Kaitlin Olson Says Fox Wanted Edgy Comedy, But They Weren’t Ready for ‘The Mick’
Following the breakthrough success of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, every TV network in the 2010s wanted to emulate its crass, punchy, anarchic humor, but some networks weren’t ready to pay the troll toll.
It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia star Kaitlin Olson is finally enjoying her well-deserved moment in the spotlight now that she's smack-dab in the middle of the zeitgeist following two straight decades of TV excellence. Between the return of Hacks, the upcoming 17th season of Always Sunny and the swift renewal of High Potential, Olson is now ubiquitous in the TV world, despite the inability of some networks to make her distinct style of comedic performance work for their delicate, corporate sensibilities. While the ascension of Olson to the top of the TV A-list has been a long time coming, her road to multi-network superstardom wasn’t without its pitfalls, as anyone who watched the unjustly canceled Fox sitcom The Mick knows all-too-well.
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In a recent interview with Emmy Magazine, Olson, who earned her third Emmy nomination at last year’s awards ceremony, recalled how she was originally wary of returning to network TV for the ABC hit High Potential after Fox tried to dull her edge during The Mick. Maybe Fox would have been better off building a sitcom around the waitress at Suds.
Fox’s The Mick centered around Olson’s character Mackenzie “Mickey” Molng, a rough-living Rhode Islander who has to move to the pampered community of Greenwich, Connecticut to take care of her sister’s three children after the FBI arrests her sister and brother-in-law for fraud and tax evasion. While The Mick amassed a cult following with all favorable reviews highlighting Olson’s performance, as Olson revealed during her talk with Emmy Magazine, Mickey’s foul mouth and flagrant disregard for decency didn’t just put her at odds with New England’s upper crust — it also caused Olson to butt heads with the suits upstairs.
“Fox wanted to bring a little edge to their comedies,” Olson said of the original deal she struck with the network to bring a bit of her Always Sunny flair to The Mick. However, as Olson quickly discovered, Fox decided that getting what they wanted wasn’t worth it if it meant allowing cuss words and shouting on a TV-14 series. Said Olson of the network’s feedback to The Mick, “There were a lot of notes like, ‘Oh, you can’t say that.’ I was like, ‘Well, we’ve got to find a way to say that in a way that I find funny, otherwise you picked the wrong person.’”
While Olson’s decision to stick to her guns made The Mick exactly the kind of “edgy” comedy that Fox thought they wanted, Fox ended up canceling the sitcom after just two seasons, and the unceremonious ending to the underappreciated series made Olson distrustful of the dull softness of network TV. “The truth was we were both very wary of returning to network television,” admitted High Potential creator Drew Goddard, who previously served as a director, writer and producer on network shows such as Lost and The Good Place.
“Kaitlin said, ‘Do you think you can protect this show?’” Goddard explained of his High Potential star’s hesitance, “I said, ‘I don’t know, but I promise you, we will be fighting this fight together. Either we’re going to make it the way we want to make it, or they’re going to fire us, and then we won’t have to worry about it.’”
Thankfully, ABC has no problem letting Olson be Olson, as they understand that, in order to create a star vehicle, you have to build around your star’s strengths instead of suppressing what makes them great in the first place. After all, putting Olson in a comedy and asking her to keep it clean is like inviting Frank to a funeral and expecting him to be sober.
