Popternative is virtually covering this year’s Austin Film Festival, and we had the pleasure of speaking with television producer, writer, and actor Michael Schur who is the 2021 recipient of the Outstanding Television Writer Award. Michael was the producer and writer for The Office, co-creator of Parks and Recreation, co-creator of Brooklyn Nine-Nine, and creator of The Good Place.
Image credit: austinfilmfest/@Instagram

Having written and created some of the most popular comedy series today, we asked Michael Schur if he has a certain formula when it comes to creativity:

There’s no formula, or if there is, I’m not smart enough to have figured it out. If there is anything approaching a formula, it’s taking an idea that matters to you, that you think is interesting, that you think has something to say about the world, collaborate with people that you think are smart and interesting and have something to say about the world, and then roll the dice. That’s about as good a formula as you can get.

Schur then discusses his most recent series, The Good Place, and his mindset when creating it:

Parks and Rec ended, and Brooklyn Nine-Nine was off and running, my friend Dan Gore that I created it with was running that show every day – I sort of stepped back. I was at a point where I had written some version of a lovable collection of goofballs in an office for three different shows over ten or twelve years, and so when I was trying to mull over my next idea, I thought ‘well I could do that again’ […] but I had been doing it for more than a decade and I had the idea for The Good Place and it was unlike anything I had done before and it was all scary and I really didn’t understand it. But I thought ‘well I keep thinking about this’ and ‘I may as well try something different because why not’? So, it was a good lesson to learn which is follow the idea – it doesn’t matter if the idea feels a little bit scary. That probably means it’s a thing that’s worth doing.

Check out the full interview below!

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