A few weeks before the New York Comic-Con on the 2 train, I met Jason Jones and Samantha Bee.
It was a dreary fall Tuesday so I didn’t hound them for pictures even though I was/am a major Daily Show fan. But it was a pleasant encounter that started with Jason letting me go first out of the car.
Fast forward to NYCC, and they’re sitting next to me in the press rooms. It’s the end of the day and they’re exhausted but I still felt the energy and passion both Jones and The Detour producer Samantha Bee, former The Daily Show correspondents, had about their newest endeavor. A half-hour comedy coming to TBS, The Detour is based on true experiences (cranked to eleven) about their family vacations that go off the rails. Perhaps literally. You can expect carnage.
The shadow of The Daily Show looms over them after a combined decade of enlightening serious issues through comedy. Unsurprisingly, The Detour might live up to that legacy. Uniquely a ten-episode serial — meaning you can’t just “jump in” with episode five — Jones and Bee are confident they’re going where comedy is headed, and that’s to prestige-level storytelling.
“People are dipping their toes in on HBO a bit. Veep is a little bit like that, Silicon Valley is a little bit like that too. I think no one’s really dove in fully. I think this is one of the first shows,” Jones says to me.
As one of the first comedies to attempt this level of storytelling, I wondered if envelope-pushing comedy would be The Detour‘s M.O. But Jones quickly dismisses the notion. “I never look at that,” he says. “I think that’s shocking for the sake of shocking. I don’t really come around to writing like that. I think [The Detour will come] from an honest perspective.
Jones and Bee illustrate to the press table an example of exactly what kind of comedy The Detour will be serving up, and it’s a concoction born of dirty sex between National Lampoon and mumblecore. “The first act [of episode two] is just a frank discussion about the mechanics of sex. It’s not speaking in euphemism. It’s just two eleven year olds discussing what actually happens. It’s just a really uncomfortable conversation that I don’t want to be telling. The wife does. Then we switch half way through. Then, we argue about it. The semantics of, no, you don’t do that. Then we get into a fight about how we actually have sex and…” he begins to laugh.”I don’t want to go there.”
“It’s pretty nuanced actually,” remarks Samantha Bee. “I think it takes it in a very authentic direction actually.”
Jones adds: “I think people would look at that and think, oh, that’s shocking. For some people, that’s shocking. [But] it was never intended, like ‘Here, this is going to be shocking.’ We’re going to shock the world by having a frank sex talk. It’s just a conversation you need to have with your children.”
Bee says that the scene in episode two was inspired from a conversation between their own children when “they literally had no idea how babies were made.”
“Had no idea how one thing got into another thing,” she adds.
A lot of The Detour was inspired by experiences Jones and Bee had on their own family vacations. While none went truly haywire, they say there have been strippers, drugs, and mail order brides. Kinda. “That was like a side bar like when I went to Russia,” Jones jokes, “but, that’s a different story.”
But as long as The Detour has been “rattling around” Jones and Bee’s heads, it took even longer to convince anyone to bring it to production. “No network wanted it because it’s too racy for network sitcoms.” But as their reputation at Daily Show rose, so did The Detour‘s chances. “You gain fans along the way,” Jones illustrates. “You have cocktails with people and they’re like, ‘Do you have any ideas?’ I got tons of ideas.”
A “regime change” at TBS was the stroke of luck they needed. “When we tried the pilot, we met with the new network president and he’s like, ‘The pilot is great. It’s a fantastic episode. I’d love it to go darker.'”
“They’ve let us explore more than we ever thought a network would let us explore,” Bee says.
Jason explains that when pilots go into production there’s “like 40 people standing around from the network.”
“When we shot this series, zero. They were like, ‘Done it? Good. Here’s a box of money. We trust you.'” The level of trust the network gave The Detour is something Bee says she’s never experienced before, and that The Detour‘s creativity “hangs on us.”
The result? Something more… story driven. And “very relationship driven.”
“The one thing that we love the most , when we shot the pilot and we reflected on, was how real the family relationship was given everything that was happening to them. The context, the situations they were in, we always felt the love of the family. No matter how much they fought and they do. No matter where they were, you emerge with a great feeling about these characters. You want to learn about the characters. I think that’s how we deviate from comedies that are on the air right now.”
“They’re funny but they’re very gag-based,” Bee adds, pointing out that most comedies have “a joke every 20 seconds. There’s a formula to the way that jokes are placed in popular television comedies right now. It’s all pacing.”
“We build to a laugh,” Jones says. “We’re all full of not subverting it with shit jokes and pop culture references and a fart joke to get to. We’ll build in something. There’s like ten references in one episode to this one thing, and you go, ‘Why do they keep bringing that up?’ At the end of episode, it all pays off.”
Jones reflects. “No one can laugh like a laugh track. We’re actually trying to laugh like human beings.”
The Detour will air on TBS in 2016.