I can drive through Back to the Future’s Courthouse Square. This home of the famous clock tower that powered Marty and Doc through space-time happens to be just past our building, so I make the pilgrimage each night, taking Middle School Me along. I roll down the windows and the warm California air runs across my face, drying my still-wet skin, a result of the makeup wipes that close out each shooting day. I usually drive a full loop and a half around Hill Valley, through the square once, then past the sign that says LYON ESTATES before disappearing through a parking lot bordering facades of a Brooklyn street, and onto Lankershim Boulevard and the 101 Freeway. I live each day with the excitement of what it means to be part of this world. Television is magic. I am fulfilled by my reality beyond measure.
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Designated Survivor (the political conspiracy drama on Netflix in which I played a press secretary) was going into its third and final season when I began to work on a pitch for a long-simmering idea for my own sitcom. The basics were this: A down-and-out guy who is trying to get his life in order ends up teaching a US citizenship class to pay his rent; I wanted it to be forward-looking, aspirational, and patriotic. I was somewhat influenced by my childhood love of shows like Head of the Class and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. Rather than being overly edgy or cynical (as lots of great comedy can be), those shows always had a way of making the audience feel good by the time they turned off their televisions at night. It wasn’t just the episodes that I loved, it was the experience of watching them—gathering around the TV with the whole family on a specific night of the week, at a particular time; going to school the next morning and repeating some of the funniest lines with my friends, knowing that they too had watched the episode with their families at the very same time.
I wanted to re-create that feeling—uniting audiences into laughing in a way that celebrates the best of who we are—in a way that actually reflects America’s diversity. I had dabbled with pitching and selling a few pilots in the years before. The process was something I really enjoyed, but none of the projects I created ever made it past the script stage.
The closest I came was probably the year after my White House sabbatical ended. I had sold a concept for a comedy about young staffers at the United Nations. The humor was a blend of intelligent and stupid, and when it came time for notes, the network seemed to always get stuck on the silliest jokes, like one I borrowed from marines on a USO tour I was on years ago: In a scene in which an African ambassador is on the treadmill at the UN gym, the camera pans over to notice his T-shirt, emblazoned with the slogan “I was all up in Djibouti.” (That’s the whole joke and I love it.) “It’s funny,” the network said during that week’s notes session, “but we don’t think most of the audience will know what Djibouti is or how to pronounce it. Can you change the name of the country to, like, France or something?”
“What do you mean? ‘I was all up in your France’ doesn’t make any sense.”
“Just make it a joke about a country people know.”
In the end, they didn’t move beyond the script stage of development, giving me the polite yet frustrating, “It’s great but doesn’t fit with our other scripts. We’re passing on this.” (That’s the network equivalent of It’s not you, it’s me. Except that, in this case, it’s actually them.)
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This time around, I made it a point to talk about the tone of what I wanted much earlier in the process. This time, it would be intelligent and dumb, and the right buyer would need to be okay with that balance before we moved forward with a script. Streaming platforms, cable, paid television—while there were plenty of edgy places to consider, it was the idea of making a diverse patriotic comedy for a traditional television network that I was excited about most.
After my experiences in Harold & Kumar (which conventional Hollywood thinking initially said would never do well because of its two Asian American leads), I was excited by the idea that now, maybe you could change hearts and minds across the country without hiding behind a television paywall. Mine would be a proudly silly, proudly American comedy without being preachy or laying a message on too thick. My goal wasn’t to beat people over the head; I wanted to get them to laugh from their bellies.
My representatives at United Talent Agency (UTA) and Spilo set up meetings with a wide range of really great writers for me to consider developing it with. Some (like Bill Lawrence, who created Scrubs and cocreated Ted Lasso) seemed to understand the vision of what I wanted to do with my citizenship class idea very well. Others didn’t get it quite so much. One of the highlights was pitching to Big Bang Theory (and a hundred other shows) creator Chuck Lorre. When Chuck kindly told me and Spilo that the idea as we described wasn’t excactly one that he found compelling, I assumed that was it—meeting over, I should quickly leave this busy icon’s office. To my surprise, he invited us to stay and spent the next hour basically giving me a master class in television development. What a profoundly generous dude! With all he had on his plate, and despite not connecting with my idea, the fact that Chuck friggin’ Lorre took the time to essentially mentor me on how to get a show on the air and make it last was not something I saw coming. It immediately elevated him to the level of the really great, encouraging people I’ve had the chance to work with in my career.1 Chuck’s advice was helpful in deciding what I somehow already knew in the back of my mind—my show shouldn’t be the kind of multicamera sitcom with a laugh track that he does so well; it needed to be a more intimate single-camera comedy to get my desired tone right.
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