Jamie Lee Curtis Spent 68 Years Trying to Get Back Into a Sitcom
A Real Married Couple, Playing Married Again
The Newlyweds is, on paper, a pretty simple pitch. A free-spirited woman and a buttoned-up professor marry on impulse after a whirlwind courtship, and now they have to actually live with that decision. The panel made one thing clear fast: the real story here is the two married couples surrounding them, both behind the camera and in the ensemble. This cast collects real-life spouses the way other shows collect running gags.
Exhibit A: Tim Daly and Téa Leoni play a married couple in the show. They are also, as of a few years ago, an actually married couple. They previously played married on Madam Secretary for six seasons. Somebody from Assignment X asked the obvious question: did they campaign to work together again, or did this just happen to them?
“We Don’t Need an Intimacy Coordinator”
“We were kind of sniffing around to play together,” Daly admitted. Then he got a little more honest about the motivation. “The world got darker and we wanted to get lighter. We spent six years pretending to be married on TV, and now we got to do it again, but we actually are married, which is just, you know, it’s a miracle.” Leoni’s whole response to that was just confirming it, twice: “It’s a miracle. It is. It’s a miracle. It took twelve years, but we got there.”
Later, a reporter asked Daly and Leoni how their real dynamic feeds into the writing. Leoni’s answer landed as the best line of the panel: “We don’t need an intimacy coordinator. We’re licensed to do whatever we want.” Nobody followed up on that, because honestly what else is there to say.
Past the joke, Leoni made a real point about acting opposite someone you actually know that well. “I can read him. I know when he’s going. We just kind of found this moment, because maybe that happens somewhere else, but it happens in our life all the time. It’s really fun to act with someone that you know so well.” Daly put the same idea another way: “We’ve been told that we have chemistry. We were told that on Madam Secretary, and hopefully we’ve exported that into this show. We haven’t lost it.”
Jamie Lee Curtis Spent 68 Years Trying to Get Back Into a Sitcom
If Daly and Leoni are the panel’s romance subplot, Jamie Lee Curtis is the main event. Jamie Lee Curtis is an executive producer and recurring guest star on the show. When a reporter asked what she was looking forward to about returning to multicam sitcoms, she basically gave her whole career as the answer.
She talked about doing plays with a live audience early on, and how sitcoms give her that same charge without months on the road. “It gives you the experience of performing in front of live people, and that special energy that’s created when this room is full of strangers.”
Then she went back further, to a canceled ABC pilot decades ago that turned into Anything But Love with Richard Lewis, which she called her favorite job she’s ever had. “I’m 68 years old, and every single year, all I’ve ever said to my agents is, I want to do a sitcom. I love the whole part of it, the dance with the cameras, the idea that you actually get to rehearse something and work it and learn a joke and play it. And I just never got to do it. So I just decided to basically create my own job, and met Gail. And that’s why we’re all here.”
Now She’s the One in Charge
On being the actual boss this time, she didn’t undersell it. “I like to refer to myself as the HBIC, head bitch in charge. I’m 68 years old. I’ve wanted to be a boss my whole life. If you ask my children and my husband, they will tell you I’ve been a boss my whole life. I’ve been waiting my whole life to manifest ideas and bring what I love about what I do into the workplace.” She also made a point of saying the casting wasn’t a compromise. “Every single person sitting on this stage was the first choice of ours in this process. We met forty versions of these people, and these are the people we chose. That’s part of being a boss too. You know what’s right, and then you fight for it.”
Why bring back a format everybody says is dying
The panel’s other real thread was a defense of the multicam sitcom itself. It’s a format critics online call old-fashioned pretty constantly. Executive producer Gail Lerner didn’t dodge it. “It’s a terrible time in the world in every aspect. There’s just nothing going on that isn’t hard. I think people love love, and family. Look at what Happy’s Place has done. People wanted to go there, that they needed to pair it with a show about love.” Her pitch for the format itself was simple. “They want to have a good time in the comfort of their own home, and they want to turn on a network show and have laughs and have feelings. If that isn’t what sitcoms can do, well, I’m not sure what they do, but that’s what they do, and that’s why we love them.”
The Old Tricks Still Work
One of the younger cast members pushed back a little on the framing that the format needs saving at all. “The fact that the medium feels old school is, I think, a big plus,” he said, speaking, in his words, on behalf of his generation. Lerner agreed the tricks haven’t really changed. “The old tricks and the new tricks are the same. Really just to create something funny, characters who are relatable, moments that surprise you and offer heart, but also really hard jokes. My first real writing job was on Will and Grace. That world of feelings and laughs with characters you care about and want in your living room. Who else could you want more in your living room than this bunch of people?”
Somebody near the end asked how much of the actors’ own personalities shape their characters. One answer stuck out, describing the type of character this show clearly leans on. “Oddball characters who bring an innocence, that perspective of an innocent in a very complicated world. Television has a history of those characters becoming our favorite. It’s a beautiful thing to watch.”
So that’s The Newlyweds: a sitcom about a whirlwind marriage. A real married couple leads it and shares an intimacy-coordinator joke. An EP waited 68 years and eventually built the job for herself instead of asking her agents for it. If nothing else, that’s a better use of a midlife crisis than most.
WHEN TO WATCH
Newlyweds premieres Friday, October 23 at 8:30 p.m. ET/PT on NBC, streaming next day on Peacock.