Michael Schur
Michael Schur
Michael Herbert Schuris an American television producer and writer, best known for his work on the NBC comedy series The Office and Parks and Recreation, the latter of which he co-created along with Greg Daniels. He also co-created the FOX comedy series Brooklyn Nine-Nine. Schur is also known for his small role on The Office as Mose Schrute, the cousin of Dwight Schrute...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScreenwriter
Date of Birth29 October 1975
CityAnn Arbor, MI
CountryUnited States of America
Every city, every town, every region in USA has these weird things - the way they pronounce words, or what they call soda, or how people drive. It's a huge country, and there's all these strange pockets of behavioral patterns that social anthropologists could spend lifetimes researching and reporting on.
You can't achieve anything entirely by yourself. There's a support system that is a basic requirement of human existence. To be happy and successful on earth, you just have to have people that you rely on.
Mockumentary formats are great for a couple of things. One of them is delivering the toughest part of any sitcom episode, what writers call "pipe" - the nuts and bolts of the story where you explain what's happening, the boring plot stuff.
With mockumentaries, the conceit is that the characters are being interviewed, so you can start a scene and cut to a character looking at the camera and saying, "I'm working on this project," instead of having to figure out ways for people to talk naturally about what they're doing. You see this problem in pilots - people end up explaining things to each other that they'd never explain in real life.
I love crazy names. It comes right from Monty Python and Woody Allen - nothing in the world makes me giggle more than a funny name. It became a thing I started doing when I wrote. If a person came into a store and said, "How much is this apple?" that person would have an insane name.
The news is a public service. It's a way to inform people of what's going on in their world. And when you make it about ratings and make it about ad dollars, there's no incentive to inform people. The incentive is to be sensationalistic and get as many people to watch as you can without any regard for truth or objectivity.
It's so much easier to write for an actor than for an imaginary character and then try to fit that character to an actor. It doesn't work very often in my experience.
I hate this phrase, but it's a "can do" attitude [that's important] that, whatever you do in life, you should have.
Despite the insanity of using whether you would want to have a beer with someone as a legitimate reason for voting for or against them, I always felt that is indicative of a massive problem in politics: It matters as much what your personality is as how smart you are or how good you are at your job. That is a huge, huge problem. A lot of people who are very smart or very good at their jobs are not people I would want to ever have a beer with - but I would want them making massive policy decisions with huge implications for the future of the planet.
I got a lot of texts from friends and emails from friends and most of them were just pure jealousy.
You should be nice to people because it's better to be nice to people than mean to people, not because you think there's something in it for you.
People do things with terrible motivations and those motivations are selfish and self-interested and financially driven.
I think that that the main problem with a lot of social media stuff in terms of ratings is it's a very skewed motivation.
I stopped using Twitter for a while just because I got sick of it and I started using it again, but I don't check the "mentions."