‘Ted Lasso’ Creator: Why I’m Shocked to Become the King of Comedy in My Mid-50s

Bill Lawrence is having a moment, and he knows it.

The prolific TV creator, who counts Spin City, Scrubs, and Cougar Town as his early success stories, “never expected to be having a career renaissance in my mid-50s,” he says. But taking in the view from 10,000 feet up, this era feels more like his imperial phase.

He’s turned out one hit after another since Ted Lasso took screens, hearts, and awards by storm in 2020. After that series racked up 11 Primetime Emmys and a Peabody Award over its three seasons, along came Shrinking, another joke-dense hangout show about navigating serious feelings. This summer brought Bad Monkey, a recognizably Lawrentian adaptation of Carl Hiaasen’s sunshine noir, that debuted to acclaim and strong viewership; and an as-yet untitled project for HBO with Steve Carell.

Shrinking and Bad Monkey, both at AppleTV+, have been picked up for third and second seasons, respectively. Not bad for a guy who delightedly calls this phase of his career “an absolute goof.”

As he was juggling edits for the last half of Shrinking and writers’ room duties for the series with Carell, Lawrence spoke with The Daily Beast’s Obsessed to reflect on this unexpectedly turbo-charged period of popularity, what he’s doing with all of the professional and social capital he’s amassed over the years, and why repeated failure has been so integral to his success.

The first thing Lawrence wants you to know is that “I’m only able to do all these things because I’m not really doing it myself.”

Sure, he’s working hard, at a nearly breakneck pace, but he’s also built what amounts to a highly accomplished repertory company, bringing along people he trusts will do their work well. It’s a recipe for preserving his own sanity, providing a “safety net of men and women younger than me who can help run shows, and direct shows, and design shows.” It’s also his own version of an industry-wide unofficial apprenticeship, a writer-to-showrunner pipeline that has all but disappeared from the TV landscape, which is now dominated by brief, six- to 10-episode seasons for streaming platforms.

Lawrence doesn’t describe it in these terms, emphasizing instead how much he “selfishly” relishes “being around people that walk in and go, ‘Wow, a TV show!,’ because it keeps me from ever being jaded and cynical.” Still, he’s fiercely proud to have created a launching pad for the careers of fellow creatives including Clone High creators Chris Miller and Phil Lord, Shrinking producer Sofi Selig, and actor-director Zach Braff. Paying forward to others the good turns that his late mentor, Gary David Goldberg, the legendary writer and creator of series like Family Ties and Spin City, did for Lawrence after he was fired from his writing job on Friends in 1995.

He’s keenly aware that Goldberg “didn’t have to do any of that s--- for me,” teaching him that “nobody has found their way in without some benevolent mentorship, and more often than not, from somebody that stands to gain very little… that’s the unsung part of this industry that ties into legacy. That matters to me.” The work itself is essential to Lawrence’s understanding of himself, and he loves that people connect with his shows, but the lineage continuing to emerge from them clearly meets a sense of obligation to do right by others.

The unofficial Bill Lawrence Repertory Company includes actors, writers, and many more specialists. Lawrence recently celebrated 30 years of working with Cabot McMullen, production designer for Spin City, Shrinking, and his upcoming project at HBO. His wife, Christa Miller, both acts (most recently on Shrinking as the prickly, intensely loyal Liz) and often draws on her earlier career as a DJ to inform her work as a music supervisor on his shows. Brett Goldstein was a writer on Ted Lasso before he played Roy Kent on the same show, and went on to co-create Shrinking with Lawrence and Jason Segel.

Goldstein appears in Shrinking this season, too, in a crucial, understated performance as the drunk driver whose carelessness killed main character Jimmy’s wife, Tia. Lawrence even brought in his own therapist as “one of the consultants on Shrinking” because their working relationship was so productive. It’s become a permanent ongoing project, something that “always kind of bleeds out and extends” from one chapter of his life to the next.

In addition to crediting his mentors and the talent network surrounding him, Lawrence considers failure as vital to the creative process. He survived multiple firings in the earliest years of his writing career—losing jobs on Boy Meets World, The Nanny, and Friends in quick succession—and those experiences loom large in his legend. He’s not ashamed of them, and they’ve long since lost their sting. Instead, the sports obsessive runs back the tape, draws lessons where there are some to be found, and eventually finds ways to put them to use elsewhere.

Bad Monkey isn’t just an adaptation of one of his favorite author’s novels, it’s Lawrence fulfilling his dream of creating something in “the banter-driven action comedy” genre, one he’s “wanted to live in forever.” His first swing was with an abandoned reboot of the Fletch films but “with more stakes and pathos” in the early 2000s. At least two more banter-rich projects—a Rush Hour TV adaptation (which he “made a disaster out of”) and the half-season wonder Whiskey Cavalier—didn’t work out, either. Bad Monkey came around at the right time, and it’s of a piece with Lawrence’s long standing belief that “I’m only good at writing stuff I know about”. Without taking big, unsuccessful swings at earlier projects, he couldn’t have done justice to Hiaasen’s ultra-quippy Florida Keys murder-and-corruption mystery.

Besides, failure itself, alongside “masculinity, and what it means,” has also been a rich vein of ideas and storytelling for Lawrence. Ted Lasso is about a man who had to put thousands of miles of land and sea between himself and his failures as a husband; Bad Monkey’s protagonist is a gifted detective on indefinite suspension for a (very funny and not entirely undeserved) violation of the social contract; and Shrinking is built around a widower who has to put his life back together after a year-long bender Lawrence describes as “boozing and drugging and hanging out with sex workers and being an absolutely horses--- father”.

It’s far too early to call the main character of Lawrence and Carell’s project anything close to a horses--- father, but he describes himself and Carell guys who “both have daughters of a certain age, who are living big lives, and who it’s hard to understand” and his developing fixation with being the parent of an adult deeply informs the series.

The self-awareness to know better than to try creating a project without roots in some of his own experiences is both a matter of preference and the wellspring of the authenticity Lawrence is always seeking in his shows. Shrinking’s writers shorthand this as a tonal tightrope, a tool that prevents them from being “too broad and silly” to execute “a hairpin curve into drama,” or being so “relentlessly dour” that landing a joke becomes impossible. Staying balanced on the tonal tightrope makes it possible to find the right combination of dizzy, screwball banter and emotional heft for each scene, each episode.

Shrinking’s second season finale, which is now available to stream, is set at a Thanksgiving dinner Gaby—Paul and Jimmy’s fellow therapist (and Jimmy’s sometime-love interest)—hosts for her extended chosen family. The episode serves up everyone’s unremitting messiness with maximum care. Gaby hurt her mother’s feelings so badly that she refuses to attend; Jimmy and daughter Alice are very gingerly but whole-heartedly repairing their own relationship.

Still, all of these people showed up to celebrate together. Their abundant mutual love and warmth is what makes it possible to be openly messy with each other. Gaby’s once and future boyfriend Derek swings by, with both his aunt and Gaby’s mom. Harrison Ford’s ultra-laconic Paul even cries as he tells everyone he’s thankful that he can be among them without the medications that make his Parkinson’s disease manageable. The clip of Ford’s performance in that scene went viral in the weeks following the finale, with captions about how much it made viewers cry.

Remaining vigilant against the scourges of inauthenticity and heavy-handed emotional manipulation, normalizing failure to prop open the door to improvement along the way, tending his talented flock, and wearing it all lightly while taking it all seriously is a recipe that works pretty well for Lawrence. It’s a good thing, too, because those three upcoming seasons of TV aren’t going to make themselves. The chef is in the kitchen; let the man cook.