The Big Picture

Chuck Lorre expresses gratitude for Bookie’s straight-to-series order and sees it as a vote of confidence for himself and Sebastian Maniscalco. Writing for a streaming series allows more freedom and the ability to build on previous episodes, unlike network television. Lorre discusses how the idea for Bookie came about and the chemistry between Sebastian Maniscalco and Omar J. Dorsey, which was crucial for the success of the buddy comedy dynamic.

From creators Chuck Lorre and Nick Bakay, the eight-episode comedy series Bookie (available to stream at Max) follows longtime L.A. bookie Danny (Sebastian Maniscalco) and his best friend Ray (Omar J. Dorsey), as they start to face the fact that the potential legalization of sports gambling in California could throw their world into upheaval. Until then, they’ll continue to try to persuade clients to settle their debts while figuring out if they can adapt to inevitable change.

During this 1-on-1 interview with Collider, writer/executive producer Lorre talked about how grateful he is for the straight-to-series order they got for Bookie, how that changed their approach to the storytelling, the way this evolved out of a desire to do a project that exists in the gray area of criminality, why he wants to avoid any hardcore violence, what they learned from speaking to real-life bookies, the unexpected dynamic between Danny and Ray, what it was like to reunite with Charlie Sheen, and how he’d tease the arc of the season. He also talks about two of the projects he’d hoped to get made but that never happened for him, the two shows from his previous projects that he’d love to do another season of, and how the reason to make comedy is simply to provoke laughter.

Bookie Release Date November 30, 2023 Cast Andrea Anders, Vanessa Ferlito, Sebastian Maniscalco, Jorge Garcia Main Genre Comedy Seasons 1 Creator Chuck Lorre, Nick Bakay

Collider: No matter how long you’ve been in this industry and you’ve made successful TV shows, does it still feel nice to get a straight-to-series order, like you did with the series, and know that you’re actually making the series?

CHUCK LORRE: Oh, yeah. I always like to say that, if you’re not grateful for those kinds of opportunities, you’re simply not paying attention. The straight-to-series was a vote of confidence, both for myself and very much for Sebastian [Maniscalco]. The folks at Max and Warner Bros. are huge fans of Sebastian Maniscalco.

Image via Max

Wanting to Tell A Story in That Gray Area of Criminality WIthout the Excessive Violence
Does it change the approach to writing something when you know that you’ll be making an eight-episode season and you don’t have to do a pilot and wait to find out if you’ll get to have a show?

LORRE: Oh, absolutely, it changes the approach. You get to make these episodes as if there are chapters in a book. Nick Bakay and I had enough time before production started to pretty much write all eight episodes. And then, we were able, once we had all eight episodes in a rough draft form, we were able to move some puzzle pieces around so that something in episode one could be referred to in episode four. In the streaming universe, I think you can safely presume that if somebody’s watching episode four, they’ve seen one, two and three. And so, because they have done that, you have all that to build on in episode four. There’s a lot of freedom you have, writing wise. I never necessarily felt we had that kind of luxury in network television, where there was no telling if the audience had seen the last week’s show.

How did this series and the idea for this series come about? You’ve worked with Nick Bakay on some other shows, but what led you to team up with him on this and tell this story?

LORRE: I’d always wanted to do something in that gray area of criminality where people are off the grid and not playing by the rules, and there might even be implications of violence, although I wasn’t comfortable with working in real hardcore violence. I simply don’t know how to make that funny because it’s, in fact, not. When I first met Sebastian and I was looking at his standup concerts, he’s a master of that craft. The obvious way to go would have been to build a show around that standup persona. And then, I saw him in The Irishman where he’s playing Crazy Joe Gallo, a psychotic gangster, in a scene with Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci. I watched that scene over and over, and I realized that Sebastian’s got serious acting chops. He’s not trying to be an actor, he’s an actor. It was a really beautiful performance, and a performance with two of the great actors of our time, and he was right there with them. I thought, “Well, we should take a left turn and go away from the standup act and find something in that underworld of criminality.”

I talked to Nick Bakay about it, and fortuitously, Nick’s background is sports gambling. He was a commentator on ESPN for several years about the spread and the parlay, and the over and the under, and the dog and the favorites. He was a talking head on ESPN for several years about sports gambling. He knew all about it and the language of it, and it is its own language, which I truly love. I fell in love with working with a language that I, myself, didn’t understand on The Big Bang Theory. Very often, they’d have speeches, which we, as comedy writers, couldn’t have possibly written without having a physics consultant on the show who had explained to us how a speech about string theory would be entirely obtuse and hard to fathom from the audience. You knew why the character was making a speech, even if you may not have understood it. And there’s this wonderful language in sports gambling that is equally hard to penetrate, but you understand the general idea of it. When I talked to Nick about this whole world, he suggested, “What about a bookie?” And I went, “Perfect.”

We figured out, early on, by speaking to a lot of bookies, who I can’t name, that the violence is something that plays in movies and television shows, but these men are too smart to really go down that road. When somebody doesn’t pay, they simply drop them as a client and they let it be known to other bookies that this person is not a viable client to take a bet with because they may not pay when they lose. There’s no breaking of the knees. That’s actually bad business. Violence attracts the police, and what these guys don’t want, more than anything, is any visibility from the police. And so, this worked perfectly. Working with Nick gave me an opportunity to dig into that language and that mentality because he understands it, viscerally. So, we started writing and we presented it to Sebastian, and he said, “Yes, let’s do this.”

Image via Max

Making this Buddy Comedy Work Was All About the Chemistry
I love when a TV series drops us into a dynamic that we’re told has been long-established, but also really feels like it has. What was it about Omar Dorsey, and Omar paired with Sebastian, that felt like the perfect odd couple duo?

LORRE: From the very beginning, Nick and I were determined to make this a buddy comedy, and for a buddy comedy to work, the two leads have to have chemistry, otherwise you’re DOA. You’ve just committed lots of money and time to a failed enterprise. And from the first time that Omar came in and read with Sebastian, they were like an old married couple. They were finishing each other’s sentences. They weren’t doing the same thing, but what they were doing worked together. There’s this ineffable weird thing that happens when two actors who just have chemistry together do a scene together. We were just sitting there going, “Oh, boy, now we have a show.” If Omar doesn’t walk in and audition, and then absolutely own that part, I don’t know how we go forward because the show, at its heart, is a buddy comedy. Those two guys are the heart of the series.

I also love that Omar’s character is the one who’s meant to be the muscle of this duo, but he’s really the more sensitive one, in touch with wanting to respect people’s pronouns and not wanting to cause anyone harm. It’s very unexpected.

LORRE: He’s much more the woke part of the duo. I hope we make it clear that he’s a visual deterrent. He’s not gonna knock anybody around. He’s just there to put the idea in their head, not to do anything. One of the things that we’ve done in the series, on several occasions, is that when somebody is a bad client and is not gonna pay the money they’ve lost, they just cut them loose and walk away. In the first episode, Sebastian’s character calls it shrinkage. All businesses have it. With stolen merchandise and damaged merchandise, you just write it off as shrinkage. It’s not about breaking legs and stuff like that. That’s bad business.

Image via Max

Which of His Previous TV Shows Would He Want to Make Another Season Of?
It seems like you have an incredible ability to get things made. Is there a TV series or a movie that you’ve always wanted to get made, but so far, no one has said yes to?

LORRE: This is going back a ways – going back a long time, like almost 30 years – and it got made by other people, but I was an enormous fan of Douglas Adams and Dirk Gentley’s Holistic Detective Agency. I thought that was a mind-bogglingly wonderful book. And I tried, several years ago, to launch a series or at least a feature based on The Bonfire of the Vanities, which is one of my favorite books of all time, but I slammed into a wall on that one. I couldn’t get that one going.

Out of all the things that you’ve worked on, if you could somehow have the ability to make one more season of something that you’ve done, what would it be and why?

LORRE: I was about to say, “I feel like I gotten closure on everything,” but you know what? Mike & Molly should have gone further, and so should have Mom. Those are series that I loved. I got to work with Allison Janney and Melissa McCarthy. What a gift that was. I wish that had gone for longer. I’m up for it, if anybody wants to reach out and do that again. The whole cast on both shows was so deep.

Are you surprised at the success of Young Sheldon and how long that’s been on the air?

LORRE: I don’t think I would say surprised because we got hit by lightning when we found Iain [Armitage]. (Co-creator) Steve Molaro and I wrote a very purposefully difficult scene for the young kids to audition with. It was a dense, difficult audition scene, and Iain, in a home audition on his mom’s iPhone killed it. It was shocking. He was amazing. He was a gift from God. Had that not happened, that series doesn’t go forward unless you’re lucky enough to cast a brilliant little boy who’s also a world-class actor.

Why Was Now the Right Time to Reunite with Charlie Sheen?
If someone has never watched anything that you have worked on, what is the first thing they should watch and why? Is there a gateway drug to your projects?

LORRE: I don’t know how to answer that question. I never thought of it as a throughline. I can tell you that I have had the most simple-minded goal, all the time, which is that comedy is supposed to make you laugh. That’s it. The reason to make a comedy is to provoke laughter. Laughter is a wonderful thing, and pursuing laughter is a wonderful thing. When it works and it’s truly funny and you’re truly laughing out loud, that’s worth the work, it’s worth the time, it’s worth the money. It’s a good goal, and when you achieve it, it’s really gratifying. When you hear people laughing out loud, it’s incredibly gratifying.

If you were going to have Charlie Sheen in Bookie, I can’t imagine any more perfect way for him to be in it than with the version of himself that he’s playing. How did it feel to go from the place of animosity that you guys were in to the place that you got to for this show? Do you think that you would have eventually gotten to the place you are in now, even if you hadn’t wanted him to do the show?

LORRE: When I realized that the perfect person to play the famous actor/degenerate gambler was Charlie, the conversations I had with Nick Bakay were, how and why can I do that, given everything that went on? It was traumatizing. It was a really difficult time for me. But gratefully, it was ancient history when we discussed it. I felt like, if Charlie is in a good place, I’m in a good place and we can have closure. I know it sounds a little bit treacly, but it was really healing. It was great. We had been friends before that whole mess, and this allowed us to be friends again, which I cherish that friendship. It was also really cool to see him knock it out of the park. He was totally on. His chops were undiminished by time. He was great.

Will we see him appear again this season?

LORRE: Yeah. He is in another episode. I won’t give the episode away, but Sebastian’s character is going through marital difficulties and Charlie is giving him advice. Marital advice from Charlie Sheen is just a wonderful starting point for another great cameo.

Image via Max

What would you say about the journey the characters take this season? How would you tease the arc of these eight episodes?

LORRE: Oh, boy, that’s a deep question. The arc? One of the things I found really wonderful to write about, that Nick and I discovered as we were writing the series, was that even in success, it’s an incredibly stressful thing to color outside the lines. Operating off the grid means you operate without any of society’s protections. You’re on your own. You can’t call the police when things go bad. You’re entirely isolated from whatever society offers the taxpaying citizens as protection, and that was interesting. Being off the grid and being in a criminal enterprise, because it’s fundamentally a criminal enterprise, we make it really clear that police don’t particularly care too much about it. For the cops, bookmaking is to the police what a cat up a tree is to the fire department. They don’t care, but it is an illegal activity.

One of the other things I found really attractive about bookmaking was the legalization of gambling that’s going across the country, with Draft Kings and FanDuel and Caesars and MGM, and it’s been sanctioned by the NFL and the NBA and Major League Baseball. That sweeping change in the culture of legalized gambling, these little guys are threatened, like the neighborhood pot dealer who’s driven out of business by legal pot, which we also have in the first episode. There’s a quality to these characters where they’re dinosaurs. They can see the asteroid coming, and there’s nothing they can do about it. We make a point of telling the audience that California is one of the few states where it’s still illegal to gamble on the internet, but that’s for now. They’re in a very tenuous position. Their jobs could disappear because of the changes in the law. I thought that was a terrific part of this. I’m not unaware that what I do for a living might also be a dinosaur function and that this might go away with cultural changes, AI, and whatever.

Bookie is available to stream at Max.