Yes, Bill Lawrence is very busy. He’s got five television shows on the air this year: the first-season HBO series “Rooster,” “Shrinking” on Apple TV (which recently dropped Season 3) and ABC’s rebooted “Scrubs,” all of which are in the running for Emmys, plus the upcoming “Ted Lasso” (entering Season 4) and “Bad Monkey” (back for Season 2), both on Apple.
When TheWrap visited him in his offices on the Warner Bros. lot the last week of April, he was spending part of every day in the “Rooster” writing room, which was gearing up for a new season that would start shooting in about six months; part in the “Bad Monkey” editing room, often writing new narration to help tie the show together; and part with the writers of “Shrinking,” which was due to begin production in less than a month. “Scrubs,” meanwhile, was about to be renewed for an eleventh season, to be shot in Vancouver, while “Ted Lasso” had just released a trailer for its long-delayed fourth season, largely made without Lawrence’s direct input.
“I’m at the age where I can run a show and a half every year myself,” Lawrence, 57, said with a shrug. “Maybe two or three shows every two years, if you stack ’em the right way.”
In a modest group of offices on the second floor of a WB building not far from Clint Eastwood’s longtime digs, Lawrence’s Doozer Productions was stacking ’em, all right. Down a long hallway, handwritten signs were stuck to the walls outside offices that no doubt do multiple duty: “Ted Lasso” here, “Bad Monkey” there… Shooting and editing were taking place nearby, and Lawrence was on the move.
“He’s like a Duracell Bunny,” said Charly Clive, who plays the daughter of Steve Carell’s character on “Rooster.” “You’d be doing a take and then you’d see him in the background laughing and running to another show. He’s unbelievably hardworking.”
Lawrence doesn’t like dwelling on the pressures of the schedule; he’d rather praise the longtime crew members and production colleagues who don’t require much supervision, avoiding anything that might be considered the least bit aggrandizing. “I’m busy, but the B side of that is that nobody’s making a ton of stuff in TV right now,” he said, presumably forgetting about Taylor Sheridan as he sat back in a chair in jeans, sneakers and a long-sleeved T-shirt.
“And everyone that does what I do, myself included, has had crazy dry spells where you feel like you can’t get anything going. So if the powers that be are crazy enough to let me make a whole bunch of shows and tell a whole lot of stories right now, which is my favorite thing on earth to do, I’m gonna do it.
“Because I know I could be a year away from sitting here with you and you going, ‘What happened? How did your career end?’ And I’d say, ‘I’m not sure, but it was a good ride.’”
That good ride has made Lawrence one of the most prolific, successful and distinctive showrunners and creators in television over the past few decades, from his days with “Spin City” and “Scrubs” to his recent quintet of comedies that has firmly established him as the poet laureate of middle-aged male depression.
What’s the Lawrence DNA? “A Bill Lawrence show is very community-based and very quickly becomes quite familial,” said Clive. “It’s a comedy that punches up, never punches down.” Her “Rooster” co-star Danielle Deadwyler, who plays the dean of students at an East Coast college, added, “I would also say that it has a collaborative nature and a bit of intuitive spirit.”
“Shrinking” star Jessica Williams put her finger on something else. “One of the first things he said before our table read was that he doesn’t like assholes,” she said. “He has a ‘no-asshole’ policy.”
Christa Miller, who has a small role on “Scrubs,” a bigger one on “Shrinking” and an even bigger one as Lawrence’s wife, added, “Bill really only likes to work with people who are lovely and talented.”
“Scrubs”’ Donald Faison identified hope as another constant. His co-star Zach Braff, who has directed several episodes across Lawrence’s series and is a co-showrunner on the hospital comedy, agreed.
“And there’s always a mix of comedy and drama. There are moments that break your heart, and then just as you’re wiping a tear out of your eye, something really funny happens. Another through line in all of his shows is that they all have an aspect of mentorship. And that’s been one of the great collaborations of my life, having Bill as the main mentor of my whole career.”
When we shared some of the cast members’ insights into the DNA of a Bill Lawrence show with the man himself, he agreed with the “no assholes” note and then nodded. “It’s taken me a long time to understand what it means to have a voice,” he said. “I’m a writer who fell in love with shows that are joke-forward, and sometimes even broad, silly comedy, but with moments of emotional depth. And you’re hopefully emotionally invested in the characters.”
I finally found myself in a position of people going, ‘Who do you want to work with?’”
Bill Lawrence
He laughed. “One of my favorite comedies of all time is “Veep.” And you could say that that show is just really talented people finding new ways to be horrible to each other. I could watch it all day, but I don’t know if I could write it, because my shows generally have a connectivity and a sense of people really giving a s–t about each other.”
Lawrence’s series also have a sense of goodness that can feel very out of place in our current society — a tone that can come across as something of a political statement in a body of work that doesn’t set out to be political.
“I find the world to have been a tumultuous shitshow from Covid on,” he said. “That’s why I’ve been writing shows like ‘Ted Lasso’ and ‘Shrinking’ and ‘Rooster’ and ‘Scrubs’ that have an inherent hopefulness and optimism and kindness in them. The fact that that almost seems like a political statement is very weird to me. I’m always taken aback when someone interprets it as such.
“When Ted Lasso says, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if people could just be a little more curious, not judgmental, and be a little kinder and meet each other with an open heart?’ I don’t think that’s a political statement. I think it’s a human statement.”
Growing up in Ridgefield, Connecticut, William Van Duzer Lawrence IV didn’t set out to be a TV showrunner. His family was more into education than entertainment: His great-great-grandmother was Sarah Lawrence, for whom the private New York college was named by its founder, the first William Van Duzer Lawrence.
“My pipe dream was to be a stand-up comic, but I’m not good in front of audiences,” he said. “I was a mediocre comic at best. I learned that I was pretty good at writing dialogue and stories when I was fairly young, but I just didn’t know it was a possibility, because I didn’t know anybody in the TV industry — or anybody west of the Mississippi, really.”
A huge fan of shows like “M*A*S*H,” he eventually moved to Los Angeles and landed a string of writing jobs on sitcoms including “Friends” and “The Nanny.” The 1996 Michael J. Fox series “Spin City,” which he co-created with Gary David Goldberg, got him into the world of showrunning. “Scrubs” followed in 2001, airing for nine seasons. “I got very lucky to find some great mentors very quickly,” Lawrence said, singling out Fox and Goldberg along with some of his early managers. “I always talk about this as one of the reasons most of my shows have a component of mentorship in it.”
By now, Lawrence has been in the TV business long enough to have seen it change dramatically, from the days of once-a-week broadcast network shows to a landscape dominated by streamers and series that rarely last more than a few years. “I come from an era when the job was to make a show that people would want to watch for 150 episodes,” he said. “The characters really don’t change that much, and it’s comfort food.
“I still think there’s massive value in that, but I realize with streaming that people want to see a story that has a beginning, middle and end. In the past, it might take five, six or seven episodes for the cast to gel and for you to figure out what the show is. But that world doesn’t exist anymore. Now people have nine million options to choose from, and if you can’t find the show in the first five or six episodes, your season is pretty much over. It’s an interesting way to evolve as a storyteller.”
Adapting to the change in TV hasn’t always been a smooth transition for Lawrence. “I’ve failed a ton,” he said. “I’m very lucky that most of the awful shows I made were so bad they didn’t get on TV.” Then there was “Whiskey Cavalier,” a 2019 collaboration with writer David Hemingson, who would go on to write “The Holdovers.” Though Lawrence moved to Prague to shoot it, the ABC action comedy about interagency spies went from a post-Oscars premiere in late February to cancellation in early May.
“It is by leaps and bounds the best network show I ever made that failed,” Lawrence said. “It was really, really good, and well-reviewed. And I didn’t understand why it failed. It upended me, because I lived so long under the impression that if you do a show that’s well-reviewed, the network will embrace it and it’s gonna work. But it never gained any traction, and no one really found it. That made me go, ‘I’ve got to either pack up and go or view this as an opportunity to redefine what I do a little bit.’
“The next show I pitched after that was ‘Ted Lasso.’”
And with “Ted Lasso” kicking off his current streak, Lawrence has ended up in a surprising position. “I did not expect to be having a career renaissance in my mid-50s, I promise you,” he said. “It’s the weirdest cool thing.”
In a way, that weird cool thing led directly to “Rooster,” in which a middle-aged writer of pulpy mysteries (Carell) is invited to teach at a liberal-arts college, where he tries to repair his relationship with his daughter, who also teaches at the school.
“I finally found myself in a position of people going, ‘Who do you want to work with?’” he said. “And Steve Carell is someone who has always made me laugh. So I met with him and just said, ‘Man, it’d be fun to do a show with you and my friend (writer-producer) Matt Tarses.’ Matt, Steve and I all have daughters between the ages of 22 and 25, and they all understandably don’t want us in their lives as much as we want to be in their lives.”
“Shrinking,” meanwhile, had been pitched to Apple as a three-year series with a defined story arc: The first season would be about grief, the second about forgiveness and the third about moving on. But the streamer was eager for a fourth season—and when the actors (Jason Segel, Harrison Ford, Williams, Miller and others) said they were up for it, the decision was easy.
“Once the actors agree, everybody understands that for the other 145 people who work on the show, the answer is always yes. There’s no world in which you go to a younger member of the writing staff or someone in the sound department or a focus puller and say, ‘Hey, do you want another year of employment?’ and they’re like, ‘No thanks, I’m good.’
“But we had pitched the show with a beginning, middle and end, and we didn’t want to push the ending off for another year. So we came up with a new beginning, middle and end story to tell.”
The same thing happened with “Ted Lasso” when star and co-creator Jason Sudeikis decided to take a three-year break after the end of Season 3. “I give Jason props, because he saw it before I did,” Lawrence said. “When ‘Ted Lasso’ ended, it was very clear that Apple would have killed for them to go right into a fourth season. But Jason really felt, ‘No, that was the story I wanted to tell. Let me sit out for a while, and if I can come up with a new story I want to tell, I’ll do it.’”
Of course, a three-year gap is nothing compared with the gulf between Seasons 9 and 10 of “Scrubs.” The sitcom ended its original run in 2010 and didn’t come back until this year, after Braff and Faison had stirred up interest with the podcast “Fake Doctors, Real Friends” and a series of TV commercials that played off their characters.
Then came the second thoughts. “I think it dawned on us all that if we blew it on this one, we’d be letting down the fan base who’d sustained that show. We fell into ‘Scrubs’ casually, and it wasn’t until after we said yes that we felt the level of panic of What if this stinks?” Lawrence said with a laugh. “I think it was the first time any of us felt fear.”
Still, having five shows on the air can keep even an overworked guy in a pretty good mood. “He’s a goof,” Williams said. “He’ll hurricane onto the show from another show and give notes, and then he blusters off set. And he makes it better every time he lands. It keeps us going in a way that’s really nice.”
If you ask Lawrence, he’ll tell you it’s all part of the plan. “I’ve changed a lot about not only what I write but how I run things,” he said. “I really want the environment to be great. Making a television show is in some ways like being at Thanksgiving with your family. You’re on top of each other and intertwined in each other’s lives, only for six months at a time. Maybe for some people Thanksgivings are idyllic, but for others there’s that vaguely toxic uncle or that cousin who has been overserved. So I really am trying to make shows culturally feel like a great and fun place to work.”
In other words, no assholes?
“Yeah, yeah,” he said, laughing again. “But I don’t know if that’s doable. It’s not the way the world necessarily works.”
This story first ran in the Race Begins issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.
