Bill Lawrence is a veritable TV legend. Look at the list of Hall of Fame shows he’s had a hand in:
- Spin City
- Scrubs
- Cougar Town
- Ted Lasso
Not bad right? Well, Lawrence is stocking Apple TV+ with hits this fall, as season 1 of Bad Monkey just wrapped and season 2 of Shrinking just dropped. Lawrence joined Mike Golic Jr. on Thursday’s edition of GoJo and Golic to discuss those shows, working with family and his legendary career in television.
Bill is happy to just have an excuse to leave the writer’s room and be able to say he has to do “other work” while not working. Bill admits that he’s reached the age where if he’s in the writer’s room after 8 p.m. he turns into the angry dude that is mad that your dog goes to the bathroom in his yard. So the young writers send him out and invite him to come back in the morning to check out their work when it’s closer to done and he’s not so angry. More seriously, he says anybody in his line of work who says they do it all themselves is full of crap and he’s lucky to work with the writers he gets to work with.
Much like GoJo and his dad, Bill gets to work with family often. His wife, Christa Miller, has been a part of many of his shows — including Scrubs, Cougar Town and Shrinking — and now he’s gotten a chance to work with his daughter Charlotte on Bad Monkey. Bill says it’s awesome, even though he pushes back when people bring up the idea of nepotism because he adamantly believes that if you can work with your friends or family and they’re talented you’re actually a weirdo if you DON’T do it. Bill says working with his daughter on Bad Monkey was really cool because she had never played a role other than a musician or some version of herself, so to get to be around her in Miami and get to see her interact with actors like Vince Vaughn and Michelle Monaghan was a career highlight for him.
With Bad Monkey, Bill got the chance to work with the aforementioned Vaughn, who he had met years earlier — and saw a real-life moment from play out in Swingers — at a low-stakes poker game. Bill says one of the dirty secrets of TV writing is that the answer key is when you cast an actor/actress where you know how they sound from years of seeing them. The cheat sheet was knowing Vince from earlier days and the fact that he says if you’re a comedy writer from that era you can’t help but crib some banter from Vaughn, even if you don’t realize it. He also says this was the right time to work with Vaughn because Carl Hiaasen’s heroes are always deeply flawed people that do sketchy stuff but you still find a way to like them anyways, which is the type of character that is one of the cornerstones of Vince’s career.
After a long career filled with success, GoJo wonders if the thing that Bill enjoys the most about making shows changed? Is he finding himself enjoying something more now with the benefit of time and experience than he did back in the Scrubs or Spin City days? Great question! Bill says he enjoys the ability to get feedback and interact with fans online. He says as a kid if he could have had even peripheral contact with the people making Cheers or M*A*S*H he would have lost his mind. The other big change that he finds makes things easier is the way the TV industry has changed, specifically the changes from the “Big Three” network era to the new world of streaming. Now instead of the goal being mass appeal shows that remain on the air for eight to nine years with characters who never change, you have to go into a pitch prepared to discuss the beginning, the middle and the end.
Even if he misses the old multi-cam sitcom days, Bill says it helps him to feel young to have new stuff around him and young people who are learning new things. Speaking of learning new things, GoJo wonders if there is anything Bill hasn’t done yet that he still wants to do? Bill talks about the peaks and valleys of his career and notes that he didn’t expect to have a career renaissance at 55, which he remains very grateful for. He’s enjoying himself, but the trick is finding things that still make you afraid. Bad Monkey, for instance, is the first time he’s done an hourlong program that involves crime and death and comes from one of his favorite authors. It was the first time he felt nervous in a long time because he didn’t want to let Hiaasen down. GoJo gets it right away and is naturally able to make a sports analogy — if you’re a great quarterback he doesn’t want to see low interception totals because that means you’re not taking chances and you’re not pushing the ball down the field. Bill loves that GoJo brought it back to sports and says he’s a big believer that failure is such a big part of all this and he thinks the greatest skill set he got with years is not to fear failure so much.
Watch or listen to the full show below and make sure to tune into GoJo and Golic weekday mornings from 8-10 a.m. ET on DraftKings Network! See more about how to watch DraftKings Network here.
SHOW BREAKDOWN
Hour 1: Cooper Kupp Trade Rumors Ahead of Vikings at Rams on TNF, The Soft Patriots, The Distracted Cowboys and CFB’s Midterm Review
VIDEO
Watch GoJo and Golic every weekday on Samsung TV Plus, Roku, Xumo Play, Google TV and DraftKingsNetwork.com from 8 to 10 a.m. ET. The show is also available via audio on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also follow Mike Golic Sr. on X at @golic and Mike Golic Jr. on X at @mikegolicjr.
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