TBS show takes a ‘Detour’ from other family comedies
In “The Detour,” which recently returned to TBS for a fourth season, married partners Jason Jones and Samantha Bee have created a comedy about a family that is not exactly a family comedy. It’s full of mayhem and love and usually interrupted sexual situations.
One could call it both mature and juvenile, intelligent and dumb — not by turns but all at once.
Jones plays father Nate Parker, with Natalie Zea as his partner, Robin. Liam Carroll and Ashley Gerasimovich play mismatched twins Jared and Delilah.
Nate is a big lug with a righteous core; Natalie a woman with a past, bits of which keep escaping into view. Jared is a sort of idiot, who last season succeeded an alpaca as the mayor of the Alaska town in which the family was hiding. His sister is a smart square peg who took off running at the end of Season 3; in the new season, the family is trying to find her, a trip that takes them to a Tibetan lamasery, down South American rivers and onto a Japanese game show.
I spoke with Jones recently by phone.
Q: The Parkers are frequently at odds, yet “The Detour” strikes me as a portrait of a good marriage.
A: That was our first and foremost reason for writing it: to show an honest marriage — even though we’re not married on the show. An honest relationship, let’s call it, one that is not saccharine or built with too much judgment — all the tropes that you see in TV comedies, for the most part.
Q: In the first season, the show was structured like an episodic road film, a family trip through strange places. Subsequent seasons feel more intricately worked out.
A: It was always supposed to be here’s a regular family, they’re on the road on what seems like a normal vacation with its own plot about I’ve been fired and I’m trying to get my job back, and at the end of the season it’s not about that.
I didn’t want to give up the road, ’cause that’s interesting to me. A family comedy where we’re having discussions in our living room every week, I had no interest in shooting that. So the idea was to always keep it moving.
Q: There’s an epic scope to the series — you’re up on mountains, on rivers. There’s a tank.
A: When you say it like that, it sounds awesome.
Scope is everything to me. You know someone on Twitter said the other day, “You’re just like ‘Malcolm in the Middle,’ but you’ve got a bigger budget. I’m like, ”We’ve got half the budget, maybe a third of the budget that ‘Malcolm in the Middle’ had.“But we put it on screen. I will shoot an episode in two days — we shot that Japanese game show episode in two days so we could afford to be on the mountain for five days.
Q: There’s a lot of physical comedy in the show, which you don’t see often on television.
A: It’s honestly my favorite thing because it’s just funny when someone falls down — when you’re not expecting it, that is.
And there’s nothing more egregious to me than falling out of frame. You see mats down, I’m like, “Get those mats away.” I want to hit the ground hard. And stunt people love working with me ’cause I want to show their work. If they’re going to hit the ground, I want to see it.
Q: Have your own kids watched the show?
A: They’ve been on it, so they’ve watched themselves on it. I show them all the big stunts and stuff. I won’t show them the sex scenes — we skip forward past those.
Q: Are they impressed by what their parents do for work?
A: They try to act a little cool about it, but I think they’re quietly impressed. I think they like what I do more than what my wife does because they maybe don’t understand what she does as much. As I said, everyone can relate to falling down a mountain. A takedown of Congress isn’t for every 8-year-old.