Hey Mr. Lawrence, how are you?
Hey, Jack. First of all, it’s Bill, Jack, because you just made me feel like I’m a thousand years old. Secondly, this is very cool because I’m still a director at heart. Symmetrically, you have good hair, but it matches up perfectly with the handbag in the painting behind you. It would be like a Wes Anderson shot from one of his movies. It’s awesome. Although Wes Anderson, he would put something like that in the bottom left, so it was perfect symmetry, but it’s awesome.
[Laughs] Thank you for complimenting my hair.
That’s the weirdest start to any of the interviews I’ve done. It doesn’t count as your time. I’m sorry.
[Laughs] No, let’s hope it sets the tone for the rest of this interview.
There we go, man. There we go.
Well, to return the compliment, I’ll just say going back to “Scrubs” and now “Shrinking,” your work brings me a lot of happiness.
Hey, that is super kind. I’m not good at accepting compliments. I really appreciate it. I’ll do my shame spiral off camera.
I think a part of the reason why these comedies are appealing is that they’re really just about getting through the day.
Yeah.
What has been drawing you to that idea for over 20 years?
I know. Well, look man, I always feel hesitant to talk about this because I would be remiss if I didn’t say I am the luckiest guy on the planet. I get paid to write silly jokes and look at Indiana Jones and Marty McFly back in the day, you know what I mean, and hang around young people that make me feel relevant on a writing staff because they’re paid to talk to me in ways that my own children won’t. It’s awesome.
I will say the one thing that connects us all, especially now that the world’s been such a dumpster fire for five years, is that everybody, I think … if you said to anybody, “Hey, how do you wake up and get through the day?”, there’s not a person out there that would go, “What are you talking about? Life’s awesome.” Everybody’s just been grinding a little bit.
It’s what I like to write about because, especially with Brett and Jason, I generally cope by laughing my way through it. It’s bleak, but my dad is only 75 years old. He has something called Lewy bodies, which is what Robin Williams had. It’s a degenerative hallucination kind of dementia. He’s there sometimes. He’s not there sometimes. But when he is there, we laugh about it and joke about it in ways that I think if you stepped into that world, you’d be like, “What the hell are you doing?” I’d have to be like, “It’s okay. It’s okay. He digs it,” and that’s the world I like to write about generally.