The Paul Reiser Show Q&A: Paul Reiser’s Life is Comedy Gold

Paul Reiser has a new show on NBC, aptly named The Paul Reiser Show. You might remember Mr. Reiser’s previous sitcom hit, Mad About You, in which he starred alongside Helen Hunt. That show ended over a decade ago, but don’t call it a comeback. Well maybe you can, it’s kind of a comeback. Okay, fine. It’s a comeback.

According to NBC, “Paul stars as himself, a man contemplating what comes next as he navigates the joys and complications of family life alongside a rather unique collection of friends.” You can expect Paul’s brand of observational comedy about marriage , kids, and a group of friends you are sometimes stuck with.  It’s his Curb Your Enthusiasm, if you will, and Larry David even makes an appearance. TV shows are starting to feel a little like Inception - a sitcom within a sitcom.

During a Q&A conference call Paul talked about the show, his modern life, and delivered one-liners like only he can.

What is The Paul Reiser show really about?

Paul Reiser: “It’s really based on my group of friends, you know, and one of the premises of the show is sort of that when you’re a father of kids — I find most guys have backed me up on this — you realize your friends are not people of your own choosing, that your friends are all fathers of your kid’s friends or husbands of your wives’ friends. And I have this world of friends that I look around and go, how did I get these people”

How does your real-life wife and family feel about being represented in your new show?

“On a good day they’re very tickled; on the other days they’re going, why did you tell them that? But you know what, my brilliant partner Jonathan Shapiro is putting his family in there too and one of the great thing about having a partner is you get to hide behind the other guy and go “honey that was really more his wife.” So we feel that enough names have been changed to protect the guilty.”

Why come back to TV now?

“I felt America needed me. I’m joking. You know, if you put a gun to my head three, four, five years ago I wouldn’t have been able to come up with the show but because I was really living that life of not being out there and being a guy who use to be on TV and being a guy whose job and daily life is, you know, taking the kids to school and putting out the little domestic fires, not literally, that suddenly when I started to look at it, I thought that’s actually very rich and very universal so the timing just seemed right.”

How did you get Amy Landecker to play your wife on the show?

“Someone said how about that woman from A Serious Man for your wife and I went wow, sure, she looks good and she came in and was one of those – it was very much like with Helen Hunt – she came in to read for the part and just chatting for two minutes, we said you know what, done, you don’t have to read, you got it, and that’s it. She was just so lovely and funny and offbeat and perfectly neurotic. I went yes, that’s what my wife needs to be, all of those things. So not that my wife is in anyway neurotic, by the way, I made that up for comedic impact, my wife is perfectly, always not neurotic, put that down, all right, good, she’s gone, not a word of this to my wife.”

What was it like to have Larry David on your show?

“I called Larry and I said I’m sure you’re not going to want to do this, but we wrote this part for you, you’ve got to do it and he was so gracious, he says, here’s the thing, but I can’t – I don’t like to memorize scripts so we’ll improvise it and I said done, let’s do that. And I got very nervous to be honest with you because he’s brilliant… I felt when we did that scene I was getting into the rink with Ali. Let me just keep running around and hopefully I won’t get hurt. It was a two-minute scene and we have 45 minutes of tape because he was no brilliantly funny.

Somebody had said early on well this show Paul, it’s sort of like your Curb, and I went yes, in that I’m playing me and Larry plays himself and when Larry says to me “Hey Paul, you know what you should do, you should do your own version of my show, A Curb” my head kind of exploded, frankly, because we were actually filming my show and he’s telling me that. He goes “You come off as Mr. Nice Guy on TV, you’re Mr. Sweet, Nice Guy but I know you, you’re not that nice” and I go I know that but America doesn’t know that.”

How do you expect the show to do?

I don’t expect that we’re going to come out and we’re going to beat American Idol, we’re not that show, but I do know that this is the show that week after week will build. I’m tremendously confident that if you just put this on and leave it, there will be a huge audience that will find it and it won’t be 200 million people, but there will be many, many people who will be drawn to the show and so I can’t wait for it to get on the air.”

The Paul Reiser Show will premiere on Thursday, April 14^th at 9:30/8:30c on NBC

Images courtesy of Michael Yarish and NBC