Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
From That ’70s Show to Two and a Half Men, few people have more experience under the bright lights of the network sitcom than Ashton Kutcher. While the actor gained notoriety hanging out (down the street) in Eric Forman’s basement, Kutcher has pivoted into the world of streaming content with his hit Netflix series The Ranch. Also starring his That ’70s Show co-star Danny Masterson, the series centers on Kutcher’s Colt Bennett, a hard-drinking semi-pro football player who returns to Colorado to help run his family’s ranch. Featuring coarse language and brief nudity, The Ranch isn’t exactly a sitcom you’d see at 8:00 on CBS.
During a recent appearance on Kara Swisher’s podcast Recode Decode, Kutcher opened up about about what it’s like to work with Netflix and his attempt at resetting the image of the traditional sitcom.
“I thought doing something with Netflix would give us the opportunity to really creatively go out and try to reset what a sitcom is because I think people really like sitcoms, but I think they’ve become tired over time because they’re just the same,” Kutcher said. “We wanted to make a show about a conservative family in the middle of America with conservative views where we’re not making fun of people in the middle of America but embracing those views and making fun of the coast.”
The former That ’70s Show star believes that The Ranch is able to break traditional network sitcom rules because Netflix doesn’t interfere with the creative process and instead has created a culture that “trusts creators to create.” While Kutcher admits that the format of the traditional network sitcom still works, he believes that the strict adherence to specific lighting, music, and time restrictions have resulted in most sitcoms having an identical look and feel. Without the creative restrictions of a network, Kutcher, who along with Masterson serves as an executive producer on the series, is free to push the creative boundaries.
“We can really push what the content is all the way to the edge,” Kutcher continued. “We hired Sam Elliott, who’s not a sitcom actor, to be on a sitcom, and Debra Winger, who’s not a sitcom actor, to be on a sitcom. I feel like we’ve been able to start to press into a creative boundary that I don’t think we would ever be able to get away with at a network.”
And while you can take the boy out of Punk’d, you can’t quite take the spirit of Punk’d out of the boy. The actor revealed that while Netflix won’t share The Ranch’s ratings with him explicitly, he did a bit of reverse engineering and uncovered that the Netflix sitcom is “well in the neighborhood of network television shows.” Unsurprisingly, Netflix renewed the series for a second season, which will premiere in 2017. If you’re one of the many, many fans still streaming the latest batch of episodes, Kutcher promises that a traditional sitcom staple, the almighty cliffhanger, awaits.
“I won’t give it away, but the cliff hang of the last set of episodes, there’s an event that happens that I think will dive very, very deep into an issue that is a polarizing issue in our country and will look at both perspectives in a slightly deeper way than maybe usually gets done.”
