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I was closest with Mindy Kaling, and also least close with Mindy Kaling, on a minute-by-minute basis. And I wouldn't trade it for the word. Actually, I would trade it for the world. What am I talking about: I'd trade it for a more consistently positive relationship with Mindy Kaling. She's the best.
Kevin sitting on Michael's lap in one of the later Christmas episodes. Michael was playing Santa, and Kevin didn't realize he was absolutely crushing Michael while he took his sweet time figuring out what present he wanted to ask Santa for.
Mitch Hedberg is my favorite comedian of all-time. I'm not saying he was the best of all time, but he was my favorite.
9am. Wake up, turn on some music I like, put on a pot of coffee, and sit down to start writing! A few productive hours and then a break for lunch, and then a couple of more hours if possible: sounds like a plan! 9:15am-4:30pm: Read, text, look up stuff on the internet, read, text, look up stuff on the internet, in a trance cycle 4:30pm: Think "Jesus Christ, have I really done NOTHING all day?!? The day is almost fucking over! I am really fucking worthless." 4:30pm-7:30pm: Write like a maniac. 7:30pm: Decide, "okay, at least I got SOMETHING done today. Tomorrow, I'm going wake up early, be at my desk by 9, and really make up for lost time. REPEAT
My personal opinion (speaking for myself, not the character of Ryan): You will never be too warm or too cold in a long-sleeve tee. In my opinion it is the perfect item of clothing. Further backstory: this line drove writer/producer Michael Schur crazy because executive producer Greg Daniels refused to clarify whether it was meant to be sarcastic or not. It was a vehemently debated line among the Office writing staff, for some reason.
We acted together in the Senior Show our senior year. He was incredibly talented and the show was a lot of fun, but no, it never occurred to me that anyone would do anything together after high school. Who ever imagines that?
I sometimes think that if I were to wake up and it turned out The Office was all a dream, the fact that John Krasinski was in it with me would be what I'd realize afterward should have been the obvious tip-off. "Oh! And John Krasinski was in it, too! But they called him Jim! And there was a beet farmer... Whoa, so weird"
Constantly. We all thought he was crazy. Little did we know!
It was actually really similar in the big creative ways: thinking about how to find comedy and surprise and emotion in the unexpected and the everyday.
Fox behaves like two different companies. There's the entertainment wing, and there's... you know, the other one. They don't really communicate. So they may as well be two different entities.
It's a reference to the utterly haphazard nature of old variety shows. You'd do a sketch and then cut to a musical number with zero segue. So... basically Family Guy.
I was very surprised by the size of the reaction. To me, the positive spin was "Hey, people still really give a shit about this guy. That's cool."
These days, Brian is my favorite because it's an easy vocal transition - Quagmire is the hardest because my voice is pretty much thrashed by the end of the session
Find somebody who knows how the hell a computer works and have em direct you to a good animation program you can use at home. As you've seen, my computer skills aren't so hot.
I wanted to do an episodic, non-serialized show. There's no real interest in that kind of storytelling on the Netflixes out there - they like continuing stories you can binge-watch. So the network made sense.
I spent a lot of time there in college, and I hadn't ever seen anyone depict it in a comedy series. Felt fresh. Like a mini-Boston. And the accent is hilarious.
Ok you want the truth? The Cavalcade of Comedy. I didn't feel like I had the time to put into it that it required. I thought it suffered as a result.
I thought it was really funny. They flagged our cutaway setups, which had been getting a little fast and loose at the time. Props for that. RE: the cutaways themselves, though, they were off the mark a bit. The cutaways are actually the hardest things to write on the show. Story-centric jokes come a little easier, but when you have to conceive and invent a whole independent little sequence several times in a episode, it's challenging as hell. Like doing a Far Side cartoon 10-12 times an episode.
I jump between TV and film for that reason. I felt fried after 12 years of Family Guy so I left to do Ted. At some point maybe I'll wind up writing for Family Guy full time again.
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BJ Novak