Paul Reiser on The Paul Reiser Show: "Larry David Said You're So Much Worse Than Me — That's My Favorite Joke in the Whole Show"

Paul Reiser said it plainly: "Larry David said to me, 'You're so much worse than me' — and my head kind of exploded. That's my favorite joke in the wh…" — and Premier Guide Miami was in the room when it happened.

NBC's The Paul Reiser Show is a new single-camera comedy from Emmy and Golden Globe Award-nominated actor, writer, and producer Paul Reiser (Mad About You) and writer/producer Jonathan Shapiro (Life). The show stars Reiser as — Paul Reiser. Paul has been out of the spotlight for over a decade. Now he returns with a new show and a diverse cast of comedians, including Duane Martin and others. Daedrian McNaughton caught up with Paul to discuss the new show.

The Paul Reiser Show aired Thursdays (8:30–9:00 p.m. ET) on NBC.

PREMIER GUIDE MIAMI: Your show has a different format for filming, using one camera. How do you feel about this format?

PAUL REISER: Yes, the irony is I always wanted to do single camera. Even when we did Mad About You I originally pitched it as a single camera, which they didn't do back then, and it has come into play. As fun as it was to have a live audience, I never really felt that comfortable with it. I love it when I do stand-up — it's great to have an audience — but I always felt that when doing a show it kind of distracted me a bit. And this feels just perfect and right and it has a much more real-life quality, which is what the show is really about. Hopefully people recognize it and go, oh, okay, that really feels real — these are real people. I'm playing myself and it's obviously accelerated a bit because it's a comedy, but that part of it feels right. It looks exactly like the show that I wanted to make so I'm very pleased with it.

PREMIER GUIDE MIAMI: With the diversity of your cast, how does Omid and the other actors fit in?

PAUL REISER: It's really based on my group of friends. One of the premises of the show is 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. Your friends are all fathers of your kid's friends or husbands of your wife's friends. And in my case this has certainly been true. I have this world of friends that I look around and go, how did I get these people? Omid's character, Habeed, is based on a couple of friends of mine who are Persian Americans. One of the things that makes me really thrilled about the show is the diversity of the characters — they all have such comedic styles. Omid is hugely powerfully funny and he's a huge comic in the UK and I'm hoping this show reintroduces him. Andy Daly has a huge following in the comedy community and he's really a clever inventive comic with really sly timing. Duane Martin is a whole other feel — not known as a comic but is just really in his own way very funny and such a delightful screen presence. And Ben Shenkman has this very New York acerbic, cerebral tone. Amy Landecker has her own comedy style. There are no cheap jokes, no jokes at the expense of anybody being Persian — these are guys who are just friends.

PREMIER GUIDE MIAMI: Will the story lines focus more on you with your friends or at home with your family?

PAUL REISER: I think one of the things that's really fun about this is that this show has everything that Mad About You had and then so much more. At the heart of it, it starts with my family and that is the priority. But you rarely see the kids in the show — they inform the show and you're doing things for your kids, but you're not going to see them much by design. The kick-off for all the stories is about the guys, and that's an element we didn't have in Mad About You that is so fun to explore. I have this group of guy friends that you suddenly find yourself driving to Disneyland with for three hours, and you go, okay, this is my life now. These guys are such strong performers — we thought we probably wouldn't have stories with just them until season 2 or 3, but even in the first six or seven episodes we were able to cut away to two of the guys and it was great. It's really an ensemble show in every sense of the word.

PREMIER GUIDE MIAMI: How does your wife feel about some story lines that made it into the show that come from real life?

PAUL REISER: On a good day they're very tickled. On the other days they're going, why did you tell them that? But my brilliant partner Jonathan Shapiro is putting his family in there too, and one of the great things 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.

PREMIER GUIDE MIAMI: Why now for this show?

PAUL REISER: I felt America needed me. I'm joking. I wasn't at all looking for it — there was no design. A very nice executive over at Warner Brothers called and said he wanted to sit down and talk to me about something. When I sat down he said, we'd like you to develop something for you and we want you to be back on TV. I said, why? His words were something like, you're sort of adult, smart, heartfelt comedy. I said, well, I'm really kind of enjoying staying home with the kids. But I'm nothing if not susceptible to flattery and nice things. So he said, why don't you go write something that you feel like writing and let's see what happens. I went away and this show came out of it. I just wrote my life and when it was done I thought, this would be a fun show to watch. Having the 10 or 11 years not being out there really was something I wanted, and as it turns out it gave me the genesis for the show. If you put a gun to my head three, four, five years ago I wouldn't have been able to come up with it. But because I was really living that life of not being out there — being a guy who used to be on TV, whose daily life is taking the kids to school and putting out the little domestic fires — when I started to look at it, I thought, that's actually very rich and very universal. The timing just seemed right.

PREMIER GUIDE MIAMI: Did you miss being on television or doing movies?

PAUL REISER: I was working — I was doing little things. I wrote a movie that I had wanted to write for years with Peter Falk. I had always wanted to write that specific movie with Peter Falk playing my father and I got to do that. Last year I got to finally do a music project. I was a music major in college and I always thought, when I take some time off I'll write some music. I wrote an album of songs with Julia Fordham, who's a great singer and an old friend. I one day said I've been writing music, would you consider looking at this and see if you want to make this into a song? She took it away and made a beautiful song and suddenly we said let's do another. Before you knew it we had an album. So we have an album out on iTunes — I love that nobody's ever heard of it. I had also written and produced about six pilots that I was not acting in. So I was certainly keeping active and creative, but I wasn't at all looking to be on TV. When this opportunity came with that kind of open gesture and not a lot of pressure, what came out really felt good.

PREMIER GUIDE MIAMI: And are you introducing any of this music on the show?

PAUL REISER: No, it has nothing to do with anything. The music is really just a side project. The album is called Unusual Suspects and you can get it on iTunes and Amazon — feel free to play it in your home.

PREMIER GUIDE MIAMI: Will you be writing anything as far as a theme song or anything?

PAUL REISER: Yes, I co-wrote the theme song — it's not a song, it's an instrumental — with a great musician named Steven Argilla. He and I wrote this sort of tango-y pop thing which I really like and it makes me laugh. Because I play myself on the show and there's a reality to it, anybody who comes on the show has to be themselves. So Larry David is playing himself, we had Henry Rollins playing himself. So we can get some cool musicians as themselves and who knows what can happen.

PREMIER GUIDE MIAMI: Who will be making special guest appearances?

PAUL REISER: We have Mark Burnett — in the first episode I'm offered a game show and I said let's give my friend Mark Burnett the part of Mark Burnett, because why fake it. And Daniel Stern, who is my old buddy who I met on my first job, Diner, a thousand years ago — he's become a great director and he directed a great episode. Helen Hunt directed an episode and Fred Savage directed a great episode. So it's really wonderful — people who might not necessarily want to just do any show are coming on board and playing with us and it's been a great experience.

PREMIER GUIDE MIAMI: Why have you turned down game shows in the past? And what's this thing about you not wanting to leave the house?

PAUL REISER: I didn't really want to leave the house — I was very comfortable. And even within the house I didn't want to get up. I was very happy sitting down. Mark Burnett is a friend — our kids became friends out here so we became friends — and he'd periodically call me: would you be interested in doing a thing? I'd say, Mark, I love you, I don't know that I'm the best for that. He'd say, no, but you would be so funny, don't you see, Paul? And I'd go, I appreciate that, it's awfully sweet. So when we were writing this episode I said, well, we have to just call Mark and have him be Mark. And those conversations were actually had — but don't you see, Paul, your misery would be entertaining for others. I went, yes, I don't know that I want to do that. It was never snobbism. It's just hard work to be funny every day doing that.

PREMIER GUIDE MIAMI: What was the relationship like with all these cast members from different backgrounds?

PAUL REISER: It was an unbelievable thing. We kind of all fell in love and the five guys were all just getting such a kick out of each other with such unique senses of humor. Ben Shenkman is a brilliantly trained actor and theater actor and you wouldn't know from his work necessarily that he's so funny — he's an unbelievably informed student of comedy and will quote every comedy ever made. Omid Djalili is 27 different flavors of funny and we would sometimes lose a lot of time just because we would crack up. I'd be off camera weeping and they'd go, hold on, we heard Paul crying and laughing. And Amy Landecker — I had seen her in A Serious Man and had never seen her before that and I thought she was fantastic. Someone said how about that woman from A Serious Man for your wife and I went, wow, sure. She came in and it was very much like with Helen Hunt — you had me at hello. 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. She was just so lovely and funny and offbeat and perfectly neurotic. Not that my wife is in any way 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.

PREMIER GUIDE MIAMI: How many other actors were considered for the role of Paul Reiser?

PAUL REISER: You know what, the original Paul Reiser — not only is he older and out of shape, but he wanted too much money. So we went looking around. Nobody would do it. Seinfeld — yes, not for this kind of money. Seinfeld wouldn't do it. Gary Shandling. We had a call into Jack Benny's office. I have not heard back. So ultimately I just did it. It worked out fine. Because I knew the jokes already.

PREMIER GUIDE MIAMI: Since the show is based around your life, how do you balance playing the real you as compared to the needs of yourself as a character?

PAUL REISER: I don't — I live on the set and have cameramen running the whole time. Because once I get home, by the way, nobody's laughing. My kids and my wife, I'll be honest, after ten years they've had enough of me. They're happy to share me with some others. There's enough mixture of experiences from my life and my writing partner's life that it doesn't get too confusing. Plus these are not my actual family — I have a whole pretend wife and pretend children and pretend friends. So far it seems to be working. We'll see. Call me in a year, we'll let you know.

PREMIER GUIDE MIAMI: When you look at life and relationships now as compared to earlier in your career, how has it been easier to notice the comedy in real life?

PAUL REISER: Somebody said — Mad About You felt very autobiographical to me at the time but it was fictional, I had a different name, and I wasn't really playing myself. Someone said this is really Mad About You, that relationship 15 years later. In the beginning they were newlyweds and there was a lot of neurotic, gee, is our relationship going to work? Well, it's 20 years in now and yes, we're in — nobody's looking at the door and thinking of getting out. There are kids, there's life. It's a much more mature, grounded point in life. Somebody said compare it to Raymond, men of a certain age. I said, that show was great, but it's very different. Those guys seem to be pontificating and observing, gee, we're getting old. This show comes at it from a very different place — I'm older, yes, I don't feel old, but it's really very much enjoying life and enjoying the challenges. Life is always throwing something at you and that's the comedy and that's the heart of this show.

PREMIER GUIDE MIAMI: Are you pleased with all the pilots you have produced?

PAUL REISER: Yes, all of them. There are one or two that I would still like to do. There was one called The Ripple Effect — it was about how unrelated people affect each other's lives, done in a very funny and sometimes dramatic way. You're in a bad mood and somebody says something to you, so you get in your car and now you're angry and you hit somebody and that affects seven other people. At the heart of it was this very global conceit that we are indeed all connected and you never know how. It was a little like Babel but funnier and shorter. That still really intrigues me and that's one I'd love to do — so if you know anybody who's buying, let me know.

PREMIER GUIDE MIAMI: What role did Larry David play in creating this series?

PAUL REISER: 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 — I can't, I don't like to memorize scripts, so we'll improvise it. And I said, done, let's do that. I got very nervous to be honest with you because he's brilliant — he has developed that art form and he's just really a genius. I felt when we did that scene like I was getting into the ring with Ali. I went, 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 so brilliantly funny. The longest, most challenging editing thing was getting Larry down to the time we had allotted. But he was so great. Somebody had said early on, well, this show, Paul, it's sort of like your Curb. And I went, yes, that's fair. And it's a very different feel but yes, in that I'm playing me and Larry plays himself. When we improvised that scene and 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. Because he's actually filming my show and he's telling me that. I have a friend who constantly rides me about it: 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. So we got to do that in the scene and it really made me laugh. Larry David of all people saying you're so much worse than me — that's my favorite joke in the whole show.

PREMIER GUIDE MIAMI: How do you feel the show will stand apart from other sitcoms?

PAUL REISER: It's the only one on at our time slot and I don't think anybody else can say that — there is no other show on NBC while we're on. I think it has a very unique flavor and such a diverse and rich cast. Each of these guys should have their own show, that's how funny they are. Duane had his own show, Omid's had several shows, Andy Daly was in the middle of developing his own show. I love to come into work just to be with these people. Somebody said it's different to the extent that there's hopefully a heart to the show — not that Larry's doesn't have a heart, but he just goes the other way in his comedy. He's a tremendously sweet guy. Cosby used to talk about how the best comedies are like a hearth and you can warm your hands up to it. I think this show is so universal it has that, but it also has some brilliant comics in it and a lot of surprises. One of the things about TV and launching a new show that is the trickiest is everybody wants you to be a hit right away. I don't expect 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. If given its chance and people leave it in its spot, 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 I can't wait for it to get on the air.

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