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Meet the Makers: Going Dutch and Animal Control
There are plenty of similarities to be found between Fox’s two live-action comedies, Joel McHale’s “Animal Control” and Denis Leary’s “Going Dutch.” Both are single-camera workplace comedies with characters in uniform: A quirky group of animal control workers in Seattle on “Animal Control,” and a quirky group of U.S. Army soldiers stationed on a tiny Netherlands base on “Going Dutch.” Making things even more personal, McHale’s “Community” co-star Danny Pudi now stars opposite Leary on “Going Dutch.”
So how about a crossover inside the Fox comedyverse? “It makes perfect sense,” Leary said during the Variety FYC TV Fest. “The guys who are the creators of ‘Animal Control’ are guys I’ve worked with before. Great writers. And we actually discussed it at some point last year. So let’s talk Fox into it. But Fox hasn’t mentioned it. It’s just you and me talking about it.”
McHale is game as well: “I’ll fly myself to Ireland,” he told Leary. (Although set in the Netherlands, “Going Dutch” shoots on the Emerald Isle.) “As long as you pay for everything else.”
Replied Leary: “I can guarantee, you’ll drink for free while you’re there!”
He’s not joking: Leary’s parents are from Ireland, “and there’s like 8 million cousins there,” he said. “Literally, I would get to work and they’d go, ‘so there’s eight O’Sullivans here that wanna sit in the chairs and by the monitors.’ And then next day you’re like, ‘is anybody coming today?’ Yeah. There’s four O’Learys at catering right now. They just drive over without telling me.”
Said McHale: “I might be your cousin. We look alike. We look like retired Swedish soccer coaches up here.”
McHale and Leary first met socially a few years ago, and have been friendly since then. McHale credits Leary for “the shaping of my childhood when he was on MTV.” He remembers a rant Leary made about Seattle — McHale’s hometown — at the height of grunge. “I remember thinking, I kind of agreed with you how annoying we are,” he said. “But then I was like, well, we rule your life!”
In the video above, Leary and McHale discuss their characters on “Going Dutch” and “Animal Control,” and save some of their biggest praise for their co-stars.
Behind the Laughs With Comedy’s Supporting Super Stars
Whether being murdered, giving birth or getting fired, the panelists at Variety’s FYC TV Fest “Behind the Laughs with Comedy’s Supporting Super Stars” made some of 2025’s buzziest moments in television. Though “Abbott Elementary” fans were horrified to discover Principal Ava Coleman (Janelle James) was fired midway through the new season, James was over the moon.
“This season was amazing, ‘cause it’s like Ava wrote it herself. It was truly an Ava season,” James gushed. ‘When Quinta told me, about a week before, that I would be fired, I believed I said ‘Do I still get paid?’ It just didn’t seem likely I wasn’t going to come back. I was excited to see how people were responding, that was like the best week of my life. People were on true suicide watch, based on my character being fired. What’s a bigger compliment than that?”
Jane Lynch’s stuntwoman Sazz Pataki on “Only Murders With the Building” is another supporting comedy character dealt an unlucky hand: Sazz is killed off at the top of the new season. Thankfully, with the season revolving around her murder, Lynch spent plenty of time on set with Steve Martin and Martin Short filming flashback sequences.
“It’s like being at a delightful dinner party when you’re sitting in the green room,” Lynch said. “There’s something to be said about maturity, these guys don’t need to prove themselves. It’s very low-key and very wonderful, everybody’s doing a crossword or a Wordle. Then we get up there and [film] and they’re so available, it’s just a joy.”
“The English Teacher” star Stephanie Koenig says there was a similarly joyful energy on the set of the returning Hulu comedy. “We just got done filming Season 2, and with the returning cast, we feel so scrappy. It’s like we’re making a home video or something,” said Koenig. “We’re all in video village together, there’s not a hierarchy of who can be in the tent when you’re on set.”
Abby Elliott, who plays Natalie on “The Bear,” credited showrunners Joanna Calo and Christopher Storer for incorporating her real-life pregnancy into the new season. “That was wild – I was actually pregnant during the second season, and I was very nervous to tell Chris and Joanna,” Elliott admitted.
“But they wrote this beautiful story about Sugar reuniting with her mom in a time when she’s the last person Sugar wanted to call. When I was giving birth to my son in real life, I knew that I was going to be doing this labor episode, so I had my actual mom videotape my contractions, so I could watch them back.”
“Mid-Century Modern” star Matt Bomer also found ways to incorporate his real-life experiences into his character. “Jerry is somebody who has experienced an incredible amount of sadness and trauma in his life, but decides to take the high road and try to see the best in people,” said Bomer. “Having grown up in a religious household myself, I could relate to a lot of those things, and I’m glad the writers didn’t shy away from creating a world where we could drop into moments like that.”
Regarding her role as the imposing Lucky Auntie on the crime drama-comedy “Deli Boys,” Poorna Jagannathan says she was surprised to find out after filming that her character was originally written as a male role. “Lucky went from Lucky Uncle to Lucky Auntie. You can feel it in the script, not a lot of female roles are written with this intensity, so that was fun to step into. She’s so masculine-feminine, and I’d never come across a character like this before.”
Meet the Makers: Georgie & Mandy’s First Marriage
Having spent the past eight years working on the single-camera spinoff “Young Sheldon,” “The Big Bang Theory” co-creator Chuck Lorre and showrunner Steve Molaro didn’t expect to return to the world of multi-camera TV.
“When I called Chuck and pitched him the idea that we flip it back to a multi-cam,” Molaro joked at Variety TV FYC Fest, “He said ‘You son of a bitch. I didn’t wanna be excited about multi-cam again, and now I am.’”
Molaro’s pitch for a new multi-cam series centered around Sheldon Cooper’s older brother Georgie (Montana Jordan) and his wife Mandy (Emily Osment). “Georgie & Mandy’s First Marriage” director and executive producer Mark Cendrowski (who also worked on “Big Bang Theory”) was similarly looking forward to returning to multi-cam.
“It’s the best,” said Cendrowski. “You’re doing a play every week, that’s certainly the most exciting thing from my standpoint. Working with the actors, you don’t work with someone and then not see them for three days because of the shooting schedule. We’re putting on a whole play every day, we’re doing a run through, we’re making rewrites. It makes the next day that much more exciting, to see what changes are brought in.”
For Jordan, who joined “Young Sheldon” as a single-cam newbie, “Georgie & Mandy” was an equally exciting new challenge. “I didn’t know what to expect- ‘Young Sheldon’ was my first single-cam, and this is my first multi-cam. I knew I wasn’t gonna let ‘em down, I was gonna do everything I needed to do to get the job done. What’s so great about multi-cam is you get the audience in there and you can tell just how good of a time everybody’s having. The instant feedback – it’s a big family at the end of the day.”
Emily Osment, a multi-cam veteran thanks to her tenure on “Hannah Montana,” agrees the format has unique benefits. “I love the schedule of multi-cam. I love, as Montana was saying, the family dynamic that you have when you’re working with the same people every single day. You get into such a nice groove.”
With so much overlap between the cast and crew of “Young Sheldon” and “Georgie & Mandy,” Osment says the family dynamic developed quickly, even for a multi-cam series.
“Because so much of our cast and crew came over from ‘Young Sheldon,’ it felt like we were in Season 2 or 3 already. We hit a really nice stride immediately, it’s one of the most joyful places to work. Montana’s hosting whistling contests before the show, we do dance parties, it’s a riot.”
Meet the Makers: Étoile
A few weeks before Luke Kirby wrapped up his role on “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” where he’d won an Emmy for portraying comedian Lenny Bruce, series creators Amy Sherman-Palladino and Daniel Palladino invited him out to dinner.
“I thought they just felt sorry for me,” Kirby quipped. “Cause I felt sorry for myself.”
But, to his pleasant surprise, the Sherman-Palladinos had a proposition: they wanted him to star in their next project, “Étoile,” a dramedy about the New York City and Paris ballet companies swapping their top talent. Kirby would play Jack McMillan, president of the fictional NYC ballet.
“They started to talk about dance and our curiosities about it and if it had any sort of curb appeal,” Kirby said. As the prolific TV creators described the character, the actor became more and more intrigued. “I just started to picture his childhood growing up in New York, being exposed to what was a very hot time for art and ballet in the ‘80s — and a sad time — all of that. It just blew up into this exciting endeavor.”
But at what point did they explain that Jack, as the businessman behind the ballet, doesn’t dance?
“They asked him not to,” Gideon Glick chimed in, ribbing his co-star and prompting Kirby to proclaim, “I’m gonna say it, I wanna dance!” Then, he rose to his feet to show off a few of his best moves.
As for Glick, who writes for the show and plays the eccentric choreographer Tobias Bell, he was happy to dance as little as possible.
“Before they officially offered me the part, Amy emailed me and she said, ‘Can you dance?’ I responded, ‘I have danced,’” Glick said, laughing. “So, I technically didn’t lie, but I’m a horrible dancer. … I’ve worked with a lot of choreographers, because I grew up doing musical theater, and they don’t really dance. They’re gestural. They take up space in different ways, so that’s what I did.”
Watch the video above for more about how the team pulled off “Étoile’s” international pas de deux.
Making Late-Night With Molly McNearney
Molly McNearney, head writer and executive producer of “Jimmy Kimmel Live” stopped by to discuss the state of late-night comedy amid Trump’s second presidency.
“It’s kinda hard to breathe, guys. We wake up everyday and, like all of you, drown in terrible news stories and try to lift ourselves up to put on a show. Late-night, as you know, has changed a lot over the years. We kind of long for the days where our lead story was who lost on ‘American Idol.’ Now it’s who’s losing the country and where democracy is going.
She added that even though there’s a lot of pressure, she and other late-night writers can at least channel their frustration with Trump’s policies into their work.
“There’s a lot of pressure,” she said. “We’re really grateful for the positions we’re in. I believe every late-night writer probably feels this. At least we have a place to put it. My therapist always says to me you need to turn off the news, and I don’t get to do that with my job. But at least I have a place to put it, and hopefully we can make sense of it a little — there’s no making sense of it. We are here to not normalize what’s going on. We are here to hold our leaders accountable. I never thought in a million years that’d be the job of a late-night writer, but that’s what has happened.”
English (US) ·