'Hank' Interviews

Emmanuel Itier: Mr. Grammer, you have done two comedies…

Kelsey Grammer: Since Frasier?

EI: Well, I guess the third, in which someone has gone back home to an old life that they thought they’d escaped from and presumably find the charms of as they go along.  Is that a particularly appealing theme for you?

KG: No. [Laughs]

Tucker Cawley: What other shows have you done?

KG: I think…none. The premise really has more to do with the emotional growth of the character, and that’s what I find, say, opportunistic in the fact that he’s forced into a situation where he has to grow up.  That was a similar quality in the previous show, Back to You, with Chuck, but it wasn’t quite the same thing because he was a lothario. This is a guy who’s just been sort of blissfully ignorant about some of the basic tasks of human existence, and that’s what he’s going to learn to do here.  But basically it’s the opportunity to grow up — for a man to actually become a fully realized man.

EI: For the producers, the house that Hank and his family move into looked pretty big, and they’re sort of referring to it as a hell-pit.  Are we just supposed to view that as them being a little too entitled, or are we supposed to view it as not really a good place?

TC: We are reshooting the pilot.  There are little tweaks we’re making to the place, but yes, we will be touching on this riches-to-rags thing.  But in general, Kelsey doesn’t look at the place and his new situation — or Kelsey’s character — as something that people should feel sorry about.  That’s what I like about this character — that he takes in the place…yes, it’s not Park Avenue anymore, but he says, “Yes, this is exactly what we’re looking for.”  It’s that kind of old-fashioned American optimism with which he views the world and his new situation that, hopefully, will be appealing.  So I don’t think we’re looking for people to go, “Oh, are we supposed to feel sorry for this guy?  It still seems pretty nice.”  No, he agrees with you.  “This is going to be great.”

EI: Following up on that, how golden was Hank’s parachute?  How much money is he working with now, and what is going to be his need to go work?

TC: That’s something also we’ll address a little bit more.

KG: We’re trying to work on that specifically, but to my mind, Hank sacrificed his parachute to make some other people whole.  We haven’t quite figured out what the numbers are exactly and stuff like that, but he did take the brunt of the responsibility for what went wrong with his company.

TC:  And he didn’t sell off his stock when…

David Koechner: They were riding high.  He kind of went down with the ship.

TC: So I think they have a nest egg.  I don’t think this is going to be a show about them worrying how they’re going to make ends meet.  They have a nest egg but not a golden parachute.  But again, Hank Pryor looks at that like, “Good.  I started with nothing and I built an empire…and I shall do it again.”

KG: Hopefully a good laugh. That’s really about it.  Probably one of the greatest human characteristics is our ability to laugh at our situations.  I think irony is our strong suit.  Humans are at their best when things are at their very worst, and I think comedy is a necessary part of that.

TC: I think we’ll obviously be touching on themes of downsizing and that sort of thing, and back to basics.  But really, the stories we’re interested in telling are this guy looking at life and looking at his family in a different way, and he’s a guy that thinks, ”I’ve lost everything I had,” but he feels he is destined to return to greatness.

KG: This was the pitch that got me.  This was the line right here.

TC: I said that Hank Pryor is a man who feels he’s destined to return to greatness.  And he is.  It’s just not the greatness he imagined.

EI: Kelsey, since you’ve produced a lot of shows too, take us back a little bit on this. Start with when Back to You was canceled.  I think, at one point, you thought maybe CBS would pick it up. How surprised were you by Back to You? What happened after that?  And then were you determined you were going to produce and star in another show?  Were you taking a lot of pitches from a lot of writers?  Just describe that whole in-between phase.

KG: We started on Back to You. Good show — Patricia Heaton…I enjoyed her immensely. I thought we had really great chemistry, and I thought we actually were onto something pretty good. Then FOX hired…what’s his name?  Reilly?

TC: Kevin Reilly. [Laughs]

KG: Who actually hadn’t bought the show.  We had pitched it to him at NBC [laughs], so I had bad feelings about that. [Laughs] Then we had the writers’ strike.

TC: Easy…

KG: Basically, we sort of preempted the recession for ourselves and got in there six months early. [Laughs] We were rehearsing for the real recession.  There was very little ability, especially on FOX, anyway, to have a sense of continuity about the show and a sense of commitment, because that’s just the way they work with shows.  It’s their thing.  And we were at sea, pretty much, once Idol came on.  Finally, there was some friction between the guy that never wanted the show in the first place, who was now running FOX [laughs], and our writers.  And off we went. [Laughs] Then there was a heart attack and there was the idea that maybe we would toy with the idea of going back to something.  But I said this to my agent: “Listen, I haven’t seen a traditional family show in a long time on television.  And you know what happened to them?  They’re still part of America, I think.”  So that became the area I was interested in.  I was pitched one other thing about a successful 50-year-old guy that was always trying to score with teenage women, and I just thought, “This is really awful.” [Laughs]  I thought it’s bound to be something someone would want to pick up, but I said, “I will not put myself in that show.”  Then somebody responded to the idea of a family.  This fellow came in the room and started talking about it…

TC: With my plucky spirit and boyish good looks. [Laughs]

KG: Yes.  I survived a turgid pitch, and [laughs] I heard the one line that made me think, “That I can play, and that would be interesting, and it would be fun.”  Tucker has a pretty good track record.  He’s got some funny ideas and a very droll manner. I thought, “That’s interesting.”  

TC: As for me, if I had my druthers, I would have rather worked with a more established comedic actor [laughs], but then I went back and familiarized myself with some of his work and he showed me something, so I thought I’d take him under my wing and… No, obviously, it’s a dream-come-true for any comedy writer to get to work with someone like Kelsey.  He’s a television icon and it’s just an honor to be doing this with him.

KG: Oh, stop.

TC: He’ll be too shy to say it, but I think largely he feels the same way about working with me. [Laughs]

KG: Yes, that’s true.

EI: For Mr. Cawley and Mr. Clements: Can you talk a little bit about the evolution of this, whether you were told “Kelsey Grammer is looking for a project,” and you put your heads together and thought, ”What can we do?” or you had the pitch and thought, ”Who’s a good fit for this?”

TC: I was having a meeting at Warner Bros. and pitching a completely different idea.  Apparently that pitch didn’t go well because, at the end of it, they said, “How about a show with Kelsey Grammer?”  And I said, “Oh, well, that would be fantastic.  But I don’t really have… Can I think about it?”  Just as we were making small talk at the end of the pitch meeting, the idea of Kelsey being a guy who had run his own company and then having that all pulled away from him — obviously, that’s what was happening in the news last fall.  In fact, I think it was Circuit City going out of business just at that time and I thought, “Wow, that’s a company that’s been around forever.” I thought, if he was a guy who ran a store or ran a company that had been around for a long time and had that taken away from him, what would that guy do?  It seemed like something that would be interesting to put someone like Kelsey in. Then just the idea of that guy dealing with his family became the far more interesting thing for me and not so much about the economy and downsizing and the fish-out-of-water aspects — the story of reconnecting with the family and redemption. I thought it was just a good fit. I brought it to him, like, a week later and nervously pitched it to him.  Happily, he responded.

EI: Melinda, can you talk a little bit about your character?  She could have come across as kind of spoiled and not so nice, and you make her not that. 

Melinda McGraw: It was always clear to me, in the pilot, that she was from a middle-working-class background, so I always saw Tilly as a tablespoon of salt-of-the-earth in a Tiffany box — that she’s definitely gotten very used to this way of life and this rarefied situation. I don’t think she’s ever been with her children alone, but that’s not her elemental nature.  When they fell in love, that was before he made it big, so this has been 17 years of a lot of wealth, but neither one of them are “silver spoon in their mouth” types — I think, in that way, uniquely American, and that’s one of the things I love about the show, because I also think the idea of losing it so quickly, which we’re all seeing and struggling with, can be funny because it’s happening to everyone.  We’d better make it funny.  But redemption is a rocky road, and that’s funny. 

TC: I think, hopefully voiced through Kelsey’s character Hank and through the entire show, there should be a hopefulness to this. We don’t want this to be dour or sad or feel sorry for them. So yes, that should come through with Melinda’s work as well.  Yes, she has had the rug pulled out from under her as well, but they’re going to make this work.

EI: Kelsey, you’ve played some slightly pompous characters.  How do you walk that fine line with this in that he’s more clueless than pompous?  

KG: I just hope that I can lend myself to the character in the same way I did to Frasier.  He has far less equipment, in terms of his life. Frasier loved clutter and conflict.  This guy is not that comfortable with all that stuff.  He is a simpler man. He made his living in sports, basically.  He loves sports.  He loves competition.  He loves the American dream.  He loves the idea of somebody working their way up from the bottom, and he loves the idea of making something of his life and of his family and of himself by virtue of the sweat of his brow. There are traditional clichéd concepts, but he actually embodies those, so he’s far less complicated than maybe some of the pompous people. What might be seen as pompous in this character would really be just the fact that he’s out of touch with some things that he’s either forgotten about… Like the other day, I was trying to make a pot of coffee in my house, and I have a particularly complicated coffee maker [laughs], and I actually had three friends trying to make a pot of coffee with me…and none successfully. I thought it might be a funny thing for Hank because he hasn’t made coffee, probably, for 20 years.

TC: Kelsey doesn’t know this, but that’s the first scene of the second episode.

KG: No sh*t.  Well, that is amazing. [Laugh]

EI: As executive producer, creatively, are you very hands-on here?  

KG: I do my best to be as little hands-on as possible.  I always like other people to do all the creative work, and then I just get in there and mix it up.  Or I tell them, “I just hate this” or “I love this.”

TC: So far we’ve done one episode, but it’s been fun to work with him because his notes are always right there and his ideas for the character are generally right there. His problems with a line or a moment don’t come from him being worried “how am I going to look in this?”  It comes from a real creative place based on what’s best for the story, so it’s been great working with him so far.

EI: Could you address your real life health issues a little bit?  There seemed to be a presumption in the press, I think…

KG: That my life was over?

EI: This may be apocryphal, but that they were related somehow to the Back to You situation.  How serious was your health?

KG: There’s obviously some connection to one’s life and the stress that takes place in one’s life.  When they examined my arteries, there were no blocked arteries.  I have no cholesterol buildup.  I had an event that they think was stress-related, and you can make of that what you will, but it was not a great year.  It was a tough year for everybody, and maybe it was my time to just get retooled a little bit.  It ended up being probably a great thing in my life. I’m healthier, stronger, faster…  Is this The Six Million Dollar Man?

TC: It is now.

KG: I’m somewhat bionic now, so things are really looking good.  

EI: For Nathan and Sasha, unlike the parents of your characters, you’ve only known wealth and privilege your young lives.  Is it difficult to get into the situation of someone who has really had a big come-down in their life?

Sasha Pieterse: Not really.  I love this character, and I fell in love with the character because the carpet has been pulled under her.  She is going from wealth to no wealth, but she does care about her little brother a lot, and they’ve gone through struggles together.   I think that plays a big part in it because they’ll be strong and they will be fine. They might be a little bit spoiled, but who wouldn’t be in that situation?  So I think this will be a good character and I think lots of teenagers will hopefully relate to this too.

TC: If anyone in the family is going to embody the “How can this happen to us?”  and “Poor me” and “This is terrible.  Now we live in Virginia” — which is where I grew up, by the way, so I love Virginia… But if anyone is going to embody that kind of “woe is me,” it’s going to be probably her character.

SP: The spoiled teenager.

TC: But hopefully the way she deals with this will be touching on universal teenage angst and it won’t be so specific to her losing everything and having to be outside of New York now — more about how a teenage girl gets through life and the regular travails, perhaps just a bit heightened because she is someone who came from everything to, in her view, nothing.

EI: How about Henry’s subteen angst?

Nathan Gamble: I love my character because I always wanted to be kind of a spaz.  I practiced when I was, like, four…

KG: He aspired to be a spaz.

NG: Acting like George of the Jungle or Ace Ventura or something, how he’s spazzing out and stuff, so this character is not going to  be hard at all.

KG: Honestly, I think this character is the most well-adjusted character in the whole show. Tilly comes from her foundation, but we were all a little spoiled at this point and not really that accustomed to taking care of ourselves.  I think he’s lived in a world where he’s been pretty comfortable in his own skin and is going to possibly become a little lightning rod of normalcy.

MM: He’s less impressed with the boats and the jets because, no matter how well-adjusted you may have started out, it’s pretty hard to kiss your Jimmy Choos goodbye when you get a new pair every week.  We are creatures of habit, and those habits are nice.

EI: David, is this guy part Mr. Haney and part Larry, Darryl and Darryl?

DK: It’s Slim Pickens from Blazing Saddles, I thought.  I don’t know why I didn’t show up with six-shooters and another hundred pounds of weight.  Sure, I think so.  It’s probably a more traditional role, right?  Or iconic comedian character.  It’s a necessary evil — a necessary irritant.

KG: I look at it as a little bit like Frasier Crane meets Home Improvement.  There’s a guy energy thing that goes on between these two people that I think can be a world of fun. We just haven’t quite gotten there because we just met you in this pilot.

DK: Plus, I think it’s a conduit to the rest of what he’s going to find out.  I mean, there are going to be parts of my world, surely, that we’re going to get to, but yes, of course, I think it’s all of those guys that are next door.  This happens to be the brother-in-law.

TC: The thing I would say about his character — and obviously you get just a taste of it in the pilot, but we will be developing it further as we write these episodes — is I think he is a little more with-it than perhaps Hank views him. He has his own construction company.  He’s a guy who actually can do things and make things, and I think Hank’s character can look down his nose at this guy, salt of the earth, but the truth is he has a facility with tools and his hands that I think Hank probably, if he had to admit it, is a little bit envious of.  So I think their sparring will be actually a little bit more on an even level than Hank looking down at him and him getting in the best shots he can.  I think he will slowly and grudgingly admit that there’s more to this guy than…

KG: Man of substance.  I do think that, and definitely a good father.

EI: How many kooky characters will there be in this Virginia town? Newhart and Green Acres and Wings were all able to juggle a lot of cast of characters, and I’m just wondering about that, and also what will Hank be doing?  Will he be pursuing a local mayorship, or will he be starting a farm?  What is he going to be doing with his time?

TC: First of all, to address the town of River Bend, I grew up in Virginia but it was not a real Southern area of Virginia.  It was about 45 minutes outside of D.C. and I think that’s where this is far enough away from New York that it will be a big change of scenery for the family, but not so Southern that farms will come into it.  I think every so often you’ll get a “y’all,” and yes, we will expand. We’re going to be expanding the world to one kooky degree or another.  There will be neighbors, and Grady’s guys who work for him and his construction crew, and then friends for the kids and friends for Hank and Tilly… I don’t want to say that, yes, they’re going to be the kooky Southerners who have just a different take.  I just want to create real people who have an interesting take on things and then put them into play with these guys. As for what Hank is going to do, that’s the big question. That’s what’s going to be driving the show.  He is a guy who thinks it’s just a matter of time until he thinks of that next idea, and whether it’s locally here or getting back up to New York, it’s going to happen for him. I think that’s easier said than done, so it’s actually dealing with the everyday aspects of life that he has to realize are also important — getting to know his kids, actually reconnecting with his wife…  That’s not to say he’s not going to try different business ventures and succeed or fail to one degree or another, but this is a guy who has defined himself through his work, and I don’t want to get him back into work too quickly, because the journey we want to take this guy is in a different direction.

KG: Baking.

EI: For the producers, can I just ask about recasting the roles of the kids and what you wanted to accomplish with that?

TC: We thought the kids we had in the pilot did a fine job, and they’re great kids and great actors.  Talking to ABC and Warner Bros., we decided to go a little bit older for both of them, and especially with Maddie’s character, or Sasha, to make her seem a little bit more Upper Westside New York — product of a rich, snobby upbringing that we weren’t really getting from our previous actors.  Truth be told, we changed the character a bit too, to reflect that.  Then, once we did that, we just decided also, with the boy, we might go just a little bit older, maybe just a little bit more with-it.

EI: David, does this mean we’ve reached the end of the road for The Naked Trucker & T-Bones?

DK: We’re on an extended hiatus, that’s for sure.  Are you talking about the Comedy Central show or the live act?

EI: The live act.

DK: I’ve talked to Dave Allen a couple of times, and I’m sure we’re going to do it in the future.  I just don’t know when.  I’ve been pretty busy.  I’ve got a wife and four kids, and I’ve been fortunate enough to do a lot of different projects, so we just haven’t gotten back at it. We definitely took an extended time off after the show — didn’t accomplish what we thought it might.  I know you all were very hopeful, but I think it will appear probably at a local venue within the next year, but probably not within the next six months.  I talked to Dave three months ago about doing something again, so I hope so.

EI: Kelsey, would you ever do an hour-long drama, or is that just not in your mix at this point?

TC: Not anytime soon.

DK: This isn’t?  How long is this show?

KG: I have done a couple guest-stars, but it’s not something I think about. I don’t have an aversion to it; I just have aversion to the schedule.  The work schedule is just untenable.

EI: Why do people like to see you as a rich person?

KG: I guess because I’m just so damn sophisticated. [Laughs]

EI: I just want to follow up on that because you still are a producer of dramas.  You produce Medium, don’t you?

KG: Uh-huh.

EI: You had some weird adventures, because that whole Medium thing was weird in its transfer too.  Reflect on that for a minute — how weird is it to be in this odd network thing where network executives change shows and bounce around like this?

KG: It wasn’t odd — it’s typical. You just hang on and survive the ride, hopefully. In terms of Medium – a show I love, a show I’m very proud of — we sold it to NBC originally, and it was just at the same time that CBS and Viacom became connected.  Les Moonves — being the selfless, egoless man that he is — took the opportunity to claim that NBC was so bad at developing that CBS had to produce their only hit show that year, so that immediately relegated Medium to the bad stepchild situation in which it has basically flourished.  They would always say, “Well, we’re not going to put it on the schedule, but we’ll plug it in somewhere,” which is what they did and the audience found it. I actually think it’s going to be a great boon to the show to have it scheduled in a regular place on Friday evenings. I had pitched it to Les previously, honestly, and he wasn’t interested. Then he spent the next four years trying to make the same show. [Laughs] What’s the one with Jennifer [Love Hewitt]?

DK: Ghost Whisperer.

KG: When they said in their press release that Medium could be a nice offspring of Ghost Whisperer, I thought that was disingenuous and misrepresentative certainly, in the least.  But I love producing shows.  I love the work.  I’m really sorry about Girlfriends and I’m really sorry about The Game, but I guess they all run their course.