When I interviewed Paul Scheer at last year’s San Diego Comic Con, the HUMAN GIANT co-creator had just received the go-ahead from Adult Swim to begin production on NTSF:SD:SUV:: (NATIONAL TERRORISM STRIKE FORCE: SAN DIEGO: SPORT UTIILITY VEHICLE::). Based on a thirty-second mock promo which aired during CHILDREN’S HOSPITAL, the show promised to be an completely bonkers parody of everything from CSI to 24 to MINORITY REPORT, with Scheer starring as the rasping, sunglasses-removing Agent Trent Hauser. I had no idea how it would work over a twelve-episode season (even at eleven-minutes-per), but I loved the notion of an inveterate scene-stealer like Scheer getting the opportunity to carry his own show.
A year later, NTSF:SD:SUV:: has premiered on Adult Swim, and I’m back at Comic Con talking to Scheer, who’s justifiably proud of the insanity he’s perpetrated. The show uses the overly-familiar formula of an hour-long network procedural as a means of both satirizing the genre and spinning off into absurd situations that have <em>absolutely nothing</em> to do with the murder-mystery narrative. Basically, though Scheer and his producing partners (Jonathan Stern and Curtis Gwinn) are always working within the framework of stuff like CSI or NCIS, NTSF:SD:SUV:: is, like CHILDREN’S HOSPITAL (with which is splits the funniest half-hour on television), really just a blissfully random fifteen minutes of comedy. And while Scheer’s the star, he leaves plenty of room for his impressive supporting cast (which includes June Diane Raphael, Kate Mulgrew, Brandon Jackson, Martin Starr, Rebecca Romijn, Rob Riggle and S.A.M., the sentient robot) to contribute their own lunacy to the proceedings.
Though Scheer was at Comic Con specifically to promote NTSF:SD:SUV::, we also found time to discuss some of his other projects, like the must-watch fantasy-football comedy THE LEAGUE (returning to FX this October for its third season) and his podcast HOW DID THIS GET MADE?, where Scheer, Raphael, Jason Mantzoukas and various guests attempt to make sense of catastrophically awful Hollywood movies like THE LAST AIRBENDER, THE LOVE GURU and THE SMURFS. For the most part, though, we stuck to NTSF:SD:SUV::, and how much fun it is writing this type of show without being burdened by stupid shit like scientific accuracy. Julian Sands also came up.
And now, the most professional start to an interview you’ll ever read…
Beaks: NTSF:SU…(Stumbles over the title)
Paul Scheer: NTSF:SD:SUV.
Beaks: I got the part I always get wrong right. Actually, I think the title is great because I’m still struggling with it.
Scheer: (Laughs) I appreciate it though. I think the cool thing about the show is it’s hard to remember the full acronym, but because it’s hard to remember, it’s a show that you are like “I know it has a lot of initials.” So at least it will stick in your head for being hard to remember it’s actually called. We have more acronyms than any other cop show or any other show on television, and definitely more colons.
Beaks So I watched the first two episodes, and I loved both of them.
Scheer: Oh good, thanks!
Beaks: You’re tackling the hard issues with this show, like Four Loko.
Scheer: I’m so happy we got to do a Four Loko. I love the idea of Four Loko and what that was; I feel like I was in that rare moment where there was a drink that was killing people because it had too much alcohol and caffeine. That was crazy that that actually happened. But it’s funny, even coming up with that… shows like the CSIs and the NCISes, they’re so heightened as it is, it’s not so far fetched. A Four Loko that blows people up? I think that could be on CSI: MIAMI.
Beaks: And that’s why I liked it, that it is just close enough. Obviously you guys are doing absurd things within it, but it doesn’t feel that far off from what you’re parodying.
Scheer: And it makes it more fun, too. CHILDREN’S HOSPITAL is so amazingly funny; it’s absurdist and great. But our absurd humor actually feels more organic to the format that we are parodying. David Caruso takes off his sunglasses every episode [of CSI: MIAMI] and gives the worst pun standing over dead bodies, and we have a scene this season where everyone is casually eating fast food during an autopsy. Those shows are so dumb, it’s amazing. I love it.
Beaks: It’s also great because you have no obligation to get any of the science or forensics correct.
Scheer: It’s great. It’s super fun. The other thing is we have fifteen minutes – or technically eleven minutes and twenty seconds – for a whole mystery play out from beginning to end, which is incredibly hard. It’s only like a thirteen-page script, and you’ve got to use all of these great people that we have in our show. But it’s funny. It’s even better that we don’t have to have any lines like, “Yeah, JK Simmons was behind it the whole time.” “What? You didn’t know that?” Those shows do it like that, too. Like “I was the killer.” “You were? You were on the show for four years and you never showed us that!” It’s like that TV show THE KILLING, when that creator was like “Oh, I don’t know who the killer is.” “Wait, wait… you don’t know who the killer is!?!? Don’t waste my time!” And clearly she didn’t know because the end didn’t make any fucking sense.
Beaks: If you are David Lynch, maybe you can get away with that.
Scheer: I know people gave Damon and Carlton a lot of shit about the LOST thing, but I do feel like that show emotionally wrapped up the right way. They had the idea. But you can’t do something where it’s like, “We need an answer,” and not have that answer from the beginning. Everything’s going to feel mushy in between.
Beaks: So how does the fifteen-minute format feel compared to a thirty-minute show?
Scheer: I like the 15 minute format, because I feel like you don’t overstay your welcome. I like that old adage of like “Leave them wanting more.” I feel like, especially in comedy, and in a genre-specific comedy, it’s kind of nice to just get in and get out. You don’t feel the weight. Maybe we would have to make the forensics hold up a little bit more if it was a half hour; you get away with scooting by some details in a [fifteen-minute episode].
Beaks: How much of a writing staff do you have? And is the show tightly scripted?
Scheer: Well you know we basically have… It’s me, this guy John Stern who produces CHILDREN’S HOSPITAL and then Curtis Gwinn, who produced this show called FAT GUY STUCK IN INTERNET for Adult Swim. It’s just the three of us, so we are kind of the writers room for all intents and purposes. I wrote four episodes and they both wrote two, and then we hired some outside hands to write episodes, and then we would get them and work on them together. This being the first season as we are figuring out the characters and everything, we did a lot of rewriting and really finessing the characters and then we would have people punch up scripts that were already done. Then when we got on set, we definitely let it be open to improv. But a show like this also shoots in twenty-four days; we did twelve episodes in twenty-four days, so we are gunning it. In an average episode, we are in a lot of different locations, so we are trying to move as quick as we can. It’s a pretty intense day. There were some days where we were doing twelve pages a day, which is a lot of script pages.
Beaks: So how did you get JK Simmons involved?
Scheer: I’ve been totally nerding out, because everybody we have gotten on the show are people that I’m a total fan of. We have gone deep in the catalog of great character actors. I’m a huge fan of JK Simmons, and I saw that he did comedy on PARTY DOWN and stuff like that. I was like, “I think he’d be open to it.” I sent him the script and the trailer of the show, and he just said yes, which was great. Then we got Jeff Goldblum to do it. Jeff was amazing. And then we just started to expand our circle a little bit and reach out to people that you wouldn’t think of, like Julian Sands, Lorenzo Lamas, who plays the President of Mexico… and we have Martin Kove.
Beaks: Kreese!
Scheer: Yeah, John Kreese! Wow, you’re the very first interviewer who knew that. That’s great. And so we got him in the show. So there are people like that, and then there are other people that are just great that I am a fan of, like Moon Bloodgood, who was super fun to get involved in the show, and Gabrielle Union and John Cho, who I am friends with and he just knocks it out of the park, and Ed Helms came by and did something. This show is kind of built around having guest stars; every week on these shows, there’s a different murderer and a different victim, so you can kind of really have fun with it.
Beaks: So Julian Sands… did you guys get any WARLOCK jokes in there, or would he not want any part of that?
Scheer: You know, I have to say Julian Sands is the person I was most intimidated by because he carries himself so seriously. That’s not to say that he wasn’t amazing on set - he was so into it - but he was nervous because he had never done comedy before. So here he is, Julian Sands, distinguished British gentlemen who had done a lot of different stuff… but he was excited to do his part. You’ve got him just being very refined sitting next to Rob Riggle on a hospital bed going like “My cock and balls are blowing up!” And that’s not even Riggle on camera; that’s just Riggle joking around in between takes. I don’t know if Julian knew what to make of us, but he had a great time. He was great and really funny. They always say comedians want to be rock stars, and rock stars want to be comedians, I think there’s a little truth to people that do a lot of drama want to do comedy. Moon Bloodgood said to me, “I just do so much sci-fi, it’s so great to do something different and have fun.” It’s fun to get people to go outside of their box a little bit.
Beaks: It’s great that you guys have all of these different shows to bounce between. CHILDREN’S HOSPITAL, THE LEAGUE… you have so many outlets for your creativity now. It’s kind of insane.
Scheer: Adult Swim has become this amazing comedy playground. Between EAGLEHEART and DELOCATED and CHILDREN’S HOSPITAL, it’s awesome and I feel very lucky. I feel very lucky to be in a community of comedians who are very successful right now, so we all get to work with each other in a great way. I just did this movie with Craig Robinson called RAPTUREPALOOZA; it’s Craig Robinson, Rob Corddry, Tom Lennon, Rob Huebel, myself, Tyler Labine, and then Anna Kendrick and John Daley from BONES. To me there’s always something very intimidating about coming on a set and being like “I don’t know anybody. Will they like me? Will it be okay?” So it’s fun to be like “Oh, these are all my friends.” I think the performances are better, and, with shows like THE LEAGUE, it’s great that we get to play around; we get to speak in our voices and really dictate the direction of the scenes. It makes a big difference.
Beaks: Outside of these shows, do you do much punch-up work?
Scheer: You know, I have not done that much punch up work. I always think I want to do it, but then I also think like “Oh, this might be gut wrenching.” I hear Patton [Oswalt] talk about it all of the time. I have done punch up for friends and stuff like that, but I’m not on the level of like sitting around at a studio going “Alright! DESPICABLE ME 4! What are some jokes we can say?” My wife who is a writer, and she’s also on the show; she had the best assignment that made me go “This is why I don’t want to do punch up.” I believe it was for that movie ALIENS IN THE ATTIC . They shot the whole movie, did the whole thing with the aliens speaking a gibberish language, and then, after they edited the movie and were ready to release it, they go “We want the aliens to speak English now.” So they had to bring in people to watch the movie, and write dialogue for every time they spoke gibberish - and make it funny. That was the whole conceit of the movie, that no one understood them! That’s the type of thing that just seems crazy.
Beaks: “This movie that we made? We actually didn’t want to make it…”
Scheer: And that’s the kind of stuff that gets me excited about movies in general. That’s why I do the podcast “How Did This Get Made?” where we just sit around and joke around about these movies. And it’s alright because these are movies that have so much money behind them. It’s easy to make fun of THE ROOM. It’s easy to make fun of THE GINGERDEAD MAN with Gary Busey. But when you are GREEN LANTERN, and you have mistakes that are just as glaring as THE ROOM, then questions need to be answered.
http://www.earwolf.com/show/how-did-this-get-made/
Beaks: There’s a lot of money going into making a lot of really stupid decisions.
Scheer: That’s gone past so many people’s desks. Everyone had to go, “Yep, we approve.”
Beaks: What other movies would you like to do on “How Did This Get Made?” You’ve got to have a queue.
Scheer: Yeah, we have a bunch of things ready to go. There’s two sides of it in my mind, like “How did this get made, because it’s so bad?” and then there’s like “How did this get made, because this is bananas?” FAST FIVE is in the bananas category. DRIVE ANGRY 3D, that’s in the bananas category. But then you have OLD DOGS, which is just like… “What?” These are movies that I need to watch with a friend to be like, “Am I seeing the same thing? Are we seeing that these characters are taking Viagra, and the side effect is that they get Joker smile? That’s happening? Then Robin Williams goes into a tanning booth and gets so tan that Indian people think he’s Indian and speak Hindi to him? Is that something I just saw?”
Beaks: How did someone like Robin Williams think that would fly today? That’s something you’d see in a ‘60s or ‘70s movie.
Scheer: It’s crazy. I mean, Peter Sellers can get away with it, but not Robin Williams in a G-rated movie. The best thing I’ve heard about OLD DOGS is - and I don’t know if there is any truth to this - that it was an - rated movie that they cut down to PG. But I don’t think that can be true.
And then there’s SEASON OF THE WITCH, the Nicolas Cage movie. That screenplay won a Nicholl Fellowship, so that clearly wasn’t the script. What happened? It’s crazy that stuff happens like that.
Beaks: So THE LEAGUE. How would a completely locked-out season impact the show?
Scheer: Well, it was resolved as of yesterday.
Beaks: I heard this morning that there was some last-second squabbling over the owners’ proposal. But if the lockout were to continue, what would you guys do?
Scheer: I’ve talked to Jeff and Jackie about it, and… we haven’t started shooting the season, which is really good. We start shooting in two weeks. If we have some resolution by then, it would be great. (Laughs) But we will do it the way the football season is. For me, I would like to do a season without football. I wouldn’t like a season without football, but it would be fun. I think a lot of people are turned off to the show because… “Oh, that’s a football show, so I need to know about football.” A lot of people now are realizing they don’t need to know it, and I think this would just further cement “Look, we don’t need football. It’s just about people in their thirties, and this just happens to be their thing.”
Beaks: It would be exciting to explore fantasy football obsessives struggling through a fall without football.
Scheer: I think it would be really exciting. I’m writing an episode right now. and we have yet to put football into it. But it’s a fun episode.
NTSF:SD:SUV airs Thursday nights at 12:15 AM ET/PT on Adult Swim (Adam Scott turns up in tonight's Rob Huebel-scripted episode). THE LEAGUE will return to FX on Thursday, October 6th. And the “How Did This Get Made” podcast is available now via Earwolf. Plenty of Paul Scheer to go around!
Faithfully submitted,
