The Big Picture

Collider’s Steve Weintraub talks to Bill Lawrence about his newest comedy,
Bad Monkey
.
Lawrence teases Shrinking’s three-season plan and a potential spin-off show for Ted Lasso.
Lawrence talks about working with Vince Vaughn’s improv, and striking a balance of comedy, satire and pathos in his projects.

Known for his highly acclaimed series, Ted Lasso and Shrinking, Bill Lawrence returns this year with an intriguing comedy that will have fishers in Florida double-checking their nets. Bad Monkey boasts comedy-connoisseur Vince Vaughn (The Wedding Crashers) in the lead role as former police officer Andrew Yancy, who stumbles upon a murder and tries to attain his previous glory by solving it. But a comical murder mystery can never be complete without oddball locals and a meddling monkey. Joining Vaughn on set are also Michelle Monaghan (The Family Plan), L. Scott Caldwell (The Fugitive), Rob Delaney (Deadpool 2), Meredith Hagner (Search Party), Alex Moffat (Saturday Night Live), Natalie Martinez (La Promesa del Returno), Ronald Peet (First Reformed), and Jodie Turner-Smith (After Yang).

In this interview, Collider’s Steve Weintraub talks to Lawrence about his impressive resume, where Lawrence teases what we can expect in future seasons of Shrinking and a potential spin-off for Ted Lasso. Lawrence also delves into his experience working with Vaughn, including the comedy gems that rose out of his improvised lines, as well as how he approaches balancing silly humor with darker pathos in his work. You can hear about Lawrence’s experiences creating these shows in the video above or follow along via the transcript below.

Bad Monkey After getting bounced from the Miami PD, a former detective is demoted to restaurant inspector in the Florida Keys. An unusual new case might get him back in the department if he can get past a trove of oddballs, and one bad monkey.Release Date August 13, 2024 Seasons 1

Will ‘Ted Lasso’ Get a Spin-off Show?
Image via Apple TV+

COLLIDER: I’ve been a fan of yours for a very long time. I just want to say thank you for making me laugh again and again and again.

BILL LAWRENCE: Oh, too nice, dude. I feel like you deserve one sucker punch if you’re gonna open like that.

[Laughs] I’m not planning on doing any such thing. I have a few other questions before I get into Bad Monkey. Like the entire planet, I love Ted Lasso. I just have to know, do you think Ted Lasso is over? Do you think there’s a chance of a spin-off? What’s the status of that?

LAWRENCE: Groupthink sometimes happens, even without talking to each other, and every actor, actress, writer, producer on that show—and [we didn’t get] together and decide this was the message—we all loved the experience, as fans, we’d all kill if it was going again, but everybody would say the same thing, which is: whatever Jason feels like doing and whatever his decision is, we’re all down with it. Not only is he the star, he’s the head writer, and he’s also the dude whose life just has to be completely overhauled and moved to a foreign country with young children. It’s a big deal. So, as a fan, if someone’s like, “Oh, it’s gonna happen again,” I’ll go nuts. As a partner, I’m down for whatever he wants to do.

It’s also possible because a lot of us wondered if it might come to America, but that’s a whole other thing.

‘Shrinking’ Season 2 Is About Forgiveness
Image via Apple TV+

I’m also a huge fan of Shrinking. What can you tease about Season 2, and do you still see it as a three-season show?

LAWRENCE: It’s interesting. I find streaming television so interesting. I pitched to Apple a beginning, middle, and end of the story we’re telling, and the cool thing is you get to do beginnings, middles, and ends now in streaming. So, this story that we’re telling right now because we know how it ends, will definitely end in three seasons. It could go beyond three seasons. If my partners are open to it and want to, I would do it in a second because I truly love the experience. It’s a career highlight getting to work with my wife, [Christa Miller], Harrison [Ford], Jason [Segel], Jess [Williams], and everybody. I haven’t figured it out yet, but if Apple said, after the third season story ends, “How does this story keep going?” They’re such great partners, it would be a gift to get to figure that out.

My favorite thing is when I’m doing the Shrinking press tour, I’m gonna be doing it with Brett Goldstein. Not only is he a co-creator but to get to—without spoiling anything—see him as an actor doing something completely different than I’ve seen him do before, it’s a gift. There’s an Easter egg out there that I would tell people to keep their eyes peeled for. Because you know me, man; if I like an actor or actress, I think they’re talented, and they’re also a great hang, they just kind of exist in my world. So, I would have people keep their eyes peeled for Meredith Hagner from [Bad Monkey] on Shrinking. I don’t think that’s come out.

I tell everybody the first year was about grief, the second year is about forgiveness, and the third year is about moving forward. We knew what the beginning, middle, and end was. But I think people are gonna dig this year’s show.

One of Vince Vaughn’s Funniest Jokes is in the ‘Bad Monkey’ Trailer

Jumping into why I get to talk to you. I finished the whole series. I’m gonna say congrats. I really hope it’s a huge hit for you guys. I am so curious about working with Vince. I’m watching the show, and there are so many moments where I really feel like people are legitimately laughing at what he’s saying for real. So how much is it him picking the script and making it Vince-like, if you will, and how much is it him saying exactly what’s there? Because his delivery is something so unique.

LAWRENCE: I wanna pump him up here for a little bit as an artist. It was a gift. I had apprehension because you never know how things are gonna go. As a writer, even though I grew up around Vince’s comedy and watching him riff in Swingers and Wedding Crashers and Old School, you also get nervous, like, “Oh, is he gonna come and just start saying whatever he wants to say from the start?” So here’s the amazing thing: If you’re an executive producer and the lead of the show, you set the tone. Male or female, young or old, people look to you to see how it’s gonna go on set. He established one thing right at the beginning: “I’m gonna do every line as written until the showrunners or the director says, ‘I got it,’ and then I’ll go to the actors that I’m in the scene with and go, ‘Hey, let’s do a couple of takes where we play.’”

Part two of that was, “And when I say a couple of takes that we play, I don’t mean so I can riff and do jokes. I will also set you up for lines that aren’t in the script.” Meredith Hagner riffed this line in the pilot, and she says, “Sweetie, are you aware this is a funeral? Because I can see your vagina.” And so, these lines come out that you, as a writer, get to later say when people say, “I really like that,” you just go, “Thank you,” even though you had nothing to do with it. But he set this communal tone, whether it was Jodie Turner-Smith, Rob Delaney Zach [Braff], for people to play around as long as they got the stuff that we had. When you have that in editing, you can pick and choose what you want.

You asked a cool, astute question. Filmmakers come on both sides of it. I always found it weird in sitcoms that a character would say something that would make a whole audience laugh and the other characters wouldn’t laugh. So on my shows, if you look back, I’ve always said, “Yo, if somebody says something that makes you laugh, laugh. Don’t hold it in.” And you are, without a doubt, seeing honest laughs at some of the stuff that Vince said that people didn’t suspect. One of the ones that we had to cut away from is in the trailer. It’s one of my favorite jokes, and he riffed part of it. He asks the guy next to his attorney, “On a scale from 1 to 10, how screwed do you think I am?” And the guy says, “A million,” and he goes, “You couldn’t just say 10? You didn’t think I’d know 10 was bad?” [Laughs] And the other actor starts laughing, so we have to cut away really quickly. It’s very funny.

I love seeing those kinds of moments.

Bill Lawrence Balances Comedy With Pathos and Satire
The creator compares the series to influences like Jackie Brown and Get Shorty.

One of the things about the show is that it has a very unique tone, and I would imagine it makes it very interesting in the editing room trying to figure out where you want to deploy it, where it’s gonna stay serious, where it’s gonna go off on a unique path. Was this a uniquely challenging show in the edit? And how did it possibly change as a result?

LAWRENCE: It was a super hard tone to capture because what I love about Carl [Hiaasen]’s books is that they walk this fine line between caper pathos, surreal satire, and character-driven banter comedy. It’s what I love about his novels. What I’m hoping is that people see this as a throwback, fun summer movie that would nail those tones. If you think of one of Carl’s buddies because they kind of write in the same genre, was Elmore Leonard back in the day. If you look at Jackie Brown or Out of Sight or Get Shorty, they’re all very different movies, but they all walk that line between, “Is it a silly comedy? But wait, people die, and bad things happen that you’re supposed to care about.” What I found amazing is that those three movies are books by the same author, but you would probably say, “Oh, Get Shorty is a very fun slapsticky comedy, but Jackie Brown is very dark.” And it’s because people chose that tone line of what they wanted to do.

I’ve always liked trying to walk that tightrope between broad, silly comedy and moments of pathos on Scrubs, on Ted Lasso, and Shrinking. So, yeah, it is really tricky, and a lot of times on set, we would try to remind actors and actresses and each other, “Hey, this is a scene that matters, so we can’t screw around too much in this one.” So, hopefully, we pulled it off because when you fall on the wrong side, those are the moments that don’t work, and when you nail it, it’s cool. Those are the things I like to watch, like Beverly Hills Cop, Midnight Run, and 48 Hrs. when I was younger. Those were all movies that walked that weird tone.

Midnight Run is also a masterpiece.

LAWRENCE: It’s a masterpiece, but people think it’s a silly comedy. Then you watch the end, and Dennis Farina goes, “Tonight, I’m gonna kill your wife and kids, and I’m gonna have a nice meal,” and you’re like, “Oh my god.” You know what I mean? It doesn’t play like a silly comedy.

The first two episodes of Bad Monkey are available to stream on Apple TV+ with subsequent episodes dropping every Wednesday.

Watch on Apple TV