Author: Danielle Turchiano

April 05, 2015 5 hours ago by Danielle Turchiano

 Brian Bowen Smith

Showrunner John Wells talks with THR about bringing Dermot Mulroney back for season six and exploring what stability means for the Gallaghers.

[Warning: This story contains spoilers from “Love Songs (In the Key of Gallagher),” the fifth season finale for Showtime’s Shameless.]

Showtime’s Shameless had all of its characters questioning what they knew about love and relationships during Sunday’s season five finale, and true to form, to mixed results.

Fiona (Emmy Rossum) was given a choice by her musician husband Gus (Steve Kazee) about whether or not she wanted to be with him — and she ran right into Sean’s (Dermot Mulroney) embrace, only for him to point out he doesn’t want to be the guy sleeping with a good guy’s wife.

Debbie (Emma Kenney) decided she wanted to get pregnant to instantly become part of her teenage boyfriend’s (Luca Oriel) picture perfect family forever — without so much as to ask him how he felt about a potential baby.

After being publicly dumped by his college sweetheart and having the husband of his college professor (Sasha Alexander) watch them in bed, Lip (Jeremy Allen White) realized he was falling in love with her.

Ian (Cameron Monaghan) saw what a bad relationship his bipolar mother was in and came home to Mickey (Noel Fisher) — only to break up with him after a fundamental disagreement about his need to be medicated. It left Mickey in tears — before Sammi seemingly returned from the dead and took multiple shots at him as a police pursuit followed and as Ian and Fiona returned inside seemingly with little interest in the outcome.

Then there was Frank (William H. Macy), who for the first time actually showed that he was capable of love at all after Bianca’s suicide, even though the career drunk didn’t seem to realize it.

But do any of the Gallaghers really know what love is? The Hollywood Reporter turned to Shameless executive producer John Wells to break down the finale and find out. “They don’t have a lot in their lives in the sense of security, and so their relationships become more and more important, and the idea of ‘How does love or caring for each other make up for scarcity [comes into play]’. There’s a constant difficulty in having these relationships in the world in which they live,” Wells says. “It’s all a part of the theme of something larger: looking for meaning in your life. Who are you, and how do your relationships fit into that?”

It’s arguable that Frank’s actions with Bianca (Bojana Novakovic) were more loving than toward anyone else we’ve ever seen him interact with on the show, especially his own children. Have we finally seen Frank start to change for the better?

You hope so, but he’s such a narcissist because he’s such an addict, and he’s so focused on his own stuff. It’s hard to say yet if he’ll use it as an example to others on how he’s opened up, or if he’s actually at a point where he can change any of his behaviors. Often it’s easier to fall in love with or be swept up in parts of melodrama with someone who’s leaving because there’s no long-term commitment. She was fatally ill, but then he found himself attached, and he had to come to terms with it, and that’s what we felt was fascinating. But we also want to make sure it’s not something that just disappears from the landscape when we come back.

While Frank’s marker of maturity came as a surprise, for other characters, like Fiona, it was more gradual. But she’s certainly still struggling at the end of the season to choose between Gus and Sean, even though maybe she needs to just choose herself for a change.

We’ve watched her grow up a bit, and she’s a woman now, and she presents herself as a woman, and so we have to start addressing that. If there was something kind of cute about [her behavior] when she was 20 years old, it stops being cute in a 26- or 27-year-old. It starts to move into that area of, “Oh, they have to get their shit together.” We all have those friends who we thought were funny or messed up when we were in college or high school, but as time goes on, if they’re still involved in that same behavior, you’re like, “Oh this has turned into sad!” And we care deeply about her as a character, and so we really want to watch her make that transition into maturity, which is a lot of what Dermot has been doing on the show. He’s saying to her, “You have a lot of potential; you’re sort of a fabulous girl, but you’re not a girl anymore.” He’s pointing out the things she does have real world consequences on the people around her now.

If Sean is such a good influence, is it safe to say he’s back for season six?

Yes, we have another year with Dermot on the show.

Does that mean Justin Chatwin’s exit was really final this time? He and Joan Cusack both left in ways that feel like there could be more story there.

We never want to say never. We could sit down and suddenly come up with a great idea, but for both of those characters, I think it would be fair to say that we love the actors and we love the characters but we sort of felt like we would need to find something completely different to do if we were going to bring them back.

Along similar lines, how do you feel about Sammi’s (Emily Bergl) future? It’s left open-ended as to whether or not she’s going to be locked up for shooting at Mickey.

We like her, but we also felt like we had started to play it to the points of the same beats. If there’s something else we can do that’s interesting, we love Emily; she was a big part of my [TNT drama] Southland, too. But we haven’t quite figured it out yet. it’s complicated because we also really enjoyed writing for [Kellen Michael], who plays Chuckie. He’s just flat out funny in everything we threw at him.

Yet you locked him in juvie along with Carl (Ethan Cutkosky)!

That ended up being a great story, but it really started because Ethan was going into high school and wanted to be there in the fall to be able to attend his first full year. So we wrote him out of the end of our season in kind of a humanitarian dispensation so he could leave — he’s from Chicago — and go back and spend his first full year of high school. We love that character, and we want to have him around more, so we’ll have to address that early in season six.

There were so many ups and downs with Mickey and Ian this season, but with Ian returning home, it seems like they are left in a hopeful place despite having broken things off. Do you see this as one rare Gallagher relationship that can go the distance?

I do, but it’s really a decision for Noel to make. He was going to do a movie and wasn’t prepared to sign on for another year, so I have to check back in with him in a few months and see. He has a very thriving film career, and we really just hired him for a few episodes when we started, but we keep expanding it, and he always comes back when he’s available. So, some of where the characters end up will be dictated by availability, but it [also] may be an interesting time for Ian to discover how important Mickey was in his life. It’s that thing that often happens when you’re younger: you have a relationship that’s really difficult and passionate and messy, and then you go away from it and you discover the rest of the world, and sometimes you come back to that first person anyway.

Then there’s Debbie, who followed Fiona’s footsteps early on with her caretaking but now seems to be making the intentionally bad decision to be a teen mom in a bid to lock down her boyfriend and have a “normal” family.

It’s not about bad decisions; it’s about her desperate desire to figure out what is normal. She doesn’t have any idea, and she’s got other adults in her life, like her sister Fiona trying to tell her, but she doesn’t know what it is, either. It’s really easy for Debbie to look at Fiona and say, “Oh yeah? You’re the one who’s supposed to tell me what happiness looks like and how you’re supposed to act as an adult?” What really defines her is some desire to find stability. It’s those horrible conversations we have with teenagers all of the time, but particularly in this circumstance, it’s heightened. There’s been a lot of teenage posturing on her part, but a child takes teenage posturing and puts it in a completely different place, so that’s definitely something we’ll want to explore this next year.

Are you willing to confirm she is pregnant? As much is assumed from her reaction, we didn’t actually see the test results.

Well, I can only confirm that that’s what we were doing at the time, but we haven’t sat down to figure out where it would got yet. We weren’t trying to just be titillating with it or provocative; we wanted to actually say, “What do you do?” when this theoretical thing just got very real.

Things seem to be getting very real for Lip, too, when he says he’s in love with Helene. Is this a moment of true growth for him?

I don’t think he’s ever really been in love with anybody. I don’t think he really knows what that is. He’s very protective and guarded, and we’ve always seen him really be much more in control of these things [aside] from something early on with Karen [Laura Slade Wiggins] as a teenager. Now, as an adult, he’s [wondering] “How do I act? What’s a commitment? Who am I supposed to be? Who am I attracted to?” All of those identity issues have come up for him [and] he doesn’t know how to separate out; he doesn’t have any history that allows him to separate out her belief in him and this world that he’s being introduced to [beyond] obviously her interest in being with a younger man who satisfies him sexually but also admires her in a way that makes her feel better about herself — which is something we’ll start to explore this coming season.

Overall this season the Gallaghers went off in their own individual directions a lot. Is that a trend you see continuing?

Yes [because] they’re all growing up! Those are the things we all have to adjust to and address all of the time. They do leave; they grow up; they have their own experiences. And they want those experiences to be acknowledged by the rest of the family and their additional maturity to be recognized by the family. And it’s not always, and that is funny, and that is also dramatic.

What did you think of Shameless‘ fifth season finale? Sound off in the comments below.

Danielle Turchiano

THRnews@thr.com

April 04, 2015 2 hours ago by Danielle Turchiano

 Virginia Sherwood/NBC

The writer-director says new conspiracy drama is out to ask “Where does the power lie today?”

Following in the footsteps of Homeland comes NBC’s newly re-titled American Odyssey, a conspiracy drama that weaves together three distinct and intricate tales that all tie in to a greater political cover-up.

At the center of the story is Sgt. Odelle Ballard (Anna Friel), whose troop is on a mission in North Africa to find a terrorist’s wife but end up finding and killing the terrorist and uncovering documents about a U.S. corporation funding said terrorist. While she should be lauded as a hero, a team of private military contractors instead are brought in to wipe out her entire troop and she must play dead in order to save her own life. Her journey then turns into one of trying to get herself home, even though the entire world is being told she died.

“It’s not a cop show; it’s not an FBI show; it’s not a CIA show; it’s about so much more and something so much more important than that, which is asking the basic question of, ‘Where does power lie today?’ ” writer-director Peter Horton told The Hollywood Reporter. “We’re seeing three normal individuals — normal people — try and exercise that power. They’re seeing something they feel is wrong taking place. Their little pieces of it seem wrong to them so [they] want to do something about it.”

While a sergeant typically has some power, Odelle is in a distant land with no method of communication and a group of powerful people out to silence her if the public begins to suspect she is alive. She has some help, however, in young political activist Harrison (Jake Robinson), who has access to the media thanks to his famous and wealthy father and is looking into what really happened when her troop was ambushed. Plus Peter (Peter Facinelli), a former U.S. Attorney-turned-corporate lawyer for the company that funded the terrorist is starting to connect the dots, too. While the trio are in different places, there is still strength in numbers.

Horton spoke with THR about the scope of the NBC drama and how these three characters may be able to come together to expose the truth.

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What’s the appeal of doing such a big scope show on a broadcast network?

Networks have had a grand tradition of big shows and very large perspective shows, whether they’re the miniseries of Roots or Shogun, all the way through to shows like Lost. There’s been a real tradition there, but it’s also been specific to this network for me. I’ve done five pilots for [Bob Greenblatt], and he’s put all but one on the air. I really love his sensibility. Coming from Showtime to a network, to me, was the perfect place for this show to land because it still embodied the size of a network but with the sensibility of someone who, I think, realizes the necessity for networks to evolve and evolve creatively toward the high bar that cable has now set. It just felt like this show was a good match with his sensibility and this network.

There are three core characters at the center of this story — Peter, Harrison and Odelle. How do you balance not only the storytelling of showing each person’s journey in this bigger picture?

What we’re finding is the luxury of being able to tell a story in three bubbles really helps us fill our tanks with the fuel that really drives our show, which is tension. When you’re in a story for a period of time and all of a sudden you get a little bit bored (laughs), you can go to the other story, and there’s an infusion of tension because it’s a new world, and where are they at now? Conceptually that’s been a really fun way to tell the story. The audience gets this omniscient view where we get to see all three points of view and we see things that [not all of the characters] see, and that can be fun [too]. Both Peter and Jake are well aware of Odelle Ballard — that she’s supposedly dead but they’re thinking maybe she’s not — but she’s not aware of them. And at some point those lines certainly find ways to cross. We have a cross in episode three where Suzanne [Sadie Sink], Odelle’s daughter, runs away from home and goes to the park where the demonstration is taking place, and she gets there right when it’s falling apart, and because of that, she runs into Harrison, who’s sitting there by himself. She comes up to him and goes, “Oh my God, you believe my mother’s alive, right?” And he goes, “Who are you? Odelle Ballard has a daughter? There’s a personal component to this!” And they connect. Eventually there are other connections between characters as we go along. But we don’t really rush to that [because] the fun of that is knowing what we know and seeing the limitations of what they know.

The inclination is to root for these characters to expose the truth, but there is danger in the how and when of that because if they’re not careful they can be silenced.

One of our challenges has been how to keep a character ignorant to situations in the age of communication, and we really try to approach that honestly. If they Google everything they can, what would they find out? Or Odelle tries to call home, but what trouble does that get her into? What we’ve found is that as you follow those roads, they present as their own hazards and their own land mines. We really try to let our characters step on those land mines. We wanted to go down the road with these characters. It’s pure kismet that we’re living in the world as it is today, even to the point where one of the big characters that gets introduced in episode two, Sophia, who is a Greek Prime Minister candidate who looks like she’s going to win based on a Greeks for Greece platform and basically is going to wipe out Greek debt. That’s exactly what’s happening in Greece today. (Laughs.) What are the implications of that — if indeed the candidate who got just elected follows through on promises? What would that do to the Euro? What would that do to the economy? Or the fact that North Africa is the new seed of terrorism? ISIS is moving into Libya. The new hotbed of terrorism seems to be migrating south, and here we are in Mali. We’re operating in the world as we know it today and asking honest questions about it. You’re on the edge of your seat — but in ways that are certainly meaningful [in addition to] entertaining.

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The show is being marketed with the hashtag of #OdelleLives, which might make it feel like she’s the center of the show to some, despite Peter and Harrison’s importance in the bigger picture.

In this season her story is the catalyst, for sure. And consequently, you’re going to feel in this first season that she’s the cornerstone, but boy are Peter and Harrison’s stories the next two stones in the building! They all three do balance, for sure, in the series. The genesis for this project was someone coming and saying, “Wouldn’t it be fun to do a modern take on [Homer’s] The Odyssey?” And what does that mean? But when you really think about it, the theme of it is wonderfully potent in someone trying to find her way home, and that is what Odelle is trying to do. And we play that out thoroughly.

What is the biggest hurdle for her in trying to get herself home? 

She’s cast adrift in the Northern Mali part of the Sahara Desert, trying to pretend that she’s not an American soldier. It’s a really cool journey. When everyone in the world, outside of her little sphere that she’s trying to survive in, thinks she’s dead, including her family — except her daughter, who has this undaunted faith that somehow her mom is alive. It’s heartbreaking. Her husband is trying to find a way for her daughter to accept and move on, and her daughter is refusing to [do that]. Then she has this new family she’s forming with Aslam [Omar Ghazaoul], who’s this amazing kid who helps her when no one would.

The character of Bob (Nate Mooney) is the archetypal conspiracy theorist in that he talks a little too fast because his brain races a million miles a minute and people find him a little bit odd and don’t take him too seriously, but he truly is smart and did stumble onto something real. And similarly with Harrison, you could just see him as a bored, rebelling rich kid. How much are you trying to make a statement about the various players in situations like this and them not being entirely what they seem? 

There are those that can seem a little bit trope-like [at the start] but our approach to all of those people is they all have a point of view, and it’s a point of view they all believe in. It’s a little bit easier to talk about the villains because traditionally they’re a little broader, but we really give Alex Baker a point of view, and a valid one. By the end of the season, you may go, “Maybe he’s right.” As much as you hate him. And same thing with Col. Glen [Treat Williams] or any of them. We’re interested in knowing all of the characters’ points of views. When you have Dick Cheney who was not only the vice president but also the head of Halliburton, and then the U.S. goes to war and Halliburton gets the first big contract and makes millions of dollars, on the face value you go, “That seems really screwed up; that’s a conflict of interest.” (Laughs.) But what’s Dick Cheney’s point of view? We’ve done that with all of our villains. When you get to someone like Harrison, sure, the onset of that character is kind of familiar, but how does a character like that find depth and evolve? One of the things that’s interesting about someone like that who’s had a cushioned life, he’s someone who’s not had struggle and hasn’t had hard experience, and we’re defined by our struggle. So if you haven’t had struggle, that’s its own struggle. We give him struggle and see what he finds about himself this season. By the end, this guy is a totally different person. He’s pursued a truth; he thinks he’s onto something. His initial motivation is to prove that he is something, but that pursuit leads him into unfathomable agony and pain.

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Having directed the pilot you really set the visual tone for the series as well. What key elements did you mandate future episode directors keep in order to match not only the style but also the tone and intensity of the pilot? 

I directed the pilot and the first episode to try and set that tone. There’s such a wonderful disparity in the worlds that I really wanted to keep going — the colors, even: there’s the blued and grays of New York vs. the yellows and earth tones of Mali. There’s the longer lens, kind of “insider” feel to New York vs. the more handheld Hurt Locker feel in Mali. I set up those ideas and then let these directors that we got to do this take those and make them their own, and they’ve done some beautiful work with it. I grew up on thirtysomething as a director, and both the writers on that show were directors as well, and basically they approached each episode saying, “Bring something new. Don’t just do what the other directors had done.” And so, I grew up with that sensibility. Everyone had different styles and different approaches, and that worked really well for that show because it was such a stable concept that putting different stamps on it was fine. And then you evolve into this world where there’s much more branding, and it’s mandated almost to “Let’s establish a look and try to do that every single week so everyone can identify this show as that show.” I land somewhere in the middle [though]. I go, “Here’s the look that we want. Here’s the feel that we want. Now make it your own. Make that interesting to you.” And so far that’s worked really well.

There is a statement being made with American Odyssey, whether entirely intentional or not, about corruption of power. What do you hope the audience takes away regarding such an issue? What are the questions you want them to be asking, not only about your show but about society?

In a democracy — even one as advanced as this one — do we still have power? Do we still have representative government? Do we still have the ability to assert our values in our society for ourselves, or has that been subjugated to different places? It’s not a rhetorical question; we’re truly asking it. Do we have a responsibility to look into these situations and due our diligence? To stand up for what you believe is right is going to cost you; there’s going to be real sacrifice involved in it, and what is that like? You may have to truly sacrifice, and not just your comfort [but also] your well being, your family, your life, for something that you feel is right. It’s posing those kinds of questions, and I think when you’re posing questions that are that acute and real for everybody — because whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican or anything right now, you may feel powerless — that’s a story that deserves our commitment and our full selves.

American Odyssey premieres April 5 at 10 p.m. on NBC.

Twitter: @danielletbd

Danielle Turchiano

THRnews@thr.com

James White/TBS

[Warning: This story contains spoilers from the series finale of TBS’ Cougar Town.]

Pour one out for Jules “Kiki” Cobb (Courteney Cox) and the rest of the cul-de-sac crew of Cougar Town. The ABC-turned-TBS sitcom said its final goodbyes Tuesday in an episode that faked out its lead character, and much of its audience, for the majority of its events.

“Mary Jane’s Last Dance” started with Jules asking Grayson (Josh Hopkins) for a seemingly ridiculous, if not impossible birthday present. She wanted to see what her own funeral would be like just so she could hear her closest friends say the nicest things about her. But her slightly off-handed request was soon overshadowed by an influx of change as Andy (Ian Gomez) and Ellie (Christa Miller) prepared to pick up and move so their son could be in a better school while Travis (Dan Byrd) and Laurie (Busy Philipps) prepared to head out of state after his wine delivery business took off.

See more Saying Goodbye: TV Shows Signing Off in 2014-15

Each important member of Jules’ extended family — even Bobby (Brian Van Holt), who was back via iPad — took time to tell her just how much she has meant to them over the years. They were tributes fitting for a series finale, but just as the tears started to well, the truth came out: Grayson had orchestrated everything just to give Jules what she really wanted for her birthday. No one was moving away; in fact, they were only about to get even closer as Travis and Laurie ended up buying Grayson’s old house to become an even more official part of the crew.

The Hollywood Reporter caught up with series creator Bill Lawrence to discuss bringing the story to a close after two networks, six seasons and more than 100 episodes. 

Knowing the show had to wrap up say good-bye to these characters and relationships, what were the story lines you felt needed to have a little extra time spent on them?

We wanted to play the stuff with Jules’ father out a bit, not just drop it and have him living with them in the house. We wanted to play Travis and Laurie out because it was a tightrope: some people liked it [when they got together] and some didn’t, and we wanted to make sure they were still fun characters, not just some married couple. The main thing we wanted to do was make Bob Clendenin step up as a regular in the last year because he really earned it. But the coolest thing about Cougar Town was there was never any real burden because — intentionally — it’s not a show about shocking events. It’s not like Friends. There’s no end to Cougar Town where it’s time for people to grow up and get new jobs and have babies. These people are all in their 40s, and they’re settled, and that’s why we’re able to tweak the conventions in the finale.

Yet in the finale, you did make it seem like people were growing up and moving on and getting new jobs. Did you think that kind of fake-out was risky?

We knew we could fake it! We knew, writing it, that if we followed it through and it was actually happening, it would be disingenuous. I felt that right at the point where people are getting pissed off and thinking we were actually doing that, we’d be like, “Of course no one’s going anywhere!”

This show has developed such a specific lexicon over the years, as well as a sense of whimsy with the games the characters play. Which of those elements were your “musts” for the series finale, especially after returning to such a memorable theme with the penultimate, “Two Story Town?”

The most fun thing about writing the finale was getting in a room together with the guys [Blake McCormick and Kevin Biegel] and actually talking about all of that. We had to do “Change approved!” because that always makes me so happy. We had to bring in her wine glass; we had do her ridiculous over the top love for her son; had to do Busy Philipps meandering story, and I liked that we called her on it for once. We had to find a way for Brian Van Holt to be in it, even though he had moved on. We had to find a way to hit on Andy and Bobby’s love for each other. We were able to do everything for us. It’s a show of fun callbacks and continuity for people, so we wanted to throw in as much as we possibly could.

Speaking of Big Chuck, what was the discussion like over whether or not it should survive the season?

We really do it on a whim. We don’t have a lot of forethought, but we knew she would break one because she always does.

Were there attempts to bring Brian Van Holt back physically for the series finale?

He was working [on another project], so it was just easier to work him in [via iPad]. The second we put him on an iPad, he could shoot seven days of work in one day, so we were able to make it happen production-wise. He sat in front of the camera and did all of his lines for 33 pages, across the episodes of the season, all at once. It probably took him like an hour and a half! We knew we needed him in the final season, but he had another gig we had to work around.

How did you work the final season of Cougar Town into your already busy schedule, with NBC’s Undateable, TBS’ now canceled Ground Floor, as well as two CBS pilots?

The honest truth is that I would be disingenuous and grossly self-aggrandizing if I was not giving huge credit to Blake McCormick and Melody Derloshon, who both were just super cool about staying the whole time. It’s cool when you are with friends or a group who don’t feel threatened when you come back. I did as many cuts as I could, and I contributed whatever I could — and so did Kevin — but I don’t want to steal any thunder from the group. They were nice enough to let us come back and write the finale and participate whenever we could. And look, with my wife as one of the stars, I could never completely get away! If she didn’t like a joke, it would be on my pillow like, “Do you want to fix this?” (Laughs.)

Looking back on the series as a whole, at what point, if at all, did you step back and look at what you were creating and feel like you were doing something unique that could sustain for 100 episodes?

We started out thinking we were going to make a campy show about a recently single woman in her 40s really getting to be a kid for the first time, and it just wasn’t in our wheelhouse as writers, and I didn’t like putting Courteney in those situations. She was game, and she was funny, but it wasn’t my favorite. Really quickly we sat down and said, “What is this show really about?” And we decided it was about a bunch of people — a divorced neighbor, an ex-husband that lives on a boat, a couple who has a really young kid and tied down by it, a townie who’s outgrown her townie roots, a nerdy, wiser than his years kid. We decided it was ultimately a show about people that would all be very good for each other. Then we did [the seventh episode of the first season, “Don’t Come Around Here No More”] where they challenged [Jules] to spend a day alone, and by the end of that day, not only was she hanging out with everyone and having a barbecue, but she seduced them back by promising Andy that she’d create the full Shawshank Redemption experience. And at the end of the day, it wasn’t just her: everybody realized they’d rather be hanging out with each other drinking a beer or a glass of wine and goofing around. That second the show was really working creatively, and we knew what the show was really about.

Did you have the expectation of hitting the milestones of 100 episodes or so many seasons at that point?

No. I did feel there was a missed opportunity by me because with modern TV, we lose audience members quick, and if I had known that right at the very beginning, people wouldn’t have thought the show was about older women screwing around with younger dudes. That’s why we have such a love-hate relationship with the title! But once we figured out what this show was, one of the writers actually tweeted that we thought the show would go on for six years and 100 episodes, and we made it.

There are so many pieces of the show that have taken off with the audience — from Penny Can to truth guns — but which are the ones that have meant the most to you?

In a very odd way on the writing side, I look forward to and really like the changing title card every week, believe it or not, because we went through such a self-hatred of why we titled the show Cougar Town and “Well, it got the show picked up, but now it’s not what it’s about, and now should we retitle it? No, to hell with it, let’s just own it; it is what it is.” That’s kind of a fun process that makes me smile when I see it. Otherwise, my favorite moments are not really stuff I created, to tell you the truth, as much as it is watching the real life elements come in. The shows that work really well, you want to hang out with the people, and you become friends in real life. The finale works because I forced each person within the show to say goodbye to each other, and how tight they were and that emotion was all real because they actually did give a shit about each other. So to me, the most fun was watching all of those relationships develop. It was a show about adult friendship, and because of that people love each other but they’re also going to drive each other crazy, so the real gift about the show was being able to work with people you want to hang out with anyway. The coolest thing about Cougar Town was the family feel to it.

What did you think of the Cougar Town finale? Leave your thoughts in the comments section below.

Twitter: @danielletbd