Paul Reiser on How He Got Involved in 'Stranger Things'

"Those are not shows that are even in my viewing wheelhouse," Reiser says.

The Mad About You and Stranger Things star takes us behind the scenes of a family sitcom in the new series Reboot (Sept. 20 on Hulu). Reiser, 66, plays Gordon, the creator of the series, who must find a way to work with his estranged daughter, Hannah (Rachel Bloom), now his co-showrunner, to reunite the dysfunctional original cast for a 20-years-later relaunch.

Reboot is built around a TV show, but is it more about the characters?

It’s about some really funny characters, all of whom have problems that I think are relatable: insecurities, families, egos, drinking problems, or in some cases growing up awkwardly. Those characters would work in any setting; this just happens to be in a showbiz setting.

Related: Paul Reiser on the Mad About You Reboot: 'If There Was Ever One Piece of Medicine Inside the Candy of Our Show, It Was, It Takes Work'

You play Gordon, who has a touch of Archie Bunker in him.

There are certain truisms that are just consistent, that mostly guys of a certain generation—my generation—are going to be a certain way. The character’s a little less evolved than I like to think I am. He’s a little bit out of touch, deliberately so for the contrast with Hannah.

Reboot is a sitcom set behind the scenes of a sitcom. Is it too “inside baseball”?

I don’t think there’s anything that will exclude anybody so that they’ll go, “I’m not enjoying it because I didn’t understand that reference.” On the other hand, I think people inside who have been working on half-hour sitcoms will go, “That’s exactly what happens, that’s really accurate.” I think we wanted it to be true.

But it’s funny: I often worry, probably too much, about is this going to be inaccessible to people? But the truth is everybody follows show business. There’s so many [shows doing], “We’ll take you behind the scenes.” I’m always the guy going, “Can we just stay in front of the scenes? Let’s not let everybody back. Let’s just put on a show and that’s the show.”

It's the same way people 50 years ago, 30 years ago even, didn’t know weekend box office reports for every movie. That wasn’t our business. We didn’t need to know how they did that special effect. At this point in history, I think everybody is accustomed to being behind the scenes. This is behind the scenes but it’s not a documentary.

You have worked “behind the scenes” in writers’ rooms. Is Gordon based on somebody that you’ve worked with? Or maybe there’s even some of you in him?

I didn’t create the character; Steve Levitan [the producer, director and screenwriter behind Modern Family] did. You’d have to ask him who he had in mind. There were pieces that felt that I wasn’t acting at all. Not the scenes, but just being in that world, walking on a sound stage, walking past cameras, walking with a script. Just that simple thing, walking with a script and a pencil, I went, “I’ve spent years walking on a stage with a script and a pencil.” Just sometimes a prop puts you in the right frame of mind. So it definitely felt true to me.

What is the setup for the differences between Gordon and his estranged daughter, Hannah?

Hannah, the young writer, says, “In sitcoms, people always get everything right, and I’m going to make it messy because people in real life don’t get everything right.” My character Gordon’s going, “Yeah, but it’s a sitcom so let’s keep it funny.” Those are the two forces of, How do we retell a comedy? I’m thrilled with it; I think it came out really well. Steve Levitan is really a great writer and very collaborative, and so it was a great experience.

You’re a dad in real life. How do you think Gordon really feels about working with Hannah, this daughter that he deserted?

By the end of episode eight, you start to see more colors of him, [that] he does have remorse and he does have a side of the story that’s a little different than what Hannah has been led to believe. Things are never black-and-white. I think deliberately when you meet them you go, “Well, he’s the idiot and she’s the wounded one.” And you find out there’s more to it. Not that she was at fault at all, but she may have been holding onto some preconceptions that were fed to her that were not quite accurate.

I think even in the second episode and the third where he rewrites the script, he says, “Characters can change too quickly.” That was a beautiful piece of writing where Steve Levitan had the idea that Gordon can’t comfortably have a meaty conversation with his daughter, he’s not ready for that. But he can do it through the story, through the scripts, which is a beautiful way for them to connect.

In real life you did an update of Mad About You, which you do not call a reboot. What have you been able to contribute to this new show based on that?

Well, it was interesting in that this new group, Reboot, I don’t believe any of us had worked together before. But we all coalesced easily, and all fell in love. We all loved playing with each other, such different characters and all of us actors have different personalities. But we really all got along, and we really loved the show. There was instantly a feeling of, “We’re in this, let’s build a barn and put on a show.” It was that kind of fun.

One of the things that struck me when we did Mad About You two years ago, three years ago, something I was not prepared for was how easily and quickly we all fell back into comfort. It wasn’t a surprise with Helen, because she and I had been really close for all these past 20 years. We’d get together all the time. And we all do individually with the other actors. But, when we got together on that stage, it was a rebuilt stage, but on that set, you walk into that kitchen door and you walk into the bedroom, it sends memories. Like, “Oh, my God, we walked this every day for seven years.” It was really kind of mind-blowing. We all joked that it didn’t feel like we had been gone for 20 years. It felt like we had a week off or something.

Except you all have gray hair now.

Yeah, well that was the fun and that was the appeal, the reason we wanted to do it. We’ve talked about this. Both Helen [Hunt] and I were adamant with each other, not that anybody was asking, but why would we ever come back? We ended it really well; we did everything we wanted to do. We landed the plane and tied it up perfectly. In fact, even specifically our one-hour finale, which Helen directed beautifully, we showed a little bit of the future so that we answered any questions and would never be tempted to come back because we’d closed the door.

And then, whenever it was, five years ago, when people started rebooting things, it was in the air. People kept asking us. Helen and I at first were laughing, like, “Why? We wouldn’t want to.” Not that we didn’t love it. We loved it. And then we thought it certainly would be fun to play together. That was really the appeal. But we were stuck on the why. It really was down to us over a lunch, and we said, “What would it even be?” Then we started realizing that 20 years later, the kid would be leaving the house. I had just dropped my son off at school on the East Coast, so I was really feeling that. Helen’s daughter was almost at that age.

So we thought that’s a really interesting thing because we haven’t seen them [on Mad About You] raise a kid. They had an infant and then they went off the air. What did they go through? And the reason I say it’s not a reboot, we weren’t trying to replicate that we were 32 years old. No, we’re in our 60s, we don’t hear as well, we have gray hair, and we walk slowly. I think there was a line in one of our episodes where I was crossing to the door from the kitchen, and I kept walking and walking. I said, “Twenty years ago I would have been there already.” Everything’s slower. We said, “That’s fun.”

For our Mad About You audience, we thought they came with us from the beginning. People would always say, “We had babies when you had a baby.” So then they’d be going through this now, they’d be going through releasing the kid.

The other added bonus from Mad About You was to write a show about the child leaving and suddenly we find ourselves alone, which was exactly what the kickoff was 30 years ago when we started the show. We’re alone, the wedding hoopla and all that stuff is over, it’s us in a house, but we’re different people now. We don’t have the same dreams, some dreams didn’t come true, we’re older, we have bills to pay, we have a kid who’s a handful. So we thought that was really a rich area to write about. So that was our thing.

On Reboot, they were focusing on the negative. Yes, there’s the romance that was between Bree [Judy Greer] and Reed [Keegan-Michael Key], but there was a lot of friction all over the place. The kid, Zack [Calum Worthy], nobody wants to treat him as an adult and he’s trying to be an adult. Johnny Knoxville’s character, who’s so great in the show, he has cleaned up his act and he’s really struggling to not fall down a rabbit hole again. There’s a lot of interesting, darker stuff. The problems are always funnier than, “Hey, we all love each other.” There’s not as much comedy that comes from when everything’s going right. Funny comes from when there’s problems, and there’s plenty of problems in these characters in Reboot to keep it going.

You have roles in Stranger Things and the gritty vigilante drama The Boys, neither of which is in your normal comedy lane. What’s it like to be on two of the hottest shows on TV?

I think it’s clear that without me they’ve got nothing [laughs]. Believe me, it is as surprising to me as it is to you. Those are not shows that are even in my viewing wheelhouse.

How did you get involved with Stranger Things and The Boys?

I watched the first season of Stranger Things. My son turned me on to it. When we watched the second season, I said, “It’s great, and I loved being in it. But as a viewer, personally, I don’t know that I would have watched the second season. It's not really my kind of show.” My son, because he’s so delightful, he said with no sense of irony, “You know, Dad, I would have enjoyed season two a lot more if you were not in it.” I went, “I can hear you when you say that. I heard that.” He said, “No, it distracted me.” I get it.

The Boys, certainly, I had not heard of The Boys. I asked my younger son, again, I said, “Have you heard of this show called The Boys? They are asking me to join.” He said, “It’s great, you’ll hate it.” I watched it and I went, “It’s two for two. It is great and, boy, this is not my kind of show.” Once I understood what they were doing I said, “It’s really violent, it’s really graphic,” and he went, “Yeah, that’s the thing.” I went, “Oh, OK.” They’re doing it more for funny. They’re not trying to shock you, it’s just like, “Oh, my gosh, that’s graphic and horrible.” But it’s funny and it’s so well done.

You turned it down initially.

I said, “It’s not for me.” They had the character doing some stuff that I said, “I don’t know if I feel comfortable.” They said, “What if we take that out and take this out and move that?” That’s better. So it was written really well, and then they let me play with it a bit. It was sort of based on a couple of prototypes and characters that I had met and seen. It’s a very old-school, Hollywood guy.

I’ll tell you, my biggest takeaway from that is the appeal of a smoking jacket. When they put this purple velvet smoking jacket on, I went, “Why is everyone not wearing this all the time? This is the greatest thing in the world.” It’s just comfy and silly and it was cool. I had great fun doing it.

A little Hugh Hefner, maybe?

Yeah, totally. The idea that there’s an item of clothing made specifically in which to smoke, who thought of that?

You mentioned being the old-school guy. What is it like? Because both of those casts are younger actors.

I was talking to some buddies of mine when we were out for a drink. We started together, are the same age. One of the guys said, “Have you had this thing yet where you look around the set and you realize you’re the oldest person by far?” I went, “Yes. Even the crew, they’re younger.” That’s sort of the arc of life. Hopefully you get to be at that stage.

I remember being on the other side, being in my 30s. On Mad About You, we had all these legends. We had Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner, Sid Caesar, Carol Burnett, Carroll O’Connor and Jerry Lewis. We were in awe. We were, “Oh, my God! We get to work with these guys.” Now I can see a little bit that as established, as huge as they were, and I’m certainly not in their league, I realize they were just people, they’re just working, terrifically, talented, brilliant geniuses, but they’re just working. You stick around long enough and there’ll be younger people behind you. I kind of enjoy it.

That actually does help both characters in The Boys. We ad-libbed lines; I go, “How does he not know who I am? Read a book.” I feel like that all the time. “What do you mean you’ve never heard of Johnny Carson? Read a book!”

I created a show a couple years ago on Peacock called There’s…Johnny! It took place behind the scenes of The Tonight Show in 1972. I was meeting these young actors and I said, “You know Johnny Carson,” and they’d go, “I looked him up.” You looked him up? Thank God, you looked him up, but yeah, why would you know? He’s been off the air since ’92 and you were born in ’97, so OK. That felt like that.

In Reboot, it’s really fun to dig into that acknowledgment of my age and my experience. There’s a scene in episode five where I go out with Keegan and we clear the air between us. He says, “You could be better. You don’t have to write these jokes.” My thing was, “You could be better too. Just embrace your funny and stop thinking that I stink and the script stinks.” That felt needed when I was saying that, how many times I felt that. We can make the script better, but why don’t you look at it and see if you can make it funny yourself?

Coming up next you have The Problem With People, which you co-wrote, co-produced and star in. Where did the idea for that come from?

I was in Ireland about 30 years ago, and I fell in love with the country. I always wanted to make a movie there. Never having found one, I said I should just write it. So I wrote The Problem With People. I found this young writer, Wally Marzano-Lesnevich, and we just sat together and came up with the story.

Basically, the reason was I wanted to get to Ireland to make a movie. When you sit down to write a script it’s like, “Why? Why is this New Yorker—I’ve been here [Los Angeles] 40 years, but I still think of myself as a New Yorker—why would I go to Ireland?”

We came up with this lovely story where it’s about two distant relatives who’ve never met, two cousins. Colm Meaney plays my cousin. He calls me out of the blue. We’ve never met, never heard of each other. There’s been a generations-old conflict between the Irish side of the family and the American side of the family. On a lark, I decide to take him up and say, “Sure, let’s bury the hatchet.”

I go to Ireland well-intentioned, and it goes very badly. But the premise of the movie is no matter how small you make a sample group, people will find something to fight about. So here there’s just two cousins who mean well, who want to bury the hatchet, and they find more hatchets. It’s really a comedy but with a lot of fun and a lot of heart. Jane Levy plays my daughter. She was the star of the There’s…Johnny! show I was talking about on Peacock. She was just brilliant, so I was happy to get her as well.

Do you like to work with the same people again?

Yeah. She totally felt like my daughter. We’re in the middle of editing it now and hope to get it out by the spring, probably spring or summer. It was a real thrill and being in Ireland was everything I had hoped. It was beautiful and people were great. You always hear the cliché, “We go to the pub,” and I go, “Who goes to a pub? I don’t go out.” When you’re in Ireland, you go to the pub every night and you go, “This is the greatest idea.” The only thing better would be if I had a smoking jacket in the pub. Then we’d be aces.

It’s been 20 years since you’ve done stand-up, and now you’re revisiting it. What will you talk about onstage?

The material is all new, but my interests are the same. I still talk about relationships. I’m complaining about my kids instead of my parents. It’s still the personal stuff and my inability to wrestle the world. I always tell people, the truth is I’m not smart enough to make anything up; I can only tell you what happened to me that made me laugh, and I’ll talk about it with you and then we’ll all laugh.

Related: Helen Hunt on the Moment She and Paul Reiser Decided to Agree to the Mad About You Reboot