Michael Schur (Michigan, 46), US series titan, was in a car accident in 2005. Not bad, but important in the long run. “You had to strain your eyes to see a scratch on someone else’s bumper,” he protests today, from Zoom in Los Angeles. However, the driver demanded that the entire bumper be replaced, which would cost $850 (€1,200 today). “It was the time of Hurricane Katrina so I offered to donate the money to the Red Cross if he gives up the bumper. I announced it at work [el equipo de guionistas de The Office], and people started offering more money to pressure him. I came up and created a blog that went viral and it ended up being $25,000. So I started feeling bad about what I was doing and started calling philosophy professors to understand why.”
Three things emerged from the incident. First, a new bumper for the poor driver (plus $27,000 for the Red Cross). Second, the series The Good Place (2016-2020, on Netflix), an acclaimed afterlife comedy centered on moral philosophy, another hit at Schur’s gallery alongside The Office (2005-2013) and Hacks (2021. -2022). , which he produced, as well as Parks & Recreation (2009-2015) and Brooklyn 99 (2013-2021), which he created. And third, How to be perfect (Roca, available May 19), where this 19-time Emmy nominee wraps everything he’s learned from reading the great philosophers into a treatise on morality, where he teaches how man human is possible in this impossible world, good man.
Questions. Is an idea of what it means to be a good person ruining your social life?
Answer. Immanuel Kant doesn’t have to say that people are disgusting, that’s obvious. But understanding ethical theory allows me to see what irritates me so much about others and also not to do things that they might find irritating. Maybe I replaced those things with other things, like telling other people what they’re doing is annoying, which is annoying in itself. There is no definitive cure. Knowing about ethics and moral philosophy, just like knowing about football, helps when your team scores a goal: you understand why this misfortune happened to you.
P Speaking of football, an ethical person can enjoy the World Cup in Qatar knowing that the country is violating the rights of women, the LGTBI collective, that the stadiums were built in conditions close to slavery and that dozens of people have died playing their games ?
R I don’t think a global ban on World Cup fun will solve anything. It’s not fair to anyone. First, sport is fun and second, it strengthens the emotional bond with our friends and family. It is a crucial part of life, our identity and our personality. You can’t tell other people not to have fun at the World Cup. It occurs to me to say, “Enjoy football, but be aware that these games are being played in a place plagued by human rights abuses.” The biggest mistake we can make is to ignore anything sad to to stick with what is happy. It’s a mistake that is often made.
Michael Schur hosts the first season of “The Good Place” on an NBC set in August 2016. NBC (NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via)
P Nobody is just good or bad. But let’s imagine someone with power, in the worst-case scenario, blocking access to hospital care for, say, the elderly in nursing homes across an entire community, causing or exacerbating thousands of deaths. How do we rate that?
R I don’t know what explanation there could be for something like this being considered tolerable or permissible. It’s hard for me to believe that what you describe isn’t just perverted. Even during the pandemic, there was a food factory in the USA whose hygienic conditions weren’t great. Their executives made bets to see how many of their employees would get Covid: it was a game for them. This is pure evil. There are exceptions. They’re hard to find, but they’re there.
P In the book he also comments that freedom is a more hollow concept than it sounds.
R In the West, people lose their minds as soon as a politician realizes that something might pose some threat to freedom. It’s the American ideal, something everyone wants, and it’s true that no one can be happy unless they feel like they have no space to make their own decisions. The problem is that this idea is so idolized that few stop distinguishing between good, bad and worse freedoms. Sometimes the benefit of freedom is being able to sacrifice it for something more important. The most obvious example is 2020.
P The concept of freedom was a mine for whom that year.
R We were asked to help save lives for the greater good, stand two meters apart and wear a mask: by no means was it tyrannical excess. Nobody has forbidden us to live in our houses, read our books, listen to our music. But because the concept of liberty is so untouchable, 30 or 40% of the United States rebelled against these mandates, causing hundreds of thousands of additional infections, among other horrific consequences. I can think of nothing better that we can do as a country, as a planet, than to ask ourselves what freedom means and under what circumstances are we willing to voluntarily give up an eight-millionth part of it to save our neighbor. To prevent something terrible from happening again.
Amy Poehler, in a moment of the first chapter of the fourth season of Parks & Recreation. NBC (NBC Universal via Getty Images)
P One of his greatest creations was Leslie Knope, the enthusiastic tiny town hall officer in Parks & Recreation (2009-2015) who liked her blind faith in the system. At what times, right?
R This series had a very specific reason for coming out at a very specific time: in 2008, governments pulled us out of the financial crisis. It seemed to us that the end of the idea that government was something bad, perverted, a sucker for liberties, had come, something that arose when Ronald Reagan said in the 1980s that the eight most terrible words in the world were: ” I come from the government and I’m here to help.” This mentality has been sustained in the US for almost a quarter of a century, and I don’t understand why: It’s a very simplistic way of understanding executive power. But before the premiere of “Parks & Recreation Obama just bailed out several industries, like the auto industry, saving hundreds of thousands of jobs. The economy picked up, the banking system didn’t collapse, the lives of hundreds of thousands of people systematically improved. We thought how fallacious! that the Faith in the system would last Leslie Knope embodied the idea that when people see that the government is actually a nice group of people who really want to create a park where they can run around and play frisbee, these people are going to complain anyway. But it’s better to do the park than send it all to hell.
P Did you know that younger people today see this show as a scam and an example of how wrong their elders were?
R And I understand. The life of this generation, that of the young Millennials and Zetas, has been a succession of betrayals. Over and over again you have been promised things that have been denied. Prosperity, climate justice, social reform: things they should carry for decades to come. It’s normal that when they watch a show where the message is, ‘Working hard is difficult, but it’s the best thing you can do’, they reply, ‘But where’s the proof? From where?” Even reproductive rights have been taken away. I don’t blame young people for being so cynical about us.
Hannah Einbinder (left) and Jean Smart (right) as Deborah Vance, in a moment from the third chapter of Hacks.
P He now produces Hacks (HBO Max), pitting a highly selfish comics veteran, Deborah Vance, against her selfish assistant, a millennial comedian. Do we live in the antipodes of Knope’s ideal world?
R Leslie Knope was from the Obama era; Deborah Vance emerged from observing the struggles between first and third generation feminists. The series talks about how different the struggles of young and older women are. We can go back to Hillary Clinton’s campaign: some girls looked at her suspiciously because they didn’t think she was feminist enough, and her elders replied: “How dare you criticize her? He has suffered from misogynist attacks since day one. The intensity and purity of your ideals are due to the struggles she has fought to get you to the point where you can ask for more. Things have changed since Leslie Knope appeared and Hacks was even published: TV is very good at recording these changes. Our characters are not the same because the world is not the same.
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