With a nod to the Golden Girls, Mid-Century Modern embraces an old style for new laughs
Mid-Century Modern, starring Nathan Lane (left) as Bunny, pushes the envelope more than traditional sitcoms.
Can a classic sitcom prosper in the streaming age? Max Mutchnick and David Kohan certainly believe so. The duo, long-time writing and producing partners who had a signature half-hour hit with Will & Grace, have a new show, a new home, and new boundaries for Mid-Century Modern, their sitcom about a trio of gay men who decide to consolidate their friendship by sharing a home.
But to the comfortably chatty pair, it’s still the sitcom format they know and will forever love: the television genre of multiple cameras shooting on a studio set in front of a live audience, an A and B-plot, and gag upon gag advancing the story. Add audience whoops and some lessons learnt as seasoning.
“It’s what we’re comfortable with,” Kohan says. “It’s easier to know when we’re doing something right, and more importantly it’s easier to know when we’re doing something wrong. You can isolate it and fix it quickly.”
Max Mutchnick (left), Nathan Lee Graham, Nathan Lane, Matt Bomer, and David Kohan promoting Mid-Centrury Modern in New York. Credit: CJ Rivera/Invision/AP
Adds Mutchnick: “And most importantly 95 per cent of the time, we’re able to get home and have a martini and dinner. It’s the absolute best. People like to make fun of [the sitcom], but it’s a brilliant way to work and the turnaround of being able to see a script shot five days later is an amazing thing.”
With all 10 episodes directed by sitcom legend James Burrows (Cheers, Friends), Mid-Century Modern feels familiar. It opens with one-liners at a funeral, as Bunny (Nathan Lane), Jerry (Matt Bomer) and Arthur (Nathan Lee Graham) say goodbye to their friend George. As gay men of a certain age (Jerry is younger), as they put it, the trio have lived through tumultuous change and experienced complicated lives.
The next step, they decide, is to live together in bra magnate Bunny’s oversized Palm Springs home. In true sitcom fashion, it’s an act of comforting solidarity and a way for Bunny to distract his very Jewish-American mother, Sybil (Linda Lavin). Soon the snippy retorts and silly complications take hold; by the end of the first episode there’s a group dance sequence.
But come the second episode and there’s some innuendo-laden dialogue delivered, which hits the line Mutchnick and Kohan had to stop at on Will & Grace. But here, after a moment of demure politeness, that line is crossed with gusto. Mid-Century Modern was commissioned for Disney’s various streaming platforms and the old broadcast network rules do not apply.
Jerry (Matt Bomer), Bunny (Nathan Lane) and Arthur (Nathan Lee Graham) reunite at the funeral of their longtime friend George in Mid-Century Modern.
“Being careful was part of the craft, and we would have gone that way this time if [Disney] wanted, but they’ve been very open and the world has changed,” Mutchnick says. “Hopefully, the show opens the door for an audience that hasn’t come to this form before because they think it’s something stodgy and something their parents watched.”
For Bomer, who has spent much of the last decade “exploring repression and trauma” in explicitly gay dramas such as The Normal Heart, The Boys in the Band, and Fellow Travelers, Mid-Century Modern was the comic change he needed. Jerry is the good-hearted hunk, irrepressibly friendly or as Arthur, a New York fashion maven puts it, “a mercilessly upbeat Ken doll”.
“We talked about iconic fools on television shows past that had inspired the role for them,” Bomer says. “That, for me, was a good launching point in terms of context for what direction they wanted Jerry to go in. It was everything from Woody on Cheers to Rose on Golden Girls to Edith on All in the Family.”
Bomer, who is an executive producer on the show, has to thread some tricky transitions as Jerry. The character’s innate goodness is used for stealthy purposes. You come to realise Jerry was excommunicated from his Mormon community as a young man because he was gay, and is estranged from his family. Different episodes, with bittersweet laughs, skilfully open up a painful past.
“What makes Max and David such great writers is that in a medium that moves so fast, they put so much thought into everything,” Bomer says. “I love that Jerry carries all that around inside him, but the public persona is the golden retriever. He’s had a lot of difficult experiences which makes this family which accepts him for who he is all the more important.”
Foor Matt Bomer, who plays Jerry, Mid-Century Modern, was the comic change he needed.
Although he did a six-episode arc on the Will and Grace revival in 2018, playing the career-minded boyfriend of Eric McCormack’s Will, Bomer had to fine-tune his sitcom performance skills for Mid-Century Modern. The live audience and the last-minute rewrites are second nature to Mutchnick and Kohan, but Bomer needed to master a very exacting skill set.
“It is its own style of acting. It borrows heavily from the theatre, it requires a certain kind of performance, it requires physical comedy,” Bomer says. “A lot of it is made from wide shots so you can’t just rely on the intensity of your thought in a close-up. It’s also very fast, some of the lines you’ve had at best for 72 hours and at worst two minutes. You find your footing as you go.”
That swift turnaround from page to production was put to sad but satisfying use on Mid-Century Modern. Near the end of production in 2024, Lavin, a stage and screen veteran whose credits included the hit 1970s sitcom Alice, passed away from lung cancer at the age of 87. Mutchnick and Kohan, who had based the character of Sybil on his late mother, channelled the sudden loss into the show, writing and shooting a new episode within a week.
“It was the most difficult writing assignment we’ve ever had to take on,” Mutchnick says. “To experience something this traumatic and profound and then turn around and write about that experience and put it on a stage was a tall order, but I think we did right by Linda.”
Adds Bomer: “It was completely shocking and heartbreaking. The floor dropped out beneath us all. Linda was so vibrant and so vital. They wrote a wonderful episode. She led the set with such a grace and kindness. I never thought to ask her age because she was so timeless.”
Mid-Century Modern is now streaming on Disney+
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