The Untold Story Behind the Man Who’s Balanced Humor and Heart for Decades—And Why You Can’t Look Away
“It’s hard out there.” Those four words from Bill Lawrence might sum up more than just showbiz; they capture the very pulse of today’s world, don’t they? Now, imagine a guy who’s not just surviving in this chaos but thriving by creating TV shows that don’t just entertain—they hit you right in the feels. Bill Lawrence’s works, from the heartfelt therapy sessions in Shrinking to the gripping comedy of Bad Monkey, showcase something rare—raw, honest emotion wrapped in laughter and pain. It’s not just storytelling; it’s a masterclass in feeling everything all at once. What’s his secret in a landscape where Hollywood is battling crises, production slowdowns, and the elusive ‘next big thing’? Buckle up—because this isn’t your typical Hollywood fairy tale. It’s about grit, guts, and maybe a sneaky Indiana Jones theme song that cost a fortune. Ready to dive into a world where grief, humor, and heart collide? LEARN MORE
14 min read“It’s hard out there.” Bill Lawrence is talking about the TV business, but it applies nowadays to pretty much … everything. Lawrence is one of the main creative forces behind a slate of mega-popular TV shows that are neither “feel-good” nor “feel-bad” watches but derive their power simply from feeling itself. Feeling everything.
In Shrinking, currently heading toward its third-season finale on Apple TV, Jason Segel, Jessica Williams, and Harrison Ford are therapists trying to help people while struggling with their own troubles. Rooster, new on HBO, stars Steve Carell as a middle-aged writer trying to restart his life while teaching at a college. ABC’s Scrubs revival brought back Zach Braff, Donald Faison, Sarah Chalke, and Judy Reyes as the seasoned veterans at Sacred Heart. Then there’s Ted Lasso, the Jason Sudeikis coaching comedy that became an emotional lifeline during the pandemic years.
Bad Monkey is the outlier, a straight-up escapist crime comedy featuring Vince Vaughn as a cop turned restaurant inspector who thinks solving the mystery of a severed arm will help him return to the force. At a time when Hollywood itself is in crisis, with production falling, mergers looming, and work becoming increasingly hard to find, Lawrence and his squads of writers are creating some of the few success stories. “A big stress was that no one was making anything,” he says. “So if anybody lets you make anything, you gotta keep going and going and going, man.”
His shows are as wide-ranging as the conversation we had about them. So we’ll just let Lawrence do what he does best: tell stories.
“A cool thing about streaming TV now, though…”
Lawrence got his start in the ’90s, writing a handful of scripts for shows like Boy Meets World, The Nanny, and Friends before his breakthrough on Spin City, which he cocreated with Gary David Goldberg. IMDb credits Lawrence with 145 scripts for the Michael J. Fox city-hall sitcom.
People nostalgic for the old days forget that the networks were much more staid than the streamers, which allow writers to take bigger risks.
“I’m a dinosaur still from network television, but I think 90 percent of the streaming pitches I have nowadays, I never would’ve been able to sell ’em back then,” Lawrence says. “ ‘Hey, it’s a half-hour comedy about a dude whose wife died and it’s about grief and forgiveness and he’s abusing substances and he is a shitty father—and it’s a comedy!’ I couldn’t have sold that back in the network days.”
Lawrence had his breakthrough on Spin City, the Michael J. Fox–starring sitcom he cocreated with Gary David Goldberg. It ran on ABC from 1996 to 2002.
Sad Songs Say So Much
The original Scrubs ran for eight seasons from 2001 to 2009, but some expected that a zany, overdue coming-of-age tale set in a hospital would flop immediately.
“A network exec said, ‘I don’t think you’re going to be able to switch from silly comedy to people caring about whether or not someone lives or dies within 25 minutes,’ ” Lawrence says. “I’m like, ‘I don’t know, I think if you turn the lights way down and put on an indie song, you can probably pull it off.’ I was half joking but half serious, you know what I mean?”
It worked. Thank the dimmer switch and the music of Colin Hay, Death Cab for Cutie, the Fray, and many others for that. Now it’s back on ABC with a hit revival, picking up a decade and a half later with the main characters as the teachers rather than the learners.
Gallows Humor
Lawrence makes shows about people who hang on as life swings back and forth—from absurd to wonderful to tragic and back again.
“It’s definitely a product of my family and friends,” he says. “I want to make sure I never sound cynical or cavalier, but we almost constantly laugh our way through the shit show of the world or personal grief or disease or all that stuff. I know other people maybe don’t take things as lightly, but that gallows humor has always kind of gotten me through everything.”
That Funky Monkey
Bad Monkey is unusual among Lawrence’s repertoire, but it’s not so far out in left field if you know where the dark crime comedy originates. A second season of the series, based on the 2013 Carl Hiaasen novel, is on the way now.
“We just wrapped that. I just got back from Key West last week, where we finished shooting,” Lawrence says. “It’s especially different. It’s not tonally like these [other] shows.” He describes Hiaasen as “one of my idols when I was a kid.”
“My mom’s whole family lives in rural Florida, and Carl Hiaasen is an icon there,” Lawrence says. “I grew up reading his books and having my fishermen cousins mock me for reading anything. I used to go out in the boat—I fucking hated fishing—and they’d call me ‘College’ just because I would read books. ‘Hey, College, what’s up?’ ”
He shrugs. “But he’s one of those dudes that made me want to be a storyteller.”
Hiaasen has written dozens of novels, but only a few have ever been adapted. “Translating his work, which I think everybody biffed on for so many years, is just so hard,” Lawrence says. “Carl’s books are more character pieces than capers.”
“I didn’t expect to be having a career renaissance in my mid-50s, man, and I’ve had a super-fun ride already,” Lawrence says.
Maybe His Nickname Wasn’t Just Because of the Books?
“My great-great-grandma is Sarah Lawrence, believe it or not,” Lawrence says. “So … Sarah Lawrence College.”
His great-great-grandfather was William Van Duzer Lawrence, a pharmaceutical and real estate magnate who became a millionaire in the late 1800s. The TV writer’s middle name is also Van Duzer, which is why his shows end with the production company banner: Doozer.
Great-great-granddad donated the land for its campus and endowed Sarah Lawrence College in 1926 as a tribute to his late wife. It was initially a women’s school but went coed in 1968. Bill Lawrence went to William & Mary but has other ties to the college that his ancestor founded. “I still go there and teach and was a commencement speaker and stuff. And my family’s really involved in that,” the TV scribe says.
Carl Hiaasen, Part II
When Carell’s character in Rooster first visits the college where he is about to take up residency and rebuild his life, the character describes his best-selling books this way: “The characters that you like have sex, the ones you don’t get shot in the face.”
That’s one way of summing up the Bad Monkey author’s own thrillers. It turns out, Hiaasen himself was the inspiration.
Lawrence says he and Rooster cocreator Matt Tarses (Sports Night, The Goldbergs) got to know the author while they were working on season 1 of Bad Monkey. “He turned out to be as great a guy as you would hope,” Lawrence says.
“He was an award-winning journalist for The Miami Herald for years and still wrote a column there until a few years ago, and he writes all these great books and kids books. When we met him, he was so filled with humility and so kind of charmingly uncomfortable in his own skin sometimes,” Lawrence says. “We said Steve Carell would be great at playing a Carl Hiaasen type.”
That’s how the new show was born. “So if you asked me who Steve Carell’s playing in Rooster, he’s Carl Hiaasen,” Lawrence says.
Ted Lasso Season 4
Lawrence cocreated this show with Jason Sudeikis, Brendan Hunt (who plays Coach Beard), and writer Joe Kelly, but he stepped back as showrunner after season 2. His Doozer company still makes the series, which has a fourth season on the way, but Lawrence himself isn’t directly writing it.
“A lot of the people that work with and for me still work on that show, but I stopped,” Lawrence explains. “I ran it the first year. I co-ran it with Jason the second year, and the third year I left to do Shrinking and Jason ran it himself. He’s got a new story.”
Lawrence says there’s no bad blood in that separation. “He’s not only [playing] Ted Lasso, he is the voice of Ted Lasso. He’s the vision behind it,” Lawrence says of Sudeikis. “So I’m super supportive and excited to see what he does with this next incarnation.”
Lasso-ing Open the Door
Shrinking was cocreated with Ted Lasso costar Brett Goldstein and Segel, so the influence of the soccer show on the therapy show is obvious.
But it’s also one of the key reasons for his recent renaissance as a storyteller. One successful show tends to lead to another. “The way Hollywood works is, when you get some luck and something like Ted Lasso comes along, the very same people that wouldn’t let you make stuff eight months ago are like, ‘Hey, is there anything else you want to make?’ And then you have to go, ‘Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.’ ”
Lawrence stepped back as Ted Lasso’s showrunner after season 2, but his influence is firmly in the feel-good comedy’s DNA.
Lawrence’s Sharpest Skill
While overseeing so many different shows at once, part of Lawrence’s job is to direct the teams of writers, rather than write or cowrite everything himself. “It’s a bigger company than just me. I’ve made an art out of taking credit for other people’s work. It’s part of my strength.”
Hug It Out
“I have a specific voice, and sometimes it’s been in vogue and sometimes it’s been out of vogue. And then it comes back around,” Lawrence says.
“Right now, maybe it’s because of where we’re at in the world, but I’m very specifically writing things that feel a little hopeful and optimistic,” he says. “They’re often about mentorship and community, whether that be a found family or real family. I like examining friendships on a deeper level.”
He says this isn’t a case of “write what you know.” “I grew up in Fairfield County, Connecticut, in a very Waspy family,” Lawrence says. “I used to joke about my first boss I had in Hollywood: In four months, I’d probably hugged him as much as I hugged my dad as a kid.”
A Tale of Three Daughters
The complicated relationship between Carell’s author and his grown-up daughter (played by Charly Clive) in Rooster is a reflection of Lawrence’s own life. “I am really not that good at writing about stuff that isn’t at least tangentially very personal for me,” Lawrence says. “Even Rooster exists because Steve Carell and Matt Tarses and I all have adult daughters.
“We all struggle with how much we’re allowed to be involved in their lives. They’re all about the same age, and they all have kind of big, complicated lives.
“My daughter’s a touring musician. She’s in Eastern Europe now singing, and she’s engaged. It’s all very weird. I don’t like it,” he jokes. “And Steve’s daughter is trying to find her way in Hollywood. Matt Tarses’s daughter went to Brown. She works in New York as a nanny and I think is trying to be an actress. So all of us at least are kind of writing about a familiar theme.”
Sentimental Journey
“Yeah, I know that I’m a softy. I know I’m not afraid of walking that line between comedy and stories with more emotional depth, and I’m conscious—self-conscious—about making sure I don’t repeat it too much.”
Rooster, now airing on HBO Max, added Steve Carell to the pantheon of great Bill Lawrence–written performances.
Veep Envy
“I wish I could write that kind of cynical acerbic comedy. I always tell people that I watched the show Veep a ton, and for me that show was about people finding new ways to be horrible to each other. It so tickled and overjoyed me. But I don’t think I could write it in a million years.”
Someday, he says, he’ll “take a shot at it.”
Emotional Whack-a-Mole
“If you’re like me, you got that whack-a-mole thing going on where there’s always somebody in tumult. None of us are more than two or three degrees separated from family drama or grief or just strife. Someone needed to be forgiven, any of that shit. So that’s definitely my world, and I find it easier to write about because I obsess about it so much in my actual life.”
The Joke He’s Not Allowed to Make*
Lawrence talks about tailoring his show’s characters to the actors playing them, so what does it mean that his real-life wife, Christa Miller, plays the intrusive, abrasive, and combative Liz on Shrinking?
“I used to do this joke that made her so mad, man,” Lawrence says. “Everybody would be like, ‘Is Christa exactly like her character?’ I’d be like, ‘Nah, she’s slightly meaner in real life.’ ”
For the record, she wasn’t like that on The Drew Carey Show, Scrubs, or Cougar Town. Liz is an antagonistic departure for Miller, even if the character means well deep down. “I can say that [joke] only if I also say, ‘I’m not allowed to say that anymore,’ ” her husband says. “It is not true.”
This Part Is True
“The only thing that’s real from her is she does collect rocks, and I think it’s such a ludicrous hobby that I put it in the show. She collects and gives out rocks to people. That’s the only true thing,” Lawrence says of the Liz/Christa personality crossover.
“I love when performers are asked to meld something that’s completely not who they actually are, while at the same time grabbing some stuff from their real life that I can kind of throw in there.”
The nosiness of Liz, and her empty-nest syndrome, are both things that came from Lawrence, not Miller. “My wife couldn’t be further from that. I’m the busybody. Our last kid just left for college, and I’m the one that fell apart.”
Harrison Ford’s Expensive In-Joke
One of the fan-favorite jokes from season 3 of Shrinking is when Harrison Ford’s Paul finally returns to work after getting his Parkinson’s hallucinations under control. As he enters the break room triumphantly, the character sings out the Indiana Jones theme song.
“That was him. That was all him. All Harrison,” Lawrence says. “I would never have the gumption, man.”
The writer in him thought it was “hilarious,” but the producer side of Lawrence saw a potentially budget-busting licensing fee on the horizon if they dared to include it. “He did it as a goof, and we were like, ‘What are you doing? Dude, that’s like a million-dollar joke.’ ”
But Harrison saved the day on that one too. “He even got permission for us.”
That means the actor took it upon himself to get “clearance” from the Indiana Jones stakeholders. But who exactly did he reach out to? Spielberg? John Williams? Lucasfilm president Kathy Kennedy?
Lawrence just shrugs. “Whoever the president of Hollywood is, I’m sure Harrison has his or her number,” he says.
Han Solo Is Fucking with You
Shrinking is forever praised for tapping into Harrison Ford’s comedic talents, but the actor himself insists that almost every movie he has ever made is a comedy in some way.
Lawrence agrees. The praise he gets for making Ford funny actually irks him. “He was always funny. The bullshit is when people are like, ‘Oh, you guys put him in a comedy? I’m like, ‘That dude was the comedic relief in Star Wars! He was funny in Indiana Jones. He’s funny in everything he does.’ ”
In real life, Ford’s humor is so deadpan that people often don’t read it as kidding. “When you’re getting to know him, everybody has stories of those moments when you’re not sure whether he’s fucking with you,” Lawrence says. “And the answer is: He’s usually fucking with you.”
Perhaps Lawrence’s greatest achievement is the beloved ABC sitcom Scrubs—which is rapidly nearing its 200th episode.
The Michael J. Fox Comeback
Another celebrated part of Shrinking’s run is the return of Michael J. Fox. He plays Jerry, a fellow Parkinson’s patient who befriends Ford’s Paul in their doctor’s waiting room. Fox first revealed he had the neurodegenerative disorder in 1998 and has been one of the most outspoken champions for research and treatment in the decades since.
The Family Ties and Back to the Future actor has also largely stepped back from acting as the progressive disease has taken its toll on him physically, but he and Lawrence have deep ties. If anyone could bring Fox back, it would be him. “We made like 9,000 episodes of Spin City in the first four years,” the writer jokes. “I told you I write a lot about mentorship, and Mike was one of my first mentors.”
Fox’s return to TV came after the first season of Shrinking revealed Paul’s diagnosis. Fox turned out to be a fan. “He goes to Long Island in the summer, and my wife’s family lives out there in Montauk, so we ran eating to each other to barbecue,” Lawrence says. “I thought he was being nice. He was like, ‘Why am I not on that show? Are you serious?’ I’m like, ‘Cool. All right, man.’ ”
It turns out Fox was serious. Or maybe Lawrence called his bluff. “I said, ‘What do you want to do?’ And the coolest thing was he said, ‘Obviously it is going to be easier for me if I play somebody that’s dealing with the condition.’ And he said, ‘But I’d love to play a character and not play, like, Michael J. Fox who has Parkinson’s.’ So we just made him an average guy and gave him an average life.”
Lawrence was one of the first people outside of Fox’s family to be told that the actor had developed Parkinson’s, back when they were in the midst of Spin City. “I was way too young to be a great help to Mike when he revealed to us really early in that show that he had Parkinson’s, and he was going to do it for four years and then start a foundation,” Lawrence says. “I think it was just all over my head. I was 26 and it’s like, ‘What the hell, man? This guy’s still so young.’ ”
One reason he didn’t approach Fox earlier about Shrinking is that he thought he was busy. “He retired and became an activist, and as a retiree, he worked harder than anybody I know,” Lawrence says.
Even so, his experience with Fox and that long-ago diagnosis wasn’t the only reason Parkinson’s became a storyline on the show. “Parkinson’s has been in my life, not only through him but Brett Goldstein’s father, my grandfather, and my dad has Lewy body dementia with Parkinson’s. So it was just something that was on our brains when we started writing.”
Harrison Ford was in no need of a late-career renaissance—but hey, Lawrence’s Apple TV sitcom Shrinking gave us more of the beloved grump.
Marty McFly vs. Indiana Jones
“It was really interesting watching him and Harrison connect,” Lawrence says. “It felt bigger than a sitcom.” Although Ford doesn’t have Parkinson’s, he’s facing his character’s sense of mortality in other ways. “Harrison is doing scenes about not knowing how much longer [Paul] can work and do the thing he loves. I mean, Harrison’s going to be 83, so I’m sure on some level he’s accessing his own emotions about acting.”
“The weirdest thing about it was Candice Bergen was there on set too,” Lawrence says. The Murphy Brown icon guest-stars as the mother of next-door neighbor Derek (played by Ted McGinley.) “I’m like, ‘This is just like the ’80s blew up and it’s back on!’
“The thing that meant the most to me was watching how kind and respectful Harrison was, because I know Harrison was certainly self-conscious,” Lawrence says. “He’s such a conscientious actor about playing somebody with a condition that he didn’t have in a scene with somebody that has been publicly struggling with it for years and years. So that was cool to watch.”
Amanda Seyfried in Skinny Dip
Consider this anecdote Carl Hiaasen, Part III. Lawrence is currently adapting the author’s 2004 novel Skinny Dip into a series with Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz, who worked on Lost together and created the 2011–2018 fairy tale retelling Once Upon a Time. Amanda Seyfried would star as a woman seeking revenge against the husband who tried to murder her by pushing her overboard during a cruise.
“Amazon bought it, and we still have got to go through all the checkpoints to make sure we get to make it, but with her being so passionate and attached to the pilot script, we’re super optimistic,” Lawrence says.
While It Lasts
“I didn’t expect to be having a career renaissance in my mid-50s, man, and I’ve had a super-fun ride already,” the writer says. “I know it’ll sound cavalier, but if somebody showed up and said, ‘Oh, you’re not allowed to do this anymore,’ I’d definitely be bummed, but I also would be like, ‘No? All right.’ Because it was a cool run.”
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