It's also a highly specific and personal project, and a far cry from the megaplex-ready Melissa McCarthy comedy Spy and the all-consuming buzz of his all-female Ghostbusters reboot, currently slated for 2016. I spoke to Feig over the phone about the dangers of passion projects and high concepts, and his deep and abiding love of funny women.

I spent the first episode of Other Space taking in its low-rent sets and effects and occasionally absurd sci-fi dialogue, trying to figure out how much of it was an insincere goof, until it dawned on me that it's just like any Paul Feig script, from Freaks and Geeks to his work on the earthbound Office — a bunch of sensitive weirdos with varying dissatisfaction about how their lives turned out, masking their insecurities the best ways they know how. In space.

Our would-be hero is Stewart Lipinski, played with Michael Cera-esque throttle-ability by Karan Soni (previously seen on the short-lived Amazon show Betas ). He's been named captain of a routine exploratory mission into outer space, much to the chagrin of his sister Karen (Bess Rous) and childhood best friend Michael (Eugene Cordero) who serve as his second and third in command, respectively. Of course, the mission does not stay routine for very long, and minutes after takeoff, the ship is transported into a neighboring universe, with no way of getting home and a stockpile of fudge as their only rations.

Emily Yoshida: So Other Space has been in the works for a while, right? I was Googling around and found you talking about it in this old profile of you in The New York Times, back in 2008.

Paul Feig: You know what, I just found that the other day, and I was like, "Oh my god, I forgot I talked about it." This has been a real pet project of mine for a long time, and I'm usually the guy who throws out passion projects. I think passion projects are dangerous, because as your career moves forward, sometimes you go back to a place that you've [since moved] beyond. But this was [a project] that just always, always stuck with me, and I'm like, "God, I just want to make that show. I know what that show is, I think it's funny."

And I'm just a sci-fi geek — and I have been my whole life — and there's been such a dearth of sci-fi comedy unless you look to England, where they have Red Dwarf, and Hyperdrive, and those things. We haven't had much here. When I was growing up, there was a show called Quark that was on for like eight episodes, that my best friend and I thought was the funniest show ever. And so, yeah, when I came up with this idea back eight years ago, or however long it was, I was really excited about it. But it was kind of before The Office, and I wanted to do it single cam, and NBC didn't quite want to do single cam. So I tried to write it [as a multi-camera sitcom], but it just didn't feel right, so it all kind of fell apart.

"Oh my god, I can actually maybe get this made."

But then the problem is once it falls apart, they still own it. And so, just every year, I'd always get on the phone with my lawyer and my agent, and then finally, when I was in post production of The Heat, it reverted back to me. And in a Kismet-ian world, that was right when Yahoo contacted my agent and said they wanted to put real money into a couple of shows. And so I was like, "Oh my god, I can actually maybe get this made."

Yeah, so I'm thrilled. I didn't want to do sci-fi comedy that made fun of sci-fi. A lot of sci-fi comedy is parody.

Yeah, you kind of have to invent a language for how an American sci-fi comedy show looks. How did that evolve from when you first kind of conceptualized the show?

The difference was that I created it originally in the pre-Office world. I think it was working on The Office that really made me go, "Oh, that's the perfect way to shoot this show." And what's funny is, [in the fourth episode] you find out why the show looks that way. Because I wanted to justify it, I didn't want the conceit to be that there's a documentary crew floating around with people in space. So I'm very happy with how we explain it.

And yeah, it's just getting the tone right and getting the right cast, but then never treating them too silly. You can have ridiculous things happen, but they're reacting the way that normal humans would. And we got this great cast, who brought so much of their own personalities in a very realistic way to bear. I just feel it works so well.

The cast is definitely one of the most pleasant surprises of the show. I read the profile of [casting director] Alison Jones in The New Yorker, and it was so interesting to see her side of developing a show, especially casting unknowns and casting female unknowns. What is it for you that really makes a comic actor stand out, especially female leads?



"I've just always been more comfortable hanging with women."

Well, across the board, regardless of gender, it's about who comes in with a unique voice, with a charisma that you can't pinpoint, and just with a deep bench of talent, so you go, "Wow, I'm going to feed off that person as much as they're going to feed off [the material]." That's how we did Freaks and Geeks. You see a lot of actors, and when you go with Alison, you know everyone you see is great. It's just, are they great for this role, and do they have anything that just pops up through the roof? And then one person will come and they just blow everyone else out of the water. And so that's kind of what I look for, regardless of male or female.

I mean as far as women go, I just love funny women. There's kind of two classes of funny women: ones [who are] very good at delivering a joke and being funny, and then there's this other tier of women — the Melissas and the Kristens and Amy Poehlers and Tina Feys, the list goes on and — that I just fall out hysterically laughing [at]. And it doesn't matter if they're a man or a woman, that’s just a funny person. They're not trying to be someone they're not, and they're not trying to act like a guy; they're just funny. And I think funny people... I think there's a comedy DNA that people have. Like Chris Farley. That man existed on this planet to be funny. He couldn't not be funny. Everything he did was hysterical, and I just feel that way about all these hilarious women.

I can't help but kind of think about Bridesmaids and The Heat and the Ghostbusters reboot on a continuum with Freaks and Geeks. Character-wise, whether it's people that don't look like movie stars or whether it's just a whole ensemble of female comedians, you’re doing something that's a little bit against the grain of what mainstream comedy is doing.

Yeah, I mean, for me, it's just a meritocracy. The funniest, best people win the day, and I don't care what they look like. When we did Freaks, it was like, we're not going to bring in a bunch of models who put glasses on and call them nerds; we want to throw the doors open wide. What ends up happening is that you still get beautiful people who are great, but it's just because you said, "We have no constraints on that, we don't care about that."

But then as far as women go, it's selfish in a way for me, because I've just always been more comfortable hanging with women. I grew up in a family of eight kids, six of them were girls, and they were all my best friends, and we always just had fun making each other laugh. And there's just something about the comedy of women that I relate to more than the comedy of most guys, because guy comedy, in general, tends to be a little more aggressive. And now I just kind of have a more feminine take on the world, I think. Plus, there's so many guys who do that guy comedy so well, and I love that stuff. I really like watching it. But I don't have a good voice for it. It's not what I do. I've tried in the past, to develop a project like that, but I always sounded like somebody pretending to know what guys sound like.