From Lewd To Leading Men: NBC’s New Comedy Lineup Is Turning Bros Into Big Stars

Brace yourself, because NBC’s upcoming comedy lineup is actually fantastic. There have been a few years of tinkering, of finding a show with the wit of Community, the heart of Parks and Recreation, and the broad appeal of The Office. And starting this spring, the network once again has a Thursday night lineup of Must See TV on their hands.

Beginning tonight, viewers will get a sneak peek of what’s to come, right before the Olympics take over NBC for over two weeks — during which, it’s likely you’ll see a promo or two for the new shows (You will. You really, really will).

A.P.Bio, premiering tonight at 9:30pm ET/PT, is one of the funnier pilot episodes that has perhaps ever graced the network’s airwaves. From executive producers Seth Meyers, Mike Shoemaker, Andrew Singer, and Lorne Michaels, and created by SNL alum Mike O’Brien, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’s Glenn Howerton stars as a Harvard philosophy scholar who is forced to work as a substitute teacher for a high school A.P. Biology class in his hometown of Toledo, Ohio. Oh, but the only lesson these students are going to learn is that there will be no learning at all. From ordering the kids to help him get revenge on an enemy to facing off with the student council (in the name of snacks, of course), the series is wildly funny, and packed with more actual laughs-per-minute than nearly anything else on TV, especially on network TV. It’s ridiculous and hilarious and expertly sneaks in just the right amount of heart to a show led by a character that doesn’t quite seem to be in possession of one.

NBC made the very wise move to give the first episode its broadcast premiere tonight, and beginning tomorrow, Friday February 2nd, the first three episodes of the series will be available to watch online on Hulu and the NBC app. However, they’re saving their other new Thursday night addition, Champions, until March 8th at 8:30pm. From creators and executive producers Mindy Kaling and Charlie Grandy, the half-hour comedy follows two brothers, Workaholics and The Mindy Project’s Anders Holm, and Andy Favreau, as they navigate their relationship, the Brooklyn gym that they own, oh, and the fact that Holm’s Vince is reunited with his teenage son, Michael (played by J.J. Totah). Champions leans a bit more heartwarming where A.P. Bio goes asinine (in the best way), but both shows have one major thing in common besides their coveted Thursday night timeslots: they’re both providing viewers the opportunity to watch their lead stars transform from bro to broad comedies.

It might be a bit of a stretch to refer to It’s Always Sunny as a “bro comedy” as it’s been one of FX’s most successful shows over 12 seasons. But my parents certainly aren’t familiar with it, yet they probably already (and only) know Howerton’s irresponsible teacher from seeing the NBC commercials alone. Same for Holm: he was great opposite Kaling on The Mindy Project and even crept a bit towards the mainstream as Anne Hathaway’s husband in 2015’s The Intern and 2016’s How To Be Single. Still, it’s safe to say broad audiences haven’t been subjected to the office shenanigans Holm and his buddies were partaking in on the Comedy Central series, Workaholics.

While Dennis Reynolds’ return to It’s Always Sunny remains to be seen, O’Brien knew Howerton was the right guy for Jack because, “It’s his combination of being really funny, which I knew he had proven in 12 seasons of Sunny, but then the fact that he’s Julliard trained made me think he could do moments we were looking for where you feel something for the kids. I was hoping for this character to have a little bit more compassion than Dennis on Sunny.” Not too hard of a task there! But that’s also not to say Jack is a Howerton that Sunny fans won’t recognize either. “He’s really versatile and insanely talented and I think he’ll constantly be expanding his resume beyond Dennis forever,” O’Brien said. “But he felt some connect with the character when he first read [the A.P. Bio script] and then we talked and worked out more together about the character.”

O’Brien came up with idea during his final year at Saturday Night Live and explained that it all started with a moment viewers will see at the top of the first episode that lays out the entire premise of the show. “I just remember starting with the opening monologue of the pilot and expanding it out from there, but that was a fun character monologue to write and pretty quickly I decided to try to expand it into a half hour.” He also drew inspiration from “living in Manhattan and going back to Toledo and the contrast of those two worlds, someone from that east coast, fast paced world, dropped down into where I grew up and had a lot of affinity for.” He swapped Manhattan for Harvard to achieve the perfect amount of pretentiousness, used that initial monologue to pitch the show, and he was off and running an NBC sitcom, which he describes as his “favorite artistic experience in 17 years of comedy.”

After Howerton was in place, O’Brien put the rest of the cast together, including a handful of student roles, and auditioned many of those actors based only on the pilot script where their characters had very few to any lines of dialogue at all. “We were very lucky to find out later these are good actors,” he admitted. Eventually Patton Oswalt signed on as Principal Durbin, Paula Pell as Helen, and Lyric Lewis, Mary Sohn, and Jean Villiepique round out Jack’s fellow teachers who handle a generous amount of comedy in their teacher’s lounge antics.

A.P. Bio is saturated in comedy, but it bends just enough to accommodate a bit of sentimentality to keep viewers invested in the brash Jack and sometimes-bratty students. But finding that balance for O’Brien proved to be, “a little tricky. Because if you go too subtle then it doesn’t feel like you did it at all. So we usually put it slightly more heavy-handed in the script where Jack actually has a line like, ‘I feel bad about what I did,’ and then we just rely on Glenn’s acting on the day, and [in the editing] very eagerly take that clunky line out. It was almost like a placeholder of the emotional arc would literally be  in a line that I knew was gonna come out later because Glenn is such a good actor he can just show that with his eyes. With him, you could show really subtle changes in the character just with rolling the camera on his face for a few seconds and he always knew exactly where the character should be emotionally in the performance.”

It’s not only Howerton’s facial expressions that give us an idea of who Jack is — his wardrobe says it all. Every day, Jack reluctantly shows up at school wearing sweatpants with a fancy-ish cardigan sweater, an outfit that can only be described as a fashion mullet: business up top, party down below. O’Brien decided the character would wear sweatpants by referencing the style choice in the pilot script. And as far as the top goes, his instructions were, “I want something to show he thinks he’s better than the Toledo world.” He suggested, “Maybe an expensive sweater he got while he was a professor at Harvard and then sweatpants and they should look like they might have been kind of expensive sweatpants. I was working with Sarah Trost, the costume designer, and I was like ‘It’s like when celebrities are caught getting coffee.’ They’re always like in the laziest Sunday clothes but you can tell they cost more. She found a great paparazzi photo of Jude Law in basically this outfit and I was like ‘That! That’s what I was talking about!’”

O’Brien is excited about the plan to stream the first three episodes, and noted, “I know I always watch things in bunches so I think it’s great that from the beginning people will be able to watch a handful instead of just watching one and waiting a week.” Viewers will get to meet Jack and his assigned students in the pilot episode, watch him visit “teacher jail” in episode two, and inevitably attempt to date a student’s mom in episode three. Oh, you haven’t heard of teacher jail? Neither had O’Brien. So after the writers’ room recalled their own high school experiences for inspiration, they brought in the experts. “One of the writers, Donick Cary, his daughter is taking A.P. Bio. She’s a freshman in high school and he had her teacher and her teacher’s boyfriend, who’s another A.P. Bio teacher come in and talk to us. So we did do research and speak to two actual current A.P. Bio high school teachers. We talked about A.P. Bio and the exam and things like that but it also was really great to just be like ‘Give us all the gossip that’s going on around school’ and ‘What happened to that guy after he said that and is he in trouble?’ The ‘Teacher Jail’ episode is all from stories they were telling. She’s like, ‘It’s a real thing, you’re put in this trailer and just held from 9 to 5 there until they figure out what to do if you’ve done something a kid got injured from. It’s called Teacher Jail.’ We just wrote it all down and said we had to do something with that. I think if we ever did more episodes of these I would want more talking to teachers ー and students if we could, I don’t know if they’d open up. But it was extremely helpful and a really fun afternoon.”

When A.P. Bio returns to NBC in March, it will take the 9:30 pm slot as Champions slides into 8:30 pm, between Superstore and Will & Grace. And as showrunner Charlie Grandy noted of the show’s new home, “We couldn’t be happier about that, that we’re on Thursdays and that we are in between those two shows. It will have something for both those audiences. If it doesn’t work it’s our fault.”

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Hey guys?! Check it out!!! @nbcchampions March 8th

A post shared by Anders Holm (@ders808) on Jan 31, 2018 at 1:25pm PST

Grandy pointed to Kaling as the genesis of the show, and explained, “The main character Michael just sort of sprung from Mindy’s head. She knew she wanted to do a half Indian kid, she knew she wanted him to be sort of very proudly out, a confident teenager, and then just this idea of telling a new New York story. She told her ideal New York story starring herself in The Mindy Project, just a very affluent single woman trying to have it all and this was like what if we took a kid from the midwest who’s coming to New York with these huge dreams and almost no money and let’s try to build a show around that.”

Although, it proved to be a bit of a challenge at first. “The character of Michael was so specific that all along we felt the show was gonna live or die by whether we could find this kid. Even while we were writing it, we weren’t very positive we’d be able to find him. And really from the moment [Totah] walked through the door he had just this great winning, charming personality and was the character we’d always envisioned. So then we put him together with Anders and it was great.”

While Holm is also about to make the major leap from cable channel comedy bro to major network sitcom leading man, nabbing him for the project was not always a guarantee. Grandy explained of the casting, “We didn’t write it specifically for him but he was always in discussion. It was always one of those things, ‘Oh god if he’s available he’d be great to get.’ He’s not the kind of person you can count on being around, but we had a relationship from The Mindy Project, we knew he was great. As soon as we had a draft that we were willing to show him we just aggressively started courting him.”

And the great news for all of us is that it worked! “He has completely thrown himself into the role,” Grandy said. “He is giving so much on set, it’s been more than we ever had really dreamed we could get from a lead. It’s always a little bit of like, you’ve worked with them, you think it’ll be great but you never know and we had high expectations and he has so far exceeded them in every way possible. He’s just been a true hero on the set. I’m so excited for everyone to see, because he was very funny on Workaholics but I think this show, he’s driving a lot of the stories, he’s a true lead and he does it incredibly well.”

In explaining what makes Holm and his character Vine such a perfect match, Grandy pointed out, “I think the character that we wrote is trying very hard but he is a little dorky and what’s so great about Anders is that he has a masculine energy, he’s a tall, strapping guy but he can play this kind of the hapless loser at times in a very winning way. And it’s just been this great combination of giving him a kid, especially a teenager that he can go toe to toe with as opposed to like a six-year-old and he’s sort of a bumbling dad in that regard. The whole point of the show is to give this guy, this former failed athlete, for the first time in his life a kind of intellectual equal around him. And that’s where they are gonna bond, is he finally has someone who can really challenge him in his life.”

Totah is not just a perfect on-screen match for Holm, but for Favreau, who plays his uncle Matthew on the show, as the two form an immediate bond. And while Grandy and Kaling certainly know what they’re doing when it comes to the comedy, they’ve also touched on a really sweet soft spot for the show, without ever going too mushy. “Mindy and I are softies as well, so we love hard comedy but we want honest, earned emotional moments and that really comes from The Office. It was a very funny show but they had really honest emotional moments and I think that is the perfect mix.” And in high praise, Grandy even compares Holm to what we’ve seen in the past from Steve Carrell’s legendary Michael Scott. “[Holm] doesn’t shy away from emotion. And we ask a lot of him in that. Every show, every episode has a nice sentimental moment in the fourth act and he doesn’t hold back. He just goes for it. He’s not afraid to be unfunny in those moments and it makes all the difference in the world. He’s not undercutting it, he really just allows that to play and I think that reminds me of Steve Carell. Steve Carell wouldn’t have to undercut the sentimentality for a joke. You get that moment and then move to a joke but just let that moment live for what it is.”

And luckily, NBC saw Champions for what it was and let Grandy and Kaling make the show they set out to make — which the network was on-board with nearly instantaneously. “It’s very easy to pitch when you bring Mindy Kaling into the room. I think it sold as soon as we walked in,” Grandy laughed. “I think it was that, and then the idea you have just a really diverse new take on family show. It’s these two brothers, it’s a non-traditional family and we’d always wanted the gym to have that Cheers style of feeling where it’s an extended family and they really bought into that immediately.” Oh, and they won’t be the only ones. Go ahead and clear your Thursday nights this spring — you’ve got plans with your new TV pals.

Where to watch A.P. Bio