TVLINE | Some shows go for slice-of-life finales, where you know life will go on exactly as we’ve seen it, episode after episode. Instead, Dave, Gemma, and Grover move back to Michigan, breaking up the Butlers and Johnsons. Why the big move?
SCHIFF | We just felt like we needed a big story with Calvin and Dave. Something big needed to happen in one of their lives. The Butlers had two new daughters-in-law and two new grandchildren [on the way], so to balance the scale, it couldn’t just be that the Johnsons were putting up new wallpaper. They needed something big in their lives.
MARTIN | We were taking a wide look at the show — from the very first frame of the very first episode — and the whole show was about Dave and Calvin, and Dave trying to make Calvin his best friend. He loved Calvin, and was so effusive and obvious about it, and we felt like the real bookend would be to drag Calvin kicking and screaming into Dave’s emotional turf, and to make him say, in one way or another, “I love you, too.” It took eight years to get Calvin there, but that was the bookend the show deserved.
TVLINE | The penultimate episode, which set up the double wedding and revealed that both Marty and Courtney, and Malcolm and Mercedes were expecting, very much felt like Part 1 of your series finale. Technically, you only have the one episode, but were you thinking of this as a two-parter?
SCHIFF | You know, it was never on the schedule as a two-parter. Even the last three were really sort of a three-act [story] of how the Johnsons go. We’d obviously been planting seeds along the way, including in the very first episode [of Season 8] when Dave lost his job. And then we began to understand why Gemma would move. She had a great career, but [had grown] disenchanted with that.
Pretty early on, we said Marilu [Henner, who plays Dave’s mom Paula] should come back and lure Dave back to Michigan, and we checked in months before. We thought we’d have her either in the fourth to-last, or third-to-last episode, and she was very happy to clear her schedule for us, which was great. And it all seemed to fall into place.
TVLINE | You’ve been building toward this big double wedding… but then we don’t actually see the wedding. Was that a matter of logistics? Limited runtime? Or was there never really a plan to show the ceremony itself, knowing audiences have seen their fair share of TV weddings before?
MARTIN | That’s the thing: We’ve seen TV weddings a million times before. We didn’t have anything [to set this one apart]. We didn’t want someone to come in and say, “Stop the wedding!” We wanted to make sure we got the obligatory stuff out of the way so we could just have fun and have our characters sit in that living room, be on that couch, and say their final peace to each other.
SCHIFF | We realized we had to isolate them. We had to get them in the living room without all the [wedding guests] and all the music. We needed to strike that balance between being big and fun, which we also have — and Calvin has his speech at the end [of the reception] — but also have enough time to get [our characters] alone in different pairings.
We lost a couple of things along the way. I mean, I’ll tell you that we had a [storyline] that I liked that would have been good. We thought that Marty was worried about telling his dad that Courtney was going to be taking time off now that they have two kids. But actually, it turned out that Marty was going to [step away from The Fuse Box] because he didn’t want to be in cars his whole life. He was a rocket scientist. He loved [running] this company with his dad, but he had to go back to his first love, and Courtney was basically going to take his spot at The Fuse Box — which is a thing that I know happened, but is not in the show because we just didn’t have enough time.
TVLINE | You already answered part of my next question, which was whether you had a checklist of which characters you wanted to see share one last scene together — but I feel like you hit every possible pairing I would have thought to include: Calvin and Dave, Calvin and Tina, Tina and Gemma… Calvin, Tina, Marty, and Malcolm… Dave, Gemma, and Grover….
SCHIFF | A week before, we realized we’d never done a scene with just Courtney and Mercedes, so we gave them a moment together just because it’s nice when you pair people in ways you don’t usually pair them. It’s fun to see what happens.
TVLINE | I also appreciated that in the finale — because so few sitcoms acknowledge when two characters are essentially strangers — that when Gemma asked Marty, Malcolm, and their brides if they would visit them in Kalamazoo, Mercedes whispered something along the lines of, “I don’t really know you.” And she’s right! She doesn’t know Gemma all that well.
SCHIFF | [Laughs] I’m glad you liked that. Amber was so funny with that.
TVLINE | She’s great. I was happy when I saw she’d been cast this year. I loved her on NBC’s “The Carmichael Show,” which was one of those great, throwback multi-cams that came and went, and never got its proper due.
SCHIFF | In the Season 7 finale, we had mentioned that there was a Housewife named Mercedes Selznick, which was not a name that we had really given much thought to or anything. Then when we cast Amber, it was such a godsend because they just had such chemistry — and we knew if we wanted Malcolm to do something pretty quickly, but still be on his side, it would only work if they had chemistry — and thank the Lord, they did. Because as soon as you saw them together, you thought, “I want to see them together.” That was just lightning in a bottle.
TVLINE | The final scene doesn’t include Marty, Courtney and Daphne, or Malcolm and Mercedes. It’s just our two central couples — Calvin and Tina, and Dave and Gemma — and, of course, Grover. Why not include the entire cast?
MARTIN | I think it was mostly driven by Beth feeling like that foursome was such her world [on this show], and it was going to be hard for her not to have that goodbye moment for them. And once she put it in those terms, we realized, “Oh, she’s right.” It’s where the show started, it’s where the show should end. There was a point where we were going to end on the toast at the wedding, but it killed us that we weren’t giving people that moment. And then, of course, once we decided to have [Dave give Calvin] the kombucha in the jar, the whole thing came together.
SCHIFF | It was hard, because Sheaun and Marcel, and Skye and Amber are so great. But it just felt like if we brought every character back for that last tag, we were going to get bogged down with it.
TVLINE | It would have felt like a roll call.
SCHIFF | Exactly. I mean, obviously, Grover’s in it because it would be weird if he wasn’t getting in the car.
TVLINE | You could have had Grover chase after the car because they forgot him.
MARTIN | [Laughs] We did have a version that I was fighting for a couple of months ago — which was that Grover says, “I’m going to stay here and finish the school year…” But, you know, I lost [that one].
