I wanted to re-create that feeling—uniting audiences into laughing in a way that celebrates the best of who we are—in a way that actually reflects America’s diversity. I had dabbled with pitching and selling a few pilots in the years before. The process was something I really enjoyed, but none of the projects I created ever made it past the script stage.
The closest I came was probably the year after my White House sabbatical ended. I had sold a concept for a comedy about young staffers at the United Nations. The humor was a blend of intelligent and stupid, and when it came time for notes, the network seemed to always get stuck on the silliest jokes, like one I borrowed from marines on a USO tour I was on years ago: In a scene in which an African ambassador is on the treadmill at the UN gym, the camera pans over to notice his T-shirt, emblazoned with the slogan “I was all up in Djibouti.” （That’s the whole joke and I love it.） “It’s funny,” the network said during that week’s notes session, “but we don’t think most of the audience will know what Djibouti is or how to pronounce it. Can you change the name of the country to, like, France or something?”
“What do you mean? ‘I was all up in your France’ doesn’t make any sense.”
“Just make it a joke about a country people know.”
In the end, they didn’t move beyond the script stage of development, giving me the polite yet frustrating, “It’s great but doesn’t fit with our other scripts. We’re passing on this.” （That’s the network equivalent of It’s not you, it’s me. Except that, in this case, it’s actually them.）
* * *
This time around, I made it a point to talk about the tone of what I wanted much earlier in the process. This time, it would be intelligent and dumb, and the right buyer would need to be okay with that balance before we moved forward with a script. Streaming platforms, cable, paid television—while there were plenty of edgy places to consider, it was the idea of making a diverse patriotic comedy for a traditional television network that I was excited about most.
After my experiences in Harold & Kumar （which conventional Hollywood thinking initially said would never do well because of its two Asian American leads）， I was excited by the idea that now, maybe you could change hearts and minds across the country without hiding behind a television paywall. Mine would be a proudly silly, proudly American comedy without being preachy or laying a message on too thick. My goal wasn’t to beat people over the head; I wanted to get them to laugh from their bellies.
My representatives at United Talent Agency （UTA） and Spilo set up meetings with a wide range of really great writers for me to consider developing it with. Some （like Bill Lawrence, who created Scrubs and cocreated Ted Lasso） seemed to understand the vision of what I wanted to do with my citizenship class idea very well. Others didn’t get it quite so much. One of the highlights was pitching to Big Bang Theory （and a hundred other shows） creator Chuck Lorre. When Chuck kindly told me and Spilo that the idea as we described wasn’t excactly one that he found compelling, I assumed that was it—meeting over, I should quickly leave this busy icon’s office. To my surprise, he invited us to stay and spent the next hour basically giving me a master class in television development. What a profoundly generous dude! With all he had on his plate, and despite not connecting with my idea, the fact that Chuck friggin’ Lorre took the time to essentially mentor me on how to get a show on the air and make it last was not something I saw coming. It immediately elevated him to the level of the really great, encouraging people I’ve had the chance to work with in my career.1 Chuck’s advice was helpful in deciding what I somehow already knew in the back of my mind—my show shouldn’t be the kind of multicamera sitcom with a laugh track that he does so well; it needed to be a more intimate single-camera comedy to get my desired tone right.
* * *
I found my cocreator and writing partner in a Brooklyn Nine-Nine and Parks and Rec scribe who I incidentally met a decade and a half ago. Enter Matt Murray.
In the mid-2000s, shortly after finishing The Namesake, I had moved from LA to a tiny West Village apartment in Manhattan. Around the same time, three of my LA buddies—the Lonely Island geniuses Jorma Taccone （one of my first friends at UCLA）， Andy Samberg （who had gone to NYU with my high school buddy Jonah Goldstein）， and Akiva Schaffer （who had attended UC Santa Cruz with our close mutual friend Matthew Bettinelli-Olpin）—moved in a few blocks away to start their breakthrough gigs on Saturday Night Live.
Matt Murray was also an SNL writer. I can’t recall on which of the alcohol-fueled nights I first met him, but I remember enjoying his company as someone super funny, supremely genuine, and oddly soft-spoken for a dude who could write specifically weird comedy bits like a sketch where Will Ferrell is born as a fully grown man.
Back in the day, we hung out a few times before subsequently losing touch. As we reconnected during our meeting, I learned that Matt was under contract with Universal Television. His good friend and fellow SNL alum Mike Schur had just re-upped a deal with Universal for nine figures following the success of a hit comedy he created, The Good Place. Matt and Mike often partnered on projects, and I was flattered to be considered in their comedic company. Clearly these guys had the kind of business background and clout that mattered. But what sealed the deal for me was ultimately the creative: Murray and Schur understood and vibed with the tone of the uplifting citizenship class concept so completely that by the end of our conversation, we were already pitching each other on how to make it better. “There’s a woman I knew,” Matt said, “a crossing guard at my kid’s school. She was a lawyer and chief of staff to the First Lady of her home country before coming to America. She saved up tons of money. She doesn’t need to work. She’s a crossing guard now because she really enjoys it. Would be fun to have a character who has like thirty jobs. Not because she has a tough financial situation, but because she wants to get the most out of life.” Matt and Mike and I clearly had great chemistry. I was excited to move forward with them.
We brainstormed the project, taking the initial concept and improving upon it. Inspired （if that’s the right word） by a hockey player who famously tried to get out of a DUI by bribing the cops with the promise of a billion dollars （he was that hammered）， Matt suggested we make my character a recently fired city councilman from Queens, who gets kicked out of the apartment he shared with his girlfriend for a similar drunken indiscretion. Moving in with his sister, his only path to redemption （and money） is to teach a course in which he helps a diverse group of people navigate the US citizenship process. I wanted to have some fun in naming the characters and give a subtle hat tip to some things I’d experienced in the past.
Over the years, when I’d play a character with an Indian name, some South Asians would inevitably complain, “Why is his name Prajeeb? How come he can’t just be named Seth or something?” But when I played someone with a name that wasn’t traditionally Indian （like my character in Designated Survivor, who was literally named Seth） others would grumble, “Why does his name have to be Seth, why can’t it be something like Prajeeb?” People have understandably emotional reactions to this stuff; the power of seeing our own names on-screen （or on the flipside, the privilege that comes from “passing”） is undeniable; strong feelings are a result of the fact that while immense progress has been made, it’s still something of a novelty to see a brown person on television at all. But conversations about those opinions are not ones that anyone wins. So, I figured why not dig a little deeper and turn that experience into a fun, nuanced story behind my character’s name?