‘Casual’ Showrunner Zander Lehmann on the Blurring Line Between Comedy and Drama

There has been a certain necessity for so many writer/ producers to recently get their first shots to run a show — doubling the number of shows from 200 to 400 in five years requires a lot of warm bodies — but the quality of the output from the newbies would have been impossible to predict.

Sam Esmail (USA’s Mr. Robot) and Alan Yang (Master of None) were first-time showrunners on two of the best-reviewed shows of 2015. Sarah Treem (Showtime’s The Affair) and Jessica Goldberg (Hulu’s The Path) were first-time showrunners on riveting, high-concept relationship dramas. Justin Spitzer (NBC’s Superstore) and Rachel Bloom (The CW’s Crazy Ex Girlfriend) were first-time showrunners on inventive, ambitious comedies.

Zander Lehmann didn’t have so much as an IMDB page when Hulu green-lit Casual, but he had a great script, a visible platform as one of the network’s first original shows, and a champion in executive producer Jason Reitman, who knew the comedy-with-heart territory well from films like Juno and Young Adult. Season 1 got overwhelmingly positive reviews, and Season 2 has been one of the best-reviewed shows of 2016.

The chemistry among the show’s three leads — an emotionally stunted man child (Tommy Dewey), his recently divorced sister (Michaela Watkins), and her sexually adventurous teenage daughter (Tara Lynne Barr) — gives the show a genuine warmth that never veers into sentimentality or teachable moments. You believe the three as a family because they love each other despite occasionally sleeping with each other’s teacher/girlfriend/etc.

We sat down with Lehmann to talk about his experience creating Casual, growing the show from the first season to the second, and maintaining such a distinctive voice with a rotating group of directors.

DECIDER: The show is about this brother and sister who have essentially had to be their own parents because their actual parents act like children. Was that something personal or just an idea you wanted to explore?

ZANDER LEHMANN: I lived with my sister for three years and wrote this while I was living with her. Our parents are way less awful than the parents on the show. [Laughs.] We certainly weren’t parenting our parents, but they were going through a divorce, were having this upheaval in their own lives, and my sister and I were becoming adults together.

The sister on the show, who’s played by Michaela Watkins, has a teenage daughter. That part is made up?

My sister didn’t have kids. We have two women in the writers’ room and two other female producers, so the characters evolved from my experiences with my sister to the live experiences of the other writers and producers.

And you’ve used several female directors on the show.

We’ve had some great female directors. Karyn Kusama did Episodes 3 and 4 of the new season, and we have Lynn Shelton and Marielle Heller later in the season.

There have been a lot of recent shows with younger first-time showrunners like yourself. Do you think having younger decision-makers is part of the reason more women are directing in TV?

I think so. For us it’s been about finding the best people to write and direct, so we’re not really thinking in terms of having so many men or so many women. The writers’ room is mostly women, which we needed with two of the three leads on the show being women. If you want to make a show in a way that gives you that perspective, then you need to have as many smart women as you can to define those characters.

Did you come from a film background?

My father is a director [Michael Lehmann, who directed Heathers]. He discouraged me from getting into the movie business, and I ignored him. I pushed a mail cart at an agency and was an assistant for four years, and I wrote a bunch of failed movies and pilots that never went anywhere. This was the first thing I wrote that was good enough to get made.

Were the three leads for the show what you wrote, or did that shift as they got attached to the project?

We were lucky that the actors we got fit the parts so well. A lot of that came from [executive producer] Jason Reitman, who was involved in the casting and conceiving those early episodes.

The more I read scripts, the more I notice how much latitude there is for tonal variation from what’s on the page to what a director can do. How have you kept a consistent tone from episode to episode?

We had written 10 or 11 episodes before we started shooting this season, so [producer] Helen Estabrook and I were able to be on set for every episode and keep that consistent tone. We go through the scripts with each director to talk about how the producers and the director see each episode, so we’re able to get consistency that way.

Frances Conroy was sort of a force of nature as the mother in Season 1. I had never seen her do anything like what she did with that character. What were you conversations with her like before you started shooting?

She was incredibly thorough and dug into every line. Why do I say that? What do I mean here? She’s obviously a heavyweight as far as actors go, so it was at times scary to write for her. She has a gravity about her, and I think we got an interesting, nuanced performance.

You’re bumping up from 10 to 13 episodes this season. Is that something you wanted or something Hulu wanted? How did that happen?

We really wanted to do 13 episodes. It was more difficult, but that extra 75 or 80 minutes really helps to tell a story. You can add more characters and go to more places. The world opened up for us in that way, and we were really glad the network supported that.

Is the Leon character [Nyasha Hatendi] sort of a Greek chorus? Was that the idea?

He is, and his story is told more in Season 2. He feels like that straight man thrust into the world of these characters, and he is a lot of people’s favorite character because he’s so sweet and well-meaning. He has some really interesting stuff toward the end of this season.

How old are you? What did you grow up watching?

I’m 28. I watched a lot of South Park growing up. When I shifted to watching TV as a writer, I would say that Enlightened was one of my favorite series. I loved Six Feet Under.

Do you make much of how the distinction between comedy and drama has started to fade?

I don’t think about it that much, but it’s nice that we can have a show like ours where some episodes are funny and some episodes are serious or sad. It gives us more freedom to do more interesting things, where I’m not sure we could have done that 10 years ago. The shows that are blending comedy and drama are the ones I tend to like and tend to watch.

Why do you think those shows are working?

The way I look at it is that there used to be studio movies like these shows — romantic comedies and adult dramas — that are all independent movies now. That’s shifting to TV, and these shows are finding an audience that isn’t being served on the features side.

Is the homeschooling story going to be a significant part of the rest of the season?

It is. The homeschool stuff is a way to get Laura into a new world. It’s mostly about relationships, about the people she meets in this group school.

I wondered if the writers’ room had some things to say with that story about political correctness with the parents.

There’s definitely some of that. The world of campus culture has changed a lot in the last couple of years, and there’s something about what it means to be a teenager or someone in their early twenties who’s entering into a world that looks different than it used to.

The second episode of this season opens with a montage of Alex making waffles, which has been a recurring thing on the show going back to the pilot. What are waffles on the show? Family? Security?

The waffles have always felt like comfort to me. It’s something that Alex knows how to do that brings joy when he has no other answers. With that montage, you can see how much joy he has making the perfect waffle. Cooking and food in general on the show are important on the show.

The purely nonjudgmental way to show the culture of this family would be to say that they have different kinds of relationships but that it’s OK, but they’re not OK. Is that something that you attribute to their parents?

I don’t want to indict the parents and say that Alex and Valerie will never be able to find happiness and it’s because of their parents.

They certainly think it’s because of their parents.

They do, and I think it’s a common thing for us to look at our parents and say, You raised me this way, and I’ll never be able to fix it. That feels like a crutch, and I’m hoping they’ll come to realize that their parents did not do well by them but that they can find a way to be happy. We’re trying not to put value judgments on any of these people. It’s way more interesting to paint them as people who are trying to find happiness.

[Watch Casual on Hulu]

Scott Porch writes about the streaming-media industry for Decider. He is also a contributing writer for Signature and The Daily Beast. You can follow him on Twitter @ScottPorch.