Greg Garcia dips into his Northern Virginia upbringing for Season Two of ‘The Millers.’
By Orrin Konheim
When TV producer and writer Greg Garcia cast Will Arnett as the protagonist for his latest show, “The Millers,” he didn’t anticipate how the Canadian actor would respond to Garcia’s preferences in sportswear.
“Will’s a big Toronto Maple Leaf fan, so it’s hard to wrestle him into a Caps jersey, whereas on my other shows the characters are OK being Redskins fans,” says Garcia of his penchant for dressing his characters in hometown fan flair, mainly for the perks he gets from it. “I put a character with Capitols gear and then we get to meet Ted Leonsis and go to a game with him. My middle son (Nate) is into hockey and he got to go to a game with him and meet Ovechkin, and that sort of trumps anything we do on the show,” says Garcia. “If we get to meet Ovechkin, we win.”
Best known for creating “My Name is Earl” and “Raising Hope,” the Emmy Award-winning writer has been living in Hollywood and enjoying a career that’s spanned 20 years. A native of Arlington and a 1988 graduate of Yorktown High School, he often drops references to his Northern Virginia roots in the five shows he’s executive produced. Aside from his affinity for dressing his characters in Capitals and Redskins gear, Garcia has included references to his uncle’s Arlington-based lawn mower company, Better Lawn Care, and used the name and colors of his alma mater for a high school reunion episode on “Yes Dear.”
The Millers” gives Garcia a much easier excuse to throw in Northern Virginia references as the show is set in Leesburg.
The sitcom, which premieres its second season October 20, stars Arnett as local newscaster Nathan Miller whose divorce prompts his parents, played by Margo Martindale and Beau Bridges, to spontaneously decide to get divorced as well. The show also stars Jayma Mays, best known for “Glee,” as his sister and J.B. Smoove, from “Curb Your Enthusiasm” and “Saturday Night Live,” as his trusted friend.
Garcia’s reasoning for setting the sitcom in Washington’s western suburb is strategic: Starting in a small-market would give the show’s protagonist a built-in goal of eventually “hitting it big” and moving up to broadcasting in D.C. Garcia knew when he wrote the script that a Leesburg affiliate didn’t exist, but he picked the town because he’s been there and has friends who’ve lived there. “I’m not really portraying [Leesburg] one way or another. In the past, when it’s a fictitious place, I took a license to make sure it’s a weird town,” he says.
Garcia’s “The Millers” marks a stylistic return to the classic multi-camera sitcoms that he worked on before making a name for himself as a creator of TV shows featuring offbeat blue-collar characters with hearts of gold.
Partially inspired by the 1987 classic film “Raising Arizona,” “Raising Hope” stars Lucas Neff as a simpleton who learns very suddenly he has a daughter. He raises her with his parents, who view the situation as a second chance to right the wrongs of raising their own son.
“Mr. Garcia has a gift for lampooning blue-collar yokels in a way that endears rather than repels,” wrote Alessandra Stanley of the New York Times in her initial review of “Raising Hope.”
In response to whether he considers his characters blue collar, Garcia says he generally is drawn to material about relatable characters.
“I like ‘Friends‘ and ‘Frasier,’ those were good shows but as far as their problems, they didn’t seem like real problems to me. As far as “Raising Hope,” you can do a show with actual problems. I tend to care about that more,” says Garcia.
Similarly, Garcia’s other big hit, “My Name is Earl” centers around a petty thief whose sudden stroke of fortune leads him to make a list of all the wrongs he’s made on the gullible townsfolk and make amends with them.
Garcia explains that “The Millers” has the feel of a traditional sitcom because of the demands of his time slot and the nature of CBS’s programming. While this type of show isn’t as groundbreaking as “Raising Hope” or “My Name is Earl,” Garcia isn’t ashamed to work in this format. He points out that his first originally conceived show, “Yes, Dear,” was in the traditional sitcom format and was his highest-rated program. The show, about a pair of siblings raising young kids with their husbands in the same house, is still running on Nick at Nite.
That his traditional sitcoms and offbeat character studies all have in common, however, is that they draw from Garcia’s personal life. Nathan Miller’s immediate family is loosely based on Garcia’s parents, Natalie and Tom, and sister, Shelley Garcia Stoker.
“The life situations in ‘The Millers’ are fictitious. There’s no divorces in my family and people aren’t moving back in with one another. But the characters are real. I try to picture what the real people in my life would do if they were put into these fictitious situations,” says Garcia. “If Will Arnett [‘s character] is teaching Margo Martindale [‘s character] how to drive … what if I had to teach my mother how to drive, all the voices are already in my head.”
“It’s not a documentary,” adds his mother Natalie Garcia. “There’s probably more truth in it then we’d like to believe, but it is hopefully highly exaggerated.”
While Greg’s father, Tom, shares the name as his TV counterpart, Natalie vetoed the idea of using her name for the show. “When I read the pilot script for that, I’d suggested I’d done my time,” she says, referring to a character named after her on “Yes, Dear.”
Natalie and Tom are both life-long Arlington residents who met shortly after high school at a bar in D.C. Tom graduated Bishop O’Connell and Natalie went to Yorktown.
As for whether her classmates were surprised to hear of her son’s success, Natalie says all of her friends from high school have known Greg and his sister since they were born, and have followed Greg’s career from the beginning.
In addition to his parents, nearly all of Greg’s uncles, aunts and cousins live in the area. “I’m pretty much the sole outlier,” jokes Garcia.
Growing up in a suburban Arlington with his sister Shelley, Garcia had a relatively idyll existence immersed in everything from Legos to soccer and baseball and a stint on the Yorktown wrestling team.
“I was a normal student in the sense that when I applied myself, I did fine. I always enjoyed English and philosophy classes,” says Garcia, who stood out more than anything for his sense of humor.
“He was one crazy, funny non-stop kidder,” says childhood friend Javier Montes, who still maintains close ties with the Garcia family. “No one thought he was necessarily going be a huge success like this, but everyone thought he was funny and outgoing and had a bright future ahead of him.”
It wasn’t until the end of his college career at Frostburg State University that Garcia figured out how to channel his sense of humor into a writing career.
A major of speech communications, which he readily admits to declaring because of the light course load, led him to enroll in a Writing for Television class that was partnered with the now-defunct college outreach program from Warner Brothers Studios where they launch a submissions contest for spec scripts from college students throughout the country.
Garcia wrote a “spec script” of “Cheers” that won him the contest. He doesn’t remember too much about it now except that it had dream sequences.
As his prize for winning the contest, Warner Brothers flew Garcia to Los Angeles and invited him to the set of a sitcom for a week.
He shadowed the writer’s room on the show “Room for Two” and he told enough jokes that the show runner invited him to stay past the first week. Unfortunately, Warner Brothers only paid Garcia’s hotel expenses for one week. When the studio found out he was still staying at the hotel, he was kicked out and promptly sent home.
Garcia returned home to a job with another rising media celebrity. He talked his way into a D.C. sports radio station as a board operator after he graduated. His host was the now-famous ESPN’s “Pardon the Interruption” host Tony Kornheiser, who, at the time, was a newspaper columnist making the transition to sports radio.
It was as Kornheiser’s DJ that Garcia got his first introduction to D.C. audiences.
“My job was to push the buttons and [over the course of the show] he asked me questions. I nodded and he said, you can’t nod you had to talk. I told a joke and he liked that so he encouraged me to do it again,” recalls Garcia. “Eventually, I became a small part of the show.”
Garcia went back to work for Kornheiser’s radio program but continued saving his money with the goal to move to Hollywood eventually. “I was very lucky that my parents were supportive and Kornheiser was very supportive and said, ‘You always have a job here if you want to come back’,” says Garcia, about when he left for the West Coast.
Garcia stayed on a friend’s couch while taking extra work on the set of “90210.” Despite being a self-professed terrible extra who couldn’t properly hit his marks, he had a lot of fun with it. He ended up in the background of both the prom and graduation episodes and joked that he hit all the landmarks of high school.
“My wife, who I wasn’t even dating at the time, I sent a postcard to her and told her to look for me on 90210,” adds Garcia.
Garcia got his first steady gig as a production assistant for another popular ‘90s staple, “Step by Step,” doing everything from scrubbing trash cans and getting lunch for the crew. “It’s not like one thing leads to another. I was an extra because I needed a job and the extra money, and then I submitted applications to other jobs and worked up from there,” says Garcia.
It was his job as a production assistant that had Garcia encountering Hollywood royalty. When he and another production assistant spotted Warren Beatty on the lot, Garcia saw an opportunity to impress his fellow production assistant. He walked up to Beatty and told him his mother also attended Swanson Middle School in Arlington. Beatty acknowledged him and was starting to walk away when Garcia shouted the name of a teacher they both had. Beatty turned around and corrected him, saying he had a different teacher but knew of her and that led to a 15-minute conversation, resulting in Garcia’s mother getting to meet Beatty at an awards show years later.
Garcia has since found his hometown connection as a useful conversation starter with people like Beatty’s Oscar-winning sister Shirley MacLaine, Springfield- and Arlington-native Dave Grohl, Alexandria-native Casey Wilson (who guest starred on “The Millers”) and Arlington-native Sandra Bullock whom he met at the People’s Choice Awards.
After working his way through staff writing gigs on TV shows like “On My Own” and “Family Matters,” Garcia got his first opportunity at producing his own show based on the life of comedian Roy L. Watkins. The show was created by stand-up comedian and writer Warren Hutcherson who approached Garcia to write the pilot and serve as a supervising producer.
“It was not a case of write what you know,” explains Garcia. “It was a case of someone else who had a stand-up act and responding to his material.”
The show was titled “Built to Last.” It was cancelled after three episodes.
It was through drawing from his own experiences that Garcia was able to find success as a show writer three years later when he created “Yes, Dear” for CBS. The show, which ran from 2000-2006, centers around the clashes between two adult sisters and their husbands at different stages of life and parenthood, all while sharing a house.
Garcia borrowed from his own experiences as a new dad and the contrasting parenting styles between him and his sister.
Garcia also took on social issues in a comedic way with his cult show “My Name is Earl.” “If you can do something positive in your shows, I’m all for that. That was definitely a show where I liked the take on social issues,” said Garcia. ”It’s never too late to turn your life around and start doing good.”
While the quirky small-town atmosphere of Camden (Garcia named it after his son Camden; Natesville, in “Raising Hope,” is named after his second son Nate) seems like a far cry from the confines of Northern Virginia, it also comes from his childhood. Garcia had a friend who lived in a trailer park in Fairfax City. “I actually loved it over there,” says Garcia. “It was like Disneyland for me.”
His following TV series, “Raising Hope,” also had themes of redemption. The series is about a family that must take in their son’s baby after their mother goes on death row.
Similarly, while “Raising Hope” was guided by developmental needs and partially influenced by the Coen Brothers film “Raising Arizona,” it was also inspired by a lot of the characters in his family and of his personal experiences.
His show’s female characters are loosely based on the women in his life, his mother and sister. “I think I have a healthy fear of both those women because they’re both so strong and smart. I think they’re both incredibly frugal. They both worry about their sons no matter how old they are and how they may be absolutely fine. And they’ll still be very mothering and I think to a comedic degree we overemphasize all these thing.”
He points to the character Margo Martindale in “The Millers” in comparison with his own mother: “They’re both very controlling in a way but controlling in a way that you often don’t realize they’re controlling because they’re right and they’re often more right than wrong but they could be frustrating to a kid who doesn’t want to think of their mother as right most of the time and then you think but I know a better way to do this.”
For his father, Garcia looks to him for inspiration for Beau Bridges’ character. “My father’s the sweetest man in the world. You haven’t met anybody who doesn’t like him. He’s the sweetest man on the planet.”
For Garcia, it always comes back to his roots. Though the actors in his shows play the part, gleaning characteristics of Garcia’s own family, his hurdle for the upcoming season of “The Millers” will be to try and continue his trademark sign of sports paraphernalia, although Will Arnett seems to be proving a tough sell.
(October 2014)