Poking A Dead Frog Part 2

I was surprised with that one. I pitched it and was shocked after it was voted in. I was totally surprised by that vote. Each of us had different styles of comedy. Mike and I would write, I suppose, zany sketches. John would write bits more having to do with character and human nature. This sketch was silly, with no greater purpose. So it was sort of extreme, and we didn't always agree on extremes. But when we did fight, it was always over the material. It was never personal. Or mostly never personal.

What's amazing about Monty Python's Flying Circus is just how close those original TV shows came to being erased by the BBC.

That's true. The BBC came very close to erasing all of the original Python tapes, at least from the first season. What happened was that we got word from our editor that the BBC was about to wipe all the tapes to use for more "serious" entertainment-ballet and opera and the like. So we smuggled out the tapes and recorded them onto a Philips VCR home system. For a long time, these were the only copies of Python's first season to exist anywhere. If these were lost, they were lost for good.

This happened quite often with BBC comedy shows from the sixties. It happened with Spike Milligan's show from the late 1960s, Q5. All those shows are gone-or mostly gone. It happened with Alan Bennett's [1966] show, On the Margin. It happened with a British TV comedy series from the late sixties, Broaden Your Mind, a show I worked on before Python's Flying Circus. All these tapes are gone. They were taped over in order to record sporting events.

Comedy shows from the fifties, sixties, and seventies were often erased in order to save money. It happened in the U.S. with the first eight years of, as well as with shows featuring the comedian Ernie Kovacs. And it happened, as you were just saying, in the U.K. with many BBC comedies. But how much, exactly, was the BBC saving when they would reuse these tapes?

I don't know. I would guess around one hundred pounds per tape reel.

So to save roughly $150-in today's money, at least-the BBC was willing to erase original comedy that could never again be duplicated?

If they'd been wiped, I don't think we'd be talking now, actually. Python wouldn't have been discovered in America. And we might not have made as many series for TV. And we may not have created any movies. It goes to show how tenuous history is. It can go in any direction.

Which direction would you recommend young comedy writers head?

If you want to create comedy, try to make people laugh. If you can make people laugh, head in that direction. If n.o.body laughs . . . well, that's not good news. [Laughs] Head in the opposite direction.

PURE, HARD-CORE ADVICE.

DIABLO CODY.

Screenwriter/Director, Juno, Young Adult, Time and a Half, Sweet Valley High I couldn't have grown up less connected to Hollywood. I lived in a very conservative Polish-Catholic community in the south suburbs of Chicago. I went to Ma.s.s and received communion six mornings a week. The idea of a "professional writer" was a fantasy. My parents told me that I couldn't write for a living, that it was just a hobby some people had outside of their real jobs. I love my folks, but they're the two most practical, risk-averse people I've ever met. As a result, I truly appreciate Hollywood. It's full of grandiose, insane dreamers with ent.i.tlement complexes. Some people find that obnoxious, but to me, it's fun. I never knew characters like that growing up. I never knew anyone who said, "I deserve to be famous." In Hollywood, that's every other person you meet! G.o.d bless these douchebags.

I'm really lazy, and I'm not proud of that. I'm usually just thinking about what I'm going to have for dinner. People say, "There's no way you're lazy; you have such a steady output of work." But writing isn't work for me. I enjoy it. If it felt like work, I wouldn't get past page two. That's why I have difficulty relating to a lot of comedy writers. They might seem rebellious on the surface, but a lot of them went to Ivy League schools and are ambitious people-pleasers at their core. I've always been straight-up lazy and defiant. I wouldn't last a week at Harvard, or at SNL for that matter. It would be like, "What can I write that Lorne will really hate?"

When I first decided to try screenwriting, I was seeking inspiration from small, offbeat films. I think this is a good way to start. I knew if I read the script for say, Armageddon, it wasn't going to connect. I was a nerdy, chubby chick on the fringes, so of course [the 2001 comedy film] Ghost World appealed to me. As I started experimenting with my own voice, I found myself interested in suburban misfits like Enid Coleslaw [from Ghost World] and like those characters in Napoleon Dynamite and Lester Burnham [the Kevin s.p.a.cey character] from American Beauty. They didn't have to save the planet to be interesting. Their stories were accessible to me. And Ghost World was funny, but also melancholy in a way that resonated with me. I think that tone has informed a lot of the stuff I've tried to write.

Always be working on your own material. Write specs [non-commissioned, unsolicited screenplays]! Though I've been hired to write studio projects, everything I've ever gotten produced has been an original spec script that I just wanted to write on my own. I wasn't being paid for them. Other people's ideas are never as important as yours. I wrote Young Adult while I was supposed to be working on a s.h.i.+tty studio movie, and I'm so glad I prioritized my own idea. Make everything as personal and specific as you can. Sometimes people b.i.t.c.h about, for example, certain screenwriters who make their writing too specific to their own lives, not realizing that that's why it works! The specificity is what makes it brilliant.

We're lucky enough to live in an era where you can write, produce, publish, and distribute your own writing through the magic of the Internet, so there's no excuse not to be creating. Just keep writing. If you really love it, you'll keep doing it even if you're not successful. If you don't love it, you don't belong here.

MIKE SCHUR.

If you want to understand the creative nuts and bolts of Michael Schur-a writer for such NBC comedy inst.i.tutions as Sat.u.r.day Night Live, The Office, and Parks and Recreation-you should probably read novelist David Foster Wallace's 1996 novel, Infinite Jest. At least the first thousand or so pages of it.

Schur didn't just enjoy Infinite Jest. It's in his bloodstream. While a student at Harvard University, he wrote his undergraduate thesis on the novel and somehow persuaded Wallace to travel to Cambridge, Ma.s.sachusetts, to receive an award from the Harvard Lampoon. (More on that later.) In 2011, Schur directed a video for the Decemberists' "Calamity Song," which featured teens playing the fictional game Eschaton, a reference to Infinite Jest. And an episode from Parks and Recreation written by Schur-"Partridge," which aired April 4, 2013-was br.i.m.m.i.n.g with Infinite Jest references. Schur also owns the Infinite Jest film rights. So you can rest a.s.sured that if there's ever a movie adaptation of the least filmable book ever written, Schur will be at least somehow involved.

Schur has a popularity that extends beyond those who read the closing credits of sitcoms and enjoy excessive footnotes. Most people would recognize him first as Mose Schrute, the quiet, bearded cousin of Dwight on NBC's The Office. Mose co-owns a beet farm with Dwight, thinks it's fun to throw manure, loves Jura.s.sic Park (he has a pair of Jura.s.sic Park pajamas to prove it), and has suffered from recurring nightmares ever since "the storm." Mose is Schur's creation-he named the character after Mose Gingerich, one of the stars of the 2004 reality series Amish in the City-and one that, for better or worse, has become his most visible mainstream ident.i.ty.

But there's another, entirely different audience for Schur. Mindy Kaling, a writer and actress who collaborated with Schur for many years on The Office, knows a very different man than most of the world has seen. "The greatest gift you can give Mike Schur is a Swedish dictionary," she said. "Because he just loves nonsense words, which [is] like a toddler sensibility for a guy who is an Emmy-nominated writer and one of the most well-read, serious guys." Schur enjoys broad comedy, Kaling said; as proof, she pointed to one of her favorite Schur-penned Office episodes-"Dunder Mifflin Infinity," October 4, 2007-in which Michael Scott, played by Steve Carell, blindly follows his GPS and maneuvers his rental car straight into Lake Scranton.

Schur was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1975, and raised in West Hartford, Connecticut. While at Harvard University, he became a member of the Harvard Lampoon, which may or may not have prepared him for a future in comedy writing. (As he said once in an interview, writing for the Lampoon didn't prepare him "for anything, really . . . [except] perhaps if I had a career as a guy who lounged around drunk in poorly maintained Flemish castles.") Almost immediately upon graduating in 1997, he was hired to write for Sat.u.r.day Night Live, where he worked for seven seasons (19972004), three as producer for Weekend Update during Tina Fey and Jimmy Fallon's reign on the segment. Schur found his way to The Office, and co-created Parks and Recreation, a mock.u.mentary-style, single-camera sitcom about the parks department of p.a.w.nee, a fictional town in Indiana, starring former Sat.u.r.day Night Live colleague Amy Poehler. In 2013, he co-created Fox's Brooklyn Nine-Nine, starring Andy Samberg and Chelsea Peretti.

As a television writer-someone who works behind the scenes-is there a frustration that your name may not be attached to a specific idea or joke? That if you were to write for The New Yorker or publish books, you'd receive a byline and full credit?

Not really. TV writing is collaborative-if I want solo credit for everything I write, I'd write a novel. Actually, that sounds really hard. Forget the novel.

But credit can be a very p.r.i.c.kly issue for some writers-most TV scripts are constantly rewritten and punched up. It gets very hard to track who did what and whose joke was which and when and where and how. When I got my first half-hour writing job, at The Office [in 2005], there were times when I felt slighted because something I had contributed didn't get "properly" attributed. And since I equated "proper attribution" with succeeding at my job, it would upset me. But then I realized that Greg [Daniels, the showrunner] couldn't have cared less about who pitched what. He saw the process of writing and rewriting as a collective effort, and as long as everyone was working hard and the collective effort was producing good scripts, the specifics didn't matter. It was a very enlightened point of view, I thought.

TV comedy writing is a team sport. That's just the deal. In most cases, I could not begin to tell you who wrote what in a given script. And I have very often had the benefit of other great writers' contributions in scripts that bore my name, so it would be crazy for me to complain about not getting credit on other writers' scripts.

Writing for sitcoms, and especially being the showrunner, or head writer, is a notoriously brutal and exhausting job. What exactly does it take to maintain a level of excellence over the course of an eight-month season-twenty-two episodes? How intense is the schedule?

It just takes tons and tons of hard work. In network TV, from the moment you start shooting, you're basically behind. Something David Mamet once said sums it up perfectly: "Doing a movie or a play is like running a marathon. Doing a television show is like running until you die."

How is this particular day at Parks and Rec shaping up?

I just got back from the sound mix for Episode 515 of Parks ["Bailout"], which is now complete. We're shooting the season five finale, featuring a giant parade in Pasadena, and it's supposed to rain tomorrow, and if it does we're completely screwed. Tomorrow morning, I have a network-notes call at 9:15 to discuss the first cut of episode 517 ["Partridge"], which I have to lock by Thursday. One new episode of the show has to be edited, noted, and locked every week for the next six weeks. Tomorrow afternoon I have a show-and-tell for the sets, costumes, and shooting style of the pilot I'm doing for Fox [Brooklyn Nine-Nine], which has a network table read Monday. By the end of the day today, my partner on the pilot and I have to finish the draft of the script to send to the studio and network to get their notes so we can turn it around by Friday. This happens to be a very busy week, because of the pilot, but this is not atypical for network TV. It's a Looney Tunes schedule.

Who's the audience for television these days? Do you write for the home audience or the audience later seeing it on Hulu and downloading short scenes?

We just went through a very specific situation on Parks, wherein, due to a scheduling quirk, we had to air two episodes back-to-back. The first was scheduled to be the biggest episode we'd ever done-the wedding of Leslie Knope and Ben Wyatt, years in the making, very emotional, and obviously a benchmark episode for the show. The second one-scheduled originally to air a week later-was a regular episode about Leslie attending a luncheon with members of the local media. So, obviously, this was upsetting. There was going to be this huge, ma.s.sive, life-changing event in the lives of the two main characters, and then, literally, one second later: "Today, I'm attending a luncheon . . ."

We had a lot of discussions about what to do-shuffle the order somehow? Extend the wedding to an hour? But ultimately we let it be. And our reasoning was that this will matter exactly once-on the night it airs this way. The number of people watching TV on their own schedule, through Hulu or iTunes or whichever platform they prefer, is rising exponentially. And it's never going back the other way.

I'd think that this would put more pressure on you as a writer. You aren't merely writing jokes to be seen once and then forgotten. You're writing for multiple viewings, to last years.

Audience expectations are sky-high, and they get bored very easily because they've seen it all. Add to that the mult.i.tude of choices the consumer has-if you slip up even once, people have dozens of other shows dangling in front of them. And they can watch them on their phones. When I was a kid, I watched every single episode of Empty Nest, a show about a sixty-year-old doctor living in Florida. I was a twelve-year-old kid in suburban Connecticut. Why did I watch it? It was on. Today, if you're a twelve-year-old in suburban Connecticut, or a forty-eight-year-old lesbian taxidermist in Tennessee, or an eighty-one-year-old diabetic gla.s.s-blower in Yakima, Was.h.i.+ngton, there are somewhere between one and three hundred better choices for you than Empty Nest-shows that someone somewhere made with you and your friends in mind.

Beyond Empty Nest, what were your major comedic influences?

I was a crazy, voracious reader of comedy. I read Woody Allen's books, Without Feathers, Getting Even, and Side Effects, when I was around twelve, and it was like I was seeing in color for the first time. Reading Without Feathers is probably the most important "holy c.r.a.p" moment of my life. I read all these books over and over. I then tried to write Woody Allen comedy pieces, but they were just terrible. I recently found this giant doc.u.ment that I had been keeping that I thought was my great masterwork-it was basically a Woody Allen book rip-off I worked on all through middle school and high school. And it's just so horrifying.

I have never laughed harder than when I saw [1973's] Sleeper for the first time. I get my love of goofiness directly from Woody Allen and Monty Python. But in some way the most important movie to me is Midnight Run [a comedy released in 1988, co-starring Robert De Niro and Charles Grodin and written by George Gallo]. Maybe the tightest screenplay ever written-not one wasted word-and a dozen indelible characters with strong personalities, each with specific goals and realistic motivations. You can learn everything you need to know about building strong characters by watching Midnight Run.

It sounds like you took comedy seriously from a young age.

Every year for Christmas or my birthday, I would receive books of comedy pieces. I remember someone telling me that Mark Twain was really funny, and I started reading Mark Twain short stories. If you're an NFL quarterback, you watch a lot of games on film, and if you're a comedy writer you have to watch a lot of game film-you have to watch comedy, read comedy, write about comedy. You have to treat it as seriously as if you're a law student studying for the bar exam.

When I was a kid, I constantly wrote. I kept notebooks and journals where I jotted down ideas for movies and sketches or whatever. I wrote submissions to shows I wasn't even planning to submit to. I would write sample scripts of TV shows that I liked, just to practice. I wrote a Cheers script around 1998, long after the show had been off the air. I didn't really know whether something was good until I had written it down and I could look at it. I would see if I could write in the style of shows that I liked. That's not a job-getting tool, that's a way to practice your craft. When it comes to writing, there's no real secret except to keep doing it. In my experience, the only way to get better at writing is to write.

Do you have any influences that one might consider nontraditional for a comedy writer?

The Mayor of Casterbridge [1886] by Thomas Hardy. Hardy's novels are insane, many of them, because they have a theme of random chance and unpredictability-sort of the nineteenth-century equivalent of the chaos theory seen in Jura.s.sic Park. Someone will be delivering an important message, and then, out of nowhere, a bull will escape from a pen, gore a guy to death, and the message will never get delivered. That book in particular struck me when I read it because it's about a man who made one awful, miserable, terrible mistake [auctioning off his wife and daughter] when he was young, drunk, and stupid, and he spends the rest of his life trying to make up for it. What a lovely, simple character detail-and a funny one when you then have a brilliant actor such as Adam Scott inhabit a similar character, and a team of excellent comedy writers writing jokes about it, like we do on Parks.2 Another influence is David Foster Wallace. I owe a great debt to Wallace-Infinite Jest is very funny, but, more important, Wallace spends a tremendous amount of time in that book, and in his others, dealing with the theme of sincerity and honesty. It's something that is very tricky for comedy writers, because sincerity is the opposite of "cool" or "hip" or "ironic," all of which comedy writers wield like swords to fend off feeling gooey or mushy. Nothing terrifies comedy writers more than heartfelt emotion. Wallace ended that for me. His entire body of work was an attempt to reconcile jokes, postmodern games, and "coolness," which he admittedly loved and reveled in, with what he saw as the most basic job of writing: to make the readers feel something. To make them feel like they are not alone in the world. That is very moving to me and certainly changed the way I write.

I wholeheartedly agree with one point Wallace made, which was, and I'm paraphrasing: "If the world is terrible and awful and screwed- up, there isn't much point to writing something about how the world is terrible and awful and screwed up." What made more sense to him-and, subsequently, to me-was to write about how people attempt to navigate this awful screwed-up world and to then find a way to be happy within it, and to make things better.

Did you ever meet Wallace?

I met him in 1996, when I was writing for the Harvard Lampoon. Infinite Jest came out in February, and after I read it I decided unilaterally that he would be receiving our "Novelist of the Millennium Award," which was a thing I had just made up, so that I could give it to him, just so that I could meet him.

We invited him to the Lampoon building through his agent, and one day, as I sat in my dorm working on my senior thesis-which was about Infinite Jest-he called me to see what the h.e.l.l this award was all about. It was very surreal. He was notoriously press-shy and wanted to make sure it wasn't a dog-and-pony show, but I a.s.sured him I had just made the whole thing up, and it was only an invitation to come and hang out in a cool old building.

The point of all this is: He wanted to come, ultimately, because he'd been a fan of the Lampoon while he was at Amherst. He knew a lot about it, like that John Updike and [novelist] William Gaddis and others had once been members, and that there was a Lampoon-SNL-Simpsons connection, which meant something to him. It turned out to be an easy sell.

There are pa.s.sages of Infinite Jest that I think are monstrously funny. He's funny and his writing is complicatedly funny. That might seem reductive, but I think it's true. He was funny in a way that most people who are funny are not.

What was your thesis on Infinite Jest about?

I wrote about Thomas Pynchon's [1963 debut novel] V. and Infinite Jest, positing that they served as bookends for a type of postmodern fiction that dealt with irony and ident.i.ty cohesion. I got really into it and worked very, very hard, and I think if I read it today I would have absolutely no idea what it meant, or indeed whether it held water at all or was completely full of s.h.i.+t. I strongly suspect that it was full of s.h.i.+t.

Wallace had a complicated relations.h.i.+p with television. He was raised on it and said it was his "artistic snorkel to the universe." But he also felt that television changed our perception of reality. Did you ever talk to him about TV, sitcoms, and comedy?

A little. We corresponded for a while after we met, and I kept him up-to-date on my budding career in TV. He was very interested in that. I invited him to come to a live SNL show, because it was a TV touchstone for him, but it never came to be. I think a Wallace essay about SNL would've been amazing.

And it wasn't just TV-obviously TV loomed large for him, and he wrote about it frequently, but I think he had a complicated relations.h.i.+p with all of pop culture. He told me a great story about when he was teaching at Illinois State and he was given an audio tape of a band that he fell in love with, and he came into his graduate seminar and said, "I might be crazy, but I think this band is great and you all need to hear this right now." He then played for his students Nevermind by Nirvana. It was about seven years after the alb.u.m had been released.

You wrote for SNL for six years, and you've mentioned in the past that the show was a big influence for you. But were there any other TV shows that influenced you?

Late Night with David Letterman. I would tape Letterman every night, watch it in the morning before school, and then steal all his jokes and stories and tell them to my friends. It was the perfect crime, because I knew that no one else my age could stay up that late.

Mary Tyler Moore was huge for me, and when I stayed home sick from school I would watch The d.i.c.k Van d.y.k.e Show. The character of Laura Petrie was my first ever TV crush. I remember my young brain being surprised that something shot in black and white could be so funny. Later, I loved Mary's relations.h.i.+p with Lou Grant-the relations.h.i.+p between Leslie and Ron Swanson on Parks definitely has shades of that platonic friends.h.i.+p.

I also remember loving individual characters within shows. I think Alex P. Keaton from Family Ties is one of the greatest sitcom inventions in history, but I also loved Michael Gross, who played the father. I became fascinated by actors who had great timing, and Gross's timing was impeccable. Same with Kelsey Grammer, Woody Harrelson, Ted Danson, Sh.e.l.ley Long-pretty much everyone on Cheers gets an A+ for pure comedic timing.

Cheers avoided a lot of current, topical jokes. In many ways, this allowed the show to age better than other sitcoms. Was this a philosophy you tried to adopt with Parks and Rec?

Well, we had more rules on The Office. Producer Greg [Daniels] really didn't want that show to seem pegged to any particular era, so he always resisted showing dates on office memos, or mentioning a specific Beyonce song that came out that month, or saying "the 2006 company picnic," or whatever. The idea was, with a show called The Office, we were trying to be maximally relatable to all persons who had ever been in an office, not just people who were in offices from 2005 to 2013. We took that idea to Parks and Rec, but loosened it up fairly quickly. It became increasingly clear that many of our stories were going to mimic specific things in the political and social Zeitgeist, and some stories were direct parallels to-or commentary on-national political stories of the time. Plus, Aziz Ansari [who plays Parks and Rec staff official Tom Haverford] improvised so many great jokes about hip-hop and the Fast & Furious movies that it seemed silly to throw them away.

Cheers is a cla.s.sic sitcom known to have taken awhile to catch on with an audience. Parks and Rec also took a little while to catch on with viewers.

In my opinion, really good pilots don't often later make great shows. Great pilots are like movies-they have big exciting concepts or hooks that grab people and draw them in, and cut through the white noise of the two hundred new shows that crop up every year. But the problem is, those hooks and concepts elbow out room that should be given to the characters-explaining who they are, what they want in life, and so on-and TV comedies only work long-term if the characters are three-dimensional and great. That's why Cheers is the best TV comedy ever-it's just great characters sitting in a bar talking to each other. And in that Cheers pilot [that aired September 30, 1982], you learn everything you need to know about the characters.

But that Cheers pilot tested terribly-there was nothing for the audience to grab on to, and at the end they probably felt like they hadn't been treated to a big, entertaining half hour. It takes awhile to learn about the characters and enjoy their funny traits. In the Cheers pilot, for example, Cliff is basically an extra. It wasn't until a few episodes later that they moved him to the other end of the bar and sat him next to Norm, forming the most famous 275-episode tableau in TV history.

It frustrates me sometimes, because shows get picked up based on their pilots, which is directly a.n.a.logous to judging a book by its first ten pages. And then critics weigh in on pilots when they air, which contributes in some way to shows' being successful or not successful in the long term. In the perfect world, no one would discuss a new TV show until it had aired eight episodes, and the creative team had already worked out all the kinks. Sadly, the world-and you might not know this-is imperfect.

You've been quoted in interviews as saying that, as the showrunner for Parks and Rec, you care more about story than individual jokes. Why is that?

This is just personal preference, but I find the world so tumultuous and hardscrabble and generally terrifying that I will never tire of stories about people caring for each other, and doing nice things for each other, and in a very basic way trying to make each other feel less alone on Earth. All stories need conflict, but conflict can come from anywhere.

It seems counterintuitive, but when you have well-drawn, three-dimensional characters, and a dozen funny writers in a room thinking about them, chances are that one of the writers can always pitch a good joke at any given point in a script. But those jokes are pointless and empty if the story doesn't hold together. Good stories beat good jokes every day of the week and twice on Sundays.

It's also very obviously the case that jokes are fleeting, but good characters and emotional stories are forever. TV is about presenting an inviting world in which audiences want to invest their time, regularly, over many years. Jokes help because, you know, they make people happy. But what makes people love a show, and get attached to it, is great characters having great adventures.

I just like that kind of show better-where the characters are generally positive and the comedy comes from goofiness and satire instead of cattiness and negativity. It's explicitly the theme of Parks and Rec-that people need each other to be happy, that communities are important, that n.o.body achieves anything alone. A show with that theme needs its characters to support each other. So ours do, generally speaking.

Can you remember an instance when a joke was cut because it sacrificed character or overall story?

It happens every single episode. Usually because the joke in question is slightly "off-story," meaning that it doesn't line up with the character's specific att.i.tude in that given scene, and it slipped through the writing-vetting process all through the script stage because it made everyone laugh. Our cast includes some of the world's greatest improvisers, and we always carve out time for them to goof around. Quite often they will add amazing material to the script. But sometimes, we have to chop off that amazing material, because what they improvised unintentionally changes their characters' story or att.i.tude, so its inclusion would just muddy the waters.

This seems like the exact opposite of the philosophy behind an SNL sketch. Or is it? Can a joke in a sketch sacrifice a character and still work?

Character isn't important in sketches, where everything is two-dimensional by design. You can't really "sell out" a character in three minutes. It's a much, much bigger deal when you're talking about a show for which you want to do more than one hundred episodes.

What do you look for in character growth? What do you want to achieve at the end of each season?

Someone said that the best ending for a story is at once inevitable and surprising. That it was the only way it could've happened, and yet the audience didn't see it coming. I'd like every episode and every season to end that way. It's a reason I loved the ending of The Sopranos, which, as I've been told by many people, who are usually shouting at me, is not a universal feeling. The entirety of that show, and that character, led to that ambiguous cut to black. To me, it made absolutely total complete sense to end the show that way. Even the debate about what had happened-which I don't imagine [the show's creator] David Chase antic.i.p.ated, in its extant form-felt inevitable, because it was a coda to the way we'd all been debating the show for years.

Great endings come from giving a character big hurdles, great successes, tough failures-testing a character's resolve and defining that character by word and action-and then putting the character into a situation where he or she stands precariously at a fork in a road. I say this as if it's all super easy.

But here's the real problem in all of this. And I've been thinking about this a lot recently: Television used to be a quant.i.ty business. They created around thirty I Love Lucys a year, and Milton Berle just walked onstage in a dress every week and everyone fell over laughing because their minds were so completely blown by what was happening. The production values were entirely secondary. "Did you see the flimsy set shake back and forth when Ricky slammed the door?" "Who cares? I'm watching this show inside my house!"

Stories were new, characters were fresh, stereotypes not yet created. Everything was new and juicy and fifty million people were watching.

Television is not about quant.i.ty anymore; it's very much about quality-and specificity. It's a giant beautiful smorgasbord of fiction, nonfiction, comedy, and drama-about every conceivable subject-delivered to the consumer at low cost and with nearly maximal convenience. It is also dissected, a.n.a.lyzed, and reported on with alarming speed by professional and amateur critics alike, who have at their disposal an online database of every single thing that has ever happened in the history of screen-based entertainment for comparison. Maximal speed, maximal scrutiny, maximal convenience, and maximal skepticism in the viewing audience that it's going to be worth their time investment.

We make twenty-two episodes of our show a year. Some shows make twenty-four episodes. On The Office we once made thirty, I think, including six or so hour-long shows. So at a time when it's never been harder to do something new and interesting, we still have to churn out episode after episode at breakneck speed.

The entire network TV system is creaking under the weight of this brave new world. I'd actually argue that this is good, in many ways, for the creative process. Obstacles are good, generally, for writers, and the increased scrutiny for television is the natural result of its ma.s.sive leaps forward in quality; it's being treated, as it should be, like an art form worthy of criticism and discussion.

And please do not think I am in any way complaining about my job. There is quite literally not another one I would rather have. I write largely exactly what I want to, spend my days giggling like a goon, work with my friends, and get paid well-a scenario which makes me, by a wide margin, the luckiest son of a b.i.t.c.h in America, if not the world. I only intend to delineate the unique dilemmas currently faced by network TV writers: Make it great, but make it very fast and make a whole lot of it, and also make it appeal to a wide swath of the American public who have a billion other tailored-to-them choices.

What do you look for in a writing staff? Who do you want in your writers' room?

Staffs should ideally be like the X-Men-lots of different weird mutants with specific voices and talents. If everyone on your staff is an improv performer from Chicago, or a sci-fi nerd from an Ivy League school, or a stand-up, you'll only get the specific kind of joke that that group provides. There's no specific ratio. Just variety is all. Ideally, we have ten or twelve different weirdos with bizarre life stories and unique experiences we can mine for stories and jokes.

Writers' rooms can be ugly, no question, but the Parks and Rec writers' room rivals Disney World as the happiest place on Earth. We have our bad days, and our grumpy days, but overall it's a very supportive, goofy, and joyous place to work. We're very lucky.

Do you think the atmosphere of the writers' room can affect the tone of a show?

Absolutely. There are basically two kinds of comedy writers-laughers and nonlaughers. Nonlaughers b.u.m me out at a very deep level. It's almost as if they think that laughing at other people's jokes is a sign of weakness or something. I've never understood it. If your staff is filled with a bunch of nonlaughers, the show can take on a bloodless, cold tone.

In the past, you've spoken about the "click" that takes place in a writers' room when a joke hits. You call it the "sweet spot." Can you remember any instances of this "click" happening on either Office or Parks?

It happens constantly. [Parks writer] Dan Goor wrote a line for Ron Swanson where someone asks him if he is scared to eat in a bowling alley restaurant, and he says, "When I eat, it is the food that is scared." That click was so loud it rattled the furniture. I wrote a joke for Dwight Schrute [on The Office] where Jim offers him a shamrock keychain, saying it's good luck, and Dwight says, "'A real man makes his own luck.' Billy Zane. t.i.tanic." That was a "click" for me. It just seemed so Dwighty that he would identify with that character in that movie. Those moments are few and far between, and they're surrounded by millions of c.r.a.ppy jokes and clumsy stuff that you throw away, but when you hit one it's the best feeling. Seth Meyers described the Weekend Update equivalent-writing a joke that you know is going to kill-as swinging the bat and being so sure you've hit a home run that you don't even watch the flight of the ball. You just put your head down and trot around the bases. The millions of c.r.a.ppy jokes you write make that rare feeling that much better.

What do you look for with submitted spec scripts from potential writers? What are some dos and don'ts?

I would say that the most valuable and unteachable a.s.set in a comedy writer is a unique voice. That is my top priority in hiring people-does this person sound like everyone else, or is there something about how he or she puts words and sentences and ideas together that sticks out? So many writers on The Office and Parks and Rec have owned irreplaceable voices, and so many actors as well. It's something I'm incredibly proud of on this show-the uniqueness of the voices we present. It makes jokes more interesting, characters more interesting, stories more interesting.