FRED Entertainment

 

-By Ken Plume

A few weeks back, we got the chance to catch up with Scrubs‘ creator/executive producer Bill Lawrence. Not only did we chat about the upcoming 6th (and final?) season, but also about the internet-driven resurrection of his pilot (with Neil Goldman & Garrett Donovan), Nobody’s Watching. Since we spoke, NBC has revived Nobody’s Watching for a series of webisodes that could eventually lead to a slot on the network’s schedule.

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KEN PLUME: I guess you’ve got a new appreciation for the internet now.

BILL LAWRENCE: I do, man. That’s what I’ve been spending all my time on, is trying to re-launch that show.

KP: So, who isn’t talking to you about that story at this point?

LAWRENCE: (laughing) You know what I think?  I think it must be that people are poised, ready, and looking for some way that the internet has a direct effect on television and entertainment, because so many people wanted to do this story – and what was fascinating about it was that everybody had their own specific angle, as if it was holstered up and waiting, you know?

KP: The zeitgeist of it all.

LAWRENCE: Yeah, it’s that, and it’s also people that A) want to write articles about the demise of network television or B), how networks are always behind the trends or C) how testing is really archaic and doesn’t work.

KP: So what’s the biggest agenda that keeps presenting itself?  What’s the one that recurs more often in the conversation?

LAWRENCE: The one that recurs the most out here is people wanting to as always write a slanted article towards how dumb network executives are. And so that’s the minefield I have to be careful about.

KP: That’s a rather awkward thing for you to deal with.

LAWRENCE: Yeah, ’cause it’s always, you know, “These guys don’t have opinions of their own and they pass over shit that’s good.”  So many stories have come at me from this angle about, “Here’s a pilot that – just because of the internet – has now been well reviewed by most of the top critics in the country, and yet the WB put on ‘this’ instead.  How dumb is David Janollari?” And you’re like, “Ha ha.  I don’t know what I want to say about that.”

KP: Well, let’s see, can we talk about this over here?

LAWRENCE: Yeah, I know. Exactly. So that’s always the diciest one.

KP: There’s an irony in the pilot itself.  You could say that the entire future of these two characters was actually created by a forward-thinking network executive.

LAWRENCE: Yeah! (laughing) And by the way, the premise is so… god, I use the word ‘meta’ just ’cause other people have, too. It makes our head spin sometimes, ’cause obviously, you know, when we get to redo the show we’re gonna make the internet, what’s been going on here, a component of it. The only thing that we didn’t do in that original pilot is the power of viral video. The internet doesn’t exist in the pilot that’s on YouTube, and when we get to make it again for network, we’ll probably add that element.

KP: You have professed in the past to not be terribly net savvy…

LAWRENCE: You know what dragged me in, is this. Without a doubt, the best thing for me is working on a comedy staff in which there’s people in here ranging from age 24 to age… to me.

KP: You’re talking like an old man.

LAWRENCE: There you go, exactly. But the reality of comedy rooms right now is that even if you’re an internet neophyte like myself, the day starts with people sharing viral stuff and funny stuff they’ve seen online and printouts of articles that they’ve read, and so even I have gotten to the point that I’m texting people back and forth with my phone. I’ve been dragged kicking and screaming into this century, and I would even say on some level, one of the reasons that we took so long to do this with Nobody’s Watching, is that it felt like serendipity.  You know, because if someone had put Nobody’s Watching on YouTube before I had witnessed first hand how quickly these things spread – like with “Lazy Sunday” and everything like that – I would have never personally had the foresight to call up a publicist, hire them, and say, “Hey, someone put this on YouTube. Can we generate some heat behind it and see what happens?”  So in that sense, I’m glad it didn’t happen until now.

KP: Well, next thing you’ll be talking about them bringing in their rock and roll and their pong and their tab collars…

LAWRENCE: I was dragged kicking and screaming.  You know what the problem was? I gotta tell you, one of the reasons I hid so much from the internet is – and I think that it’s dangerous for like-minded personalities like myself – I’ve gone almost overnight from somebody that, you know, doesn’t spend a lot of time doing that to somebody who’s wife had to go into the family room last night at 4 in the morning and lecture him to stop playing hearts with people.  You know what I mean? Because for an obsessive personality, it’s endless 24-hour entertainment, whether it’s watching shit or actually playing your favorite card game against a bunch of people that you can talk smack as you go against them.  It’s not a healthy thing for me if I want to spend any time with my children.

KP: You’ve pretty much reached 1995, is what you’re saying.

LAWRENCE: Exactly.

KP: But Christa’s pretty net savvy, isn’t she?

LAWRENCE: Christa, my wife, is obsessed – and that’s why it’s available to me. One of our couple arguments is that once the kids are down, her unwinding – especially being a music freak – is all about her updating her library and searching for music.  For me to be such an idiot, we don’t even have a stereo in our house. It’s all played from my wife’s computer.

KP: But that’s just practical.  When you have that many songs, you can’t put them on CD anymore.

LAWRENCE: No, exactly, and the funniest part of it now, too, is that not only is this thing a huge time suck for me, ’cause I’m sucked in, but it’s opened up a whole new topic for my wife and I to argue about, because now that I actually know how to do this and how to use it, I suddenly think I should have a say in what music we play – all the stuff that was working smoothly before because I didn’t know how to do it is now causing semi-serious marital stress!

KP: So you’re getting all uppity now is what you’re saying.

LAWRENCE: Yeah, man, you know – like before, Christa would jokingly say, “Yeah, go ahead, do whatever you want…” and I’d be like, “I don’t know how.”

KP: “Where’s the button?”

LAWRENCE: Exactly.

KP: You talked about hearts – what other addictive things have you found? What’s the website you can’t not hit?

LAWRENCE: You know what the biggest thing for me was, there’s not only YouTube, but there’s another one – you know Break?

KP: Yes.

LAWRENCE: I think one of the scary things about a comedy writer is if you’re successful, you start to get so removed from your real life, and that’s when you start to run into people going, “Hey, I saw this episode of Friends two years ago, you could do a story like that.”

KP: Isn’t that the case of any creative person, where you run the risk of reaching a disconnect?

LAWRENCE: I think it is.  It’s why I was so impressed by Mel Brooks being able to do The Producers. You know, to stay current, ’cause I think there’s a period when he was hip and so funny and then people were like, “Oh, this is getting hacky and dated,” and then he made a comeback, which is so cool.  And for me personally, everything that I’m drawn to – aside from playing hearts and poker and wasting time – is about going to websites and seeing the shit that has grabbed the public zeitgeist, comedy-wise.  Not only is it hysterical, but it’s actually kind of an angle for me of what people are cracking up about now.

KP: Do you find that it’s a constant concern, particularly when you’re on a long running show, that you can become cocooned within that writers’ room, and just producing that show?

LAWRENCE: I think it’s a long-running concern – not so much specifically even with the show, but with what you do for a living… which is, you know, if you’re successful as a comedy writer, the inevitability is you lose touch with reality simply out of financial success, and spending 99% of your time around Hollywood people who, let’s face it, aren’t the rest of the world. I got that lesson once in a really valuable way from a friend of mine. I told him that he should go see the movie The Player, and he had kids at the time, and he had to get a sitter for his night out.  I loved that movie.  And the next day, I played a message on my message machine, and it was just him going, ‘Hey – fuck you.”  And I’m like, “What do you mean? I love that movie!”  He goes, “Look, pass this around to your friends.  Nobody but you guys gives a fuck about movies about movies.  And no one cares about TV shows about TV shows except you.”  And I was thinking about it, and over the years, my favorite show – like, I loved Larry Sanders.  One of my favorite shows on Earth. I really stayed tight with my friends that aren’t in the entertainment industry back on the east coast, and none of them watched it. So the reality is the cocoon thing is much wider than just your show.  It’s that you become so detached in success and in what you do for a living out here. The clichés exist for a reason.  People sitting around at dinners and talking about nothing except who’s in what movie, and how much that movie made and who’s doing what project.  One of the cool things about the internet is it’s immediate gratification on seeing not only what’s going on in the world, if you’re news minded, but what’s making people laugh.  We were talking about shit like that today. I went on Giant Magazine, which has a list of top ten viral videos right now, and there’s one that it’s just a fuckin’ animated banana singing this song, “It’s Peanut Butter and Jelly Time.”  And I now have to play that for half an hour chunks for my kid to dance.  That’s A.  And B, one of the things we got – which is interesting because I watch so much TV – is a show that I would never watch, but the Maury Povich show has this one hilarious clip in which… it’s everything that’s wrong with television, and it’s all over the internet, which is they bring a guy on who a woman claims to be the father of her unborn baby, and they give a DNA test to him.  On the Maury Povich Show, they make a big moment, almost like the Oscars’ “and the winner is,” and it’s basically, “And anyways, we’re here – live – to tell you that you are… not the father.”  And then the guy starts, in an impromptu way, to do this giant exuberant dance as the audience claps for him while his wife is inconsolably crying in the background. And it is so painful, and so painful and funny to watch, that we’re immediately like, “How could we do something that inappropriate on this show?” and trying to figure out how to essentially crib it, you know?

KP: Give an end zone dance to an inappropriate moment?

LAWRENCE: Exactly.  I gotta tell you man, it’s partly… it’s due to you guys.  The first time I realized the power of this stuff, because I obviously was a neophyte, was the boost that Scrubs got when we did that air band thing and Turk dancing, and how quickly it spread, in many ways stemming from the site that you were working on for us, and it just was kind of a shocking to me. We got more feedback on that from people that hadn’t seen the show that were like, “Oh, I’m gonna check this out.” And I’m like, “Wow.” It’s weird… even more than just somebody catching a TV show and the old traditional water cooler word of mouth, you know, one of the most downloaded things on the NBC site was Donald Faison lip-synching and dancing to the Poison song. It went everywhere.

KP: It was a surreal moment getting that phone call shortly after you guys came back in January, from Randall (Winston, executive producer), calling to thank me because he believed that there was a ratings boost, and not the deterioration that NBC thought would be there, because of the blog.

LAWRENCE: I wholeheartedly think so.  The other thing that I’m watching now, with an eye toward business, is the guys at Lost, who I think are really savvy, and are turning this kind of into the “Lost experience.”  You know, ’cause the traditional summer reruns – which keep people hooked on their favorite shows by tuning into the ones they missed and re-watching the ones they loved – is gone. It’s been replaced by reality TV and by people – you know, they don’t need a rerun when they can just purchase it on ITunes.  And the fact that these guys at Lost are making this very savvy effort to keep the show progressing and alive and the interest piqued on the internet is just fantastic to me. And it’s one of those things that really feels like a trend that if TV falls behind it and doesn’t take advantage of it and ends up chasing its tail like it usually does – you know, ’cause television has a long, long, long pattern of trend chasing… “Hey, Friends worked – let’s see seven copies of Friends“… long after people are sick of that. But it seems like, for a change, that TV is catching on when it needs to.

KP: I think it’s the very nature of the way the internet is, in that nothing dies.  There’s work that someone might have done 30 years ago that will suddenly appear as a clip.  It’s like trading baseball cards.  Count yourself lucky you haven’t discovered BitTorrent yet…. which I know some of the guys in your office have.

LAWRENCE: Yes, they have. I feel right now – which is cracking me up – that my wife, computer, and my TIVO are in a weird battle for my attention.

KP: When are you having that showdown?

LAWRENCE: I know, exactly, right?

KP: You know, you have characters now that are gonna be entering that. You have Turk and Carla about to enter that whole arena…

LAWRENCE: Yes.

KP: Maybe now is the time to actually launch the storyline about him setting up that web page.

LAWRENCE: That would be funny…

KP: But there is a power to what happened with Nobody’s Watching. You’ve said in the past that you know who leaked it.

LAWRENCE: Oh yeah… Yeah.

KP: It’s that power that someone can now wield to essentially say, “No, I’m not taking this lying down – I’m gonna go and take it to the people.”

LAWRENCE: Well, there’s two things.  One is that you would not believe, in television especially, that if your show gets rejected – no matter what the quality of it – it has, in the past, been such a brick wall.  And I’ll tell you why – and it’s what’s fascinating – is executives have such a short life span.  They really gotta be protective… you know, they have families, too, and they have to protect their jobs as much as they can. And one of the things that we ran into with Nobody’s Watching that I’ve never experienced before… and when I say this, I’m not being self-aggrandizing, because I made plenty of pilots that, if they turned up on YouTube, it would make me miserable, because it would make me look like I don’t know what I’m doing…

KP: Come on, you’ve got to name one!

LAWRENCE: I’m not gonna happily name the shows that I did that sucked.

KP: Don’t worry, they’re probably already out there.

LAWRENCE: Yeah, I was about to say.  Well, that’s the other good thing, man, is that it’s not… I think eventually, not only me, but other people get burned, too, ’cause it’s not a Shangri-la, man.  People do not pull their punches on the internet.  That’s one of the things I like about it.  But the really weird experience with television is – so we made this pilot, we thought it was really good, we thought it was going on, they flew us out there, all that shit. And when they said no, we turned our attention to using what little clout we had to get them to release it to us so that we could put it on elsewhere, thinking… you know, “What’s fine about this is, yeah, it’s not gonna be on the WB.  Who gives a shit, ’cause so many people have said that they liked this show.  Different networks, network presidents, etc., and the trades said it was the hot pilot, and all that stuff.  This’ll be cool ’cause we’ll just get to put it on whoever wants to pay the most money for it.”  And what we ran into was this kinda archaic system out here that once your show’s been rejected, people are very candid in saying, “Hey man, look, the odds of a TV show succeeding, even if they’re good, are so slim, that as an executive I can’t fail with a TV show that wasn’t even good enough for the WB, because if it does anything other than becomes a hit, I’m gonna look like an idiot.”  So we ran into this weird wall of other networks going, “Yeah, you know, this is a funny show, I might like it, but if I put it on and it doesn’t work, whoever’s going after my job is gonna be saying, ‘This idiot spent millions of dollars on a show that wasn’t even good enough for the WB to pick up.'”  And while it’s understandable, it was very frustrating.  And so, many people – even our agents – reached the point that they were like, “Will you guys stop with this thing, it’s dead.  This is how TV works.”

KP: It’s got the scarlet letter upon it.

LAWRENCE: And so this all happened for us, that once somebody put it on YouTube, our initial reaction was like, “There’s like 4,000 people in the first week.” And we would go on there and we read comments, and it was just nice, slight vindication, because people didn’t have the same notes that the WB had.  They didn’t have the same response and we felt like, “Hey, look, we aren’t idiots.  A lot of people like this.” And then we sat around, and what motivated us to hire a publicity firm was the sole desire of going, “Hey, let’s see if we can find a way that it wouldn’t be stupid for a network president to take a chance on this show.”

KP: A way to save face…

LAWRENCE: Yeah.  Because to tell you the truth, the reason that this archaic testing… you know how they test TV shows – they take it out to the valley and they sequester 40 people that they give $50 to, and ask them leading questions about a show…

KP: So it’s jury duty.

LAWRENCE: There’s no correlation between good testing and success or bad testing and failure. You know, one of the things that all TV writers like to talk about, Seinfeld, was one of the lowest testing pilots ever. One of the highest testing pilots on NBC, the highest testing pilot on NBC that year that Scrubs premiered, was Emeril.  You know, and so you’re like, “Well, if everybody knows it doesn’t correlate to success or failure, why do we do it?” And the reason that they do it is to justify decisions.  You know?

KP: So they have a fall back.

LAWRENCE: “Why’d you put it on?”  “Look at the testing. The testing was through the roof.”  “Hey, this show’s really good – why didn’t you put it on?”  “Well, the testing sucked.  No one’s gonna like it.”  And so we came to the conclusion, if testing really exists for the reason of justifying decisions – giving people the opportunity to save face – stirring up some publicity about this and seeing what reviewers and people really think is such a better form of testing.  And that was our motivation in the first place. I think, “Why wouldn’t the network take their comedy pilots and their drama pilots and put them on a website and let the people decide which are the best ones to put on TV in the fall?”

KP: What were the notes that you got from the WB?

LAWRENCE: Well, here’s the best thing for us. I’ll say it now, even though most of the comments on YouTube were positive, there was a lot of negative critique that’s so much more valuable than the fake testing notes.  Like, the biggest note we got from the WB that was one of the issues that they said for ultimately not picking the show up, was it was way too complicated a premise.  Impossible for the viewing public to understand.  So much so… and by the way, when you’re a writer, all you want to do is get your show on, so you start to believe this.  “Wow, it’s so confusing!”  We didn’t have any money to make a credit sequence.  We were gonna make a credit sequence that explains the entire pilot, to try and calm the network’s fears – so, like, “Look!  Every week in the credits we explain to everybody how this show works!”  And we didn’t have the money to do it, so if you look at that bootlegged copy on YouTube, after the cold open there’s this black card that says, “Very cool explanatory credit sequence to come later.”  And then we looked through the 9,000 some odd… and by the way, we ready every one of them… You know, the 9,000 some odd critiques and comments on YouTube, and not one said, “Wow, this is too confusing.  I didn’t understand it.”

KP: In fact, they probably all thought the title card was a joke.

LAWRENCE: Yeah.  And nobody had any problem following it. In fact, I would even say, to take it further, that testing 50 people that are actually willing to give up their Friday or Saturday to sit in a room in the Valley for 50 bucks and talk about a TV show – I don’t think that’s your viewing audience.  I think testing from people that have taken the time to download something and watch 27 minutes of it and then talk about it is so much more true and valuable that we actually… to be candid, there’s a couple of negative through lines… there’s a couple of negative criticisms that we saw in numerous comments, even from people that liked the show, that actually meant something to us, and when we get to do this again we’re gonna address them.  The main one being, if you read a lot of them, even the people that really liked the show responded to the kind of loose style, in that it seemed kind of improvy and, like The Office, that people were not really acting and ad-libbing, and they all responded negatively to the one or two little sections that seemed very overly scripted like a sitcom. And that makes some sense.  It’s supposed to be a hip, edgy, fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants show, and when we redo this pilot, we’re gonna take those scenes and make them less scripted and let the actors riff with the audience more, and kind of not be in that traditional sitcom dialogue format.

KP: If there’s one criticism that I had of it, it was exactly that.  I loved the premise, it just it seemed almost like it was too similar to what you were making fun of at the beginning, with According to Jim, or those type of shows.

LAWRENCE: Yeah.

KP: I mean, Larry Sanders really is your perfect model for that in-front-of-the-camera sort of thing, in that you have these two different worlds that are the same world.

LAWRENCE: Yeah.

KP: And Nobody’s Watching didn’t seem like it had that looseness.

LAWRENCE: And there’s two scenes in particular… and the amazing thing is, when you change a pilot – you change like one, two big things and the whole thing changes.  And for us, there’s two big scenes that were on the soundstage shot multi-camera style that were very scripted, and that the guys… ’cause if you look at some of the scenes that we shot later and the single camera stuff where we let all the actors riff, and the scenes that the actors are obviously ad-libbing, turning to the audience and saying, you know, screaming “You tell me” and stuff like that…  That stuff really works, and the scenes that seem incredibly like, “Wow, that could have been taken from any sitcom…” will go away.

KP: Honestly, one of the things I was really hoping for, a show that I loved and I hoped this would sort of be a new spin on that, was It’s Gary Shandling’s Show. 

LAWRENCE: Yeah.

KP: It’s so close, yet different from that – but still using the hip awareness of the fact that anyone can be a TV star today.

LAWRENCE: Yeah. Which is true, by the way.

KP: Again, look at YouTube. Anyone can be a sensation.

LAWRENCE: Not only that, but that most reality shows are comedies. If you watch the most successful reality shows – when people say, “Wow, there’s a great cast on Survivor…” translation: “There’s a crazy guy and the dynamic with him and the other people and the dialogue they have, while very real, is incredibly funny.”  Because otherwise no one’s interested.

KP: I can imagine, in a future episode, meeting the mad editor who has to put together this mess for air.

LAWRENCE: Oh, without a doubt.

KP: That was the only thing that struck me in the thing, was that it just seemed very mannered, wen obviously you could tell the actors were waiting to break out, and you, the writers, were trying to break out.

LAWRENCE: Yeah. But one of the cool things about this, too, is I find that that information that I got from real people responding is so much more valuable than the bullshit stuff. If you read network testing, it’s “He’s not handsome enough.”  “I don’t like her hair.”  “It’s complicated.” It’s all bullshit, you know, and it’s stuff that real TV viewers don’t care about.

KP: Also, there’s performance anxiety, I’m sure, for people who are paid 50 bucks and think “Oh, well, I can have an opinion on everything. I might as well nitpick.”

LAWRENCE: There’s also, you know – I mean, this is me being a biased TV producer – the other thing that people traditionally use testing for is you get in a standoff with the network… “I think that this actor sucks,” and I say, “I think this actor’s really good,” and then they’ll go to testing, and if you’re there, the guy will go, “Yeah, but isn’t this actor not great when it comes to the emotional stuff?”  Well, basically they ask questions to support the things that they already believe.  And it turns into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

KP: What kind of criticism is more damaging to you?  What really is like a knife to you?

LAWRENCE: Oh shit… You know what? I think I’ve reached the point that very specific criticism doesn’t… it’s really hard for me, ’cause the stuff doesn’t really hurt my feelings anymore.  I think the only thing that could really get me is if something that I believed had merit – like I never thought Nobody’s Watching was perfect, but man, I will gladly put it up next to every single new show that was picked up that year, comedies… none of which survived, mind you.  Except maybe the War at Home.

KP: I think that’s walking wounded.

LAWRENCE: Yeah, and I’d be confident that people like yourself, even if they had issues with it, would go, “Well, that’s one of the best of those.”

KP: Well that’s the other thing about the mentality today, is that there’s not even time allowed for a show to evolve.

LAWRENCE: Not only that – what we’re talking about is even before that, you know, when I was talking about the death of a sitcom – this is what’s amazing to me…  As a writer, if you do a play, you workshop it – you’ll take it to a regional place, you’ll write new scenes, you’ll add a new act break, you’ll change dialogue, you keep going, and then when it’s ready, you fuckin’ put it on Broadway. You know what I mean?

KP: Right.

LAWRENCE: A pilot… and even movies now, by the way, ’cause I was just doing this with one… You’ll rewrite it, you’ll rewrite it, you’ll cast it, you’ll shoot it.  If it doesn’t work, they’ll put more money into it and go shoot new endings and a new thing and a new this and a new that.  With TV shows, you make it – and say that the network, for whatever reason, goes, “You know what? This pilot doesn’t really work for us.”  There’s never an opportunity to go next year, “Hey, remember that thing last year that I did that no one’s ever seen? You liked this actor, you liked a lot about it, you thought this worked.  I have been continuing to work on this and I think it’s a lot better now, and would like to have that be my show.”  You will never get a yes.  The answer is always, “Yeah, that’s dead.”  And it’s amazing to me that they would rather spend their money on, instead, “Why don’t you give us a new idea that we haven’t seen the actors, and we haven’t seen anything, and we don’t know how it’s gonna turn out at all.”  I would think that the one that they thought had some good stuff about it is much further along and it has a better shot at being great, you know what I mean?

KP: Right – if you’re gonna give a shot anyway, why not let be the one that already has a good chunk of work done?

LAWRENCE: Yeah.  I mean, I’m looking at this with Nobody’s Watching.  Here’s an example: NBC studios signed both Neil & Garrett, the guys that wrote it with me, and one of the lead actors of it, to holding deals because they liked them so much from this pilot. And so my attitude is like, “If you guys like these guys so much from this show that didn’t get on the WB, but you personally liked it so much that you’re gonna invest millions of dollars in these three guys to work for your company from now on, why wouldn’t you want us to continue working on this show that made such a great impression on you?”  “Well, ’cause the WB rejected it.” It’s very weird, man, and that was all before the internet helped us out.

KP: So what are you hearing now, post-internet?

LAWRENCE: Well, I’m gonna get this show on television, you know?  We’ll find out if it’s on NBC on Thursday.  Kevin Riley’s coming back from vacation.  He’s been very supportive and cool and keeps moving the meeting up as more and more press happens.  We keep getting calls going, “Okay, instead of next week, it’s now the day I get back.” And the funniest thing – because I’ve pitched tons of TV shows before – I’m going to the network president on Thursday to talk about whether or not we’re going to do this show, but I’m going to be late because I’m on CNN Showbiz Tonight and then Neil is gonna have to leave early ’cause he and the cast are on the Carson Daley show.  Which is hysterical to me. 

KP: At this point, just to get the original cast, you need a character death on Prison Break.

LAWRENCE: Exactly – but you know what?  To me, like when you talk about really expanding… ’cause I simply held back in some things creatively because we had been convinced it’s so confusing.  But fuck that, you know? I mean, I wouldn’t change the character, I’d keep him in the pilot.  Anybody that’s on a show is allowed to do three guest spots.  I’ll have him do his three guest spots on this show, and if we can’t work something out with Prison Break or his character hasn’t died or if that show’s still on, then instead of Jeff Tucker it’ll be Kevin Smiley.  They’ll hire somebody new. It’ll get promoted upwards.

KP: In fact, that can be your first internet tie-in – Find The New Friend.

LAWRENCE: Exactly….

KP: Send in your YouTube videos…

LAWRENCE: Without a doubt.  If you’re really gonna expand the premise, I think you gotta just look at it that as long as those two guys that are buddies in real life are the core of this and this is really just a buddy show, who gives a shit about all that other stuff.  I think that’s part of the fun – letting people help us make creative decisions.

KP: And the existing pilot is essentially a pilot for whatever the next iteration is.

LAWRENCE: Yeah, without a doubt.

KP: It’s not gospel at this point…

LAWRENCE: No, not at all.

KP: When you look at what’s possible with the internet now, has it changed your thinking in how you approach work?

LAWRENCE: It has, because I think that… and I was guilty of this as well, but I think that network television has been too many years of people crossing their fingers and going, “Gosh, man, I hope the networks get huge again.”  And A, that’s not gonna happen.  My father has 160 channels.  That’s one sign.  The other sign is every young kid in my family – they don’t even have the same background. Like, when I was a kid, all I remember was the three big networks.  You’re watching CBS on Monday nights.  Kids don’t even have a concept of the big networks.  The younger people, if the show they like is on Discovery, they’re watching Discovery. If it’s on Comedy Central, they’re watching Comedy Central.  They don’t differentiate between network TV and their 150 channels.

KP: It’s just numbers on the box…

LAWRENCE: Right.  And because of that, the cool thing about there being so many different outlets for media is that there’s so many different opportunities for creators and people and writers and actors and performers to do stuff. The down side is that the burden of getting people to check out your show initially, which is 90% of the battle.  Your show’s survival is on two things – people coming to it initially, and then they stay based on quality.  In the old days of network TV, getting people to come to your show initially was by however well they promoted it on their own network – “Hey, Must See Tuesdays on NBC!”  That’s over.

KP: You can’t assume that anyone’s watching the network to see those.

LAWRENCE:  You can’t.  And you can’t assume that, with so many options, that there’s any synergy left between, “Hey, the people that like Scrubs are also gonna like this weird show on another night and we’ll promote Scrubs then and that’ll make them watch…” It doesn’t work that way anymore.

KP: But that’s where the net steps in.

LAWRENCE: Yes.  That’s also a clear example of why the most successful promotion for Scrubs and the most successful lead in for Scrubs was when we aired back-to-back episodes.  You know, because the only correlation that worked was, “Hey, look, people that like Scrubs also like Scrubs.”

KP: Took them how many years – five years to figure that out?  I have to admit, I was quite happy about that… because I had run up against a lot of problems trying to pitch the idea of doing the Scrubs blog, internally.

LAWRENCE: Yes.

KP: So it was kind of wing and a prayer, believing it would work, in spite of the company going “Well, whatever.  Whatever you want to do. We’re not gonna pay you anything for it.”  So it was a labor of love. Luckily, you latched onto it and everyone there, like gangbusters, latched onto it.  And I hope everyone had a good time doing it.

LAWRENCE: You were so cool, by the way.

KP: I’m glad it took off the way it did.  One of the big things, when you talk about maintaining a through line, was to try and get a clutch of material to carry through the summer. We’ve been running the audio commentaries that you guys did pre-break, to keep Scrubs out there.  To keep a through line where people see that the show is not gone in any way.

LAWRENCE: This is gonna sound delinquent, but we actually… the meeting we had right before lunch, and why I was a little late on the phone call, was partly ’cause I saw that I was talking to you today – and it was me taking the blame – but I sat down with the writing staff and said, “Guys, I’ve slightly dropped the ball, because I’ve concentrated so much both online and publicity-wise on the presence of Nobody’s Watching, that we had a big rally cry today to make sure that we don’t drop the ball on keeping Scrubs alive for the next few months ’til it comes back on TV.” Not only that, we hired a group of young savvy people… I mean really young for us, early 20s, that are so into this and came to the show with such quirky ideas about stuff, that we’re also planning on coming up with some fun content, too, even if it’s just… it’s very weird.  Part of the thing that we’re taking advantage of here, Ken, is that when I first started, you just had to be funny in college and you would come out here and get a comedy writing job. And now there’s so few comedy writing jobs… and all you would do is write a spec script and go be funny in a meeting and hopefully get work.  But now, these kids that I was hiring, they all have their own things on MySpace, they all make their own short films, they all trade these videos that they do. They’re so active in this, it’s one of the reasons we brought them into it.

KP: When you look at it, on the Scrubs blog side of it, what do you see as the major push a year into it, as what to what we should concentrate on?

LAWRENCE: For me right now, you know, the biggest thing that we’re gonna do is… this is gonna sound too general, ’cause I’m gonna try and sound too clever… I just want to make sure that everybody knows A, you know, that the show’s still alive, and we’re still aggressive about it, and then B, the thing that we’re considering here is really selling that this is the last year. 

KP: Right.

LAWRENCE: You know, because, quite honestly, if that changed, I think fans would be happy, but we’re going in towards the writing staff thinking about “It’s the last year,” and so because of that, a lot of the stuff that we’re talking about ranges from how should we end this stuff up, you know? How does this show finish, where are we taking these characters – to be a retrospective thing, since it’s the last year… What were our favorite moments? What were our favorite jokes? What were our favorite things… you know what I mean?  And I think that’s kind of… I think it’s a thing that the people that are big enough fans to go onto the blog and check it out will respond to.

KP: The thing is, when you look at that, it’s gonna be an impossible task to try and reassemble the group after the fact.

LAWRENCE: Yeah.

KP: But while everyone’s there, that’s the time to really grab all the stuff, grab all the recollections…

LAWRENCE: And that’s what I thought would be cool, because if you notice, we got the idea ’cause sometimes shows that are doing DVDs way after the fact… like, Seinfeld ran into this big issue, that the DVDs became big after they were gone, and then they were trying to get all these people come back and talk about what moments they loved, and it was tough because they were already so removed from it.

KP: Right.  You don’t get that visceral impact.

LAWRENCE: Yeah. For us, with this immediate internet presence… to me, to be shooting little videos of cast members talking about – “Is it weird that this might be the start to the last year?  How does it make you feel going into this?  How are you…” I think that’s kind of cool to actually watch that as it happens, rather than in the past, where the only thing that you ever see is that cheesy Entertainment Tonight piece with people cutting a fake cake and saying goodbye and crying.

KP: And the days of a photo-op like that are even past.

LAWRENCE: Yeah.

KP: The internet takes the need for that away.

LAWRENCE: Without a doubt. And I’m also gonna be… and I didn’t do this last year, which is last year the two staff writers I said, “You guys are gonna do blogs on what it’s like to start here and stuff like that.”  And I left it at that, I think in part because, quite honestly Ken, I didn’t realize the power of all this stuff.  And this year, with the three new people I hired, what I’m gonna do is essentially make it their job… not that writing a blog is their job, but the creative aspect of this is the job and I’m gonna hold them accountable for it. I’m gonna make it the job for these kids, which’ll be great.

KP: I’m there…

LAWRENCE: Yeah, but you don’t have to be this way, because one of the things I hope you can tell, is not empty words, but I’ve realized not only by my recent thing with Nobody’s Watching, ultimately by what I think the boost for the show was from you guys, the value of this, and I got a track record completely from a self-centered place, and when I think something’s incredibly valuable, I pounce on it. You can see it happening right now with how much publicity and how much shit we’re doing with Nobody’s Watching.  I can do the same with this.

KP: And as you know, whatever you guys need, don’t hesitate to ask.

LAWRENCE: Awesome.