When Max Mutchnick and David Kohan first partnered on “Will & Grace,” they paved the way with a fresh sitcom that was immediately embraced by queer communities. Now, over two decades later, the duo hopes to reinvent the genre once again with Hulu’s “Mid-Century Modern.”
“I hope we’re able to be a show that breaks the mold of a multicam a little bit in the way that we get to sound a little bit more like the world sounds,” Mutchnick told TheWrap. “The gift of working at Hulu is that we got a chance to graduate to a language and a sound and a cadence that really is more like what we sound like. I hope that that’s one of the things that’s able to stick with this show, which is, it’s a little bit more grown up.”
“Mid-Century Modern” centers on three gay best friends of a certain age played by Nathan Lane, Matt Bomer and Nathan Lee Graham, who, after a tragedy, decide to spend the next chapter of their lives together in Palm Springs, where Lane’s Bunny lives with his mother, played by the late Linda Lavin.
With each of the single friends navigating their own love lives, working with the streamer gave the duo more license than when they wrote “Will & Grace” for NBC, but they were not sure how to take advantage of it. “If you’re doing a sitcom for a broadcast network, you have very, you have clear parameters, there are certain lines you can’t cross, and one of the things that you do as writers is, ‘How can we get right up to that line?’” Kohan said. “You want to be able to say something that you would hear in your own life, but you don’t want to be crass.”
As Mutchnick and Kohan filled the crew of “Mid-Century Modern” with familiar faces and the “best and the brightest” writers from their time on “Will & Grace,” working on the new series felt like a “time capsule,” despite the major changes across the TV landscape. Even so, Kohan said trends are “cyclical,” saying, “reports of the death of the sitcom are premature.”
“It seems like a tumultuous time right now, and a lot of times, what you want is something comforting and something familiar and something from a time when things were slightly less complicated,” Kohan said.
“This one worked and this one got on the air,” Mutchnick said, adding that Ryan Murphy coming on board as an executive producer was the “800-pound gorilla that made this happen.” “But it would not have moved forward if Nathan Lane, Matt Bomer, Nathan Lee Graham and Linda Lavin were not pulling this cart — that’s really the issue with why I think these comedies go away. They’re not funny — it’s really hard to make something funny and have it work.”
While Mutchnick and Kohan admitted they had always had Nathan Lane in mind for Bunny, a successful businessman and hopeless romantic who has been unlucky in love, the casting came together in several days time thanks to Murphy, who gave Lane the script for “Mid-Century Modern” during production for
“Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story,” who played journalist Dominick Dunne in the Netflix series. “A decision came the next day — it just happened,” Kohan recalled.
Bomer’s casting was also a suggestion from Murphy, though Bomer was not who Mutchnick and Kohan had in mind for Jerry, who transformed from an older character, aged 63, to become the younger, ditzy yet lovable friend in the trio.
“It threw us, to be perfectly honest, it was not what we planned or what we wrote, but these are the reasons why you collaborate with new people, because they bring you thoughts that you know you just never considered,” Mutchnick said of Murphy’s suggestion of Bomer. “It makes sense in this world — in these chosen families, very often there’s the younger one that was the younger boyfriend of someone, and the relationship didn’t work out, but they all became a tight knit friendship.”
And Graham came on via the audition process, with Mutchnick recalling, “he auditioned and he left the room … and I looked at Nathan Lane, and I said, ‘What do you think?’ And he said, ‘Well, it’s obviously Nathan Lee Graham’ and I said, ‘Why is that?’ And he said, ‘He’s the only one I’m afraid of.’”
The decision to cast Lavin, who passed away in late December with just three episodes of “Mid-Century Modern” left to film, was also a “short conversation,” according to Kohan, who recalled director Jimmy Burrows immediately saying Lavin should have the role, saying “she’s a heat, sinking missile with a joke — she’s brilliant.”
With that, “Mid-Century Modern” had its cast, which translated into an “instant chemistry” that shines through in the pilot. “These shows — they’re all about, will there be an alchemy with the cast once you put them together,” Mutchnick said, with Kohan adding “They’re just generous, lovely actors who happen to be enormously talented.”
“Mid-Century Modern” also welcomes a stacked lineup of guest stars — including Pamela Adlon, Vanessa Bayer, Kimberly Coles, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Judd Hirsch, Richard Kind, Stephanie Koenig, Billie Lourd, Esther Moon Wu, Jaime Moyer, Cheri Oteri, Rhea Perlman and Zane Phillips — all of whom the creators said not only delivered great character acting but also an engaging live performance.
“There’s a difference between just a good comic actor, and then the ones that can show up and deliver a performance in front of a live audience after only a week’s worth of rehearsal,” Mutchnick said. “We, fortunately, we know a lot of those people, so we’re able to zero in on the ones that we wanted from the very beginning.”
“Mid-Century Modern” is now streaming on Hulu.
