I think everybody wants to be loved, all the time, but it's not realistic. It's also not realistic, if you're going to be ambitious, in terms of changing the form or evolving.
There's a lot that you can do in television that you can't do with a film, theoretically. At the time, the only possibility was to do a movie.
If you've never watched people watch television, I don't recommend it. It's not an exciting thing to do.
Chance favors the well prepared. The more stuff you throw in, the more chances you have of looking like, 'I did that.'
There are elements of that, where you'll see a scene again and you'll recognize it, but I wouldn't say it's got one conceit like that, at all. It definitely has those jokes, but it would be wrong to say this is a show where, every time you see it, you see a new angle.
We figured the interesting question for them is, "Where has the family been since 2006, since the last time we saw them?" So, part of the time, we had to spend answering that question. Then, inevitably, it goes up to a point of crisis, in everyone's show. There was just no getting around that it was about 2006-2012.
First of all, there is absolutely an order that we have put together to create the maximum number of surprises, but that's just part of our storytelling.
We will be looking at things like the confluence of a scene, and we still have all these creative decisions to make. In general, we're going to just try to make these under a half-hour. We're going to try to take that kind of cable TV comedy model.
We started writing the shows in order, and then very quickly had to jump to, "Oh, we got Tony Hale today and Jessica [Walter." We've got to jump ahead and write that stuff that's in Jessica's show. Fortunately, we knew the story, but it was challenging.
We started gearing our content more to what makes us laugh and stories we wanted to tell, and we had to decide, early on, to not be precious about it.
I could vomit, right this moment. I literally could vomit on cue. Yes. Here's the truth of that. We didn't have a big audience, obviously, when we made the show. Very early on, we made a decision that we were going to try to give the fans and the people that were loyal to us something that they felt was special.
The form came out of the function because it is for the audience that already knows the show, while hoping to get a new audience, too.
