Michael Schur: The Face Behind All Your Favorite Shows

 Legendary television creator Michael Schur is nothing short of a hit sitcom machine, cranking out crowd-pleasers left and right.

Schur’s career began as a writer for Saturday Night Live after graduating from Harvard University with a B.A. in English. Since then, he has worked on the production team for popular shows like The Office, Parks and Recreation, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Master Of None and The Good Place.

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Much of Schur’s success is due to his own creative strengths — The Good Place star Ted Danson once said “It’s all Mike. We’re all just a bunch of little Mikes.” — the environment and culture of television show production requires a lot of collaboration. And, as straight.com notes, “it isn’t cool, in the world of television, to take too much of the credit.”

Over the many years of experience he’s accumulated in his field, Schur has a “dedicated group of talent that follows [him] from show to show,” which include actors like Marc Evan Jackson, who stars in both Brooklyn Nine-Nine and The Good Place, and Greg Daniels, who helped write and produce The Office and Parks and Recreation.

This small group of collaborators that also have connections to other talents and creatives places Schur in a medium to high range of “Q,” which has been noted by Brian Uzzi and Jarrett Spiro to be the most optimal range for creative success.

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Another factor to Schur’s success is his inauguration of what New York Times calls a “new tone in prime-time comedy, an era of good-hearted humanistic warmth.” This reimagining of modern television is inspired by his experiences of reading the formal experimentation in literary fiction writers like David Foster Wallace, who New York Times labelled “another innovator obsessed with goodness.” 

The organizational culture that Schur worked in at NBC is also a factor in his “rise to network power.” The network’s “reward orientation” — as described by Laird D. McLean — is based on Schur’s creative achievements, and his reward was complete creative freedom for a new show. That show ended up being The Good Place, which has since been nominated for fourteen Primetime Emmy Awards along with a number of others.

Schur’s most recent project has been an American sitcom series titled Rutherford Falls, which will premiere on NBC’s Peacock streaming service.