I found my cocreator and writing partner in a Brooklyn Nine-Nine and Parks and Rec scribe who I incidentally met a decade and a half ago. Enter Matt Murray.
In the mid-2000s, shortly after finishing The Namesake, I had moved from LA to a tiny West Village apartment in Manhattan. Around the same time, three of my LA buddies—the Lonely Island geniuses Jorma Taccone (one of my first friends at UCLA), Andy Samberg (who had gone to NYU with my high school buddy Jonah Goldstein), and Akiva Schaffer (who had attended UC Santa Cruz with our close mutual friend Matthew Bettinelli-Olpin)—moved in a few blocks away to start their breakthrough gigs on Saturday Night Live.
Matt Murray was also an SNL writer. I can’t recall on which of the alcohol-fueled nights I first met him, but I remember enjoying his company as someone super funny, supremely genuine, and oddly soft-spoken for a dude who could write specifically weird comedy bits like a sketch where Will Ferrell is born as a fully grown man.
Back in the day, we hung out a few times before subsequently losing touch. As we reconnected during our meeting, I learned that Matt was under contract with Universal Television. His good friend and fellow SNL alum Mike Schur had just re-upped a deal with Universal for nine figures following the success of a hit comedy he created, The Good Place. Matt and Mike often partnered on projects, and I was flattered to be considered in their comedic company. Clearly these guys had the kind of business background and clout that mattered. But what sealed the deal for me was ultimately the creative: Murray and Schur understood and vibed with the tone of the uplifting citizenship class concept so completely that by the end of our conversation, we were already pitching each other on how to make it better. “There’s a woman I knew,” Matt said, “a crossing guard at my kid’s school. She was a lawyer and chief of staff to the First Lady of her home country before coming to America. She saved up tons of money. She doesn’t need to work. She’s a crossing guard now because she really enjoys it. Would be fun to have a character who has like thirty jobs. Not because she has a tough financial situation, but because she wants to get the most out of life.” Matt and Mike and I clearly had great chemistry. I was excited to move forward with them.
We brainstormed the project, taking the initial concept and improving upon it. Inspired (if that’s the right word) by a hockey player who famously tried to get out of a DUI by bribing the cops with the promise of a billion dollars (he was that hammered), Matt suggested we make my character a recently fired city councilman from Queens, who gets kicked out of the apartment he shared with his girlfriend for a similar drunken indiscretion. Moving in with his sister, his only path to redemption (and money) is to teach a course in which he helps a diverse group of people navigate the US citizenship process. I wanted to have some fun in naming the characters and give a subtle hat tip to some things I’d experienced in the past.
Over the years, when I’d play a character with an Indian name, some South Asians would inevitably complain, “Why is his name Prajeeb? How come he can’t just be named Seth or something?” But when I played someone with a name that wasn’t traditionally Indian (like my character in Designated Survivor, who was literally named Seth) others would grumble, “Why does his name have to be Seth, why can’t it be something like Prajeeb?” People have understandably emotional reactions to this stuff; the power of seeing our own names on-screen (or on the flipside, the privilege that comes from “passing”) is undeniable; strong feelings are a result of the fact that while immense progress has been made, it’s still something of a novelty to see a brown person on television at all. But conversations about those opinions are not ones that anyone wins. So, I figured why not dig a little deeper and turn that experience into a fun, nuanced story behind my character’s name?
After his parents immigrated to the United States, the silly backstory goes, they fell in love with American television, especially Diff’rent Strokes. When they saw that Diff’rent Strokes housekeeper Mrs. Garrett was also Mrs. Garrett, the housemother on The Facts of Life, they thought, Look at this woman! She is the hardest working person in America! We will name our son after her. We will call him Garrett. After Garrett was born, his parents felt they perhaps needed to bequeath to their next child a name with far fewer expectations, so they went with the frivolous Mallory from Family Ties. In our pilot episode, of course, Garrett is the lazy one who’s down and out, while his younger sister, Mallory, is a successful, hardworking doctor. Matt and I finished writing a pitch and went out with the “Untitled Kal Penn Project,” with Mike Schur, David Miner, and Dan Spilo executive producing alongside us.
There was quick and enthusiastic reception from NBC. Given Schur’s relationship with them (The Good Place was going into its final season), we figured that developing the “Untitled Kal Penn Project” there gave us the best shot of having it end up on the air. Most importantly, they committed to us that they would invest in the show if they picked it up. “Comedy is hard. It takes time to find its audience. Sometimes multiple seasons. We’re the best at what we do because we know how to invest in comedy and sell the ones we put on the air.” Creatively, the NBC executives seemed to be especially proud to develop our unifying feel-good comedy at a time when the nightly news featured mostly the opposite. We turned in a pilot script, and they actually allowed us to shoot it. We called it Sunnyside because it sounded as uplifting as our story and it’s also a wonderfully diverse part of New York City. Another option was Flushing, but that’s a really terrible title for a show.
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This was new territory for me as a producer and creator! Things moved fast. I needed to hire an assistant to help juggle my different obligations. I didn’t have to search far: Romen Borsellino (of cum laude thesis and Obama dildo vetting fame) had moved to LA to pursue a career in entertainment. I brought him on quickly. I couldn’t believe it but the unbeatable casting director Allison Jones—who did Family Ties and Fresh Prince—agreed to cast Sunnyside. (Allison is the comedy go-to in the casting world, and only takes on projects she believes in, truly the highest compliment for any comedy creator.) We hired a talented line producer, Kris Eber, and began the process of staffing up a crew and getting everything as perfect as we could for our pilot shoot.