Intentional Callbacks in Comedy: A Conversation with ‘The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins’ Co-Creators and Showrunners Robert Carlock and Sam Means

Disgraced former football star Reggie Dinkins (Tracy Morgan) is on a mission to rehabilitate his image with the help of award-winning filmmaker Arthur Tobin (Daniel Radcliffe). In order to earn back the admiration of his fans and the respect of his family, Reggie will also have to confront the ghosts of his past.

10 episodes times 21 minutes.

A formula that comedy TV veterans Robert Carlock and Sam Means have seemingly mastered with their new comedy series The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins. Now, don’t get me wrong, should there be more than 10 episodes in this show’s first season – absolutely! But we’ll take what we can get (at least ‘til Season Two lands). And what we get in these treasured 21 minutes over 10 episodes is comedic gold. It’s a cozy viewing experience. A blissful 21 minutes where you can tune out of the “real world” and be at peace with Tracy Morgan as the loveable goof Reggie Dinkins, and his inner circle, which includes (the) Erika Alexander, Daniel Radcliffe, Bobby Moynihan, and newcomers Precious Way and Jalyn Hall.

Tonally, the show is reminiscent of previous comedy trailblazers like 30 Rock, Parks and Rec, and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt – which makes perfect sense – these are Carlock’s and Means’ voices through and through. The humor is sharp, witty, non-judgmental and the stories are wholesome with oddball quirks. The characters are uniquely their own, navigating life and all it's ups and downs, all the while adding to the humor and to the stories that unfold.

Broadcast TV is having a "comeback" with their latest slate of comedies and dramas rolling out from NBC (and pilot season slowly making it's comeback as well) - and we're here for it. And you really can't go wrong with Tracy Morgan back on TV, doing what he does best. "We love Tracy Morgan. We love broadcast TV, and we love Tracy Morgan on broadcast TV. Let's keep doing it," Sam Means loveably quipped during our conversation.

In this conversation, Robert Carlock and Sam Means discuss the creation and development of their new comedy series, their approach to the mockumentary format, the importance of making characters like Reggie and Monica multifaceted, utilizing intentional callbacks and thematic elements, and their hope for future seasons with deeper character development.

This interview has been edited for content and clarity.

Sadie Dean: Let’s dive in and talk about setting up the cast of characters who are essentially all a work in progress and nailing the specificity of character voice, their actions and their character arc in this first season.

Robert Carlock: I love you describing them as all unfinished projects… It was really important to us to say, OK, we have Erika Alexander, she sure plays smart and competent with a depth and an inner life. But we didn't want her - and this was sort of a starting place - it would be very easy to make her always the voice of reason and the grown up. And it was something we had some experience with writing for Tina as Liz Lemon too. We wanted Liz Lemon to be able to make some really stupid mistakes [laughs] and to have her flaws.

So it was, what's the way into how that character played by that woman who is also still a work in progress - which I'm a fan of people who through their whole lives are works in progress. [laughs] That was a really fun thing to unlock with. She spent a lot of time and money on this really lovable, promising, other human being. And in some ways, she's right that may have been wasted time, and in some ways, she's blaming other people for maybe her own shortcomings, and that's something that she's grappling with there in middle life.

And so I feel like digging into her and knowing we had Erika pretty soon, because we had the dynamic between Arthur Tobin, played by Dan Radcliffe, and Tracy's [Morgan] character, Reggie, we sort of knew how we wanted them both to realize, ‘oh, we both made this one huge life mistake,’ and it was like backing up to that character really opened the door for us when we figured out the ways in which Monica could be in a similar place.

Sam Means: Yeah, and finding the commonalities there as well. Reggie obviously has some arrested development from having been a celebrity and then that having been kind of locked in time with his scandal, and having trouble moving past that. But we thought it was interesting to explore Monica's character and the ways in which she's also been the victim and the self-victim of that sort of arrested development where she had devoted herself entirely to Reggie's career, and the scandal had also stopped her from moving forward. And so, they both had this sort of lost 20 years in a way, and they're both dealing with that in different ways.

Robert: And the one thing we didn't quite have time to do in these 10 [episodes], so hopefully we'll get to do more, is clearly Bobby Moynihan's character, Rusty, has made some serious mistakes. [laughs] He's perfectly happy where he is, especially if he can be close to his friend Reggie. But I really hope we get to dig into where his life branched in the wrong directions to be living in the basement. When did he first move in? And why exactly?

Sadie: The mockumentary turned meta-documentary, and implementing Arthur Tobin into this journey. How did that come to be, especially in terms of the trajectory of this season?

Sam: Well, that's a nice thing about the mockumentary format, and owning it the way we do, is that the cameras are discovering, ostensibly, the story at the same time as we are. Maybe in a future season, they have may become convinced that the story isn't about Reggie at all, and it's about the neighbor who was burying something in the backyard. [laughs]

We've done some mockumentary episodes on 30 Rock. We did the “Queen of Jordan” episode, and we did the “Party Monster” episode with Jon Hamm on Kimmy Schmidt. And we really just enjoyed doing them as a format. Enjoyed telling stories that way. It's a different way to inhabit the space and have the awareness of the cameras.

And of course, we've been watching The Last Dance, Beckham, these sports documentaries that are about a figure like Reggie is in this and so it made sense thematically. But then one of the things we really want to do was be really rigorous about the mockumentary format. It's not just that people can look at the camera. It's not just that cameras are there. It's not just that you can have the talking heads. It's that the cameras are a presence that the characters are aware of, and that we want to be sure that that actually affected their behavior.

Robert: And similarly, and it can be a bit of a puzzle, but we like puzzles, finding those moments, and hopefully we can continue to find them and earn them where the people think our characters think they're not on camera. It tells the viewers so much about what's about to be said, because they think they're getting away with it.

And so, fortunately, we live in basically a surveillance state, and the idea of the cameras are everywhere… There's an episode… where Corbin Bernen's character is just getting money at an ATM. How are we going to see this scene? Well, what if he's getting out, he's on hard times, he's getting out $10 from the ATM. [laughs] And you imagine, ‘OK, well, Tobin somehow convinced the bank to let him have that footage down the road,’ and that was always a fun thing to do. But it also allows in that there are cameras everywhere, whether it's a smart fridge or someone's phone. It allows you to still hopefully see everything and see those unguarded moments as much as the kind of guarded moments.

Sam: Yeah, and one thing, I think hopefully we'll be able to explore more in the future, and it comes up a little bit in an episode where there is a reality show that Brina is auditioning for. But Brina and Carmelo, as a younger generation, who have grown up with reality TV as a fact of life with --

Robert: They think of the camera differently.

Sam: Right, so there's generational differences between how you think of the fact of being on camera. And Reggie grew up in his own way on camera, but that's such a different thing... he's an actual celebrity, as opposed to reality celebrity.

Sadie: And I would assume, you guys putting on your producer cap, that it's a win-win production wise, that you're also shooting additional coverage with these cameras?

Robert: Good question. Those are working cameras. And so, they're always getting something. And some of the directors really leaned into the kind of, ‘while we're just on a turnaround, let's just shoot some stuff.’

Sam: But it's a fun opportunity.

Robert: Yeah, it was a fun thing. I think our camera ops came from the documentary world... because they're all so good at doing the traditional thing, which is, ‘I know there's a line coming, so I'm going to be on that person.’ And you have to get the muscle memory of, ‘No, I'm reacting, I have to pretend I've never seen this before.’ [laughs] And they got great at it.

Sam: Which is part of us, again, owning the fact that the cameras are actually there, they are like a character on the show.

Sadie: It reminds me of that episode where Arthur Tobin is very adamant that he no longer wants to be part of the documentary, but the camera keeps going back to him, slowly panning toward him.

Sam: It helps that the cameramen maybe don't like him. [laughs]

Robert: That was another thing... that was another kind of character too, as you introduce into the world, like he at least tells himself that he's objective and isn't in his movies. I think he ends up being in all of his movies. [laughs] So building the process over the 10 episodes and hopefully still with some room to play in that where he allows himself to get drawn in and realizes he's part of this was also just a fun game to play with that same sort of camera panopticon.

Sam: It's fun to think about the show. It's fun to make. But on the episode, that's... Episode Five... Craig Robinson's character, Jerry Basmati, is a TV host, and he has his own TV cameras there, which were also operational cameras for us. And so, there are times where we can slip in between the footage of AM New Jersey, his show, and our documentary cameras, and whether they're aware of each other or not...

Robert: Also, him playing the game of he has this very public persona that's lovable and when dropping a facade, the game of like ‘it's AI, no one will ever believe that this is me.’ [laughs] The horrible world we live in is allowed for a lot of comedy tools for us. [laughs]

Sadie: [laughs] The art of the callback, and you guys are definitely masters at this. You and your writers have this wonderful knack of lining up the jokes and they land so beautifully. There’s a few callbacks that are fantastic, like Mike Carlson's character Nick, and now the Romeo and Juliet breadcrumb misdirect that you guys lay out in the first season. It’s intentional and not so heavy handed, and it lets the audience attempt to figure out what’s going on.

Robert: Yeah, I love this. There were some things that we thought we knew we wanted to do pretty early. In that we started Reggie with this goal of, if I can get into the Hall of Fame, a goal that I think we don't think is... we think he's wrong, right? It's not a cure all. It would be amazing if he could do it. So, we knew that we had to, by episode 10, be doing something about that. And that was always fun.

And as football fans and as long as the family is all invested, it's always fun to find episodes where all your characters have a common outside enemy. They're not just fighting with each other. It was a great bugbear in that way.

But I think, correct me if I'm wrong Sam, sort of what led us to that as we were getting into the middle of the season to start talking about that and thinking of, OK, how can we start to lay some things in with Carmelo? … it could feel a little abstract and cold. And I think with our cast, it came to life when you have Monica, and when we got Corbin and realized, ‘oh, he could be a part of that.’

You start to, I think, get away from just the mechanics of the Hall of Fame, but that always felt in the room a little like it was not dragging us down, but like we're missing something in the episodes. And I think that's kind of what led us to, all right, where is an opportunity for some surprise, kind of romantic, emotional stuff that we tried to bread crumb, but we also wanted it to be a surprise. And hopefully it works in both ways, and that'll be a really fun thing to pick up in season two.

Sam: And at the end of the season, we always want to give ourselves something to throw forward, so either a problem or a fun puzzle to then explore going forward.

Sadie: The mentor-mentee relationship between Monica and Brina is so refreshing to see, because like you said earlier, Monica could have been antagonistic and this brutal person --

Robert: And Brina could've been vapid.

Sadie: Yeah, exactly! And they're just these great people who are just supporting each other, and standing up for each other. Landing on that relationship and that bond, and settling in on that trajectory for this first season, when with those two.

Sam: One of the things we wanted to do very, very early on is for both those characters, but especially for Monica, to define her separate from Reggie. So much about this dynamic is about their past and their present, but to fill her out as a character, not just defined by her ex-husband, not just defined by her client as their main relationship is now. And then, same with Brina that there are certain expectations with which we tried to hint at, at subverting in the pilot, but not entirely she is the much younger, very pretty fiancé…

All these dynamics are so specific with the football career and the divergent family and everything. But sometimes that sort of specificity can allow you to fall into tropes more easily... And so right off the bat, the first things we want to establish was these characters are not necessarily their tropes, not necessarily their cliches, and that they don't have the relationships that you might expect.

Robert: We've worked with Bobby before. Obviously worked with Tracy. We've worked with Dan. We know Erika's skill set. You hire people like Jalyn [Hall] and Precious [Way] who have great auditions, but those auditions are limited, and I think we wrote some longer scenes that just never were in a script just to get a longer audition.

But in the pilot, Brina has that one nice scene with Reggie, but you don't know what you've got exactly, especially on a comic level, and everything else. And so, a lot of the fun, which episode was it… where she just kind of blew up in a table read… where she kind of goes head-to-head with Monica a little bit. And it's like, ‘you've got me wrong,’ just like the audience does, right?

Sam: [laughs] Going toe to toe with Erika freaking Alexander, holding her own…

Robert: [laughs] And just cracking themselves up as they were realizing what the relationship was that we were describing and just delighting in it, of like, oh, I underestimated her. And anyway, making them friends, so to speak, mentor-mentee, and generational divide and all that stuff was a really fun sort of machine to put into motion. It was something that we definitely thought about very intentionally from go.

Sam: ... And we talked about our intentions.

Robert: Realizing that Precious can do anything is really helpful.

Sam: Yeah. So much of writing can be and should be… working with what we're given, with the circumstances on the ground and not being ossified in our thinking, in what we thought we wanted. Seeing what we had in Precious and in Erika and in their dynamic at that first table read gave us the confidence and the tools to just expand that relationship even more than maybe we had thought we would.

Season One of The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins is now streaming on Peacock.