It takes an awful lot of hard work (and hard liquor) to make a laugh-riot sitcom.
Emmy-award winning duo Max Mutchnick and David Kohan joined The Daily Beast Podcast this week to talk about their new show, Mid-Century Modern, which has been hailed as the “gay Golden Girls.” Although the creators say that’s not exactly right, the pair told co-hosts Samantha Bee and Joanna Coles that the show isn’t afraid to be candid about what life really looks like for three gay gentlemen in their later years, much as Golden Girls did for its four older single women.
“This is a show about a family, a group of friends,” said Mutchnick. “We weren’t about to alienate the audience. Our job is to bring them in, but we knew we wanted to address the world that we were writing about in a very real way.”
Mutchnick and Kohan previously worked on the Will & Grace, one of the first primetime series to feature openly gay lead characters on U.S. television. It broke taboos in the 1990s, and now Mutchnick and Kohan are ready to be even more brazen.
Their new show’s star-studded cast includes Matt Bomer, Nathan Lane and Nathan Lee Graham, whose characters decide to spend their golden years living together in Palm Springs after the unexpected death of a fellow friend.
It reads like a joke off the bat: what do you get when a former Mormon (Bomer), a fashion industry old-timer (Graham) and a wealthy socialite (Lane) walk into a bar?
Mid-Century Modern filmed in front of a studio audience, so hundreds of people were reacting in the moment to the character’s one-liners. It’s a great—but nerve-wracking—way to improve the show in real time.
“Dave and I rewrite throughout the night,” Mutchnick said. “There are some that call it the writer’s scrum… another way you can refer to it as the viper pit.”
“Does the stress make you eat, or does the stress make you lose weight?” Coles asked.
“We have to be honest with these people and tell them really how we eat on a show night… it used to be pills,” said Mutchnick. “Then booze.”
“At every filming, Dave and I are handed a hot steamy cup of iced vodka,” he confessed.
“It looks like coffee,” said Kohan. “We fool the audience, blow on it.”
In other words, exactly the sort of stunt Blanche Devereaux would approve of.
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