Michael Schur is one of the most adept minds in TV comedy. From his early days producing the Tina Fey and Jimmy Fallon-era Weekend Update on Saturday Night Live, to his work as one of the key writers on The Office, he has charted a career that spans some of the best TV comedy of the 2000s.

But in the 2010s, he’s become perhaps the principal figure in network TV comedy, via his shows Parks and Recreation and The Good Place. (He’s also the co-creator of Brooklyn Nine-Nine, though his fellow co-creator Dan Goor is the showrunner on that series.) Parks and Recreation was a tribute to the idea of a kinder, more loving America, just barely holding off a dark and horrifying one, while The Good Place is the only show in TV history that has balanced advanced lessons in ethics and philosophy with elaborate jokes about shrimp.

That’s what made me want to talk with Schur for the latest episode of my podcast, I Think You’re Interesting. But I wanted to talk not only about his shows, but about his overall philosophy of comedy.

We delved into questions of what makes a good comedic premise, what makes a good character relationship to build a comedy around, and what the best comedic actors have in common. We even got around to tackling that age-old question: Why is it so much easier to set a sitcom in a bar than it is to set one in a restaurant?

But early in our discussion, when I asked him to find a common denominator among successful sitcoms, he gave me a long dissection of what went right with The Office, which helped transform it from a one-season curio into a nine-season series that ran for over 200 episodes. His answer, lightly edited for length and clarity, follows.

Todd VanDerWerff

I want to think about what it takes to create a TV comedy that can run several years. You’ve worked on some that have run several years. You’ve created three, now, that have run several years. So you clearly know something about it. When you look at comedies that work that you didn’t make, do you find a common denominator in everything from Cheers to Mary Tyler Moore to The Simpsons?

Michael Schur

Of course. There’s multiple similarities. Some of them are facile. Some of them are, like, “Man, that’s a good cast.” There’s no comedy that’s lasted for any amount of time that you can’t say, “Boy, that’s a really good cast.”

It seems reductive, but I don’t think it is, because this is alchemy that we’re talking about. It’s not one thing. If it were one thing, there’d be a lot more long-running sitcoms. About a million things have to go right.

My introduction to the world of sitcoms was The Office. It was incredibly fortunate and great for many, many reasons. Most of them have to do with [co-creator and showrunner] Greg Daniels and the things that Greg taught me and taught Mindy [Kaling] and taught B.J. Novak and taught everybody who worked on that show about how to write.

But the path that show took was fascinating, and even though I was working on that show, I became a sort of student of the path of that show. And I remember tracking, internally, all of the things that went right with that show. There are so many, but I’ll give you three examples of things that went right for that show.

Thing No. 1: That show was developed by Kevin Reilly, who was running NBC at the time. He had come from FX, and he loved the British show, and he was very passionate about The Office. So he gave Greg the chance to basically do it the way he wanted and basically cast it the way he wanted. He was very invested in the show. We made six episodes that first season, and no one liked it. [Laughs.]

Ordinarily, 99 times out of 100, or maybe even 999 times out of 1,000, that show is canceled. It’s a six-episode experiment, and this is back, by the way, when sitcoms — when anything — could get big ratings on network TV. So that show is gonna get canceled. We all knew it was going to get canceled.

There was a moment when we were shooting the last episode, where the cast was sort of huddled outside, and everyone was a little bit glum because it was our last week of shooting, and even though the show wouldn’t air for months, everyone kind of felt like, there’s no way this ever works. I remember Steve [Carell] looking around at the cast and saying, “Hey, we got to make six.” Like, “We got six of these things. That’s amazing. What a dream to make six episodes of this thing that’s so weird and pure.”

So, definitely going to get canceled — except that Kevin Reilly kind of stakes his reputation as an executive [on it]. And says to his bosses at NBC, “I believe in this show. I think it can work. Please, please, please give me another chance. Give us another season.”

They give him what was announced in the press as 13. It was not. It was six. We were given six more for season two, but they announced it was 13, because if they had announced it as six, everyone would have smelled blood and said, “Well, it’s doomed.”

So that’s thing No. 1. A network executive does something which network executives are not known to do, which is stick his neck out.

Thing No. 2: Over that off-season, after those six episodes aired that nobody liked, Steve Carell became a gigantic movie star. Just totally coincidentally, 40-Year-Old Virgin comes out, and the world goes, “Oh my God, look at this guy. Look how funny he is, and look how kind he is, and look how talented he is.” And NBC goes, “Well, we have this giant movie star under contract...”

And, look, things one and two are related here. They partially gave us the second season because they had Steve under contract. So. Network executive sticks his neck out. The guy who’s the main character becomes a movie star.

Here’s thing No. 3: The guy who created the show [Greg Daniels] is a first-ballot hall of fame TV brain. And he says, “Well, let’s look at thing No. 2, and let’s think about how we should take that information and use it for the show. And the way we should is by saying, that guy, that character he’s playing in that movie, is so sympathetic and so kind and so lovely. We need to take 20 percent of that energy and put it into Michael Scott”

And the writers — his own writers, me included! — rebelled and said, “You’re going to ruin it. The thing that Ricky [Gervais] and Steve [Merchant made] is perfect, and how dare you, and the whole point is it’s supposed to be bleak, and Michael Scott, like David Brent, is a terrible person.” And Greg patiently listened to all of us, and heard us all out, and said, “No, you dummies, I’m going to do it this way, and we’re going to add just a tiny little glimmer of hope to the end of every episode.”

And he did. And that is the difference between that show lasting 12 episodes and lasting 200. So I say all of this as a way of saying, it’s not one thing. It’s a great cast. It’s a very, very smart person making good decisions. And then it’s just stuff that you have no control over. It’s The 40-Year-Old Virgin coming out.

I think about Cheers all the time, as you well know, and Coach [Nicholas Colasanto] died. Coach is arguably the best character on the show in the first two seasons, maybe the most purely funny character on the show. And he dies! And then Woody Harrelson just walks through the door, Woody Harrelson decides to be an actor, and goes to LA, and walks into what I believe I’ve heard was his first audition ever. And they find another Coach.

So sometimes, it’s talented people and a talented group of people who have a sort of mind-meld, and then it’s just really good luck. A lot of it is stuff you have no control over that you have to just hope happens to you. With almost every show I’ve been involved in, that has been the case.

For much more with Michael Schur, including his thoughts on how to cast a comedy, what makes a great setting for a comedy, and how he came up with the idea for The Good Place, listen to the full episode (and once you have, take heed of his suggestion to watch the wonderful HBO series Enlightened).

To hear interviews with more fascinating people from the world of arts and culture — from powerful showrunners to web series creators to documentary filmmakers — check out the I Think You’re Interesting archives.