At TCA over the weekend, former SNLers John Mulaney and Nasim Pedrad got the opportunity to talk about leaving the long-running NBC sketch show to work on the upcoming Fox sitcom Mulaney, which is set to premiere on Sunday, October 5th. Aside from making a joke about how he directly copied Seinfeld, Mulaney went on to describe his intentions behind choosing the more traditional multi-cam format for his show: “I just remember thinking to myself, the type of show I want to do is the type of show that I grew up on. [I thought] it would be really cool to try to do one with my sense of humor. Just an updated version of that old-school sitcom with maybe a weirder bent to it, and I hope I accomplished that.” As for leaving his job as an SNL writer, Mulaney said he “loved it at SNL” but “wanted to make a move to do something else.”
Nasim Pedrad had a slightly different response when asked about her recent SNL departure. “Obviously there’s nothing like that show and I was lucky to be there for five years. At some point you have to leave, and I can’t think of a better reason to leave than for this particular show and this particular cast.” When asked whether she would’ve stuck around at SNL had Mulaney not been in the cards, Pedrad said:
Yeah, had it not been for this show. Look, at the end of the day, these are two shows filming at the same time on opposite coasts. It wouldn’t have been practical to stay there. I don’t think it’s that common to get this kind of group together, and having experienced working with John at SNL, I couldn’t be more confident in his ability to write and star in a sitcom like this, truly.
