by Mike Sacks
Did you write with that in mind?
Absolutely. Ricky and I wanted to make a show that we could put on our shelves. In years to come, we could pull the show down and re-watch it and notice new details. Characters are doing things in the background; things are going on all the time. I love that you don't have to get everything on the first viewing.
The Simpsons does it famously with all these weird little gags thrown in. I think that's a real luxury, because it also means that the creators were thinking beyond the immediate television audience. They were thinking that even if this show was not a hit, it would still eventually find the right people who would enjoy it — it would still have an afterlife. We were hoping that our show would, too.
Let's talk about Extras. The pressure for both you and Ricky must have been great. Did you have any worries that audiences wouldn't accept the show after the great success of The Office?
I think we knew that it was impossible to create a show that would have the same impact and would perhaps be as perfectly formed. We just knew that. It's very difficult to make that happen, and we knew that this was going to be a transition show — from The Office to the rest of our lives and careers. This new show was going to be a gateway; afterwards we could maybe explore other avenues.
With that in mind, we thought, What have we not done? We'd like to keep the elements that amuse us and entertain us and that the audience would be familiar with, but also perhaps not give ourselves the burden of trying to create a show that's iconic.
So we tried to give ourselves a bit of a break and write something that was a bit more frothy. Certainly a little less emotionally wrought. We made Extras a lot broader, just to tap into that side of ourselves that we didn't really explore with The Office. It was very much a conscious decision to move on from The Office, but not so far that people would freak out.
The anxiety we had after The Office was not whether we could write another funny one, but whether people would watch it on our terms, as opposed to those set by themselves. The audience's expectation was very high.
If I sit down to watch someone's new project, I always try to be as open-minded as I can. It seems to me that they're writing something from wherever they are at that point in their mind-set. So you're not necessarily going to get Annie Hall again; you might get Interiors. I was hoping that people would take to Extras, but there's no way you can police it, you know? Some people were going to like it, some people weren't. And some people were going to fall by the wayside.
The Andy Millman character that Ricky plays in Extras is just as needy as the David Brent character, but his neediness seems to come from a different, almost darker place. Brent wants to be liked, whereas Millman wants to be renowned. But for what purpose, really?
That was the thing we wanted to carry on from The Office: this feeling of thwarted ambition and people craving some kind of escape from their world, but never really quite knowing what that escape is. David Brent wanted adoration from the viewers of the documentary, as well as from his office staff. But that was obviously just some desperate attempt to fill a void in his life.
Andy Millman, on the other hand, had those same trappings, but we tried to curse him a little bit more than David Brent. Some viewers have said that Andy Millman is contradictory — sometimes he's Brent-like in his haplessness and other times he's supremely self-aware. To us, that's not a contradiction. There are many people who have those two sides. There are moments when you're blinded by your own ambitions or failings or whatever else. To us, Andy Millman seemed like a perfectly legitimate character.
In the second season, Millman had the success he craved — he became the star of his own sitcom — but it was compromised. He chose success rather than credibility, and that in itself brought its own kind of anxieties and discomforts.
Another difference between the shows is that the characters in The Office are people who do not go after their dreams. In Extras, it becomes sadder. Characters reach for their dreams and fail.
That's particularly terrifying to me. You know, I watch these reality shows where contestants audition to be singers, like on American Idol. And some of these people are in their forties. They'll say, “I thought I'd give it just one last shot.” It's apparent that they've waited this long because they've been fearful that they might receive rejection. It's no different than failing to ask someone out on a date.
It really is fascinating, and I often think that if I had not had the good fortune I've had, if I had not met Ricky when I did, if we hadn't shot that first project together, well, there but for the grace of God …
Talent seems almost secondary now. These contestants on reality shows seem to feel that all you really need is the courage to go up onstage and give it a shot.
Yes, absolutely. It's enough to just wish to be famous, without the need for talent. It's almost as if fame is some sort of shortcut out of whatever hole you've put yourself in.
Also, the contestants on these programs never seem to act like they would in real life. They base their actions not on reality but on how other people have acted on other reality shows. They give the audience what they want to see, rather than act in a truthful manner. It's very strange.
It's such a rich area to explore. The whole culture is preoccupied with it. It seems like a perfectly relative subject for comedy today, almost as much as class was in the England of the seventies.
Was your not having to stay within the documentary format with Extras liberating for you as a writer and director?
We looked forward to throwing off the restrictive shackles the documentary imposed on us, but we found that with the first season of Extras we were kind of caught a little bit between the two elements. We wanted to use the freedom of traditional storytelling; we were also still a little bit in love with the documentary-realism thing. Maybe Extras fell between two stools, I'm not sure.
I remember reading an interview with Larry David after he made the first season of Curb Your Enthusiasm. He said that he used that silly circus-style music throughout the show to lighten the mood after a particularly anxious moment, just to remind people that they should be taking it all in a certain spirit. We never did that with Extras.
Audiences understood what was going on in The Office, because it was in a documentary form. With Extras, it was more of a traditional narrative. To some viewers, it might have seemed more odd. Perhaps more sour or depressing. Certainly darker. Maybe the audience didn't get the relief with this format that they got with documentary. There was no editorial voice, and it made some viewers less relaxed.
Do you regret not using music in Extras? That you didn't give the audience a wink, of sorts? To say, “This is okay. It's all right to laugh.”
Not really. I think we kind of liked that the audience was not entirely sure how they should feel. You can lurch from moments of agony to moments of silliness and slapstick. I just love the fact that those elements can jar against one another. It makes for quite an unusual viewing experience. So many of my favorite comedies are on that brink.
When you look at Laurel and Hardy, it doesn't take too much to tip them into a world of incredible darkness and tragedy and blackness and existential doom. They are always walking that fine line. They are often homeless or living through the Depression.
There are moments in The Office that are very explicitly Laurel and Hardy. There's a scene when Gareth stands behind David Brent and starts massaging him, just lightly massaging him. Ricky kind of stares at the camera, and Gareth continues to give him his neck massage. It goes on too long, and Ricky very consciously slumps down into the chair while staring at the camera in that way Hardy did. Which is to say, “I know this is absurd, but have you got a better suggestion? A better idea of what we should do at this moment? Because I haven't.”
I think Oliver Hardy might be the greatest comic performer of all time. Everyone always talks about Stan Laurel as being a comic genius, but I think Oliver Hardy's creation of his persona is amazing. The character is a com
pletely believable creation. He's utterly believable, and he has a sort of sophistication to that persona that you don't really see anywhere else. The way that he buzzes a doorbell with that little flourish of his hand, the way he orders a beer by sort of miming it in the air and then blowing off the imaginary foam. There's a sort of pomposity to that and a self-anointed grandeur that just don't befit his kind of idiocy and his standing in society.
Are you also a fan of Abbott and Costello? You can see elements of them in Extras and The Office, specifically with the way Tim and Gareth speak to each other.
Yes. I really love that cross-talk. There's something lovely about listening to that rhythm. There was a scene in Extras where my character is trying to figure out the time difference between Los Angeles and London, and he can't get his head around it being eight hours ahead or behind. That's pure Abbott and Costello.
But the problem for me with Abbott and Costello is that there's not quite the same warmth between them that exists between Laurel and Hardy. There's not that same richness.
The character of Abbott could be quite cruel to Costello.
Almost too cruel. Unrealistically cruel. Whereas with Laurel and Hardy, you get the feeling that they really loved each other.
Are there any topics off-limits to you as a writer for television?
I don't think there are any topics that should be off-limits, no. Ricky and I did an episode of Extras that dealt with and featured an actor with Down syndrome. We understandably received a letter from a Down-syndrome organization saying, “Some of our members have complained; they felt uncomfortable.” Ricky and I had to write what we considered to be a fairly strong defense of the show. For us, we did not feel we were laughing at the subject. We felt we were using the subject to elicit laughter of a different type — that gap between how you should behave and how you do behave in certain situations.
You know, Ricky and I never sit down and think about what subjects we are going — or are not going — to tackle. We just do what feels right. Audiences see certain topics, and their immediate reaction is anxiety. You can't talk about this, you can't joke about that. Our feeling is that the more we accept people who may be different, the more we should be able to joke about our own discomfort. If I have friends who are disabled, I can make jokes about their disability, just like they can make jokes about my height or Ricky being overweight. Of course, if you're meeting someone in the street for the first time you don't start making those cracks, because it's inappropriate. But to us it's that fascinating stew of discomfort and ignorance that becomes a great recipe for laughter. We're not laughing at the disabled; we're laughing at people's discomfort with disability.
Look at a subject as terrible as rape. I can't think of anything funny about rape, and I certainly wouldn't feel comfortable laughing about it. But I could imagine a situation in which a man is uncomfortable around a woman who has been raped and his discomfort might come through in the way he speaks about the subject. It's not joking about a topic; it comes down to your treatment of taboo subjects. If you arrive from a position of ignorance or hate or racism, you're probably going to approach it from the wrong point of view. That's why I think there's a very big difference between exploring a taboo and making a joke about one.
Andy Millman is slightly homophobic — just a little bit strange around gay people. But that's the point of the character. It's interesting that audiences feel uncomfortable with that. It's almost as if all characters now have to be black-and-white. Good and bad. And that all heroes have to be noble and honorable. But that's not what real life is all about.
I was talking earlier about not necessarily going for a large audience. And that's because we want our shows to be aimed at a sort of reasoning, smart, intelligent audience that can steer its way through ambiguities.
Does it frustrate you when you see comedies aimed at intelligent audiences fail?
Arrested Development is one good example. I thought, What's going on? I couldn't understand why people weren't laughing. I didn't understand why they didn't find this funny. How was this not funny? It was so clearly funny to me. I've never quite understood the idea that people have different senses of humor.
On the other hand, I suppose there's always that danger that we as comedy fans are writing comedy for other comedy fans. Whereas the average viewer — and I don't mean this in a disparaging way — but the average viewer doesn't sit around thinking about how jokes work. It's just not something that's important to them. They just want the joke to be funny. So you can't be too clever. You can't assume reference points and sophistication that are not there.
I think this is something I've probably learned as I've gone on. I probably started off being a touch snobbish. I wouldn't want to write jokes that I thought were too easy or cheap. Now I've come to feel that it's just sometimes fun to have silliness.
For instance, take the famous scene of David Brent dancing in Season Two of The Office. That scene has become absolutely huge. There were articles in newspapers about how to perform that dance. There were videos of that dance, photos of that dance; it was probably the most repeated clip from the show. But we were really worried about it. We were thinking about cutting that scene, because it was too broad, too zany. And now it's the thing people most associate with the show, which is probably the least typical element of the program. Sometimes you can get too up your own ass, for lack of a better phrase.
And, actually, that's one of the things I like about the American version of The Office. It feels a little less constrained than ours. It doesn't obey these scrupulous rules of realism in quite the same way. It indulges itself a little bit more. I love that about it, and it really makes me laugh.
Do you think there are any crucial differences between American and English humor?
People constantly say there are differences, especially in Britain. There's a snobbery sometimes with Brits. They say that Americans don't understand irony, which is just a self-aggrandizing way of saying, “Look how we Brits are so much more clever and smarter.”
To me, that's completely misinformed. All the best American humor is steeped in irony. But then there's this inverse snobbery that says that Brits can't do the brilliance of American comedy. And that's just nonsense.
One of the differences, I suppose, is that there's a freedom found in most American humor — they're not ashamed to use slang and vernacular. There's an easier rhythm to American humor. It has almost a jazz quality to it. Whereas in England, there's a need to display one's intelligence. The language can be a little bit airy-fairy, a bit long-winded, deliberately showing off. Compare that attitude with a joke by Woody Allen where he says, “My aunt looked like something you'd buy in a live-bait store.”
Now, we don't have live-bait stores in England, and we wouldn't use the term “live bait.” It would never be called that. It would never have that succinctness, because we'd want to be sort of grand. We'd have an official-sounding name for it. It's the same way you say “drugstore.” It's so blunt. It's a store that sells drugs. In England, we have “pharmacists” and “chemists.” It lacks the everyday poetry. That's really what I love.
I suppose another difference would be that American sitcoms tend to have more episodes per season than British sitcoms. Is that an advantage or a disadvantage as a writer?
I think it's an advantage, because as a viewer I want certain shows, like Fawlty Towers, to go on and on. One of the things I like about American shows is that they are able to run long enough to create a story arc. Roseanne, a show that I really enjoyed, went through so many stages and brought in so many characters that by the end there was a history created. The show created a past that the viewer witnessed and experienced. It created a layered viewing experience.
You mentioned earlier that you considered Extras a gateway to the rest of your career. What do you consider it a gateway to?
Both Ricky and I now feel that we've done the awkward silences and the agonizingly uncomfortable moments to death. Extras will proba
bly be the last time that we do that sort of thing, because you can only take that so far — you know, when you let a gag crash and fall and burn.
As for the future, I'm excited about doing a darker sort of TV drama. I just love The Sopranos and The Wire. I just find them utterly mesmerizing. Movies have let me down as of late. They just don't seem to have the richness, the novelistic depth, and the ambition of these TV shows. So many people try to make a film after they have had some success on TV, and then they get their fingers burned. Ricky and I would love to try something on the scope of The Sopranos.
Truthfully, I found the office life you depicted in The Office, and the show-business industry in Extras, just as terrifying as the Mob world in Jersey.
We're not suggesting that our next show would have to have gangsters or policemen as characters, but we like that format because it can be what it wants to be. The Sopranos is hysterically funny at times. People take it on its own terms. It loosely falls within the gangster genre, but if you were the average viewer and you watched it expecting a cop show, you wouldn't get it. It demands quite a lot from the viewer.
Those demands usually make for the best television.
Absolutely. And to do something with that scope, that scale, that ambition, well, that would be really exciting. It would be a challenge. So why not then?
Famous Last Words (of Advice)
Advice is tricky when it comes to comedy, because people are either funny or they are not. If someone is funny, there are many ways to get better. Most everything I know, I learned from Garry Shandling. Whenever we got stuck, he always said, “What is the truth here? What would someone actually do?” He pushed his writers to go deeper to the core.
Once he told us, “The Larry Sanders Show is about people who love each other but show business gets in the way.” There is a way to apply that concept to any story. What are the obstacles to love, to connection? There is always comedy in that area.