I was invited on an all expenses paid trip to cover the #ABCTVEvent. All opinions are my own.
I am loving ABC’s The Real O’Neals! It airs Tuesday nights on ABC at 8:30/7:30c. I just love watching this family navigate real life problems in a funny way with a great message of sticking together no matter what. If you aren’t current, you can catch up on episodes at ABC.Go.com or on the ABC app.
While in LA I had a chance to talk with some of the cast. In case you missed it, be sure to read my post about chatting with The Real O’Neals cast members. Also, we got to sit down with show’s Executive Producers Casey Johnson, David Windsor, & Stacy Traub.
How did you come up with the idea behind this show?
David: Well, Casey and I were first approached last year, from the network and studio who had tried to develop an idea with Dan Savage. I don’t know if you guys know who Dan Savage is? So it’s sort of very loosely based on his life being a gay kid growing up in a Catholic family. We thought, ‘oh, it’s kind of interesting’. We liked the idea of a family show for ABC since they have all these really good family shows. It’s very specific so that was the germ of it from upstairs in this building. And then I sort took it and ran after that.
Casey: Stacy has four kids; I have two kids; and David has two kids. But David and I have been writing together for about fifteen years. And then we wrote the pilot for this, and when we went into production on the pilot, we brought Stacy Traub onboard to help us. Once it got to series, the three of us run it together which is great, especially since we have eight children between us.
Stacy: So if there’s, like, something at school, we have each other covered, you know? It’s like parent/teacher day? Okay, we’ve got it. We understand.
It probably trickles down to storylines too, right?
David: Yeah, for sure.
Casey: Oh, absolutely. And it’s been fun to show the show to our kids, actually. It’s been really neat. There’s the one episode where the two boys have the fantasy dance sequence together to- “I Can’t Feel My Face”, it was really neat to show that to my daughter because she watched the other boy on a Disney Channel movie and I think had a crush on him, and then she watched the two boys dancing together. It was really interesting. She was kinda like, ‘let me see that again’, and then she watched it again, and she loved it. It’s neat as a parent to be able to make that kind of programming for our kids.
So do you pull from anything that happens to your kids to writing these story lines?
Stacy: Yeah, my daughter’s eleven, but she might as well be twenty. She’s very much like Shannon. Very smart. And that episode, “The Real Man” where she’s sneaking off to go work at Wetzel’s Pretzels, that last scene with the two of them, it just really makes me feel like conversations I’ve had with my daughter where she’s maybe a little bit too smart for her age, and maybe too smart for me. We all share, we have writers who are from Chicago; we have writers who are Catholic; we have writers who are gay. And the writer’s room is so lovely because it’s this safe place where everyone shares all these stories, and then we try and figure out, okay, this experience works for this story. We want it to feel as real and honest as possible.
David: I don’t know if you guys saw the episode where they went camping- the beginning of that- it’s just a silly thing, but Jay and Matt do a boy battle; that’s something my son and I do. He’s only seven. We wrestle and we have this elaborate introduction. But there’s always stuff from our lives that we like putting in. It just feels more authentic. The stuff feels more real.
Stacy: And it helps you work through your own issues [she said as she laughed].
The cast is fantastic. What was the process for choosing the cast?
Casey: We were really lucky. We got Martha and Jay pretty early on. So lucky to get them. Then we got Matt Shively, and Bebe, and Mary Hollis, but we didn’t have our Kenny yet. It’s a big piece of the show, really, really important, and we’d been working with some other actors that we weren’t quite sure about, and Noah was in New York. He’s a theater actor. He’d been on Broadway since he was thirteen but had never done a show, and had never acted in front of a camera before. And we saw his tape. He flew out here to this building upstairs and did a screen test for us, and in about a minute we all kinda felt it. We were like, this is our Kenny. We feel like we have a show now. It was really neat, and then we got to show it to the executives, and they all felt the same way. Everyone immediately was very excited.
David: They’re all so amazing. They instantly bonded; they hang out with each other outside of work. They’re a family and that just makes our job so much easier because you can only write so much of that, and then rest of it has to sort of happen organically. And luckily with them they love each other so much.
Stacy: Yeah, from the pilot they had that chemistry. Jay was on Mad Men, and he said they used to always play games during the downtime, so during the pilot, he brought Catch Phrase and all these games, and he was the one who kind of was like, ‘we’re doing this’. Because some actors can just go off to their trailer; they wanna do their own thing, and he really made them this family. And now they still hang out. It’s very amazing.
When it comes to the topics, you don’t wanna go too far, how do you guys determine how far you can go?
David: I think we always come out at what is real; what’s happening in people’s lives; the kid’s lives at that age; the grownups that are going through this heavy thing. It’s kind of a fine line we’re walking because we’re dealing with a lot of serious, heavy issues, but at the same time, we’re making a comedy. Aand so the authenticity of all of their problems, I think, makes the show more relatable to everybody. It also in some weird way makes it easier to write comedy for, because those awkward moments, the divorce, and coming out, and all these things that are so uncomfortable often times are mined for a lot of comedy. So our goal is really just to make it as real as we can, and it’s part of the reason we made it the title. We didn’t wanna shy away from any of that stuff.
Stacy: Because our staff is made up with lesbians and gay guys, and Catholics- we’re always checking with them, and everyone’s got a different experience. We’re just constantly checking in- does this feel real? What’s so lovely is that we have all these people with us who can tell us what the real thing is.
So how do you guys come up with different ideas?
Casey: We can pair up all the different family members in different combinations, and there’s a lot going on in the O’Neal family, so there’s lot we wanna explore. We just sit in a big room with eleven other really smart people and pitch around.
Stacy: You guys also saw “The Real Retreat” episode, right? I remember that starting with Jimmy who had so been supportive of Kenny. And we started talking about, how can we set them up for some conflict? Where would they not get along? What could happen? Is there a power struggle? We started talking about that. Poor Shannon just wants to get her kiss. And then, the idea of the fact that they were in conflict, they kind of forgot about Shannon, so they weren’t supporting each other like they would do. Sometimes you come at it from wanting to tell some character’s story, or sometimes they come in from the weekend going, you would not believe what my kid did this weekend. And then we start telling those stories- figuring it out.
Casey: And like the grandma episode, David’s got a grandma who actually made a coloring book about the Bible for him.
Stacy: It is so funny.
Casey: Yeah, so from the very beginning, we were like, we have to do a story about the grandma. And knowing that, then it kind of became about Eileen coming out, as well. But it sort of started with the grandma. I think “The Real Man”- the camping one, came from the writer who wanted to tell a story about what’s masculine enough. That was something he wanted to tell a story about, and we were trying to think, what’s the right way to tell that story?. So it always kinda starts with someone.
Stacy: And the retreat, my sister and I went to summer camp together, and I was her counselor at summer camp. And she’s the best, she’s such a good kid, and we were so close, and suddenly she starts hanging out with the bad girls and treating me poorly. So that was kind of fed into the story that you guys saw.
They were so nice and really great to talk to. Here is our group photo with them as well as the cast members.
Make sure you tune in tonight for a new episode of THE REAL O’NEALS on ABC at 8:30/7:30c! If you can’t wait live, be sure to watch it on your DVR within 3 days to help boost the ratings so it will get picked up for another hilarious season!
I got a special sneak peek at tonight’s episode and it is a funny one!
Tonight’s Episode: 110, “The Real Retreat”
“When Jimmy is unexpectedly named Faith Leader for the weekend at the Catholic Youth Retreat, a jealous Kenny decides to take on his older brother’s role as ring leader of the bad kids. Home alone without the kids, Pat invites a new lady friend over, and Eileen can’t help but enlist Jodi to spy on them, with surprising results.“-ABC
