What Emmy winner Paul Feig really wants for his new mockumentary series, "Welcome to Flatch," is a Season 2.
"I've never had a monster hit," he said of his TV experience, and "when you have a monster hit, it means you get to make more and more" of the thing you love.
"I want nothing more," he added, "than to make 200 episodes of 'Welcome to Flatch.'"
The right ingredients, including Feig, are there: Based on the successful BBC series "This Country" (2017-20), the show on Fox is styled as a documentary about small-town life in America, as filtered through the fictional town of Flatch, Ohio (population: 1,529).
For Feig, 59, who grew up in a small suburban town outside Detroit, the series feels especially personal — this is the most deeply he has been involved in a major network TV show since the beloved high school comedy "Freaks and Geeks."
Q: You've produced a lot of TV shows that you didn't help write and direct. What was it about "Welcome to Flatch" that made you want to be so involved?
A: There are stories that I can't tell in movies because they're just too small. But with TV, going, "Oh gosh, I can really go granular in this" — that's why I fell in love with "This Country," which then became "Flatch."
"Flatch" spoke to me because of my Midwestern upbringing and because of loving those types of characters so much. I also love the docu-style of comedy, which is the greatest way to do comedy on television because it's so immediate, so in the moment.
Q: Why was the setting so important to you, beyond your having grown up in the Midwest?
A: I feel like I'm a protector of the Midwest, and of small towns. It's a very coastal thing to make fun of the flyover states, as they call them — and I'm from a flyover state, you know? So when Jenny Bicks and I took this out to try to sell it, that was the first question from everybody: They're like, "We just have to make sure you don't make fun of small towns." And it was like, that is not what we want to do. Jenny's from a small town. I'm from a small town. We want to protect them. But by doing that, we want to have fun with them. And I want you laughing with them.
