You Can’t Be Serious(98)
“I have a question,” Joel spoke up. “My brand is literally talking about sexual things, that’s what I do. My stand-up comedy is about cum in butts. Are you saying I can’t tweet about cum in butts?”
The now-shocked-and-amused lawyer assured all the performers that these things were really just issues of context—NBC had no intention of getting in the way of anyone’s brand, as long as performers avoided mentioning the network by name in tweets that wouldn’t pass their purist benchmarks. “You can do stand-up comedy and tweet as you normally would, as long as you don’t mention or tag NBC.”
The next day, when Deadline gave accolades to our talented, funny cast with a flattering article titled “NBC Assembles Cast of Mostly Immigrant Actors for Kal Penn Pilot ‘Sunnyside,’?” Joel retweeted the link with his own hot take:
Despite his clear violation of their rules, the network was very cool about it and nobody asked me to tell Joel to take it down.2
The pilot shoot was some of the most fun I’ve had in television. We edited and turned it in, the studio and network focus-group tested it, and a couple of months ticked by as we waited.
* * *
I’m at home in New York City, pacing in my apartment, on hold with the executives at NBC and Universal for a phone call I have dreamed about my entire career. “We just wanted to let you know,” they say, “how excited we are to be picking up Sunnyside for a ten-episode season this fall!” I belt out a “woohoo” at the top of my lungs. “You probably won’t see news about our other comedy pickups for a few days,” the executive encourages. “We want to make sure you can grab great writers before they get staffed on other shows.”
Across the apartment Josh smiles.
I quickly call my parents to share the good news.
I get back on the phone with Matt because it’s time to hire a writing staff and I’ve never done that before! As the showrunner, he takes the lead on the time-consuming process, and brings together the funniest of the applicants. He composes a team made up entirely of immigrants and immediate family members thereof. As I read their bios and writing samples I can’t quite tell if the ray of light I’m feeling is bursting out of my heart and onto these pages, or the other way around. We already assembled the most diverse cast in the history of network television, and I guess I’m the first Indian American leading man. Now I know we have the most diverse writers’ room too. I’m very proud.
In fact, among the entire creative team, I realize most people are either first-generation, BIPOC, LGBTQ, or many hyphenates on top of that. What makes this so special to me is that it’s icing on the cake: That our Sunnyside family reflects the real America is an important bonus that comes out of our desire—Matt’s and mine—for both representation and diversity of comedic viewpoints, something my cocreator has been especially thoughtful in executing. And in his true humble Matt Murray fashion, when I ask him about it all, he downplays his own hard work, hinting at a changing system in the industry we both love, telling me, “There are plenty of great writers out there from all sorts of cool backgrounds. If other shows don’t reflect that, it kinda seems like it’s a choice.”
I think to myself about the absurdity of the casting director who once told me she wouldn’t hire me because I’m not “even” Latino; the trust fund boss who barked that Joseph Gordon-Levitt was unemployable because he’s “fucking Asian.” Our show is a real point of pride for those of us who’ve had experiences like that on our paths toward this big network television moment. “Wow,” I say to our team, feeling thankful for it all, “we’re really doing it!”
* * *
Sunnyside had a lot going for it: NBC put us in prime real estate: nine thirty on Thursday nights. In decades past, that was the same time slot occupied by Seinfeld and Friends—two iconic, hilarious New York shows (albeit each with a take on the city that looked more like Omaha than Manhattan). I was excited and anxious to be occupying that same real estate, being the new, not-from-around-here neighbors; the people of color who moved in next door, bringing our reflective, heterogeneous, modern-day NYC to the masses.
The NBC Thursday Night Comedy Block, as it was called, was formidable.
The first prime-time slot of the evening was for long-running Superstore (8 p.m.), followed by the series premiere of a musical comedy about a small-town church choir called Perfect Harmony (8:30 p.m.) starring the very funny Bradley Whitford. Our lead-in was Mike Schur’s hit The Good Place (9 p.m.), with Ted Danson and Kristen Bell. And then our baby, Sunnyside (9:30 p.m.). After that, Dick Wolf’s Law & Order, followed by your local nightly news.
Free television! No fancy streaming, no expensive paywall. Hopefully, that meant success in the ratings, but at a minimum, it meant that whoever wanted to watch the show could actually watch it. For a lot of the people in the cast—who grew up, like me, watching their parents pinch pennies—that meant something too. It’s easy to look at the monthly subscription fees for various streaming services and treat them as an afterthought, but for a lot of people, they aren’t. I was proud that anyone with a TV could join in the fun with us.
* * *
The chemistry among the cast and crew grew each day as we got into production. In between shooting scenes on our soundstage at Universal Studios, I’d head up two flights to our writers’ room to check in with the team there, weigh in on an edit with Matt and the postproduction people, offer script notes. Everything felt right. Everything felt—in a word—comfortable. Here’s an example of what I mean when I say that. When I checked in with our writers one afternoon, they were sharing stories about home remedies for a potential joke runner. Two of our writers, Bosnian American brothers Dario and Damir Konjicija, recounted how whenever they got sick as children, their mother would chop mounds of potatoes, soak them in vinegar, and stuff them in their socks to ward off the sickness. “You’d just wake up feeling miserable from an awful fever, and nauseous from the smell of the vinegar, which made being sick that much worse. Our mom would insist the ‘potato socks’ were the reason our fever eventually went away, and not the Tylenol we also took!” Telling this story in a typical writers’ room might get you some laughs at your expense. Telling it with the Sunnyside team meant you got hearty laughs with nods around the room. Since every person had an immigrant background, everyone could relate from experience on some level, and chime in with their own wholesome version of potato socks.